confession. “You could look at him and size him up as the weak
sister,” White observed. A prosecutor working with White put it
more bluntly, “We all picked Ernest Burkhart the one to break.”
Burkhart was brought into a room on the third floor of a federal
building in Guthrie, which was being used as a makeshift
interrogation room: the box. He was wearing the same clothes that
he had when he was arrested, and White thought that he looked
like a “small-town dandy, well dressed in a western way, expensive
cowboy boots, loud shirt, flashy tie, and a high-priced, tailored
suit.” He moved about nervously and licked his lips.
White and Agent Frank Smith questioned him. “We want to talk
to you about the murder of Bill Smith’s family and Anna Brown,”
White said.
“Hell, I don’t know a thing about it,” Burkhart insisted.
White explained that they had talked to a man named Burt
Lawson in the pen, who said differently—said that Burkhart knew
a good deal about the murders. The mention of Lawson did not
seem to faze Burkhart, who insisted that he’d never had any
dealings with him.
“He says you were the contact man in setting up the Smith
house explosion,” White said.
“He’s lying,” Burkhart said emphatically. A doubt seized White,
a doubt that perhaps had been lurking somewhere inside him but
had been suppressed: What if Lawson was lying and had simply
picked up information from other outlaws in prison who had
heard rumors about the case? Perhaps Lawson was lying in the
hopes that prosecutors would reduce his jail time, in exchange for
his testimony. Or maybe the whole confession had been
orchestrated by Hale—another one of his plots within a plot.