Hattie Whitehorn—Minnie Savage

The relationship between Hattie Whitehorn and Minnie Savage was presented as a suspected partnership in the plot surrounding the killing of Charles Whitehorn. Investigators believed Savage had arranged Hattie’s marriage to LeRoy Smitherman after Charles’s death, and that the marriage was part of a plan to take control of Charles’s Osage headrights and fortune. The evidence described a suspected criminal connection, not a proven one: the investigators’ theory grew from informants, surveillance, and circumstantial clues, but did not lead to a prosecution.

The Suspected Arrangement

After Charles Whitehorn was killed, his widow Hattie married Smitherman, a white man whom private detectives regarded as unscrupulous. Their investigation traced the match to Savage, who ran a boardinghouse and was described in one investigator’s report as shrewd and capable. The detectives suspected that Savage, Smitherman, and other conspirators had arranged the marriage to gain access to Charles’s estate. In this account, the marriage was not merely a change in Hattie’s personal life: it was a possible instrument for transferring wealth after a killing.

The suspected scheme also made Hattie’s own position uncertain. Investigators initially treated her as the bereaved widow whose new marriage might benefit others, but reports increasingly suggested that she may have been more than a passive beneficiary. They noted that she had spent some of her husband’s fortune, and an informant told a private detective that Hattie had been a prime mover in killing Charles. That allegation made the relationship between the two women look less like a simple arrangement brokered by Savage and more like a possible collaboration—though the surviving account does not establish what either woman knew or intended.

Investigators’ Leads

Private detectives placed an undercover investigator in Savage’s boardinghouse. The operative could hear telephone conversations, an attempt to gather evidence from inside the place associated with Savage’s activities. The investigators also received information from Savage’s sister, who reported seeing what might have been the murder weapon: a large, dark-colored gun that Savage had taken from beneath a pillow while making a bed. The report connected Savage to a possible weapon, but did not establish that it had been used to kill Charles.

When Bureau of Investigation agents began examining the case in 1923, they reached a similar conclusion about the suspected participants. An agent wrote that the evidence gathered so far suggested Hattie had caused Charles to be murdered to obtain his estate, implicating her alongside Savage and Smitherman. Hattie denied involvement. She also warned an agent that she had been cautioned about him and said that speaking openly could send her to the electric chair. Her warning shows that investigators were pressing her about the case; it does not, by itself, prove the accusation against her.

A Theory Without a Prosecution

The investigations assembled a chain of suspicions: Savage was believed to have orchestrated Hattie’s marriage to Smitherman; the marriage was thought to serve a plan to take Charles’s property; and Hattie was eventually suspected of helping arrange his murder. Each link came from reports, informants, or circumstantial evidence, rather than a conclusive demonstration of the whole plot. The private detectives failed to secure enough evidence to prosecute any of the suspects. The account leaves open whether they simply could not prove the theory or whether they were bought off.

The relation therefore remains defined by an unresolved contrast: investigators repeatedly described a coordinated effort to turn a widow’s marriage and inheritance into means of acquiring wealth, yet the alleged coordination never became a tested criminal case. Savage’s suspected role as arranger and Hattie’s suspected role as participant were distinct allegations, and neither should be treated as established fact. Their connection matters in the wider history of the Osage murders because it shows how investigators believed marriage, inheritance, and access to Osage property could be joined within a suspected scheme—and how a detailed theory could still fail to overcome the evidentiary barriers to prosecution.