The private detectives shared what they knew with Bill Smith, Mollie’s brother-in-law, who was still conducting his own investigation. The twenty-nine-year-old Smith had been a horse thief before attaching himself to an Osage fortune: first by marrying Mollie’s sister Minnie, and then—only months after Minnie’s death from the mysterious “wasting illness” in 1918—by wedding Mollie’s sister Rita.
