James and David Shoun

James and David Shoun were physician brothers whose medical work placed them at the center of two defining scenes in the Osage murder investigation: the discovery that Anna Brown had been shot, and the rescue of Bill Smith after the bombing that killed Rita Smith. Their examinations supplied crucial evidence, but also exposed how little certainty a makeshift autopsy could provide when the bullet itself could not be found.

Physicians at the Inquest

The brothers cared for Mollie Burkhart’s family and were summoned to examine Anna Brown at the ravine where her body had been found. A justice of the peace had hastily assembled an inquest, selecting jurors from the white men present, including Scott Mathis. The jurors were charged with deciding whether Anna’s death had been an act of God or man and, if a felony had occurred, identifying its principals and accessories. The Shouns worked over Anna’s body while the inquest members crowded around them.

Their first examination was conducted with primitive equipment and improvised surroundings. The brothers laid a plank across supports to make a table and removed a few instruments, including a saw, from a medical bag. They inspected Anna’s bloomers and skirt for tears or stains, but found nothing unusual. Because her body had been dead for several days, estimating the time of death was difficult; the Shouns judged that she had been dead for between five and seven days.

When the doctors shifted Anna’s head in its wooden box, part of her scalp slipped away, revealing a round hole at the back of her skull. One of the brothers exclaimed, “She’s been shot!” The opening was barely as wide as a pencil, and Mathis thought it had been made by a .32-caliber bullet. Its downward path, entering just below the crown, made the conclusion unmistakable: Anna’s death was murder, not misadventure or natural cause.

The Bullet That Would Not Be Found

The first autopsy did not produce the physical evidence investigators hoped would identify the weapon: the Shouns cut through Anna’s skull, removed her brain, and probed it with a stick, but the bullet could not be traced. At the creek, lawmen found blood smears beside a rock and a bottle partly filled with clear liquid that smelled like moonshine; they inferred that Anna had been drinking there when someone approached from behind and shot her. The scene yielded a theory of the killing, not the missing projectile.

The search resumed after the county prosecutor obtained a court order to exhume Anna. Scott Mathis, who was both her friend and the guardian administering her estate, supervised the grim work with an undertaker and a gravedigger. At the cemetery, where the grass had barely grown back, they lifted her dirt-blackened casket from the earth. The Shoun brothers returned and, this time wearing gloves, used a meat cleaver to cut her head into what the undertaker later called “sausage meat.” Again they found no bullet. By July 1921, the justice of the peace had closed the inquiry, ruling that Anna had died at “the hands of parties unknown,” and locked away the small amount of evidence in case new information emerged.

The Smith House Bombing

When the Smith house was reduced to burning rubble, James Shoun’s familiarity with its layout helped direct the search. He had once owned the house and knew where the main bedroom had been. As he searched there, he heard a faint call for help; others heard it too. Firemen poured water over a smoldering mound, and the searchers clawed through the debris until Bill Smith’s face emerged. His legs, back, and hands were severely burned. James tried to comfort him and promised he would not let him suffer.

Rita Smith lay beside Bill in her nightgown. Her face appeared unmarred, but the back of her head had been crushed, and she was dead. When Bill understood that his wife was gone, he cried out in anguish. The contrast between her apparently peaceful face and the fatal injury became clear only when the rescuers lifted her from the wreckage. The brothers’ work at the scene thus involved not only locating the living, but confronting the deaths left by the blast.

The doctors and other searchers carried Bill toward an ambulance. At Fairfax Hospital, David Shoun injected him several times with morphine; Bill was the sole survivor, but he lost consciousness before investigators could question him. Lawmen arrived after a delay because the town marshal and other officers had been in Oklahoma City for a court case. Once they returned, they placed floodlights at the hospital’s front and rear exits and posted armed guards, fearing the killers might try to finish off Bill there. The Shouns’ medical care could ease his immediate suffering, but his condition also made him a vulnerable witness whose testimony investigators could not yet obtain.

Medical Evidence and Its Limits

The Shoun brothers’ examinations belonged to an older, improvised system of inquiry as much as to medicine. The inquest at the ravine was led by a justice of the peace and relied on jurors selected from the white men present; this form of citizen investigation survived after professional police departments had displaced it elsewhere. The brothers’ findings entered a process tasked not only with deciding whether Anna Brown had died by human action, but also with identifying those responsible. Their medical role could establish what had happened to her body, but it could not by itself identify a killer.

The examination also shows the gap between the promise of forensic science and the practical limits of the evidence. A neck injury, a torn fingernail, or damage to clothing might disclose how a death occurred, while estimating its timing depended on changes such as rigor, temperature, and discoloration. Yet humidity, clothing, and other conditions altered decomposition, making a precise estimate impossible. The Shouns could offer a five-to-seven-day range, and the wound established that Anna had been shot, but the bullet remained beyond recovery even after the later search. The medical evidence made murder certain while leaving the weapon and the perpetrators unknown.