White still didn’t know quite what to believe. But if Lawson was
lying about anything, getting a confession from Burkhart was even
more crucial; otherwise, the case would collapse.
For hours, in the hot, claustrophobic box, White and Smith went
over the circumstantial evidence that they’d gathered on each of
the murders, trying to trip up Burkhart. White thought that he
detected some element of remorse in him, as if he wanted to
unburden himself, to protect his wife and children. Yet, whenever
White or Smith mentioned Hale, he stiffened in his chair, more
afraid of his uncle, it seemed, than he was of the law.
“My advice to you is to tell it all,” White said, almost pleadingly.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Burkhart said.
After midnight, White and Smith gave up and returned Burkhart
to his cell. By the next day, White’s case encountered even more
trouble. Hale announced that he could prove positively that he had
been in Texas at the time of the explosion, for he had received a
telegram there and signed for it. If this was true—and White was
inclined to believe that it was—then Lawson had indeed been lying
all along. In White’s desperation to get Hale, he’d committed the
ultimate sin of an evidence man and believed, despite apparent
contradictions, what he wanted to believe. White knew that he had
only hours before Hale’s lawyers would produce the record of this
telegram and spring Hale, along with Burkhart—only hours before
word got out that the bureau had humiliated itself, news that
would then reach Hoover. As one of Hoover’s aides said of the
director, “If he didn’t like you, he destroyed you.” Hale’s lawyers
promptly tipped off a reporter who ran a story about Hale’s
“perfect” alibi, noting, “He’s not afraid.”
Desperate, White turned to the man who had embarrassed
Hoover and become a pariah in the eyes of investigators: Blackie
Thompson, the part-Cherokee outlaw who, during the bureau’s