Fairfax is where the investigation into Anna Brown’s disappearance gathered crucial witness accounts, where authorities arrested Ernest Burkhart, and where a later return found the town’s oil-boom streets largely deserted. In the book, the place carries two sharply different images: a landscape of late-night drinking, hidden movements, and local influence, and a diminished town whose surviving buildings make its violent past feel close but difficult to recover.

The Night Anna Brown Disappeared

After leaving Ralston, Anna Brown and Ernest Burkhart were seen at a nearby speakeasy, where they stayed until about ten at night. They then went to another drinking place several miles north of Fairfax. The owner told investigators that they remained there until about one in the morning, and Ernest’s uncle, William K. Hale, was spotted with them. That sighting raised the possibility that Hale had misled Agent Burger not only to protect his nephew but also to conceal his own involvement.

Witness accounts of what followed became less certain. Some placed Anna and Ernest alone at another speakeasy closer to Fairfax; others said they left with a third man. The last reported sighting of the pair together came at roughly three in the morning, near a Fairfax resident’s house. A woman there heard a car stop and a man she believed to be Ernest call for Anna to get into it. The account did not establish what happened next, but it put Ernest and Anna together later than he had claimed.

Investigators treated the discrepancy as the first proven breach in Ernest’s alibi. He had sworn at the coroner’s inquest that he left Anna safely at her Fairfax home between half past four and five in the afternoon. A neighbor later saw him return home at sunrise. Ernest then urged the neighbor to keep quiet and gave him money. Anna, meanwhile, had vanished. Fairfax thus became more than a point on a route: the town’s scattered witness accounts supplied a timeline, while the gap after the final sighting left the central question unresolved—who had taken Anna, and what had happened to her?

Local Power and the Roan Investigation

Fairfax also appears as a place where William K. Hale’s influence was visible in ordinary transactions. An undercover operative posing as an insurance salesman spoke to a woman at a filling station. She said Hale controlled everything in the area and had sold her a house on the edge of his pasture. She also described a fire that had consumed thousands of acres of Hale’s land. Although most people did not know who had started it, she attributed the blaze to Hale’s workers acting on his orders, for an insurance payment of $30,000. Her account widened the investigation’s view of Hale from a suspect in murders to a man alleged to have profited from deliberate destruction of his own property.

The inquiry into Henry Roan’s life-insurance policy sharpened that suspicion. After Roan was found with a bullet in the back of his head in 1923, Hale stood to benefit from a $25,000 policy, yet the sheriff and other local lawmen had not investigated him. The salesman who originally sold the policy recalled that Hale, rather than Roan, had pressed for it and had promised to pay an additional premium. This evidence did not itself settle the murder, but it challenged Hale’s explanation that he had been named beneficiary because he had lent Roan money. Fairfax is presented here as a town where conspicuous influence and failures of local scrutiny formed part of the investigative problem.

Arrests in Fairfax

By the end of 1925, T. B. White believed the investigation could no longer wait, although important details remained unconfirmed and Burt Lawson’s account contained contradictions. Warrants for Hale and Ernest Burkhart in the killings of Bill and Rita Smith and their servant were issued on January 4, 1926. Because the agents could not make arrests themselves, they spread out with U.S. marshals and other lawmen, including Harve M. Freas, who had been expelled from office and then reelected sheriff.

Several lawmen found Ernest at his favorite Fairfax pool hall and took him to jail in Guthrie, eighty miles southwest of Pawhuska. Hale was initially missing. Agent Wren learned that he had ordered a new suit and said he might leave town at a moment’s notice, heightening authorities’ fear that he had disappeared. Instead, Hale walked into Sheriff Freas’s office to surrender. Dressed in a pressed suit, polished shoes, felt hat, and overcoat bearing a diamond-studded Masonic lodge pin, he presented his surrender as a courtesy to the authorities. As he was taken to Guthrie, a reporter described his movement as that of a leashed animal. The arrests linked Fairfax’s familiar public places—the pool hall and sheriff’s office—to the widening federal case.

A Boom Town Remembered

On a later visit, Fairfax seemed close to oblivion. Its population had fallen below fourteen hundred, and the western-style buildings along the main street, built during the boom, stood abandoned. Even on a Saturday night, the street could be described as a ghost town. The contrast is stark: the same town associated with oilmen, automobiles, cafés, and wealthy Osage residents was now marked by empty storefronts and silence.

The largest storefront recalled the Big Hill Trading Company. Margie Burkhart remembered that it had still been operating when she was growing up, with wooden banisters and floors, and a smell of wood. Her recollection restores the building’s former presence without disguising its later decay: by the time of the visit, its window was dark with grime and cobwebs. A few old mansions remained in the residential area, but they were deserted and deteriorating, some nearly engulfed by vines.

The return to Fairfax makes the town’s change part of the account’s meaning. The present-day streets do not reproduce the earlier scene; they offer a diminished setting against which the reader is asked to imagine the Pierce-Arrow motorcars, cafés, oilmen, and aristocratic Osage of the boom years, as well as the violence that unfolded there. The town’s abandoned buildings preserve traces of prosperity, while its reported population decline and decaying houses register what remains after that world has passed.