Asa Kirby

Asa Kirby was a gold-toothed outlaw and safecracker whose reported expertise in explosives placed him in the alleged plot to destroy the Smith house. He never testified: a few weeks after his associate Henry Grammer died in a car crash, Kirby was killed during a botched diamond-store burglary. His death left T. B. White with another potential witness gone and sharpened his suspicion that William K. Hale was manipulating events around the investigation.

Identity and Alleged Role

Kirby entered the investigation through a safecracker, or yegg, who gave T. B. White and his team the name of another possible witness to the bombing plot. The informant described Kirby as Grammer’s associate and as the explosives specialist who had designed the bomb. That identification was an allegation, not Kirby’s own testimony: investigators never had the opportunity to question him about it.

Ernest Burkhart’s account supplied a separate link. He said Grammer had told Hale shortly before the explosion that “Acie”—Kirby—would do the job, and that Hale had relayed this information to him. Burkhart also said that he had carried Hale’s message to John Ramsey telling Kirby it was time to act. These details place Kirby in the reported chain of arrangements, but do not establish that he personally built or planted the bomb.

The Burglary and His Death

A few weeks after Grammer’s fatal car crash, Kirby broke into a store at night intending to steal diamonds. The shopkeeper had been tipped off and was waiting with a 12-gauge shotgun; he shot Kirby during the attempted burglary. Kirby died there, unable to give investigators an account of his alleged role in the bombing.

T. B. White learned that Hale had warned the shopkeeper about the robbery. That apparent intervention could bolster Hale’s reputation as a defender of law and order: Kirby, an outlaw, had been caught in the act. But another outlaw told White that Hale had set up the burglary, having told Kirby about the diamonds and suggested when to break in. The two accounts made Kirby’s death look less like a simple failed heist and more like a possible plot nested inside the bombing investigation.

Significance to the Investigation

Kirby’s death came amid a troubling sequence of lost or dead potential witnesses. Grammer had recently died when his Cadillac left the road and overturned; people who knew him suspected that its steering wheel and brakes had been tampered with. T. B. White also learned of a potential witness in the Henry Roan murder case who had been bludgeoned to death, while Curley Johnson’s widow believed her husband had been poisoned by Hale and his associates. These were suspicions and allegations, not proof that every death had been arranged by Hale, but together they changed how investigators viewed the dwindling witness pool.

Kirby therefore mattered less as a voice the investigation heard than as a voice it could not hear. His alleged role connected Grammer to the bombing, while the circumstances of his death raised the possibility that Hale could appear to expose an outlaw’s crime even as he had helped engineer the danger that killed him. Kirby’s fate contributed to the investigators’ sense that anyone able to implicate Hale might be eliminated before giving evidence.