crime scenes, but in the case of Anna, the undertaker had secretly
kept one object: her skull. About the size of a melon, the hollow
chamber felt unnervingly light in one’s hand, air blowing through
as though it were a sun-bleached shell. White examined the skull
and could see the hole in the back where the bullet had entered.
He concluded, as earlier investigators had, that the bullet must
have come from a small-caliber gun—a .32 or perhaps a .38 pistol.
He, too, noticed the oddity that there was no exit wound in the
front of Anna’s skull, which meant that the bullet had lodged
inside her head. The bullet would’ve been impossible to miss
during the autopsy. Someone on the scene—a conspirator or even
the killer—must have swiped it.
The justice of the peace admitted that he had harbored such
suspicions as well. He was pressed on the matter: Was it possible
that, say, the two doctors, David and James Shoun, had taken it? “I
don’t know,” he said.
When David Shoun was questioned, he conceded that there was
no exit wound, but he insisted that he and his brother had “made a
diligent search” for the bullet. James Shoun protested similarly.
White was convinced that somebody had altered the crime scene.
But, given the number of people present during the autopsy—
including the local lawmen, the undertaker, and Mathis, the Big
Hill Trading Company owner—it seemed impossible to say who
the culprit was.
To separate the facts from the hearsay contained in the bureau’s
case files, White settled upon a simple but elegant approach: he
would methodically try to corroborate each suspect’s alibi. As
Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth.”