Rita and Bill Smith bombing

The Rita and Bill Smith bombing was a nighttime attack in Fairfax that turned a family home into a field of burning wreckage, killed Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire, and left William Smith gravely wounded. The blast’s force and the destruction it caused made the violence impossible to mistake for an accident, but the surviving victim never identified who had carried it out.

The Blast and the Search

Just before three in the morning, a nearby resident heard the explosion. Its force bent trees and signposts, shattered hotel windows, threw a guest backward, and smashed doors in houses closer to the blast. Ernest Burkhart and Mollie Burkhart felt the shock from their home; when Mollie went to the window, she saw a distant glow, and Ernest joined her as they watched the fire in the night sky.

Ernest ran outside, where residents were emerging with lanterns and firing guns to alert others. People converged on the Smith home, calling out its name, but the house had been reduced to charred sticks, twisted metal, shredded furniture, and debris. The Studebaker in the garage had also been demolished. The remains of recently purchased furnishings lay amid the wreckage, while bedding hung from telephone wires. The scene established that someone had planted a bomb beneath the house and detonated it.

Volunteer firefighters carried water from wells as the flames consumed what remained. Searchers looked for William, Rita, and Nettie; James Shoun knew the house’s layout from having owned it and searched near the former main bedroom. He and the others heard a faint call for help beneath a smoldering mound. After firefighters doused the area, the searchers clawed away the debris until William’s face appeared. He was badly burned, with severe injuries to his legs, back, and hands. James tried to comfort him as the men carried him from the ruins.

Deaths and the Hospital Vigil

As the rubble was cleared, the rescuers found Rita Smith beside William Smith. Her face appeared untouched, but the back of her head had been crushed; she was dead. When William understood that Rita was gone, he cried out and repeated that she was dead. He then asked a friend for a pistol, a desperate response to the loss that had become visible around him. Ernest Burkhart watched from nearby, unable to turn away. He kept remarking on the fire while the undertaker sought permission to remove Rita’s remains, so they could be prepared before Mollie Burkhart learned that another of her sisters had been killed.

Nettie Brookshire was not found in the ruins. The justice of the peace concluded that the blast had blown her to pieces, leaving too little for an inquest. Even in the immediate aftermath, the destruction became a contest between undertakers: the Big Hill Trading Company’s undertaker and a rival both arrived, and the rival secured the burial fee. The scene’s wreckage thus held three victims, but only William could be carried out alive.

The rescuers lifted William toward an ambulance and took him to Fairfax Hospital. David Shoun injected him with morphine several times; William soon lost consciousness, too gravely injured to be questioned. Local lawmen had been away in Oklahoma City for a court case, and an investigator later noted that the timing had left them absent. On their return, officers placed floodlights at both hospital exits and posted armed guards, fearing the bombers might try to kill William before he could speak.

For nearly two days he drifted between life and death, at times muttering that Rita had been killed and that he, too, seemed doomed. After regaining consciousness, he asked where Rita was buried. David Shoun thought William might be preparing to disclose what he knew about the bombing and pressed him for the attackers’ identities, but William revealed nothing relevant. He died on March 14, four days after the explosion, carrying with him the only testimony the bombing’s lone survivor might have given.

Public Outcry and State Response

The bombing provoked both a demand for formal justice and an impulse toward vengeance. A Fairfax newspaper called the attack beyond comprehension and urged the law to “leave no stone unturned to ferret out the perpetrators and bring them to justice.” At the scene, a firefighter had put the anger more starkly, saying those responsible “should be thrown in the fire and burned.” The contrast captured the aftermath: the community wanted the killers found, but the violence itself invited an answering violence.

In April 1923, Oklahoma governor Jack C. Walton dispatched Herman Fox Davis, the state’s top investigator, to Osage County. A lawyer and former private detective with the William J. Burns International Detective Agency, Davis arrived with a carefully cultivated detective’s manner: he puffed cigars, his eyes shining through a veil of smoke. One law-enforcement official called him the epitome of a “dime-novel detective.” His appointment placed the state’s investigative authority in the county after the bombing had made the local threat impossible to ignore.

The Household and the Attack’s Place in the Reign of Terror

Bill Smith had dropped off a friend before driving home and pulling his Studebaker into the garage. Rita was inside with Nettie Brookshire, a nineteen-year-old white servant who often stayed overnight; the household soon went to bed. That ordinary sequence fixes the bombing’s violence in a domestic setting: it struck while the people inside were asleep, not during a confrontation described in the account. Nettie was married and had a child, details that sharpen the human cost of her death even as the blast left too little of her remains for an inquest.

The bombing became another death in what the book identifies as the Osage Reign of Terror. Its outcome was not only the destruction of a home but the loss of Rita, Nettie, and, four days later, Bill—the one survivor who might have identified the perpetrators. His silence was not a choice the narrative presents as resolved: he never disclosed anything relevant before he died. The attack therefore left both a family’s losses and a central question unanswered, while the guarded hospital and the call for the law to find the bombers registered the fear that the violence might continue.