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David Grann is the author of the book, "Killers of The Flower Moon" and answers multiple questions from people to describe in more detail of how and why he decided to write the book.

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David Grann, author of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” takes questions from readers

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Not very often that you have to deal with your own husband trying to poison you for money. Mollie Burkhart went from healthy and wealthy to sick, but strong in a blink of an eye due to her horrible husband, Ernest Burkhart. He was a murderer, so naturally Mollie left him.

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Who was Mollie Burkhart, and what did she have to do with the Osage murders?

Mollie Burkhart was an Osage woman who was married to Ernest Burkhart, a white man who was later convicted for the Osage conspiracies, including the murder of Mollie's sister. Mollie Burkhart suffered immensely during the Reign of Terror, and she narrowly escaped death herself.

Murder of Mollie Burkhart's Sister Anna Brown

On May 27, 1921, the partially decomposed body of a 25-year-old Osage woman named Anna Brown was discovered in a ravine in Osage County, Oklahoma, dead from a bullet to the back of the head. Anna would be merely one of the first victims in a five-year-long Reign of Terror that would run from 1921-1926 and claim the lives of dozens (and possibly hundreds) of Osage men, women, and children.

Anna's immediate family included her sisters, Mollie Burkhart and Rita Smith, and her mother, Elizabeth Kyle. Mollie Burkhart was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhardt, a native of Texas who had moved to Osage County as a young man. Rita and Anna had also married white men.

(Shortform note: In this NPR interview, Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann explains that intermarriage between whites and Osage had become quite common by the early 20th century. Many white people from states bordering Oklahoma had been drawn to the area by the oil boom and the opportunity to get rich-by either striking oil or marrying an Osage.)

Anna had been a vivacious, outgoing young woman. In the days before her disappearance, Anna's family had been concerned about her behavior-she had been staying out late at night at speakeasies, often in the company of Bryan Burkhart, the brother of her sister Mollie's husband. Anna had been missing for three days, immediately sparking her family's worst fears. They were no strangers to loss- just a few years before, a younger sister named Minnie had died of a mysterious and unexplained wasting illness.

Mollie Burkhart, Ernest Burkhart, and William Hale

Because she spoke English and was married to a white man, Mollie Burkhart became the family's natural liaison with the white authorities. But this was also due to the fact that she wasn't married to just any white man. Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, was the nephew of William Hale, one of the most prominent figures in Osage County.

Hale was a widely respected businessman and influential force in the county, having made his fortune in the cattle business. Known as the "King of the Osage Hills," Hale's business interests were firmly entrenched throughout the county. He had powerful political connections and was even a reserve deputy sheriff in the town of Fairfax. The county prosecutor himself owed his election to Hale.

In an era when many white authority figures used their status to exploit and abuse the Osage, Hale positioned himself as a benevolent, if somewhat paternal, figure. His philanthropy had supported the establishment of charities, schools, and hospitals for the Osage, and he vowed to Mollie Burkhart and her mother that he would see justice done for Anna.

Murder of Rita and Bill Smith

In March 1923, Rita and Bill Smith (the sister and brother-in-law, respectively, of Mollie Burkhart) were killed when their house went up in an explosion.

In the wake of the Smith bombing, Mollie Burkhart's situation became even more fraught. Mollie was convinced that there was a well-orchestrated plot afoot to eliminate her family, and that she would be the next target. She became a recluse, shuttering her windows and closing her home to guests. In this state of absolute terror, she even gave her new baby, Anna, to a relative to raise. Most troublingly, she was in ill health-she was a diabetic, and her condition appeared to be getting worse.

In response, the ever-present local doctors, the brothers David and James Shoun, visited Mollie Burkhart regularly to give her injections of what they claimed was insulin. But the authorities weren't so sure that Mollie was really sick. An anonymous letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs warned that Mollie's life was in grave danger. Mollie wasn't sick with diabetes-like George Bigheart, William Stepson, and her own mother, she was being poisoned. The only question was who was responsible.

