Killers of the Flower Moon: Chapters 16–21

And without an airtight case White knew that he’d never be able to bring down this man who hid behind layers of respectability—who called himself the Reverend—and who used a network of patronage to influence the sheriff’s office, prosecutors, judges, and some of the highest state officials.

Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I.

Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I.

As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age.

The fact that he didn’t fire a gun only burnished his image.

Hoover often repeated the maxim “You either improve or deteriorate.”

Before joining the Justice Department, Hoover had been a clerk at the Library of Congress—“I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us,” a co-worker said—and Hoover had mastered how to classify reams of data using its Dewey decimal-like system.

At a makeshift training school in New York, agents were indoctrinated in the new regulations and methods.

Some agents, especially older ones, despised Hoover and his edicts.

White, too, sometimes chafed at Hoover’s rules and whims.

He tried to neatly type up his reports and touted the virtues of scientific policing.

In the short time that White had been on the case, he had seen the lights burning each night around the homes of the Osage, and seen that members of the community wouldn’t let their children go into town alone, and seen more and more residents selling their homes and moving to distant states or even other countries like Mexico and Canada. (Later, one Osage called it a “diaspora.”)

The Pawhuska Daily Capital had reported: WITH $10,000 BONDS IN ONE HAND AND WINCHESTER CLUTCHED IN THE OTHER, FAMOUS BANDIT DIES IN HIS BOOTS WHILE HILLS WHICH GAVE HIM SHELTER IN LIFE ARE HIS SEPULCHER IN DEATH.

It was, evidently, a plot within a plot, and White suddenly became suspicious of the litany of dead witnesses.

“Hale knows everything,” the informant Morrison had told agents, and there were signs that Morrison might be playing his own duplicitous game.

White studied the man who appeared before him: short, portly, and middle-aged, with ghostly white long hair.

Even Ernest seemed terrified of the plan’s inevitable denouement.

John Wren, the Ute agent, had recently spoken to Mollie’s priest, who said that she had stopped coming to church, which was unlike her, and that he had heard she was being forcibly kept away by family members. The priest was sufficiently alarmed that he had broken the tenet of parishioner confidentiality.

“He’s lying,” Burkhart said emphatically.

Desperate, White turned to the man who had embarrassed Hoover and become a pariah in the eyes of investigators: Blackie Thompson, the part-Cherokee outlaw who, during the bureau’s early investigation, had been released from prison as an informant, only to murder a police officer.

Hale was a schemer, Burkhart said, and though he hadn’t been privy to all the mechanics of Hale’s plots, his uncle had shared with him details of a murderous plan: to kill Rita and Bill Smith.

Even after White detailed the overwhelming evidence against him, Hale seemed unperturbed, as if he still held the upper hand. Kelsie Morrison had earlier told agents that Hale was certain that “money will buy the protection or acquittal of any man for any crime in Osage County.”

Hale held enormous influence over Oklahoma’s fragile legal institutions; as a reporter who visited the region noted, “Townspeople, from low to high, speak of him with bated breath. His influence and that of his associates is felt everywhere.”

Despite the brutality of the crimes, many whites did not mask their enthusiasm for the lurid story. OSAGE INDIAN KILLING CONSPIRACY THRILLS, declared the Reno Evening Gazette.

But, as with many crimes against American Indians, the question of which government entity had jurisdiction over the Osage murders was confounding.

Under Springer’s counsel, Ramsey quickly recanted his confession, insisting, “I never killed anyone.”

Hale’s wife, his eighteen-year-old daughter, and his many boisterous supporters clustered behind the defense table. Journalists jostled for space.

Many people in the gallery gossiped about an Osage woman who was sitting on one of the benches, quiet and alone. It was Mollie Burkhart, cast out from the two worlds that she’d always straddled: whites, loyal to Hale, shunned her, while many Osage ostracized her for bringing the killers among them and for remaining loyal to Ernest.

“Have state or federal officials offered you immunity or clemency if you changed your plea?”

“William K. Hale is charged with aiding and abetting to the killing of Henry Roan, while John Ramsey is charged with the killing.”

Leahy outlined the alleged facts of the insurance murder plot in a matter-of-fact voice. One observer noted that “the veteran of legal battles does not go in for fireworks or courtroom histrionics but he makes his points all the stronger for his quiet reserve.”

The prosecutor Roy St. Lewis called Hale “the ruthless freebooter of death.”

According to one witness, the defense attorney Jim Springer had offered him money to lie on the stand, and when he refused, Springer aimed what appeared to be a gun in his pocket at him and said, “I will kill you.” In early October, a grand jury recommended filing charges against Springer and several witnesses for what it called flagrant attempts to obstruct justice.

The prosecution protested that the question was immaterial, and the judge agreed. Indeed, there seemed to be no point to the line of questioning other than to inflict more suffering upon her.

The inmates took in their grim destination: Leavenworth was a 366,000-square-foot fortress, which, as a prisoner once described, rose out of the surrounding cornfields like a “giant mausoleum adrift in a great sea of nothingness.”

At forty-four, Mollie could finally spend her money as she pleased, and was recognized as a full-fledged American citizen.

The many details of Hoover’s abuses of power would not be made public until after his death, in 1972, and despite White’s perceptiveness, he was blind to the boss man’s megalomania, his politicization of the bureau, and his paranoid plots against an ever-growing list of perceived enemies, among them American Indian activists.

He wrote a few stilted pages, which read, in part,
After the Director Mr. J. Edgar Hoover briefed me on the importance of the case, he instructed me to return to Houston, arrange my affairs there, and go as soon as possible to take charge of the Oklahoma City office...

On February 11, 1969, Doc, who was staying on the ranch where he and Tom had grown up, died at the age of eighty-four. In a letter, White shared the news with Hoover, noting that he and his four siblings had been “born on this land.” He added wistfully, “And now I am the only one left.”

An agent urged Hoover to send condolences to White’s widow, emphasizing that there was nothing in White’s files to “militate against such action.”