her saying, “My husband is a good man, a kind man. He wouldn’t
have done anything like that. And he wouldn’t hurt anyone else,
and he wouldn’t ever hurt me.”
Now the attorney asked her, “You love your husband?”
After a moment, she said, “Yes.”Once armed with the statements of Ernest Burkhart and
Ramsey, White and Agent Smith confronted Hale. White sat
across from this gentlemanly-looking figure who, he was
convinced, had killed nearly all the members of Mollie’s family
and who had killed witnesses and co-conspirators. And White had
discovered one more disturbing development; according to several
people close to Anna Brown, Hale had had an affair with Anna and
was the father of her baby. If true, it meant that Hale had killed
his own unborn child.
White tried to contain the violent passions inside him as Hale
greeted him and Agent Smith with the same politeness that he had
demonstrated while being arrested. Burkhart once described Hale
as the best man you “ever saw until after you found him out and
knowed him,” adding, “You could meet and you’d fall in love with
him. Women were the same way. But the longer you stayed
around him, he’d get to you. He’d beat you some way.”
White did not waste time. As he later recalled, he told Hale, “We
have unquestioned signed statements implicating you as the
principal in the Henry Roan and Smith family murders. We have
the evidence to convict you.”
Even after White detailed the overwhelming evidence against
him, Hale seemed unperturbed, as if he still held the upper hand.
Kelsie Morrison had earlier told agents that Hale was certain that
“money will buy the protection or acquittal of any man for any