sure that the investigators were who they said they were. Talking
to the wrong person about these murders was liable to get one
planted in the ground.
The farmer now spoke to White and his men. According to
testimony that the farmer subsequently gave under oath, he
remembered that evening well, because he’d often discussed it
with friends of his who gathered regularly at the hotel. “We old
fellows have a lot of time in town and that is where we sit down,”
he said. He recalled that the car had stopped by the curb and
through its open window he could see Anna—she was right there
in front of him. She said hello, and someone in the group said
back, “Hello, Annie.”
The farmer’s wife, who had been with him in Ralston that night,
was also certain that the woman in the car was Anna, though she
didn’t talk to her. “There was Indians so much around there,” she
testified. “Sometimes I spoke to one, and sometimes I didn’t.
Sometimes when I spoke to one they didn’t speak.” Asked if Anna
had been slumped over from drinking, she said, “Just sitting like
they all sit, just about like this.” She posed herself straight and
rigid, like a statue, her rendition of a stoic Indian.
At one point, she was asked if anyone had been with Anna in the
car.
“Yes, sir,” the farmer’s wife said.
“Who?”
“Bryan Burkhart.”
Bryan, she said, had been driving the car and wearing a cowboy
hat. Another witness said that he also saw Bryan with Anna in the
car. “They went straight west from there right on through town
and I don’t know where they went from there,” the witness
recalled.
It was the first proven crack in Bryan’s alibi. He might have