Tom White's Investigation

Tom White was sent from the FBI to investigate the crimes. Despite the political and social roadblocks, White and his team were undaunted. Through a combination of undercover sleuthing, combing through financial records, and extracting confessions from key witnesses, the agents identified the businessman, power broker, and self-styled "True Friend of the Osage" William Hale as the mastermind behind the Reign of Terror. Hale had powerful business and political connections and had supported the establishment of charities, schools, and hospitals for the Osage. Hale was more than just any local grandee, moreover-he was the uncle of Ernest Burkhart, Mollie Burkhart's husband. He had been at Anna Brown's funeral and even vowed to the family that he would seek justice for Anna.

The Bureau agents discovered that Ernest Burkhart and his brother, Bryan, had been willing and active accomplices in their uncle's murderous conspiracy-Ernest Burkhart had been a party to the murder of his wife's sisters. In piecing together the puzzle, White's team saw that the motive for all the murders was simple: profit.

While individual Osage had been barred by the Tribal Council from buying or selling headrights, they could be inherited. An Osage who suffered many deaths in their family could find themselves with title to multiple headrights. As White studied the probate records dealing with the estates of murdered Osage, the outline of the murderous plot began to make sense.

Many of the headrights of the victims had been willed to Mollie Burkhart. When all of this money came to Mollie, it would be easy for Hale to exercise control of it through his easily manipulated nephew Ernest-though it would be even easier if Mollie were to be killed, too. This was why Mollie Burkhart's family was being systematically eliminated. Through oil headrights and life insurance policies, Hale and his conspirators had a direct financial stake in the deaths of many Osage.

As he studied the probate records, Tom discovered that many headrights had come into the possession of Mollie Burkhart, married to Ernest Burkhart, nephew of William Hale. Ernest was known to be highly influenced by his domineering uncle. When all of this money came to Mollie, it would be easy for Hale to exercise control of it through his nephew-though it would be even easier if Mollie were to be killed, too.

This explained the precise pattern and order of deaths in Mollie Burkhart's family. The divorced and childless Anna had been the first to be eliminated, with her headright going to her mother Lizzie. Killing Anna first ensured that her assets would not be divided up between multiple heirs. Lizzie herself was the next target, having willed her headrights to Mollie and Rita, her surviving daughters. This also explained why the next victims, Bill and Rita Smith, had died in a bombing attack, which was an unusual method of killing. In fact, the Smith murders were done this way because it was critical that the two died at the same time. If only Rita had died, her headrights would have gone to her husband Bill Smith. But because the couple died mere days apart, Rita's headright reverted to her only surviving heir-Mollie Burkhart. It all began to make sense as the outlines of the murderous plot became clear to Tom White. By conspiring to have all the members of Mollie's family killed, Hale was maneuvering to have all their headrights bequeathed to her. Once Mollie Burkhart herself was murdered, the oil wealth would be his to exploit.

The Trial of Ernest Burkhart

The trial was devastating for Mollie Burkhart, as she learned more about the plot to eliminate her family. The national press, which avidly covered the case, refused to respect her privacy, circulating photos of her around the country and generally portraying her as an ignorant, backwoods Osage. Hale, meanwhile, packed the gallery with his supporters, who would hoot and cheer at every motion made by the defense and jeer and boo the prosecution. It brought a circus-like atmosphere to the trial and amply demonstrated the difficulties of bringing a white man to justice for crimes against an Osage Indian.

During the trial, Hale's team lied and blatantly tampered with the witness Ernest Burkhart and attempted to intimidate him into silence. Shockingly, the judge allowed all of this to happen in open court. On one occasion, Hale openly berated Burkhart personally, in full view of the judge and jury. Tom White was outraged and appalled by the utter brazenness and arrogance of Hale's conduct.

Now, under the pressure of Hale's backroom scheming, Ernest recanted his testimony, claiming that he knew nothing about the murders and taking the stand as a witness for the defense instead of the prosecution. Outrageously, he claimed that Tom White's agents had only obtained his confession through torture-a lie that was echoed by Hale and Ramsey. White's onetime star witness was being used against him.

Although J. Edgar Hoover back in Washington knew these charges against the Bureau to be totally baseless, he was fearful of anything that might bring further embarrassment or scandal to the Bureau. Behind the scenes, there was mounting political pressure to sack White and his team.

