23 A CASE NOT CLOSED

History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders

and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets,
wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who
seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset. As I
combed through the historical records, I could see what Mollie
could not see about her husband. (An Osage had told me, “Who
would believe that anyone would marry you and kill your family
for your money?”) I could see White unable to recognize Lawson’s
bogus confession or Hoover’s sinister motives. And as I dug
deeper into the Osage murder cases—into the murk of autopsies
and witness testimony and probate records—I began to see certain
holes in the bureau’s investigation.

The authorities insisted that once Hale and his conspirators
were given life sentences, they’d found the guilty parties. And after
White had taken the job at Leavenworth, the cases were closed,
closed with great triumph, even though the bureau had not yet
connected Hale to all twenty-four murders. Was he really
responsible for every one of them? Who, for example, had
abducted the oilman McBride in Washington, D.C., or thrown W.
W. Vaughan off the speeding train?

Hale relied on others to do his bloodletting, but there was no
evidence that Hale’s usual coterie of henchmen—including Bryan
Burkhart, Asa Kirby, John Ramsey, and Kelsie Morrison—had
trailed McBride to the nation’s capital or were with Vaughan on
the train. Whoever had murdered these men had seemed to get