Once more, the macabre rituals began. The deputy and the
marshal returned to the ravine, and Hale went with them. By then,
darkness had enshrouded the crime scene, and the men lined up
their vehicles on the hill and shone their headlights down into the
depths below—into what one law-enforcement official called “truly
a valley of death.”
Hale remained on top of the hill and watched as the coroner’s
inquest began, the men bobbing in and out of the silhouetted
Buick. One of the Shoun brother doctors concluded that the time
of death was around ten days earlier. The lawmen noted the
position of Roan’s body—“his hands folded across his breast and
his head on the seat”—and how the bullet had exited through his
right eye and then shattered the windshield. They noted the
broken glass strewn on the hood and on the ground beyond. They
noted the things he carried: “$20 in greenback, two silver dollars,
and...a gold watch.” And the lawmen noted nearby tread marks in
the frozen mud from another car—presumably the assassin’s.
Word of the murder rekindled the sense of prickly dread. The
Osage Chief—which, in the same issue, happened to carry a tribute
to Abraham Lincoln as an inspiration to Americans—stated on its
front page, HENRY ROAN SHOT BY UNKNOWN HAND.
The news jolted Mollie. In 1902, more than a decade before
meeting Ernest, she and Roan had been briefly married. There are
few surviving accounts detailing the relationship, but it was likely
an arranged marriage: youths—Mollie was only fifteen at the time
—pressed together to preserve a vanishing way of life. Because the
marriage had been contracted according to Osage custom, there
was no need for a legal divorce, and they simply went their own
ways. Still, they remained bound by a memory of a fleeting
intimacy that had apparently ended with no bitterness and
perhaps even some hidden warmth.