Indian Affairs received a note from someone who knew Mollie,
saying that she was “in failing health and is not expected to live
very long.” Consumed by fear and ill health, she gave her third
child, Anna, to a relative to be raised.
Time ground on. There are few records, at least authoritative
ones, of Mollie’s existence during this period. No record of how
she felt when agents from the Bureau of Investigation—an obscure
branch of the Justice Department that in 1935, would be renamed
the Federal Bureau of Investigation—finally arrived in town. No
record of what she thought of physicians like the Shoun brothers,
who were constantly coming and going, injecting her with what
was said to be a new miracle drug: insulin. It was as if, after being
forced to play a tragic hand, she’d dealt herself out of history.
Then, in late 1925, the local priest received a secret message
from Mollie. Her life, she said, was in danger. An agent from the
Office of Indian Affairs soon picked up another report: Mollie
wasn’t dying of diabetes at all; she, too, was being poisoned.