questioned these men. According to a transcript of these
interrogations, David Shoun acknowledged that he and his brother
had summoned the lawyer, believing that Bill might name his
killers, but nothing came of it. “If Bill Smith had an idea who
blowed him up, he never said,” the doctor recalled.
One of the prosecutors pressed him about why it had been so
important for the nurse to leave the room. Shoun explained that
nurses “often leave when the doctors come in.”
“If she says that you asked her to step out, she lies?”
“No, sir. If she says that, I did.” Shoun said he would swear a
dozen times that Bill never identified his killers. Pointing to his
hat, he added, “Bill Smith gave me that hat, and he is my friend.”
James Shoun, David’s brother, was equally adamant, telling the
prosecutor, “He never did say who blew him up.”
“He must have talked about that.”
“He never did say who blew him up.”
“Did he talk about who blew him up?”
“He didn’t talk about who blew him up.”
When Bill Smith’s lawyer was questioned, he, too, insisted that
he had no idea who was responsible for blowing up the Smiths’
house. “Gentlemen, it is a mystery to me,” he said. But as he was
being grilled, he revealed that in the hospital Bill Smith had said,
“You know, I only had two enemies in the world,” and that those
enemies were William K. Hale, the King of the Osage Hills, and his
nephew Ernest Burkhart.
The investigators asked James Shoun about this, and eventually
he divulged the truth: “I would hate to say positively that he said...
that Bill Hale blew him up, but he did say Bill Hale was his only
enemy.”
“What did he say about Ernest Burkhart?” a prosecutor asked.