J. J. Faulkner

J. J. Faulkner was an opportunistic intermediary in the investigation of Charles Whitehorn’s murder, accused of using Hattie Whitehorn’s knowledge of the crime to gain control over her and her property. The reports do not establish that he was prosecuted or prove every allegation against him; instead, they trace how suspicion shifted from the suspected murder plot to the man investigators believed was exploiting its surviving witness.

Arrival in Hattie Whitehorn’s Life

After Hattie’s new husband, LeRoy Smitherman, fled to Mexico with her car and some of her money, Faulkner insinuated himself into her life. An investigator described him as an unscrupulous crook and suspected that he was blackmailing Hattie with information she had shared about her alleged part in the murder.

The conflict surfaced in a confrontation witnessed by one of Hattie’s sisters. She shouted at Faulkner to stop extorting Hattie; he answered that he knew all about Hattie and the murder and warned the family to be careful how they spoke to him. The exchange made the leverage investigators suspected more tangible: Faulkner appeared to claim knowledge of the crime as a means of intimidating Hattie’s family.

Alleged Control and Financial Exploitation

In a report, Agent Burger and a colleague said they strongly believed Faulkner had obtained some kind of confession from Hattie and was using the threat of prosecution and exposure to make her do as he wished. They suspected that he aimed to get money from her while she lived and control her property after her death. These were investigators’ conclusions, not a proven account of Faulkner’s actions, but they framed him as a second predator around a woman already implicated in a murder investigation.

As Hattie became gravely ill, Faulkner’s wife told agents that he was refusing to let Hattie go to a hospital, allegedly to keep her under his influence. Hattie’s sisters separately reported that he had begun taking her money while she was under the influence of a narcotic. The agents recorded these warnings but, despite the poisoning of other victims during the Reign of Terror, did not express suspicion that Hattie’s illness itself might have been caused deliberately.

Hospitalization and Hattie’s Limited Disclosure

Hattie’s sisters eventually managed to get her admitted to a hospital. Believing she might die, agents tried to persuade her to make a confession. Their report said that Hattie had acknowledged to Comstock that she knew the facts and had never told what she knew. She also said that the people involved had sent her away when Charles Whitehorn was murdered, though the report leaves the identity of those people uncertain.

Hattie disclosed nothing further. After she was removed from Faulkner’s reach, she recovered from the mysterious illness. That recovery sharpened the contrast between the sisters’ intervention and the agents’ failure to investigate the illness as a possible crime, while leaving Faulkner’s alleged role in her condition unresolved.

Significance in the Whitehorn Case

By the time Tom White began his investigation in 1925, the Bureau of Investigation had largely dropped the Whitehorn case as an isolated murder. Faulkner’s episode nevertheless forms part of the account’s wider challenge to the theory that one mastermind explained the Osage killings: the suspected plot against Whitehorn, and the alleged exploitation of his widow afterward, pointed to a broader landscape of predation. Faulkner’s importance lies not in a documented conviction or a definitive resolution, but in the way the reports expose the danger surrounding Hattie and the limits of what investigators established.