murder case in the history of the Southwest—the wholesale
slaying of Osage Indians for their oil headrights....The freeing of a
principal in so cold-blooded a plot, after serving little more than a
decade of a life sentence, seems to reveal one of the besetting
weaknesses of the parole system.”
Margie said that after Ernest got out, he robbed an Osage home
and was sent back to prison. In 1947, while Ernest was still in jail,
Hale was released, having served twenty years at Leavenworth.
Parole board officials maintained that their ruling was based on
the grounds of Hale’s advanced age—he was seventy-two—and his
record as a good prisoner. An Osage leader said that Hale “should
have been hanged for his crimes,” and members of the tribe were
convinced that the board’s decision was the last vestige of Hale’s
political influence. He was forbidden to set foot again in
Oklahoma, but according to relatives he once visited them and
said, “If that damn Ernest had kept his mouth shut we’d be rich
today.”
Margie told me that she never met Hale, who died in 1962, in an
Arizona nursing home. But she saw Ernest after he got out of
prison again, in 1959. Barred from returning to Oklahoma, he had
initially gone to work on a sheep farm in New Mexico, earning $75
a month. A reporter noted at the time, “It will be a far cry from the
days of affluence as the husband of an oil-rich Osage Indian
woman.” In 1966, hoping to return to Oklahoma, Ernest applied
for a pardon. The records no longer exist, but his appeal, which
went before a five-member review board in Oklahoma, was based
at least partly on his cooperation with the bureau’s investigation
of the murders. (White had always credited Burkhart’s confession
as salvaging his case.) Despite intense protests from the Osage,
the board ruled, three to two, in favor of a pardon, which the
governor then granted. HEADRIGHTS KILLER WINS PARDON VOTE, the
Oklahoman declared, adding, OSAGES TERRORIZED.