Smith family home bombing

The Smith family home bombing turned the investigation of the Osage murders toward a crime scene that had been destroyed along with much of its physical evidence. The attack killed Rita Smith and, after she had survived her by several days, her husband William Smith. For T. B. White, the bombing’s method, the family’s inheritance arrangements, and the testimony that emerged later connected it to a broader effort to channel Osage wealth toward Mollie Burkhart—and, through her, toward William K. Hale and Ernest Burkhart.

The family and the inheritance pattern

In September 1925, White was trying to determine what Hale and his nephews Ernest and Bryan Burkhart were concealing. He considered whether William Smith, Rita’s husband and Mollie Burkhart’s brother-in-law, had discovered more than other investigators knew. William had suspected that Lizzie was poisoned and had looked into the possibility of a larger conspiracy tied to the family’s oil wealth. If his death followed from what he had learned, White reasoned, the information he had pursued might help expose the conspiracy.

The family’s succession of deaths gave the bombing a particular financial significance. Anna Brown, who had no children, left nearly all her wealth to her mother, Lizzie. Lizzie’s will directed most of her headright to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita. White saw Anna’s death as the first step in a sequence that made Lizzie, and then Rita and William, targets. Rita and William’s wills stipulated that if they died at the same time, much of Rita’s headright would pass to Mollie. Their simultaneous deaths would therefore have advanced the concentration of family wealth in Mollie’s hands.

The plan did not work exactly as intended: Rita died first, but William survived her by several days. He consequently inherited much of her wealth, which went to one of his relatives when he died. Even so, White concluded, most of the family’s headrights had been directed to Mollie, whose wealth was controlled by Ernest. He suspected that Hale had made an indirect route to the family’s assets through his nephew. White could not establish whether Ernest’s marriage to Mollie, four years before Anna’s murder, had been part of the original design or whether Hale turned him against her after the marriage. The sequence suggested a scheme that made family life and inheritance inseparable from the murders.

The bombing and Lawson’s account

The bombing destroyed the Smiths’ house, and William was treated in a hospital before his death. The account that later implicated Hale came from Burt Lawson, who was in jail after being arrested for killing a fisherman. Hale, then a reserve deputy sheriff who could enter and leave the jail, visited Lawson and pressed him to take on what Hale called a job. Lawson eventually agreed.

Lawson recalled that another deputy let him out of his cell one night and led him to Hale’s car. Hale drove him to a building in Fairfax, where Ernest was waiting. At Hale’s instruction, Ernest brought out a wooden box containing a jug of nitroglycerin with a long, coiled fuse attached to its spout. After they loaded it into the car, the three men drove toward the Smith home. Lawson said Hale and Ernest drove on after he got out with the box and fuse. He entered the cellar by the back way, placed the box in a far corner, laid out the fuse as Hale had directed, and waited in the dark.

Lawson watched the lights come on and then go out. After allowing what he estimated was about forty-five minutes, he lit a short piece of fuse and fled as the long fuse began to burn. He heard the house breaking apart. Hale and Ernest picked him up nearby and returned him to the jail, where the deputy smuggled him back into his cell. Before leaving, Hale threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone what had happened. The account supplied White with a witness who directly implicated Hale in the bombing; it also placed Ernest at the scene and described his role in bringing out the explosives.

What the surviving testimony established

Lawson’s account did not resolve every question. White and Agent Smith still needed to investigate whether Asa Kirby, known as the soup man, had prepared the bomb; the investigators considered that possible, but Lawson’s account did not mention Kirby. In October 1925, White reported to J. Edgar Hoover that Lawson had confessed to placing and setting off the explosive and said that Ernest Burkhart and Hale had persuaded, prompted, and assisted him.

At Ernest’s later trial, he admitted a separate but connecting act: he had delivered Hale’s message to John Ramsey, telling him to let Kirby know it was time to blow up the Smith house. Ernest said he had acted because his uncle had requested it, and presented his admission as a reason to stop the trial and acknowledge the truth. The accounts therefore described different links in the operation: Lawson’s placement and detonation of the explosive, and Ernest’s relaying of the signal. Ernest’s statement did not erase the uncertainty about Kirby’s precise role, but it confirmed that Hale’s instruction had passed through his nephew to others involved in the attack.

The bombing also left a trail of unrecorded or inaccessible evidence. After the explosion, agents asked the nurse who had cared for William whether he had spoken about the murders. She recalled that he sometimes muttered names in feverish sleep, though she could not make them out, and that he seemed worried after waking that he might have said something he should not have. Shortly before he died, William met with his doctors, James Shoun and David Shoun, and his lawyer. The doctors asked the nurse to leave; she suspected that William had made a statement identifying who had blown up his house. David later acknowledged that the brothers had summoned the lawyer because they thought William might name his killers, but said that he had not done so. The hoped-for dying disclosure remained unconfirmed.

Legal and historical aftermath

The bombing became the basis for state charges against Hale and Ramsey when a federal jurisdiction ruling threatened their release in the Henry Roan case. While Hale and Ramsey were celebrating in court, Sheriff Harve M. Freas served Hale with an arrest warrant. White and prosecutors had worked with the Oklahoma attorney general to keep the men in custody by bringing state charges for the bombing murders. The prosecution then had to proceed in Pawhuska, which White regarded as a difficult setting because Hale had strong local influence. At a preliminary hearing, Osage relatives of victims, Hale’s supporters, journalists, and other townspeople crowded into the courtroom to hear the case.

The bombing’s evidence belongs to a wider record marked by gaps. In Anna Brown’s case, the coroner’s inquest testimony had vanished; elsewhere, investigators had preserved little from crime scenes. Years later, a hand-kept Office of Indian Affairs guardianship log showed how many Osage wards had died under particular guardians, while the circumstances of many deaths had never been investigated as homicides. The pattern cannot by itself identify who caused those deaths, but it shows why the Smith bombing mattered beyond its immediate victims: it was one attack that investigators could connect to named participants, set against a much larger history in which violence and financial exploitation often left scant, compromised, or missing records.

That conflict between remembered violence and public erasure recurs in the later account of the case. At the Osage Nation Museum, a 1924 panoramic photograph had a section cut away; the missing panel showed Hale. The Osage had removed his image not because they had forgotten the murders, but because they could not forget them. The bombing thus remains both a particular crime—with a cellar, a box of nitroglycerin, and testimony about who set the fuse—and part of a history whose surviving evidence is incomplete, contested, and consequential.