Three Mile Creek is the place where accounts of Anna Brown’s murder converge on a ravine and a creek: in court, Kelsie Morrison described taking Anna there with Bryan Burkhart; years later, Margie Burkhart identified the spot from a family memory. The location matters not only as part of the crime’s reconstructed geography, but as a landscape in which the story remained present for later generations.

The creek and the ravine

Morrison testified that William K. Hale recruited him to kill Anna and supplied a .380 automatic. He said Bryan Burkhart acted as his accomplice. After they had made Anna drunk, the men drove her out to Three Mile Creek. Morrison’s wife at the time remained in the car while he and Bryan carried Anna down into the ravine, because she was too drunk to walk. Morrison further recalled that Bryan helped Anna sit up on a rock by the creek.

A contemporary account places Anna’s drinking that night in Ralston, where Bryan Burkhart took her to drink. Together, that detail and Morrison’s testimony establish the creek as part of the movement from drinking to the isolated ravine, though they do not provide a precise map of the route or the exact point along the creek.

A place in family memory

During a later visit to the region, Margie Burkhart took the book’s narrator across the prairie. At a rise, she stopped the car and pointed toward a ravine with a meandering creek at its bottom, identifying it as the place where Anna had been shot. Margie said her father had shown her the spot while taking her horseback riding when she was young; the visit had frightened her.

Her account adds a different kind of evidence to the courtroom testimony. The ravine is not only a location named in a reconstruction of the crime: it is also a place passed between generations through a family outing and a remembered act of pointing out where Anna died. Margie’s recollection preserves the site’s significance without claiming to resolve every uncertainty about the scene.

Testimony, landscape, and remembrance

The book brings the creek into view through two distinct moments of narration: Morrison’s testimony about the crime and Margie’s return to its setting in memory. The first gives the ravine a place in the prosecution’s account; the second locates that account in the prairie landscape as Margie recognized it. Their convergence makes Three Mile Creek legible both as a crime scene and as a remembered place.

That remembered geography belongs to a wider effort to recover the history of the murders through family knowledge as well as documentary records. The book’s research drew on interviews with descendants and other family members, alongside court transcripts, informants’ statements, and archival materials. At Three Mile Creek, the testimony and the inherited recollection meet at the ravine’s edge, keeping the site connected to Anna Brown’s life and death.