Bill Smith

Bill Smith was more than a victim of the bombing that destroyed his home: he had already suspected that Lizzie was poisoned and investigated whether a larger conspiracy was targeting his family’s oil wealth. His efforts made him a possible threat to the people profiting from the murders, while the uncertainty surrounding what he said before his death became one of the investigation’s most consequential silences.

Family and Early Suspicions

In September 1925, as Tom White tried to determine what William K. Hale and his nephews Ernest and Bryan Burkhart were concealing, he returned to Bill Smith’s earlier suspicions. Smith had been the first to suspect that Lizzie was poisoned, and he had investigated whether the deaths were connected to a broader effort to seize the family’s oil wealth. White reasoned that if Smith had been killed because of what he had learned, his knowledge might unlock the conspiracy’s inner workings.

The sequence of deaths in Mollie Burkhart’s family gave that suspicion a larger context. Anna Brown’s headright passed to Lizzie, who left most of her own headright to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita Smith. Rita and Bill Smith were then killed in a house bombing. Their wills stipulated that if they died simultaneously, much of Rita’s headright would pass to Mollie. But Bill survived Rita by several days, so he inherited much of her wealth; when he died, that portion went to one of his relatives instead. The bombing thus fit a suspected plan to concentrate family headrights in Mollie, but its timing disrupted the intended inheritance route.

The Hospital Statement

After the explosion, investigators asked the nurse who had cared for Bill in the hospital whether he had spoken about the murders. He sometimes muttered names while feverish, but she could not make them out. When awake, he seemed worried that he might have said something in his sleep that he should not have revealed. Shortly before he died, his doctors, James and David Shoun, met with him and his lawyer; the doctors asked the nurse to leave. She suspected Bill had given some kind of statement identifying those responsible for the bombing, but she did not hear what he said.

The Shoun Brothers later acknowledged that they had summoned the lawyer because they thought Bill might name his killers. They said that nothing came of the meeting. Bill’s lawyer likewise maintained that he did not know who had caused the explosion, yet disclosed that Bill had described William K. Hale and Ernest Burkhart as his only enemies. When investigators pressed James Shoun, he recalled Bill identifying Hale as his only enemy. These accounts did not establish exactly what Bill had said or what the doctors had heard, but they placed Hale and Ernest within the dying man’s suspicions.

The Bombing and Its Execution

Burt Lawson’s account supplied the missing operational detail behind the explosion. After Lawson was jailed for killing a fisherman, William K. Hale visited him and pressed him to carry out the bombing, offering to arrange lawyers he could not afford. Lawson eventually agreed. One night, a deputy let him out of his cell and took him to Hale, who drove him to a building in Fairfax, where Ernest Burkhart was waiting with a wooden box. Inside was a jug of nitroglycerin, with a long fuse attached to its spout.

Hale and Ernest drove Lawson to the Smiths’ house. Lawson said he carried the box through the back entrance and placed it in a far corner of the cellar, then laid out the fuse as Hale had instructed. He waited in the dark until the house lights went out, lit a short piece of fuse, and ran. Hale and Ernest collected him nearby and returned him to jail, where the deputy slipped him back into his cell. Before leaving, Hale threatened to have him killed if he told anyone. Lawson’s testimony directly implicated Hale and Ernest in the attack, though investigators still had to resolve how the bomb had been prepared and whether Asa Kirby had also taken part.

A Case Inside a Wider System

Bill Smith’s suspicions and death belonged to a pattern that extended beyond the conspiracy Tom White was trying to prove. Mary Lewis had been killed for her headright in 1918, years before the period usually assigned to the Reign of Terror. Her killer’s plan included impersonating her to collect the payments, and his murder sentence was eventually commuted; after serving six and a half years, he was pardoned. The case showed that headright killings did not begin or end neatly with the Hale investigation, and that the bombing of the Smiths’ home was one episode in a broader system of exploitation rather than an isolated crime.

The surviving records make the reach of that system visible, but also expose how much remains uncertain. A hand-kept Office of Indian Affairs guardian log recorded wards who died with the terse notation “Dead.” Among Scott Mathis’s nine listed wards, seven had died; other guardians’ lists showed similarly extraordinary numbers, including one guardian whose five wards all died. Some deaths carried additional signs of suspicion, but many were never investigated as homicides, leaving no reliable way to establish how many were murders or who was responsible. The same archival gaps that obscure the scale of those deaths also limit what can be known about how fully Bill Smith’s warnings were understood before he died.

The Shoun Brothers’ connections to several of the family’s cases sharpen that uncertainty without resolving it. They had been associated with the missing bullet in Anna Brown’s case, the concealed hospital conversation with Bill, and the administration of Rita Smith’s estate; investigators also suspected that they had given Mollie Burkhart poison instead of insulin. These links do not by themselves establish the doctors’ guilt, but they place Bill’s final, incompletely recorded statement within a network in which medical authority, estate administration, and the handling of evidence could converge. His importance to the investigation therefore rests not on a fully preserved account of what he knew, but on the fragments that survived—and on the possibility that those fragments pointed beyond the people who carried out the bombing.

The Missing Record and the Limits of Proof

The uncertainty around Bill Smith’s last statement echoed an earlier failure of evidence in Anna Brown’s case. The coroner’s inquest records had mysteriously vanished, and the justice of the peace in Fairfax said his desk had been broken into and the testimony taken. Almost nothing had been preserved from the crime scenes. The undertaker, however, had secretly kept Anna’s skull: Tom White could see the entry hole at the back, but no exit wound at the front, suggesting that the bullet remained inside her head. Since such a bullet should have been found during the autopsy, its disappearance pointed to someone at the scene, though the surviving account could not identify who took it. The justice of the peace acknowledged suspicions but could not say whether the doctors, James and David Shoun, had removed it.

That earlier gap does not establish what happened in the hospital room with Bill, or prove that the same people suppressed evidence in both cases. It does show why investigators were left to assemble the family’s story from fragments: a missing inquest record, a bullet that should have been recovered, a nurse’s recollection of a private meeting, and a lawyer’s report of Bill naming his enemies. His significance lies partly in this broken chain of testimony. The surviving pieces made his suspicions consequential, while the missing pieces kept the full extent of what he knew—and who else might have known it—beyond firm historical proof.