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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Grann
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April 15 - May 14, 2018
Then, in late 1925, the local priest received a secret message from Mollie. Her life, she said, was in danger. An agent from the Office of Indian Affairs soon picked up another report: Mollie wasn’t dying of diabetes at all; she, too, was being poisoned.
One day in the summer of 1925, Tom White, the special agent in charge of the Bureau of Investigation’s field office in Houston, received an urgent order from headquarters in Washington, D.C. The new boss man, J. Edgar Hoover, asked to speak to him right away—in person.
He wanted his agents to be a specific American type: Caucasian, lawyerly, professional.
President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement.
J. C. “Doc”
The White brothers were part of a small contingent of frontier lawmen who were known inside the bureau as the Cowboys.
head of the bureau: William Burns,
Calvin Coolidge, had gotten rid of Burns and appointed a new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone.
Stone selected J. Edgar Hoover, the twenty-nine-year-old deputy director of the bureau, to serve as acting director while he searched for a permanent replacement.
In December 1924, Stone gave Hoover the job he longed for. Hoover would rapidly reshape the bureau into a monolithic force—one that, during his nearly five-decade reign as director, he would deploy not only to combat crime but also to commit egregious abuses of power.
From the moment he walked out of Hoover’s office, he was a marked man.
Repeat killers tend to rigidly adhere to a routine, yet the Osage murders were carried out in a bewildering array of methods.
Instead, whoever was behind the crimes must have employed henchmen.
it was that there were too many.
disprove
John Wren.
American Indian.
In a joint report, Burger and another agent had stated, “The Indians, in general, are lazy, pathetic, cowardly, dissipated,” and Burger’s colleague insisted that the only way to make “any of these dissolute, stubborn Osage Indians talk and tell what they know is to cut off their allowance…and if necessary, throw them in jail.” Such contempt had deepened the Osage’s distrust of the federal agents and hindered the investigation.
The insurance salesman dropped by the houses of various suspects, under the pretense of hawking policies.
The records from the coroner’s inquest into the death of Anna Brown had mysteriously vanished.
Was it possible that, say, the two doctors, David and James Shoun, had taken it?
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.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
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.
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.
Hoover’s
criticism
he had started to investigate matters himself.
case. Kenny had told agents that A. W. Comstock,
mental instability—
He had told agents that he was sure he could secure critical evidence—if only he could have access to the bureau’s files.
Bryan Burkhart,
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.
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.
It was the first proven crack in Bryan’s alibi.
3:00 a.m.
A man whom she believed to be Bryan shouted, “Stop your foolishness, Annie, and get into this car.”
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.
there was a mole inside the investigation.
A U.S. attorney also discovered that the reports furnished to him by the bureau had vanished from his office.
No one had aroused more suspicion than the private eye called Pike.
a crucial piece of information that he had discovered during his investigation: he knew the identity of the third man who’d been spotted with Bryan and Anna around the time that she was killed.
Pike would share this information under one condition: that he be paid a king’s ransom. “It is quite apparent there is some crooked work afoot,” Agent Burger wrote in a report.
Agents launched a manhunt for Pike, whose last known address was in Kansas City.
He disclosed that he’d never really been hired to solve the murder of Anna Brown; in fact, he’d been asked to conceal Bryan’s whereabouts on the night of the crime.
What’s more, he claimed that his orders had come directly from William Hale.
Was Hale merely protecting Bryan, or was he part of a more intricate, nefarious design?
Ernest Burkhart. Pike added that Ernest was careful never to “discuss this case or talk it over with him in the presence of Mollie Burkhart.”
badness could take hold of anyone.
Tom grew to oppose what was then sometimes called “judicial homicide.” And he came to see the law as a struggle to subdue the violent passions not only in others but also in oneself.
