little unusual.”
“It is the way we have always handled it.”
At the archive in Fort Worth, I pulled records from the U.S.
Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Oklahoma that dealt
with the murders of the Osage. They contained something that I’d
never seen anywhere before: the secret testimony of the grand
jury that in 1926 investigated the murders of the Osage. Among
the witnesses who testified were many of the principal figures in
the case, such as Ernest Burkhart and Dick Gregg. There was no
mention of Burt’s testifying. However, the life-insurance agent
who had issued a policy to Henry Roan, which had named Hale as
the beneficiary, testified that Burt had also recommended another
American Indian to target with an insurance-policy scheme.
I later found, amid the thousands of pages of records on the
murders archived by the Bureau of Investigation, two other
references to Burt. The first was an agent’s report from a
conversation with a trusted informant, who had indicated that
Burt and Hale were “very intimate” associates. What’s more, the
informant said that Burt and Hale had “split on the boodle”—the
sum of money—obtained from Bigheart. It wasn’t clear from the
report what, exactly, the amount was, but the bureau had noted
that after Bigheart’s death Hale successfully made a claim upon
his estate for $6,000, by presenting a bogus creditor’s note.
Perhaps “the boodle” also included the $10,000 that Burt had tried
to make off with.
Still, unlike the invaluable headrights involved in the slaying of
Mollie’s family members—or the $25,000 life-insurance policy in
Roan’s death—none of these sums, especially if divided,
represented a significant incentive for murder. This may explain
why the Justice Department never prosecuted Hale for Bigheart’s
killing or pursued Burt further. Yet it was evident that White and