To bolster their position against Hale, the prosecution decided to first seek a conviction of Ernest Burkhart. With Ernest recanting, however, their case looked like it was falling apart. But the prosecution had one more card to play: Kelsie Morrison, the notorious bootlegger, outlaw, onetime Bureau informant, and the man whom Ernest had fingered as Anna Brown's killer. The prosecutor brought Morrison in to take the stand. This time, Morrison decided to cooperate with the government against his former employer, Hale. Morrison confessed in open court that he had been recruited by Hale to help eliminate Mollie Burkhart's entire family. He then proceeded to narrate the awful details of Anna's final moments.

On October 29, 1926, both Hale and Ramsey were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Neither man made any statement upon the conviction and sentencing. The next year, Morrison was convicted of Anna's murder, although Bryan Burkhart was ultimately given immunity by the prosecution.

In response to the murders, the Osage Tribal Council persuaded Congress to pass a law barring anyone who was not at least half-Osage from inheriting a headright, removing some of the incentive for whites to murder them. Mollie Burkhart divorced Ernest shortly after he was sent to prison, revolted and outraged by what he and his family had done. Treacherously, many of the co-conspirators-including Bryan and Ernest Burkhart, Morrison, and Hale-had been among the crowd of onlookers when Anna's body was discovered, comforting Mollie in her hour of need. Little did Mollie know that she was being comforted by blood-stained hands.

Mollie Burkhart: Survivor of Her Husband's Osage Murder Plot

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Mollie Burkhart: Survivor of Her Husband's Osage Murder Plot

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Who was Mollie Burkhart, and what did she have to do with the Osage murders? Mollie Burkhart was an Osage woman who was married to Ernest Burkhart, a white man who was later convicted for the Osage conspiracies, including the murder of Mollie's sister.

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With generations led down, Mollie's Grandchild, Maggie Burkhart, speaks of her connections to the Osage murders. In order to know Mollie for my essay, I require hidden information such as this point of view.

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Mollie Burkhart's descendants

When cast and crew from Killers of the Flower Moon came to Pawhuska to film, it seemed everyone in Tulsa had their own story to tell.

There were Leonardo DiCaprio sightings, friends who were cast as extras, business owners who saw a boon from the traffic and attention. Those brushes with fame were part of the fun and part of the hype surrounding the Martin Scorsese-directed film based on the popular 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon.

But for Margie Burkhart, this is more than a Hollywood movie. This is her life. This is the aftermath of the tragedy that left her without aunts, uncles and cousins. This is the reality that turned her big family into a much smaller one and left the family that remained divided.

Margie's grandmother, Mollie Burkhart, survived the 1920s Reign of Terror, a scheme by white men in the area to kill members of the Osage Nation to gain their wealth and mineral rights. From 1918 to 1923, Mollie's three sisters and mother died under mysterious circumstances or were found murdered, leaving Mollie afraid for her life. At the same time, other Osage men and women were also found dead.

An investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI, led to the arrests of a handful of men including Mollie's husband, Ernest Burkhart, and his uncle, William K. Hale, the ringleader of the murder plot.

Today, Mollie's granddaughter, Margie, lives in Tahlequah. She watched as David Grann's book Killers of the Flower Moon became a bestseller and is now amazed at the attention the movie has brought to Oklahoma.

"I'm glad the story is getting out there. It was a story that needed to be told," Margie said. "When the book came out and we would go to some of the book signings, people would come up and say, 'I lived in Tulsa all my life but never knew this happened.'"

That's less likely the case today with all the attention the book and movie have received over the last few years.

Margie has never shied away from talking about her family history. In high school, a teacher told her she should consider writing a book about the Osage murders, saying "You know, this is going to be an important story one of these days." She does wonder why it took so long for the Reign of Terror to capture the attention of the public. K illers of the Flower Moon wasn't the first book about the murders, but it was the one that clicked.

And though Margie had some worry about how her family would be portrayed, that was alleviated after speaking to Scorsese.

"I was kind of concerned in the beginning. But I could tell he's going to be very sensitive to the story," she said.

