Rita Smith

Rita Smith was Mollie Burkhart’s sister, Bill Smith’s second Osage wife, and a central figure in the family’s inheritance history. Her death in the bombing of the Smith home was both a personal loss and a pivotal event in the investigation: the terms of her will made the order and timing of deaths financially consequential, while a later admission by Ernest Burkhart connected William K. Hale to the message that set the bombing in motion.

Family and Marriage

Rita was first introduced in the investigation through her connection to Mollie and Anna Brown. When men at the creek could not identify Anna, Scott Mathis, who managed Anna’s financial affairs, contacted Mollie. Rita went with her sister to see the body, alongside Ernest, Bryan Burkhart, and Rita’s husband, Bill Smith. The face could not provide recognition; instead, Rita and Mollie identified Anna by her Indian blanket and the clothes Mollie had washed for her. Bill then recognized Anna by her gold fillings. The scene places Rita within the close family circle grieving Anna and shows her taking part in the identification when other witnesses could not make it.

Bill had been a horse thief before attaching himself to an Osage fortune through marriage. He first married Rita’s sister Minnie. After Minnie died of a mysterious wasting illness in 1918, he married Rita only months later. Their marriage was marked by conflict. When Bill drank, he sometimes struck Rita; a servant recalled seeing her bruised after an argument. Bill made a racist remark to the servant about the way he treated her. Rita repeatedly threatened to leave him, but did not. People close to her regarded her as keen-minded, while one observer believed her judgment was clouded by what they described as blind love. Those accounts portray a relationship shaped by both attachment and unequal power, without establishing that Rita knew of any plot against her.

Suspicion Around Bill

Rita’s marriage also made Bill a subject of suspicion. Mollie wondered whether he had been responsible for Minnie’s earlier death, although the evidence presented does not resolve that question. William K. Hale said he did not trust Bill, and a local attorney suspected that Bill used marriage for financial gain. These were suspicions, not proof, but they framed Bill’s place within the family: he had married two sisters in succession, each connected to Osage wealth, and was simultaneously conducting his own investigation with private detectives.

After the Smith home was bombed, Bill’s lawyer said he did not know who was responsible. Under questioning, however, he disclosed that Bill had named William K. Hale and Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhart as his two enemies. That reported statement gave investigators a direct lead, though it did not by itself establish who arranged the bombing or why. In the later investigation, Rita’s death would be considered alongside the deaths of Bill and their servant, Nettie Brookshire.

Inheritance and the Pattern of Deaths

The investigation reconstructed a sequence in which each death altered who could inherit. Anna Brown, who had no children, had left nearly all her wealth to her mother, Lizzie. Lizzie in turn left most of her headright to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita. After Anna and Lizzie were gone, Rita and Bill became targets in a further stage of the pattern described by Tom White.

The bombing had a particular consequence under Rita and Bill’s wills. If the couple died at the same time, much of Rita’s headright would pass to her surviving sister, Mollie. But Bill outlived Rita by a few days and inherited much of her wealth. The difference between simultaneous deaths and a brief interval therefore mattered: the outcome frustrated the apparent plan to direct Rita’s property to Mollie. The investigation treated this inheritance sequence as evidence that the killings were not random, but connected to the movement of headrights through the family.

The handling of Rita’s estate raised further concerns. In a later account of the investigation, the Shoun doctors were linked to the concealment of Bill’s final statement and to the arrangement by which one of them became administrator of Rita’s valuable estate. This did not identify Rita’s killer, but it placed the estate within the wider network of suspicious decisions surrounding the family’s deaths and property.

Death and Investigative Aftermath

Rita was at home with the nineteen-year-old servant Nettie Brookshire when Bill returned and put his Studebaker in the garage. The Smith home was later bombed. In the aftermath, those who gathered found Rita dead; Bill’s response was to cry out that she was gone and repeat the news. The account emphasizes the contrast between the apparent quiet of the scene and the violence of the event without resolving, at that moment, who had caused it.

By the end of December 1925, Tom White had decided to seek arrest warrants, although he had not confirmed every detail in Burt Lawson’s confession and contradictions remained about the whereabouts of William K. Hale at the time of the explosion. The warrants, issued on January 4, 1926, named Hale and Ernest Burkhart in connection with the deaths of Rita and Bill Smith and Nettie Brookshire. Investigators needed U.S. marshals and other lawmen to make the arrests because the agents themselves lacked arrest authority.

At trial, Ernest Burkhart admitted that he had carried a message from Hale to John Ramsey, telling him to let Asa Kirby know it was time to blow up the Smith home. Ernest said that he had acted at Hale’s request, identifying Hale as his uncle. His admission connected the family relationship to the crime: the message passed through an uncle’s nephew and onward to the men implicated in the plan. It did not erase the uncertainty and conflicting accounts that had marked the investigation, but it supplied a direct account of how the bombing was set in motion.

Narrative Significance

Rita’s story is told largely through relationships and consequences rather than through an extended account of her own actions. She appears as Mollie’s sister, Anna’s relative and fellow mourner, and Bill’s wife; then, after her death, as a person whose will determines how wealth could pass within the family. That structure makes her more than a name in a succession of losses: the conditions of her inheritance become part of the evidence by which investigators interpret the deaths.

The episodes surrounding Rita also show how intimate and financial histories overlap in the investigation. Bill’s marriages to Minnie and Rita, the doubts about his motives, his reported naming of Hale and Ernest as enemies, and the terms of the Smith wills all enter the same inquiry, but they do not carry equal evidentiary weight. Suspicion about the marriages remains suspicion; Ernest’s later admission supplies a specific link to the bombing. Rita’s death thus marks both the human cost of the family’s losses and a turning point in the effort to trace how murder, kinship, and inheritance had been made to converge.