The case of Red Corn’s grandfather was one of those voids.
Because there had been no investigation into the death, and
because all the principal figures were deceased, I couldn’t find any
trail of evidence to follow. Virtually all traces of the grandfather’s
life and death—of passions and turmoil and possible brutal
violence—had seemingly been washed away.
The conversation with Red Corn, though, prompted me to probe
more deeply into perhaps the most puzzling of the Osage murder
cases—that of Charles Whitehorn. The murder, which bore all the
markings of a Hale-orchestrated hit, took place in May 1921—the
same time period as the slaying of Anna Brown, in what was
considered the beginning of the four-year Reign of Terror. Yet no
evidence had ever surfaced implicating Hale or his henchmen in
Whitehorn’s murder.
Though the case had never been solved, it had originally been a
prime focus of investigators, and when I returned to New York, I
gathered evidentiary material related to the crime. In one of the
tottering piles in my office, I found the logs from the private
detectives hired by Whitehorn’s estate after his death. Their
reports read as though they’d been torn from a dime-store novel,
with lines such as “This dope is coming to me from a reliable
source.”
As I read through the reports, I jotted down key details:Whitehorn last seen alive in Pawhuska on May 14, 1921. Witness spotted him
around 8:00 p.m. outside Constantine Theater.Body discovered two weeks later—on a hill about a mile from downtown
Pawhuska.According to undertaker, “The position of the body indicated that he had fallen in
that position and had not been carried there.”