16 FOR  THE BETTERMENT  OF  THE

BUREAU

White and his men felt a growing sense of progress. A Justice

Department prosecutor sent Hoover a note, saying that in the few
months since White had assumed command of the investigation,
“many new angles of these cases were successfully developed” and
a “new and enthusiastic spirit seemed to pervade the hearts of all
of us.”

Still, White faced the same problem with the investigation of
Mollie Burkhart’s murdered family that he did with his inquiry
into Roan’s death. There was no physical evidence or witnesses to
prove that Hale had carried out or ordered any of the killings. And
without an airtight case White knew that he’d never be able to
bring down this man who hid behind layers of respectability—who
called himself the Reverend—and who used a network of
patronage to influence the sheriff’s office, prosecutors, judges, and
some of the highest state officials.

In a stark report, agents noted that Scott Mathis, the Big Hill
Trading Company owner and a guardian of Anna Brown and Lizzie,
was “a crook and evidently in the power of Hale”; that an associate
of Mathis’s served as a “spy for Bill Hale and the Big Hill Trading
Company, and does all the framing for them in their crooked deals
in skinning the Indians”; that the chief of police in Ponca City had
“taken money from Bill Hale”; that the chief of police in Fairfax
“will do nothing against Hale whatsoever”; that a local banker and
guardian “will not talk against the Hale faction, for the reason that