certificate, and an informant’s statement to the FBI that Vaughan,
shortly before being killed, had mentioned having collected
“sufficient evidence to put Bill Hale in the electric chair.”
Martha and Melville said that Vaughan’s widow, Rosa, was left
with ten children to raise and no income. They had to move from
their two-story house into a storage garage. “They didn’t have
money to eat,” Martha said. “The Osage banded together and
basically helped feed the family.” Some of Vaughan’s children,
including Martha’s father, went to live with Osage families, where
they grew up speaking Osage and learning the traditional dances.
“My father felt safe among the Osage,” Martha said.
She explained that though many members of her family
believed that Hale had wanted Vaughan silenced, they suspected
that there was more to the murder. They wondered who the
assassin was and how the killing was carried out: Was Vaughan
murdered before he was thrown off the train, or did the impact kill
him? Someone with influence had made sure that the inquest was
a sham—the cause of death was listed as “unknown.”
For a while, we discussed elements of the case. Melville
explained that Vaughan was big and strong, which meant that the
assassin had to have been physically powerful or helped by
accomplices. Vaughan, I recalled, had told his wife that he had
stashed evidence on the murders—as well as money for the family
—in a secret hiding place. I asked Melville and Martha how the
killer could have determined where this hiding place was. Martha
said that there were only two possibilities: the killer either forced
the information out of Vaughan before throwing him off the train,
or the killer was someone whom Vaughan trusted enough to
confide such information.
Melville said that after Hale had gone to jail, a relative tried to
continue investigating the case, but he received an anonymous