message: “Congratulations.”
As White and his men worked to corroborate the details in
Lawson’s confession, they felt a growing urgency to get Hale and
his nephews off the streets. The attorney and guardian Comstock,
who White no longer doubted was helping investigators by
persuading witnesses to talk, had begun to receive threats to his
life. He was now sleeping in his office, in downtown Pawhuska,
with his .44-caliber English Bulldog by his side. “Once, when he
went to open the window, he found sticks of dynamite behind the
curtain,” a relative recalled. He was able to dispose of them. But,
the relative added, “Hale and his bunch were determined to kill
him.”
White was also very concerned about the fate of Mollie
Burkhart. Although White had received reports that she was sick
with diabetes, he was suspicious. Hale had successfully arranged,
corpse by corpse, for Mollie to inherit the majority of her family
members’ wealth. Yet the plot seemed unfinished. Hale had access
to Mollie’s fortune through Ernest, but his nephew did not yet
directly control it, and would do so only if Mollie died and
bequeathed it to him. A servant in Mollie’s house had told an
agent that one night Ernest had muttered to her while drunk that
he was afraid something would happen to Mollie. Even Ernest
seemed terrified of the plan’s inevitable denouement.
John Wren, the Ute agent, had recently spoken to Mollie’s
priest, who said that she had stopped coming to church, which was
unlike her, and that he had heard she was being forcibly kept away
by family members. The priest was sufficiently alarmed that he
had broken the tenet of parishioner confidentiality. Soon after, the
priest reported that he had received a secret message from Mollie:
she was afraid that someone was trying to poison her. Given that