teaching evolution in a state-funded school.
Many people in the gallery gossiped about an Osage woman who
was sitting on one of the benches, quiet and alone. It was Mollie
Burkhart, cast out from the two worlds that she’d always
straddled: whites, loyal to Hale, shunned her, while many Osage
ostracized her for bringing the killers among them and for
remaining loyal to Ernest. Reporters portrayed her as an “ignorant
squaw.” The press hounded her for a statement, but she refused to
give one. Later, a reporter snapped her picture, her face defiantly
composed, and a “new and exclusive picture of Mollie Burkhart”
was transmitted around the world.
Hale and Ramsey were escorted into the courtroom. Though
Ramsey appeared indifferent, Hale acknowledged his wife and
daughter and supporters confidently. “Hale is a man of magnetic
personality,” the Tribune reporter wrote. “Friends crowd about
him at every recess of court and men and women shout cheerful
greetings.” In jail, Hale had jotted down these lines from a poem
as he remembered them:
Judge Not! The clouds of seeming guilt may dim thy brother’s fame,
For fate may throw suspicion’s shade upon the brightest name.White sat down at the prosecution table. In an instant, one of
Hale’s lawyers said, “Your honor, I demand that T. B. White over
there, head of the federal Bureau of Investigation in Oklahoma
City, be searched for firearms and excluded from this courtroom.”
Hale’s supporters hooted and stamped their feet. White stood,
opening his coat to show that he wasn’t armed. “I will leave if the
court orders it,” he said. The judge said that this wouldn’t be
necessary, and White sat back down and the crowd quieted. The
hearing proceeded uneventfully until that afternoon, when a man
entered the courtroom who had not been seen in Osage County for