Charles Whitehorn—Hattie Whitehorn

Charles Whitehorn and Hattie Whitehorn’s relationship became the focus of an unresolved murder investigation after Charles was killed and Hattie, his widow, soon married LeRoy Smitherman. Investigators suspected that the new marriage and the prospect of controlling Charles’s estate were connected to his death. Their theory accumulated informants’ claims and circumstantial clues, but no prosecution followed; Hattie denied involvement, and the surviving account preserves suspicion rather than a settled finding.

Marriage, Inheritance, and Suspicion

After Charles’s death, Hattie married LeRoy Smitherman. Private detectives came to believe that Minnie Savage, who ran a boardinghouse in Pawhuska, had arranged the marriage. They suspected that Savage, Smitherman, Hattie, and other possible conspirators had joined in a plan to kill Charles and take his Osage headright and fortune. The proposed motive, as investigators understood it, was financial: Charles’s death would leave an estate that others might seek to control.

Hattie’s use of some of her husband’s money after his death intensified suspicion. An informant told a private detective that Hattie had been a prime mover in Charles’s killing. That claim was an accusation relayed through an informant, not an established verdict, but it helped move investigators from suspicion of Smitherman and Savage toward the possibility that the widow herself had participated.

The Private Investigation

The private detectives tried to test their theory through surveillance and informants. They placed an undercover investigator in Savage’s boardinghouse, where he could hear telephone conversations. Savage’s sister also supplied an account of seeing what she believed might be the murder weapon: a large, dark-colored gun that Savage had taken from beneath a pillow while making a bed. The report offered a potentially important lead, but the account does not establish that the gun was identified or conclusively tied to Charles’s murder.

Despite those efforts, the detectives did not secure enough evidence to prosecute any suspect. The record leaves open why their investigation failed: they may have been unable to turn leads into courtroom-proof evidence, or, as the narrative suggests as a possibility, the private investigators may have been bought off. The distinction matters. The growing detail of the theory did not resolve the central evidentiary problem.

Federal Agents and Hattie’s Denial

When Bureau of Investigation agents examined the case in 1923, they likewise suspected Savage, Smitherman, and Hattie. Based on the evidence they had gathered, one agent concluded that Hattie had caused Charles to be murdered in order to obtain his estate. That conclusion records the investigators’ theory, not proof that the alleged arrangement occurred.

Hattie denied involvement but made clear that she understood the danger in speaking to the agents. She warned one that she had been alerted to them and said that if she told him what she knew, he would send her to the electric chair. Her words could be read as fear of prosecution, but they do not, by themselves, establish either guilt or innocence. They show how the investigation had become entangled with the possibility that a witness—or a suspect—might incriminate herself.

Aftermath and Unresolved Evidence

The marriage that detectives believed had been arranged as part of the plot did not provide a stable aftermath. Smitherman fled to Mexico with Hattie’s car and some of her money. Later, J. J. Faulkner insinuated himself into her life and appeared to use information she had shared about her possible role in Charles’s murder to extort her. Investigators suspected that Faulkner was threatening exposure and prosecution to obtain money while Hattie lived and control of her property after her death. Those reports add another layer of exploitation around the widow, but they do not independently verify the original murder theory.

The investigation’s strongest claims therefore remain attributed to detectives and informants: that Savage arranged Hattie’s marriage to Smitherman, that Hattie helped bring about Charles’s death for his estate, and that evidence may have been used to blackmail her afterward. Although private detectives and federal agents repeatedly converged on this explanation, they failed to bring a suspect to trial for the murder. Hattie’s relationship to Charles is preserved in the record both as a marriage and as the center of a disputed inheritance-and-murder theory whose allegations never became a legal resolution.