William J. Burns
The Detective Called America's Sherlock Holmes and the Cold Cases He Cracked
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His career included major cases like the Teapot Dome scandal investigations. Burns served as director of the BOI from 1916 to 1921. He faced criticism over his handling of various high-profile cases during this time.
Burns spent his later years working on cold cases and private investigations. He died in 1932 at age seventy-one. His legacy includes both significant law enforcement achievements and controversial decisions that shaped early federal investigation practices. Readers interested in American criminal justice history will find this account of Burns's career valuable.
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The City of Los Angeles called in William J. Burns to track down the people behind the attack on the Times building, which killed twenty people on October 1, 1910. The motive appeared to be personal anger, given that Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher, was known for opposing labor unions. This act of violence fit into a pattern of similar bombings across the country, some of them harmless, that Burns had already been looking into for the National Erector Association.
After months of digging into the case, William J. Burns helped track down Jim McNamara and his associate Ortie McManigal in Detroit on April 14, 1911. Police from both Detroit and Chicago were involved. Later that month, Jim’s brother John McNamara, who held the title of Ironworkers Union secretary-treasurer, was arrested in Indianapolis. He was extradited to Los Angeles, where all three brothers pleaded guilty to murder in connection with the bombing. The investigation revealed the union’s leadership, including President Frank M. Ryan, had approved over 100 bombings between 1905 and 1910, marking what may have been the largest domestic terrorism campaign in U.S. history.
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William J. Burns was chosen to lead the Bureau of Investigation, a role he accepted in August 1921, after being confirmed by President Warren Harding’s Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, who was also a friend of Burns. During his time as director, Burns continued to run his own detective agency. Under his leadership, the bureau's staff dropped from over a thousand employees in 1920 to just 600 by 1923. He also made history by hiring the first women into the bureau’s special agent ranks, starting with Alaska P. Davidson in 1922 and Jessie B. Duckstein in 1923.
In the Summer of 1922, Burns led a raid on the Bridgeman Convention, where the American Communist Party was secretly meeting. He seized a lot of evidence, but the case that followed didn’t go as planned. During the trial of trade union leader William Z. Foster, an undercover agent testified that Burns had told him to lie to make Foster look like a "dangerous subversive." The jury couldn’t agree on a verdict.
When Attorney General Daugherty asked, Burns dispatched agents to look into Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh, who had stood in opposition to oil leases granted by Interior Secretary Albert Fall. The investigation was really a move for revenge, since Walsh had been a major critic of those deals. Later, Burns refused to give Congressional investigators documents from the Department of Justice, which sparked a full probe into the BOI. Senate hearings uncovered serious misconduct, and the press ran stories about it daily. Public opinion turned sharply against the bureau. Burns’s agents also attempted to scare newspaper editors who had reported negatively on the BOI, but their efforts rebounded badly. In 1924, Burns stepped down at the request of Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone. On May 10, J. Edgar Hoover took over the role on a temporary basis.
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The Daily Worker, published by the Communist Party USA, reported in October 1924 that Jacob Spolansky had left the BOI and taken a position with the Burns Detective Agency. The agency was led by a man called "Bill" Burns, who went by the nickname "King of Dicks."
In November 1927, Harry F. Sinclair stood trial for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. in connection with the Teapot Dome scandal. Henry Mason Day, an oil executive representing Sinclair, asked William J. Burns to secretly deploy a team of fourteen men from his detective agency to monitor the jurors. Day handled their pay and reviewed their daily reports. The government’s investigators uncovered Burns’s operatives during the trial, leading to an immediate mistrial.
At a new hearing in the Teapot Dome scandal, Sinclair’s defense argued he had jurors followed to shield them from federal interference, claiming no direct contact was made between operatives and the jury. Sinclair was found guilty on corruption charges, receiving a six-month sentence, while Day got four months. William J. Burns was sentenced to fifteen days in prison, and his son, William Sherman Burns, was fined $1,000. Burns immediately appealed the verdict, and the Supreme Court reversed his conviction in Sinclair v. United States, 279 U.S. 749 — a ruling delivered in 1929.
