Bill Smith home bombing

The Bill Smith home bombing was an attack planned by William K. Hale against William Smith and Rita Smith, intended to kill the household and advance Hale’s designs on the family’s Osage wealth. Its significance in T. B. White’s investigation lies not only in the explosion but in the unstable chain of testimony that followed: Burt Lawson initially described placing and igniting the bomb, then Ernest Burkhart denied that Lawson had taken part, and Lawson admitted that his account was false. Burkhart ultimately pleaded guilty to delivering a message that set the operation in motion, while identifying a different chain of intermediaries and an intended bomber.

A murder plot built around inheritance

The scheme grew out of the killings and attempted killings directed at Osage families whose wealth and headrights could pass to surviving relatives. Burkhart told White that Hale had disclosed a plan to destroy the Smith home and everyone in it, including Hale’s own relatives. When Burkhart objected to the danger to his family, Hale’s answer, as Burkhart recounted it, was that Burkhart’s wife would receive the money. The plan treated the Smiths’ deaths not as an end in themselves but as a way to redirect wealth through inheritance.

Hale first sought people who could carry out the violence without tying it directly to him. According to Burkhart, Hale approached Blackie Thompson and Curley Johnson; when they could not do the job, he turned to Al Spencer, who refused. Hale then spoke with Henry Grammer, who undertook to provide a man. Burkhart said Grammer later told Hale that Asa Kirby would do it. In this account, the operation moved through outlaws, a bootlegger and rodeo performer, and a messenger, while Hale remained the planner behind the chain.

Lawson’s account of the attack

Lawson’s first detailed account began with his own grievance against William Smith. He said he had worked as a ranch hand for Smith from 1918, but left after discovering an intimacy between Smith and Lawson’s wife that, he said, broke up his family. Ernest later approached him with a proposal to blow up Smith and his wife. When Lawson refused, Hale allegedly offered him $5,000 and described how to use nitroglycerin and a fuse beneath the house. Lawson said Hale demonstrated with a piece of white fuse, cutting off a short section and lighting it.

Lawson still declined at first. After he was arrested for killing a fisherman, however, Hale visited him in jail. Hale, who could enter and leave as a reserve deputy sheriff, reminded Lawson that he would soon need lawyers and had no money to pay them, then pressed him to accept the job. Lawson said he agreed. His account made the jail itself part of the operation: another deputy opened his cell, took him to Hale’s car, and helped return him to confinement after the attack.

Lawson described Hale driving him to a building in Fairfax, where Ernest was waiting with a wooden box. Inside was a jug of nitroglycerin, with a long, coiled fuse attached to its spout. Hale and Ernest drove Lawson to the Smith home, then left him there with the box. Lawson said he entered through the back and placed the explosive in a far corner of the cellar, laying out the fuse as Hale had instructed. He waited in the dark until the lights went out, then lit a short piece of fuse and ran. He heard the house break apart. Hale and Ernest picked him up nearby and returned him to jail, where the deputy slipped him back into his cell. Before leaving, Hale warned him that speaking about the operation would get him killed.

Confession, contradiction, and the message

On October 24, 1925, three months after taking over the case, White reported to J. Edgar Hoover that Lawson had confessed to setting off the explosive and had implicated Hale and Ernest as the men who persuaded and assisted him. The confession seemed to offer White a direct connection to Hale. Yet White still had unanswered questions, including the part played by Kirby, whom Lawson had not mentioned. Investigators began checking Lawson’s account rather than treating it as a complete explanation.

Burkhart’s account overturned the apparent solution. When White questioned him, Burkhart said he wanted to tell what he knew, and signed a statement after being advised of his rights and told that no promise of immunity had been made. He described himself as a boy who had worshipped Hale, taken on jobs for him, and habitually followed his uncle’s judgment. Burkhart said he knew some details of the plot but not all of its mechanics. He placed Hale’s search for a perpetrator through Thompson, Johnson, Spencer, and Grammer, and said Hale told him Kirby would do the job.

Burkhart specifically denied that Lawson had participated, telling White that investigators had the wrong man. He said Hale had gone to Fort Worth with Grammer to establish an alibi, and before leaving had instructed Burkhart to pass a message to Ramsey, who worked for Grammer: Ramsey was to tell Kirby that it was time to carry out the job. Burkhart said he delivered the message and was at home with Mollie when the explosion occurred. When Mollie saw a light on the north side and thought another house was burning, Burkhart said, he understood what had happened.

Lawson later admitted to White that his bombing story was a lie and that what he knew about the attack came from what he had heard in jail. This reversal did not erase the significance of his earlier account as an investigative lead, but it meant that his description of placing the box, lighting the fuse, and being collected by Hale and Ernest could not be treated as an established account of the bombing. Burkhart’s testimony instead pointed to a message relayed through Ramsey to Kirby, while still placing Hale at the center of the plan.

The plea and the limits of the record

During the trial, Burkhart chose to stop contesting the case and admit what he had done. In his statement, he acknowledged delivering Hale’s message to Ramsey to tell Kirby it was time to blow up the Smith house. He said he had acted because Hale, his uncle, had requested it, and considered it honest to stop the trial and acknowledge the truth. The judge asked whether federal agents had forced him to sign a confession at gunpoint or threatened him with electrocution. Burkhart said the agents had treated him well, apart from keeping him up late, and the judge accepted his guilty plea.

The record therefore establishes Burkhart’s admitted role as messenger, but the accounts do not converge on who physically planted or detonated the explosive. Lawson’s detailed confession was followed by his own recantation; Burkhart denied Lawson’s involvement and described Kirby as the man selected for the job. The bombing’s chain of responsibility emerges through testimony that both exposed Hale’s direction of the plot and showed how difficult it was to reconstruct the act from statements shaped by fear, self-interest, and the pressure of prosecution.

A wider pattern of missing evidence and uncounted deaths

The investigation unfolded against a background in which records and evidence were often absent. In the separate investigation into Anna Brown’s death, the coroner’s inquest testimony had vanished after the justice of the peace’s desk was broken into. White found that little physical evidence had been preserved from the various crime scenes. That loss helps explain the weight placed on later confessions, but it also warns against confusing a compelling narrative with independently verified fact.

Years later, the book’s archival research widened the frame beyond the cases formally investigated. A handwritten Office of Indian Affairs guardianship log listed Osage wards and marked many simply as dead. Of Scott Mathis’s nine listed wards, seven had died; other guardians’ lists included eight deaths among eleven wards, more than half among thirteen, or all five. The precise number of suspicious deaths could not be established because so many cases had never been investigated. Against that larger landscape, the Smith bombing appears as a documented operation whose testimony remained contested, while the broader system of violence also left deaths without a trial, a preserved crime scene, or even a homicide classification.