19 A TRAITOR TO HIS BLOOD

The revelations of the arrests and the horror of the crimes

held the nation in their grip. The press wrote about “an evidently
well-organized band, diabolic in its ruthlessness, to destroy with
bullet, poison, and bomb the heirs to the oil-rich lands of the
Osage”; about crimes that were “more blood-curdling than those
of the old frontier days”; and about the federal government’s effort
to bring to justice the alleged “King of the Killers.”

White had been consumed with the cases involving Roan and
Mollie Burkhart’s family members, and he and his men had not
yet been able to connect Hale to all of the twenty-four Osage
murders or to the deaths of the attorney Vaughan and the oilman
McBride. Yet White and his team were able to show how Hale
benefited from at least two of these other killings. The first was
the suspected poisoning of George Bigheart, the Osage Indian
who, before dying, had passed on information to Vaughan. White
learned from witnesses that Hale had been seen with Bigheart just
before he was rushed to the hospital, and that after his death Hale
made a claim upon his estate for $6,000, presenting a forged
creditor’s note. Ernest Burkhart disclosed that Hale, before filling
out the note, had practiced making his handwriting look like
Bigheart’s. Hale was also implicated in the apparent poisoning of
Joe Bates, an Osage Indian, in 1921. After Bates, who was married
and had six children, suddenly died, Hale had produced a dubious
deed to his land. Bates’s widow later wrote a letter to the Office of
Indian Affairs, saying, “Hale kept my husband drunk for over a