11   THE THIRD MAN

Hoover immediately began pestering White for updates. Once, when White was in the field and did not respond immediately, Hoover chastised him, saying, “I do not understand why, at the end of the day, you could not have wired me fully as to the developments and general situation.” Hoover’s attention to the case had waxed and waned over the years, but he had become so agitated about the growing criticism he was receiving in Oklahoma that prior to White’s arrival he had started to investigate matters himself. Though he was not one to venture into the muck of the field (he had a phobia of germs and had installed in his home a special filtration system to purify the air), he would sit in his office, poring over incoming reports from agents—his eyes and ears on the menacing world.

As Hoover studied the reports on the Osage murders, he found it an “interesting observation” that Anna Brown and Roan were both killed with a bullet to the back of the head, and “after carefully going over all of the angles,” he came to believe that a white woman, Necia Kenny, who was married to an Osage man, might hold the key to the case. Kenny had told agents that A. W. Comstock, the attorney who served as a guardian for several Osage, was likely part of the conspiracy. Hoover hadn’t forgotten that Comstock had criticized the bureau and had threatened to turn Senator Curtis against him—which made Comstock, in Hoover’s eyes, a malicious rat. “I am convinced that Mrs. Kenny is pretty well on the right track,” Hoover had told one of his agents.

Kenny had a history of mental instability—she claimed to be possessed by spells—and she had once even attempted to murder another local attorney. Still, Hoover himself had interviewed her in Washington, not once, but twice, and he arranged for a government expert on “mental diseases” to evaluate her. The doctor concluded that she was paranoid, but noted, as Hoover put it, that she “perceives items which would escape the observation of the average individual.” As a result, Hoover said, Kenny “is of greater value to us in furnishing leads than she would be possibly as a witness.”

White hadn’t been able to substantiate Kenny’s allegations, but he wasn’t sure what to make of Comstock, either. Armed with his English Bulldog revolver, Comstock was one of the few prominent white citizens in Osage County who seemed willing to assist investigators. He had told agents that he was sure he could secure critical evidence—if only he could have access to the bureau’s files. White refused to share any confidential records. Still, Comstock would routinely come to see White, sharing helpful tidbits of information and checking on the progress of the investigation. Then he would disappear into the streets with his gleaming English Bulldog.

By the end of July 1925, White had turned his full attention to the last of the listed suspects in Anna Brown’s murder: Bryan Burkhart, Mollie’s brother-in-law. White learned that during the inquest, in 1921, Bryan had stated that on the night Anna disappeared he’d taken her straight home from Ernest and Mollie’s house, dropping her off between 4:30 and 5:00 p.m.; Bryan then headed into Fairfax, where he was seen with Hale, Ernest, and his visiting uncle and aunt, who went with him to watch the musical Bringing Up Father. There wouldn’t have been time for him to go to the creek, shoot Anna, and return to town before the show started. His alibi seemed airtight.

To corroborate it, Agent Burger and a colleague had earlier traveled to Campbell, a town in northern Texas, where Ernest and Bryan’s aunt and uncle lived. The agents sped past the old trails that cowboys had once followed—trails that were now supplanted by cattle cars pulled by shrieking locomotives. Agents discovered that Hale had grown up in a wooded grove only a few miles from Campbell. His mother had died when he was three years old—the King of the Osage Hills, too, burdened by a past.

In Campbell, agents stopped at the austere house of Bryan’s uncle and aunt. The uncle was away, but the aunt invited the investigators inside and launched into a venomous rant about how Ernest had married one of those red millionaires. Burger asked her about the night Anna disappeared. Oh, she’d heard the whispers about how Bryan was responsible for killing that drunken Indian, she said. But none of it was true. After dropping Anna off, Bryan had joined the rest of the party in Fairfax.

The uncle suddenly appeared at the front door. He seemed displeased to find a pair of federal agents inside his home. He was reluctant to speak, but he confirmed that Bryan had met them in Fairfax after dropping Anna off. He added that after the show he and his wife had spent the evening in the same house with Bryan and that Bryan was there the whole time; he simply couldn’t have been the murderer. The uncle then made it clear that he wanted the agents to get the hell out.

