Weapon: a .32 revolver. Shot—twice—between the eyes. A professional hit?The reports noted that the attorney Vaughan had been eager to
help the private eyes. “Vaughan who is well acquainted with the
Indians stated that his real interest in the case was to...have the
guilty party prosecuted,” a private detective wrote. Neither the
private detectives nor Vaughan had any inkling that Vaughan
would eventually become a target—that within two years he, too,
would be murdered—and I found myself pleading with them to see
what they could not see.
Comstock—the attorney and guardian who, despite Hoover’s
initial suspicions, had proven to be trustworthy—had also tried to
assist the private detectives investigating the murders. “Mr.
Comstock had received some information,” a private detective
wrote, noting that Comstock had reported that on May 14 an
unidentified man had been seen lurking on the hill where
Whitehorn’s body was subsequently found.
Because the Whitehorn case was officially unresolved, I
expected the trails of evidence to disappear into a morass. In fact,
the reports were bracing in their clarity. Based on leads from
informants and from circumstantial evidence, the private
detectives began to develop a crystalline theory of the crime. After
Whitehorn’s death, his part-white, part-Cheyenne widow, Hattie,
had married an unscrupulous white man named LeRoy
Smitherman. The private eyes learned that the marriage had been
orchestrated by Minnie Savage—a “shrewd, immoral, capable
woman,” as one investigator put it, who ran a boardinghouse in
Pawhuska. The private eyes suspected that she and Smitherman,
as well as other conspirators, had arranged Whitehorn’s killing in
order to steal his headright and fortune. Over time, many of the
investigators came to believe that Hattie Whitehorn, who had
quickly spent some of her husband’s fortune after his death, was