her about the night Anna disappeared. Oh, she’d heard the
whispers about how Bryan was responsible for killing that
drunken Indian, she said. But none of it was true. After dropping
Anna off, Bryan had joined the rest of the party in Fairfax.
The uncle suddenly appeared at the front door. He seemed
displeased to find a pair of federal agents inside his home. He was
reluctant to speak, but he confirmed that Bryan had met them in
Fairfax after dropping Anna off. He added that after the show he
and his wife had spent the evening in the same house with Bryan
and that Bryan was there the whole time; he simply couldn’t have
been the murderer. The uncle then made it clear that he wanted
the agents to get the hell out.
In August 1925, White sent his undercover operatives to
infiltrate the town of Ralston. White wanted his team to
investigate a lead that had not been properly followed up: on the
night Anna Brown disappeared, case records showed, she might
have been spotted in a car by a group of white men who were
sitting in front of a hotel on Ralston’s main street. Previous
investigators, including local lawmen and the private eyes, had
spoken to these valuable witnesses and then seemingly buried
what they had learned. At least one of the witnesses had since
vanished, and White was convinced that, as one agent had noted in
a report, such people were being “paid by suspects to go away and
stay away.”
White and his men tried to track down some of the witnesses
outside the hotel, including an elderly farmer who had been
questioned earlier by an agent. During that initial interview, the
farmer had seemed to be suffering from dementia: he had stared
at the agent blankly. After a while, though, he had perked up. His
memory was just fine, he explained; he’d simply wanted to make