While the authorities went to round up Morrison, they also
made sure that a doctor went to check on Mollie Burkhart. She
seemed near death, and based on her symptoms, authorities were
certain that someone had been secretly poisoning her and doing it
slowly so as not to arouse suspicions. In a later report, an agent
noted, “It is an established fact that when she was removed from
the control of Burkhart and Hale, she immediately regained her
health.”
Burkhart never admitted having any knowledge that Mollie was
being poisoned. Perhaps this was the one sin that he couldn’t bear
to admit. Or perhaps Hale had not trusted him to kill his own wife.
The Shoun brothers were brought in and interrogated over what,
exactly, they had been treating Mollie with. One of the prosecutors
who was working with White asked James Shoun, “Weren’t you
giving her insulin?”
“I may have been,” he said.
The prosecutor grew impatient. “Wasn’t she taken away from
you and taken to the hospital at Pawhuska? Weren’t you
administering insulin to her?”
Shoun said that maybe he’d misspoken: “I don’t want to get
balled up and don’t want to get in bad.”
The prosecutor asked again if he’d administered injections to
her. “Yes, I gave her some,” he said.
“For what?”
“For sugar diabetes.”
“And she got worse?”
“I don’t know.”
“And she got so bad she was taken away from you and taken to a
hospital at Pawhuska, and she got better immediately under the
care of another doctor?”