the case of the Smith murders, Ernest was soon convinced that even his wife's money and his uncle's political influence could not save him. He changed his plea to guilty and asked to be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than receive the death penalty. He turned state's evidence, naming his uncle as responsible for the murder conspiracy. Ernest said that he had used a person named Henry Grammer as a go-between to hire a professional criminal named Asa "Ace" Kirby to perform the killings. Both Grammer and Kirby were killed before they could testify. Ernest Burkhart's attempt to kill his wife failed. Mollie, a devout Catholic, had told her priest that she feared she was being poisoned at home. The priest told her not to touch liquor under any circumstances. He also alerted one of the FBI agents. Mollie recovered from the poison she had already consumed and (after the trials) divorced Ernest. Mollie Burkhart Cobb died of unrelated causes on June 16, 1937. Her children inherited all of her estate. In the early 1990s, journalist Dennis McAuliffe of The Washington Post investigated the suspicious death of his grandmother, Sybil Beekman Bolton, an Osage with headrights who died in 1925 at age 21. As a youth he had been told she died of kidney disease, then as a suicide. His doubts arose from a variety of conflicting evidence. In his investigation, McAuliffe found that the BOI believed that the murders of several Osage women "had been committed or ordered by their husbands." Most murders of the Osage during the early 1920s went unsolved. McAuliffe found that when Bolton was a minor, the court had appointed her white stepfather, attorney Arthur "A.T." Woodward, as her guardian. Woodward also served as the federally appointed Tribal Counsel, and he had guardianship of four other Osage charges, each of whom had died by 1923. McAuliffe learned that his grandmother's murder had been covered up by a false death certificate. He came to believe that Woodward was responsible for her death. His book about his investigation, Bloodland: A Family Story of Oil, Greed and Murder on the Osage Reservation (1994), presents an account of the corruption and murders during this period. Osage County officials sought revenge against Pyle for his role in bringing the murders to light. Fearing for his life, Pyle and his wife fled to Arizona, where he again served as an officer