“Yes, sir.”
Bryan was detained by the authorities after the first hearing. To
Mollie’s distress, they even held Ernest, too, in case he was
covering for his younger brother. But both men were soon turned
loose. There was no evidence implicating Bryan other than the fact
that he’d been with Anna before she disappeared. When Ernest
was asked if he had any information as to how Anna met her
death, he said no, adding, “I don’t know of enemies she had or
anyone that disliked her.”
A prevailing theory was that her killer came from outside the
reservation. Once, the tribe’s enemies had battled them on the
plains; now they came in the form of train robbers and stickup
men and other desperadoes. The passage of Prohibition had only
compounded the territory’s feeling of lawlessness by encouraging
organized crime and creating, in the words of one historian, “the
greatest criminal bonanza in American history.” And few places in
the country were as chaotic as Osage County, where the unwritten
codes of the West, the traditions that bound communities, had
unraveled. By one account, the amount of oil money had
surpassed the total value of all the Old West gold rushes
combined, and this fortune had drawn every breed of miscreant
from across the country. A U.S. Justice Department official warned
that there were more fugitives hiding out in the Osage Hills than
“perhaps any other county in the state or any state in the Union.”
Among them was the hard-boiled stickup man Irvin Thompson,
who was known as Blackie maybe because of his dark complexion
(he was a quarter Cherokee) or maybe because of his dark heart: a
lawman described him as “the meanest man I ever handled.” Even
more notorious was Al Spencer, the so-called Phantom Terror,
who had made the transition from galloping horses to speeding