In August 1925, White sent his undercover operatives to infiltrate the town of Ralston. White wanted his team to investigate a lead that had not been properly followed up: on the night Anna Brown disappeared, case records showed, she might have been spotted in a car by a group of white men who were sitting in front of a hotel on Ralston’s main street. Previous investigators, including local lawmen and the private eyes, had spoken to these valuable witnesses and then seemingly buried what they had learned. At least one of the witnesses had since vanished, and White was convinced that, as one agent had noted in a report, such people were being “paid by suspects to go away and stay away.”

White and his men tried to track down some of the witnesses outside the hotel, including an elderly farmer who had been questioned earlier by an agent. During that initial interview, the farmer had seemed to be suffering from dementia: he had stared at the agent blankly. After a while, though, he had perked up. His memory was just fine, he explained; he’d simply wanted to make sure that the investigators were who they said they were. Talking to the wrong person about these murders was liable to get one planted in the ground.

The farmer now spoke to White and his men. According to testimony that the farmer subsequently gave under oath, he remembered that evening well, because he’d often discussed it with friends of his who gathered regularly at the hotel. “We old fellows have a lot of time in town and that is where we sit down,” he said. He recalled that the car had stopped by the curb and through its open window he could see Anna—she was right there in front of him. She said hello, and someone in the group said back, “Hello, Annie.”

The farmer’s wife, who had been with him in Ralston that night, was also certain that the woman in the car was Anna, though she didn’t talk to her. “There was Indians so much around there,” she testified. “Sometimes I spoke to one, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes when I spoke to one they didn’t speak.” Asked if Anna had been slumped over from drinking, she said, “Just sitting like they all sit, just about like this.” She posed herself straight and rigid, like a statue, her rendition of a stoic Indian.

At one point, she was asked if anyone had been with Anna in the car.

“Yes, sir,” the farmer’s wife said.

“Who?”

“Bryan Burkhart.”

Bryan, she said, had been driving the car and wearing a cowboy hat. Another witness said that he also saw Bryan with Anna in the car. “They went straight west from there right on through town and I don’t know where they went from there,” the witness recalled.

It was the first proven crack in Bryan’s alibi. He might have taken Anna home, but he’d eventually gone back out with her. As an agent wrote in a report, Bryan “perjured himself when he swore before the coroner’s inquest at Fairfax…that he had left Anna safely at her home in Fairfax between 4:30 and 5 p.m.”

White needed to establish where the two had gone after leaving Ralston. Piecing together details from Agent Burger’s previous informants as well as from witnesses located by the undercover team, White was able to create a time line. Bryan and Anna had stopped at a nearby speakeasy and stayed there until about 10:00 p.m. Then they headed to another hell joint, several miles north of Fairfax. Bryan’s uncle was spotted with them, so perhaps the uncle had been lying to Agent Burger, to cover not only for Bryan but for himself as well. The owner of the place told agents that Bryan and Anna had been drinking there until about 1:00 a.m.

Accounts of where Bryan and Anna went after that grew murkier. One witness said that they’d stopped, alone, at another speakeasy closer to Fairfax. Others reported seeing Bryan and Anna leave the speakeasy in the company of a “third man” who wasn’t the uncle. “Third man is said to have been present with Anna Brown and Bryan Burkhart,” Agent Burger noted. The last sighting of Anna and Bryan together that the investigators heard about had been at approximately 3:00 a.m. A witness who knew them both said that she’d heard a car stop near her house in Fairfax. A man whom she believed to be Bryan shouted, “Stop your foolishness, Annie, and get into this car.”

After that, there was no trace of Anna—she’d been ghosted. Bryan’s neighbor, though, spotted him returning home at sunrise. Bryan later told the neighbor not to say a word to anybody, and gave him money to keep quiet.

White had homed in on a prime suspect. But, as with many mysteries, each answer to a question opened up another question. If Bryan had killed Anna, what was his motive? Was he involved in the other murders? And who was the third man?