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After retiring from the Burns Detective Agency, William J. Burns settled in Florida. There, he spent several years writing detective and mystery stories inspired by his long career. He died in April 1932 from a heart attack in Sarasota, Florida.
Paul Dooley played William J. Burns in the TV miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan. A fictional version of Burns appeared in the film Killers of the Flower Moon, portrayed by Gary Basaraba. That character combined elements of Burns with other private investigators involved in the Osage Indian murders.
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Overview
John Edgar Hoover was an American law enforcement leader who became the fifth and final director of the Bureau of Investigation, and then the first director of the FBI. President Calvin Coolidge appointed him to lead the BOI in 1924. After 11 years, he helped create the FBI in June 1935 and stayed as its director for another 37 years until his death in May 1972. He led both agencies for a total of 48 years under eight different presidents. Hoover grew the FBI into a major crime-fighting force and brought in modern technology like centralized fingerprint files and forensic labs. He also built a national blacklist known as the FBI Index or Index List. Later, after his death, it became clear that Hoover had broken FBI rules and even federal laws, using the bureau to spy on political opponents, civil rights leaders, and ordinary citizens through illegal wiretaps, break-ins, and surveillance. His actions gave him enormous power and allowed him to threaten high-ranking officials.
Early life and education
J. Edgar Hoover grew up in Washington, D.C., where he was born on New Year's Day 1895 to Dickerson Naylor Hoover and Anne Marie "Annie" Hoover. His maternal grandfather came from St. Gallen, Switzerland, and his grandmother was born in Virginia to Swiss parents. Hoover attended Central High School, taking part in the choir, Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and debate team—where he argued against women's suffrage and the death penalty. He struggled with a stutter as a child but learned to speak rapidly, a habit that stayed with him. At eighteen, he began working as a messenger at the Library of Congress, a job that helped shape his future FBI work. In 1916, he earned a Bachelor of Laws from George Washington University Law School and later a Master of Laws in 1917. While studying law, he became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, a U.S. Postal Inspector known for fighting fraud and vice.
War Emergency Division
After earning his LL.M., J. Edgar Hoover joined the Justice Department's War Emergency Division in July 1917 at age twenty-two. He was paid $990 a year and exempt from the draft. Hoover quickly rose to lead the Alien Enemy Bureau, created by President Woodrow Wilson to detain suspected disloyal foreigners during World War I. That bureau gained more power through the 1917 Espionage Act. From a list of 1,400 suspicious Germans in the U.S., the Bureau arrested ninety-eight and marked 1,172 as arrestable.
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Violent or major crime
Cold cases are typically violent or major felony crimes like murder and rape, which don’t expire due to statute of limitations. Some disappearances also become cold cases when victims haven't been seen or heard from in a long time. Examples include Natalee Holloway and the Beaumont children. These are the kinds of serious crimes that detectives like William J. Burns focus on solving years later.
Tunnel vision
Sometimes, a case moves forward not because the right person is found, but because investigators become fixated on someone who turns out to be innocent. This happens when the evidence seems weak at first, or when there’s a more obvious suspect—someone who later proves to be wrong. In those moments, the focus shifts away from other possibilities, and that’s called tunnel vision. It’s a pattern where the mind locks onto one idea so tightly that it ignores what else might be true. That’s how a viable suspect can be overlooked or simply ignored.
Famous criminal examples
The case of Jack the Ripper remains one of history’s most famous unsolved mysteries, with many theories about who the killer might have been. The Zodiac Killer, active for nearly fifty years, also sparked endless speculation and investigation. In 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing people and injuring others, but no one was ever definitively identified as responsible, though the Galleanists were widely suspected. Another controversial event was the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. Marinus van der Lubbe was tried, convicted, and executed for setting the fire, yet some believe the Nazis themselves may have been behind it to gain power and weaken democracy in Germany.
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