and Anna Brown, the investigations into the cases seemed to have
reached a permanent impasse. Pike, the detective Hale had
enlisted, had moved on. Sheriff Freas was also no longer leading
the investigation; that February, he was expelled from office after
a jury had found him guilty of failing to enforce the law.
Then, on a frigid night that month, William Stepson, a twenty-
nine-year-old Osage champion steer roper, received a call that
prompted him to leave his house in Fairfax. He returned home to
his wife and two children several hours later, visibly ill. Stepson
had always been in remarkable shape, but within hours he was
dead. Authorities, upon examining the body, believed that
someone he met during his excursion had slipped him a dose of
poison, possibly strychnine—a bitter white alkaloid that, according
to a nineteenth-century medical treatise, was “endowed with more
destructive energy” than virtually any other poison. The treatise
described how a lab animal injected with strychnine becomes
“agitated and trembles, and is then seized with stiffness and
starting of the limbs,” adding, “These symptoms increase till at
length it is attacked with a fit of violent general spasm, in which
the head is bent back, the spine stiffened, the limbs extended and
rigid, and the respiration checked by the fixing of the chest.”
Stepson’s final hours would have been a hideous torment: his
muscles convulsing, as if he were being jolted with electricity; his
neck craning and his jaw tightening; his lungs constricting as he
tried to breathe, until at last he suffocated.