The Skirvin Hotel in Oklahoma City stands in the account as both a showpiece of oil wealth and a place where the unresolved murder of W. W. Vaughan came into focus through his family’s records. Its history of grandeur, closure, and revival gives the hotel a public story; the binders opened there by Vaughan’s descendants carry a more intimate one, preserving evidence and questions that had not been settled.

Oil-Era Grandeur and Changing Fortunes

Built in 1910 by oilman W. B. Skirvin, the hotel was once billed as the finest in the Southwest. Its ballroom could seat five hundred, and its chandeliers had been imported from Austria. Pillars topped with busts of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, made opulence part of the building’s visible design.

That prosperity did not make the hotel’s history unbroken. In 1988, amid a devastating downturn in the oil industry, the Skirvin closed and remained shuttered for years. Nearly two decades later, a $55 million renovation brought it back into operation as part of the Hilton chain. Its successive closures and reopenings echo the economic fortunes that had first made it a symbol of oil-rich Oklahoma.

A Meeting in the Preserved Lobby

The hotel’s past was still legible in its interior when Martha Vaughan and her cousin Melville Vaughan met the researcher there. The lobby retained its original arched wooden entryway, while faces of Bacchus looked down from the ceiling. The setting’s display of wealth was not merely historical: Martha had proposed the meeting as a way to glimpse what oil had brought to Oklahoma.

Melville arrived carrying two thick binders, which he laid on the bar. The family had assembled their contents over decades of research into W. W. Vaughan’s murder. Faded newspaper clippings, including one headlined “PAWHUSKA MAN’S NUDE BODY FOUND,” sat alongside Vaughan’s death certificate and an informant’s statement to the FBI. The statement reported that, shortly before his death, Vaughan had said he had collected sufficient evidence to put William K. Hale in the electric chair. In the hotel’s public setting, the binders made the family’s private effort to preserve the case tangible.

Wealth Beside Unresolved Loss

The meeting also connected the hotel’s oil-era splendor to the consequences of violence in Vaughan’s family. His widow, Rosa Vaughan, was left to raise ten children without income. The family moved from a two-story house into a storage garage, and, according to Martha and Melville, members of the Osage community joined together to help feed them. Some of the children, including Martha’s father, lived with Osage families, where they grew up speaking Osage and learning traditional dances; Martha recalled that her father felt safe among the Osage.

Many in the family believed William K. Hale had wanted Vaughan silenced, but their suspicions did not resolve the mechanics of the killing. They continued to wonder who had carried it out and whether Vaughan had been killed before being thrown from the train or had died from the impact. The inquest had listed the cause of death as unknown, and the family believed that someone influential had ensured it was a sham. Against the hotel’s polished displays of oil wealth, those surviving questions make the Skirvin a setting where prosperity and an unclosed case occupy the same frame.