Hattie Whitehorn

Hattie Whitehorn, the widow of Charles Whitehorn, occupied an unsettled place in the investigation of his murder: private detectives and federal agents suspected her of helping arrange the killing, while later reports described her as vulnerable to blackmail, drugging, and theft. The case never yielded a prosecution or a complete account of what she knew. Her trajectory—from suspected beneficiary of a murder to a sick woman apparently controlled by another man—makes the Whitehorn investigation a revealing counterpoint to the theory that one mastermind directed every killing in the Reign of Terror.

Identity and Background

After Charles Whitehorn’s death, Hattie, described as part white and part Cheyenne, married LeRoy Smitherman. Investigators came to suspect that the marriage was not simply a personal relationship: they believed Minnie Savage, who ran a boardinghouse in Pawhuska, capital of the Osage Nation, had arranged it. The private detectives’ theory was that Savage, Smitherman, and other conspirators had organized Charles’s killing to take his headright and fortune. The suspected financial purpose placed Hattie close to the center of the alleged scheme, though the investigation did not establish her guilt in court.

The reports also made her conduct after the murder part of the case. Hattie had quickly spent some of her husband’s fortune, a fact that helped fuel suspicion about her role and the intended destination of the estate. An informant told a private detective there was no doubt that she had been a prime mover in Charles’s killing. That accusation was an informant’s claim, not a judicial finding, and the surviving account preserves the difference between what investigators believed and what they could prove.

The Investigation and Suspicions

The private detectives developed a detailed theory from informants and circumstantial evidence. An undercover investigator stayed at Savage’s boardinghouse and listened to telephone conversations; another report described the man as promising but in need of coaching. Savage’s sister supplied a further lead, telling investigators she had seen what was likely the murder weapon: a large, dark-colored gun that Savage had picked up while making a bed, where it had been under a pillow. These clues strengthened suspicion around the group, but the detectives did not secure enough evidence to prosecute anyone—or, as the book allows, they may have been bought off.

When agents from the Bureau of Investigation examined the case in 1923, they likewise concluded that Savage, Smitherman, and Hattie were responsible. One agent wrote that the evidence appeared to show Hattie had caused her husband’s murder in order to obtain his estate. Hattie denied involvement, but her response was not a simple declaration of innocence: she warned the agent that she had been warned about him and said that if she told him what she knew, he would send her to the electric chair. Her words suggested that she believed she possessed dangerous knowledge, but they did not specify what that knowledge was or establish that she had participated in the crime.

Smitherman and Faulkner

The case shifted again when Smitherman fled to Mexico, taking Hattie’s car and a portion of her money. A man named J. J. Faulkner then insinuated himself into her life. Agents suspected that he was using information Hattie had shared about her role in the murder to blackmail her. In a family confrontation recorded in the reports, one of Hattie’s sisters accused Faulkner of extorting her; Faulkner answered that he knew all about Hattie and the murder and warned the family to be careful in speaking to him.

Agent Burger and a colleague believed Faulkner had obtained some kind of confession from Hattie and was using the threat of prosecution and exposure to control her. They further suspected that he wanted to gain control of her property after her death and extract money from her while she was alive. Those conclusions remained the agents’ assessment, but the reported circumstances made Hattie’s position starkly precarious: Smitherman had left with her car and money, while Faulkner was suspected of turning knowledge of the murder into leverage over her remaining property and her freedom of action.

Illness, Silence, and Recovery

Hattie soon became gravely ill. Agents noted that she seemed liable to die at any time, yet their reports did not express suspicion that her illness might have been caused by poisoning, despite the many poisonings associated with the Reign of Terror. Faulkner’s wife told agents that he was refusing to let Hattie go to a hospital, supposedly to keep her under his influence. Hattie’s sisters, meanwhile, said he had begun taking her money while she was under the influence of a narcotic. These accounts cast her not only as a possible participant in Charles’s murder but also as someone whose illness and dependency may have been exploited by Faulkner.

Her sisters eventually succeeded in getting her admitted to a hospital. Believing she might die, agents tried to persuade her to confess. Their report said Hattie had admitted to Comstock that she knew the facts but had never disclosed them; she also said that they—presumably Savage and other conspirators—had sent her away when Charles was murdered. She offered no fuller account. After being removed from Faulkner’s control, she recovered from the mysterious illness. That recovery ended the immediate crisis but did not resolve the central questions: what she knew, what she had done, and whether the reports of coercion revealed another crime or only an investigative suspicion.

Narrative Significance

By the time T. B. White arrived to investigate in 1925, the Bureau had largely set the Whitehorn case aside as an isolated murder, unconnected to the systematic killings. Its apparent separation from the bureau’s theory—that one mastermind was responsible for the murders and that capturing William K. Hale and his associates would solve them all—made the case easy to dismiss. Yet the account gives that separation a different meaning. If William K. Hale had no apparent role in the Whitehorn plot, then the case suggested that predation against the Osage was not confined to one man or one conspiracy.

Hattie’s story therefore remains unresolved on two levels. The reports never establish whether she helped arrange Charles’s murder, and her guarded statements never disclose the facts she said she knew. At the same time, the sequence of Smitherman’s flight, Faulkner’s suspected blackmail, the disputed control of her money and medical care, and her eventual recovery after her sisters intervened exposes a continuing vulnerability around the estate. The investigation’s failure to convert a detailed suspicion into a prosecution is not merely a gap in the case: it is part of what makes the Whitehorn episode evidence of a broader, dispersed history of exploitation.