initially suspected his grandfather Harry, who was white. By then,
Harry had died, but his second wife was still alive and told
McAuliffe, “You should be ashamed of yourself, Denny, digging up
things about the Boltons. I can’t understand why you’d want to do
such a thing.” And she kept repeating, “Harry didn’t do it. He had
nothing to do with it.”
Later, McAuliffe realized that she was probably right. He came
to believe, instead, that Sybil’s stepfather was responsible. But
there is no way to know with certainty. “I did not prove who killed
my grandmother,” McAuliffe wrote. “My failure was not just
because of me, though. It was because they ripped out too many
pages of our history....There were just too many lies, too many
documents destroyed, too little done at the time to document how
my grandmother died.” He added, “A murdered Indian’s survivors
don’t have the right to the satisfaction of justice for past crimes, or
of even knowing who killed their children, their mothers or
fathers, brothers or sisters, their grandparents. They can only
guess—like I was forced to.”
Before I left Osage County to return home, I stopped to see
Mary Jo Webb, a retired teacher who had spent decades
investigating the suspicious death of her grandfather during the
Reign of Terror. Webb, who was in her eighties, lived in a single-
story wooden house in Fairfax, not far from where the Smiths’
home had exploded. A frail woman with a quavering voice, she
invited me in and we sat in her living room. I had called earlier to
arrange the visit, and in expectation of my arrival she had brought
out several boxes of documents—including guardian expense
reports, probate records, and court testimony—that she’d gathered
about the case of her grandfather Paul Peace. “He was one of those
victims who didn’t show up in the FBI files and whose killers