She told me her concerns of the Hollywood stereotypes of American Indians in film, including the infatuation with alcoholism, for instance. They also spoke of the complexity of her grandmother's relationship with her grandfather. Though Mollie did end up divorcing Ernest, she supported him during his trial.

She had the same conversation with Leonardo DiCaprio, who spoke to Margie and her husband for a couple of hours. She said meeting Leonardo DiCaprio in his basketball shorts and sneakers as he asked questions about her family history was one of those moments that made her realize just how big the movie was going to be. DiCaprio, who plays Margie's grandfather, wanted to better understand the relationship between Mollie and Ernest.

"He wondered how somebody could love someone and murder the rest of the family. It was hard for him to wrap his head around it," she said. "I told him that Ernest was so under the influence of his uncle, he would have done anything asked of him."

Margie's father, who fought against alcoholism and anger issues stemming from the murders, attempted to reconnect with his father after Ernest was released from prison, but Margie says the pain and outrage over the betrayal was too much to bear.

"My dad was very upset. To really be honest, I think the Osage tribe ostracized those kids. As a tribe, they should have nurtured and cared for these kids, like my dad and his sister," she said.

Despite Margie's father's issues, she says he was always a good dad, making sure to create happy memories with his family like beautifully decorating the Christmas tree and going all out for Halloween.

"He was dealing with a lot of internal feelings all his life. I'm sad he didn't get to read the book," she said.

Margie thinks her grandmother, who died young at age 50, would have been pleased with how the book and movie have brought light to the murders of her beloved family.

"She was a traditional Osage woman. Even though she was forced to go to boarding school, she hung on to those traditional values. She was a good mother to her son and her daughter," she said. "She was the strong, silent type. And I think reading the book would have brought up a lot of sensitive feelings since she was the only one left of her sisters."

Margie and her husband have many friends who are extras on the movie, and her brother will play a schoolteacher.

"He fills me in on it, and it seems like they're having fun," she said. "I can kind of distance myself from it. I can see the good that it's doing for Pawhuska and Fairfax."

She sees the happiness ushered in with the film and is able to allow herself to distance from the pain of the past, she said.

For Margie, with a family history as difficult and complex as this, it's never been something she's been afraid to talk about. Her mom and dad spoke openly about it with her, and she did the same with her children.

"I think for the next generation of my family, they're going to be OK just because of the way we talk about it," she said. "We don't put any shame on anything. It was a tragedy, and we're strong because of it, and they'll be strong because of it, too."

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"Killers of the Flower Moon" Granddaughter Shares Complex Connection with Osage Murders - TulsaKids Magazine

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When cast and crew from Killers of the Flower Moon came to Pawhuska to film, it seemed everyone in Tulsa had their own story to tell. There were Leonardo DiCaprio sightings, friends who were cast as extras, business owners who saw a boon from the traffic and attention.

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This informational page shows the chronological order of events that happened to the Osage. It mentions Mollie Burkhart as a victim of being poisoned.

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Oil well on the Osage reservation in the early 1920s

Early 1800s Over the course of two decades, the Osage are forced to cede about 100 mile acres of ancestral land between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers and to live on a reservation in Kansas.

July 9, 1866 A reservation in northeastern Oklahoma is acquired by treaty ("the Cherokee Treaty") from the Cherokee.

1870 The Osage sell their Kansas lands for $1.25/acre to settlers.

Early 1870s The Osage are driven from their home in southeastern Kansas to the reservation in northeastern Oklahoma.

June 28, 1906 The Federal Government enacts the Osage Act which gives each of the 2,229 members of the tribe shares known as "head rights" for money received for the production of oil on reservation land.

1917 Mollie, a full-blooded Osage, marries Ernest Burkhart and becomes Mollie Burkhart.

1917 The Osage reservation is discovered to have some of the richest oil fields in the United States. An oil rush begins.

1918 Minnie, a sister of Mollie, dies at age 27 of what was called a "peculiar wasting disease" (but which might in fact have been the result of poisoning).

May 14, 1921 An Osage named Charles Whitehorn leaves his home and is never seen alive again.

