10   ELIMINATING THE IMPOSSIBLE

One after the other, the strangers slipped into Osage County. The former sheriff showed up, in the guise of an elderly, quiet cattleman from Texas. Then the talkative former Texas Ranger appeared, also presenting himself as a rancher. Not long afterward, the onetime insurance salesman opened a business in downtown Fairfax, peddling bona fide policies. Finally, Agent Wren arrived as an Indian medicine man who claimed to be searching for his relatives.

White had counseled his men to keep their covers simple so they didn’t betray themselves. The two operatives acting as cattlemen soon ingratiated themselves with William Hale, who considered them fellow Texas cowboys and who introduced them to many of the leading townsfolk. The insurance salesman dropped by the houses of various suspects, under the pretense of hawking policies. Agent Wren made his own inroads, attending tribal gatherings and gleaning information from Osage who might not otherwise talk to a white lawman. “Wren had lived among the Indians…and had gotten away with it in remarkable shape,” White told Hoover, adding that his undercover men seemed to be able to “withstand the rigor of the life.”

It was hard for White to know where to begin the investigation. The records from the coroner’s inquest into the death of Anna Brown had mysteriously vanished. “My desk was broken into and the testimony disappeared,” the justice of the peace in Fairfax said.

Virtually no evidence had been preserved from the various crime scenes, but in the case of Anna, the undertaker had secretly kept one object: her skull. About the size of a melon, the hollow chamber felt unnervingly light in one’s hand, air blowing through as though it were a sun-bleached shell. White examined the skull and could see the hole in the back where the bullet had entered. He concluded, as earlier investigators had, that the bullet must have come from a small-caliber gun—a .32 or perhaps a .38 pistol. He, too, noticed the oddity that there was no exit wound in the front of Anna’s skull, which meant that the bullet had lodged inside her head. The bullet would’ve been impossible to miss during the autopsy. Someone on the scene—a conspirator or even the killer—must have swiped it.

The justice of the peace admitted that he had harbored such suspicions as well. He was pressed on the matter: Was it possible that, say, the two doctors, David and James Shoun, had taken it? “I don’t know,” he said.

When David Shoun was questioned, he conceded that there was no exit wound, but he insisted that he and his brother had “made a diligent search” for the bullet. James Shoun protested similarly. White was convinced that somebody had altered the crime scene. But, given the number of people present during the autopsy—including the local lawmen, the undertaker, and Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner—it seemed impossible to say who the culprit was.

To separate the facts from the hearsay contained in the bureau’s case files, White settled upon a simple but elegant approach: he would methodically try to corroborate each suspect’s alibi. As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

White relied upon Agent Burger to guide him through the murk of the previous federal investigation. Agent Burger had worked on the case for a year and a half, and during that time he had pursued many of the same leads as the private eyes hired by Hale and Mathis and Mollie’s family. By drawing on Agent Burger’s findings, White was able to quickly rule out many of the suspects, including Anna’s ex-husband, Oda Brown. His alibi—that he was with another woman—checked out, and it became clear that the forger who had implicated Brown had fabricated his story hoping to bargain with prosecutors for better prison conditions. Further investigation eliminated other suspects, like the ruffian oil workers who had been pinpointed by Harve Freas, the ousted sheriff.

White then explored the rumor that Rose Osage had killed Anna because Anna had tried to seduce her boyfriend, Joe Allen. (Rose and Joe had since married.) White learned of the statement that private investigator No. 28 had obtained from the Kaw Indian woman, in which Rose had confessed to being the murderer. In a field report, an agent from the bureau observed, “It is a matter of common knowledge that Rose…was of a violent and jealous disposition.” The Fairfax town marshal also shared with agents a disturbing detail: around the time of Anna’s murder, he had found a dark stain on the backseat of Rose’s car. It looked like blood, he said.

Agent Burger informed White that he had once brought Rose Osage and Joe to the sheriff’s office for questioning. The two suspects were placed in separate rooms and left to stir. When Agent Burger interrogated Rose, she insisted that she’d nothing to do with Anna’s killing. “I never had a quarrel or fight with Anna,” she stated. Agent Burger then confronted Joe, who, in the agent’s words, was “very self-contained, sullen and wicked appearing.” Another investigator had separately asked Joe, “Were you thick with Annie?”

“No, I was never,” he said.

Joe gave the same alibi Rose did: on the night of May 21, 1921, they had been together in Pawnee, seventeen miles southwest of Gray Horse, and had stopped at a rooming house. The owner of the rooming house—which was one of those seething places that often reeked of sex and moonshine—supported Joe and Rose’s claims. The investigators noticed, however, that the stories told by Rose and Joe were almost verbatim, as if they had rehearsed them.

