away scot-free.
I could not find any new leads on the McBride case, but one day
when I was doing research in Oklahoma City, I called Martha
Vaughan, a granddaughter of W. W. Vaughan’s. She was a social
worker who lived in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, which is 160 miles from
the state capital. She was eager to talk about her grandfather and
offered to drive to see me. “Let’s meet at the Skirvin Hotel,” she
said. “It’ll give you a glimpse of some of the riches that oil brought
to Oklahoma.”
When I arrived at the hotel, I understood what she meant. Built
in 1910 by the oilman W. B. Skirvin, it was once billed as the finest
hotel in the Southwest, with a ballroom that seated five hundred
people and chandeliers imported from Austria and pillars topped
with busts of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. Hale’s attorney
Sargent Prentiss Freeling died—apparently of a cerebral
hemorrhage—in one of the hotel rooms while playing solitaire. In
1988, amid a devastating oil downturn, the hotel closed and
remained shuttered for years. But nearly two decades later, after
undergoing a $55 million renovation, it reopened as part of the
Hilton chain.
I waited for Martha in the lobby, which still has the original
arched wooden entryway and the faces of Bacchus peering down
from the ceiling. When Martha arrived, she was accompanied by
her cousin Melville Vaughan, a biology professor at the University
of Central Oklahoma. “He knows a lot about Grandpa Vaughan,”
Martha said.
Melville was carrying two thick binders, and as we sat at the bar,
he laid them before me. They were filled with research that over
decades the family had obsessively collected about W. W.
Vaughan’s murder. The binders included faded newspaper
clippings (PAWHUSKA MAN’S NUDE BODY FOUND), Vaughan’s death