Rose and Joe were released, and afterward Agent Burger sought the help of an informant—the bootlegger and dope peddler Kelsie Morrison, who seemed an ideal source of intelligence. He’d once been married to an Osage woman, and was close to Rose and other suspects. Before Agent Burger could recruit Morrison, though, he needed to find him: Morrison had fled Osage County after assaulting a local Prohibition officer. Burger and other agents made inquiries and learned that Morrison was in Dallas, Texas, using the alias Lloyd Miller. The agents sprang a trap. They had a registered letter sent to the P.O. box listed under Miller’s name, then they nabbed Morrison when he went to retrieve it. “We interviewed ‘Lloyd Miller’ who for about an hour denied that he was Kelsie Morrison but finally admitted that he was,” Agent Burger reported.

Morrison, whom Agent Burger described as an “unusually shrewd and reckless and self-confessed criminal,” dressed like a dance-hall hustler. Tall, bullet scarred, small-eyed, and jittery, he seemed to be wasting away from within—hence his nickname, Slim. “Talks and smokes cigarettes a lot,” Agent Burger noted in a report. “Sniffs nose and works mouth and nose like rabbit almost continuously, especially when excited.”

The feds cut a deal with Morrison: in return for getting his arrest warrant for assault quashed, he would work as an informant on the Osage murder cases. Agent Burger told headquarters, “This arrangement is strictly confidential and not to be divulged outside of this Bureau to anyone, under any circumstances.”

There was a risk that Morrison might slip away, and before releasing him, Agent Burger made sure that he’d gone through a rigorous process known as Bertillonage. Devised by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in 1879, it was the first scientific method for identifying repeat criminals. Using a caliper and other special tools, Agent Burger, with the help of the Dallas police, took eleven of Morrison’s body measurements. Among them were the length of his left foot, the width and length of his head, and the diameter of his right ear.

After Agent Burger informed Morrison of the purpose of these measurements, he also commissioned a mug shot, another of Bertillon’s innovations. In 1894, Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, wrote that any prisoner who passed through Bertillon’s system would be forever “spotted”: “He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless.”

But Bertillonage was already being displaced by a more efficient method of identification that was revolutionizing the world of scientific detection: fingerprinting. In some cases, a suspect could now be placed at the scene of a crime even without a witness present. When Hoover became the bureau’s acting director, he created the Identification Division, a central repository for the fingerprints of arrested criminals from around the country. Such scientific methods, Hoover proclaimed, would assist “the guardians of civilization in the face of the common danger.”

Agent Burger had Morrison’s fingertips dabbed in ink. “We have his picture, description, measurements and fingerprints in the event we have cause to apprehend him,” he informed headquarters.

He then gave Morrison some spending money. Morrison promised to visit Rose Osage and Joe Allen as well as members of the underworld, to see what he could learn about the murders. Morrison warned that if anyone discovered he was working for the feds, it would mean his death.

He reported back that he had asked Rose, regarding Anna’s murder, “Why’d you do it?” And she replied, “You don’t know a god damn thing about it, Slim, I did not kill Anna.” In a memo, Agent Burger noted of his prized informant, “If he is not bumped off too soon he can do us a lot of good.”

White now reviewed all the information that had been gathered by Morrison and the agents regarding Rose Osage and Joe Allen. In light of Rose’s statement to Morrison and the fact that the rooming house owner had confirmed Rose and Joe’s alibi, the Kaw Indian’s statement that Rose had confessed to her seemed puzzling. One detail, in particular, was curious. According to the Kaw Indian’s account of Rose’s confession, Anna was in the car when Rose shot her, and her body was then dumped at Three Mile Creek, where Rose also discarded her own bloodstained clothes.

The autopsy findings were telling. Criminologists had come to understand that blood coagulates at the lowest point of a body after death, producing dark splotches on the skin. If, when one finds a corpse, these splotches appear on the higher regions, it is a sign that someone has moved the body. In Anna’s case, the doctors had not reported any indications of this, and from all the descriptions of the crime scene there had been no trail of blood from the car down to the creek.

It seemed that the witness must be lying and that Rose and Joe were innocent. This would explain why the Dictograph set up by the private detectives working for Mollie Burkhart’s family had never picked up any incriminating statements, and why Rose’s clothes had never been found in the creek. When agents interrogated the Kaw Indian, it didn’t take much for her to crack. She admitted that Rose had never told her any such story about the killing. In fact, a strange white man had come to her house, written up the statement, and forced her to sign it, even though none of it was true. White realized that the conspirators were not only erasing evidence—they were manufacturing it.