May 22, 1921 Anna Brown, a sister of Mollie, is murdered.

May 27, 1921 The body of Anna Brown is discovered in a ravine just off the Pawhuska-Fairfax road. An autopsy shows the death to have been the result of a gun shot to the back of her head.

July 1921 Lizzie Q., Mollie's and Anna's mother, dies after a prolonged malady at the home of her daughter Mollie and her husband, Ernest Burkhart.

February 1922 William Stepson, a 29-year-old Osage, dies as the result of poisoning. In the months that follow, two other Osage die of suspected poisonings.

August 1922 Barney McBride, on a trip to Washington to urge a federal investigation of the Osage murders, is stabbed to death.

January 1923 Bodies of additional murdered Osage tribal members are found, including the bodies of Joe Greyhorse and Anna Sandford.

February 6, 1923 The body of Henry Roan, a full-blooded Osage, is found in the front seat of a car in a ravine. Hale had been shot in the head from the rear.

March 10, 1923 At 2:00 a.m., the home of Rita and W.E. ("Bill") Smith blows up. Rita and a white servant girl named Nettie Brookshire are killed instantly; Bill Smith dies a few days later.

March 11, 1923 Before he dies, Bill Smith says that "he has only two enemies in the world, and they are Bill Hale and Ernest Burkhart."

March 24, 1923 The Commissioner of Indian Affairs requests the aid of the Bureau of Investigation (an agency later called the FBI) in investigating murders on the Osage reservation.

June 14, 1923 Henry Grammer, who might have been able to provide incriminating evidence against W. K. Hale, dies in a car accident that might have resulted from tampered with brakes.

June 1923 Lawyer W. W. Vaughan, returning from an interview with George Bigheart in an Oklahoma City hospital (Bigheart revealed to Vaughan information about the Osage killings), is killed and thrown off a train.

Summer 1923 By now, over two dozen Osage have been murdered--the actual toll is probably significantly higher. Oil revenue for the the Osage in the year 1923 totals over $30 million.

July 1925 Tom White, appointed by J. Edgar Hoover to head the Osage murders investigation, takes over the Oklahoma City field office.

September 1925 Federal agents focus on how W. K. Hale came to be the beneficiary of Henry Roan's $25,000 life insurance policy.

Late 1925 Mollie Burkhart, a likely victim of poisoning, is hospitalized. She had been receiving insulin objection from two of the town doctors, the Shoun brothers, that probably contained poison.

January 4, 1926 Warrants are issued for the arrest of William Hale and Ernest Burkhart for murders of Bill and Rita Smith and their servant, Nettie Brookshire.

January 1926 Agents obtain statements from Blackie Thompson, who says that Burkhart and Hale asked him and a buddy (Curley Johnson) to kill Bill and Rita Smith. Thompson says they refused to do the job.

January 1926 Ernest Burkhart confesses. He says that Hale recruited Henry Grammer to find Asa Kirby to plan and execute the explosion at the Smith home.

January 1926 Burkhart identifies John Ramsey as the killer of Henry Roan and Kelsie Morrison as the killer of Anna Brown.

Jan. 6-7, 1926 John Ramsey confesses to coercing the murder of Roan and implicates himself in the murders of Bill and Rita Smith and their servant, but then repudiates his confession.

January 9, 1926 William K. Hale and John Ramsey are turned over to the Federal government for prosecution.

1926 Federal authorities decide to proceed first with charges for the murder of Roan, believing that his murder (unlike the others) was committed on Indian territory, thus allowing for federal court jurisdiction.

January 20, 1926 Ernest Burkhart tells authorities that he is sure Hale is trying to "bump him off."

January 1926 Hale hires a gunman to kill Katherine Cole, Kelsie Morrison's former wife, because she knew too much about the murders, but the gunman doesn't go through with it and tells authorities.

March 1, 1926 A federal district court judge rules that the Roan case could only proceed in state court. The federal government says it will appeal.

March 12, 1926 At the preliminary hearing in the Hale-Ramsey state court trial, prosecution witness Burkhart is allowed to meet with Hale's lawyers in the judge's chambers.

March 13, 1926 Ernest Burkhart refuses to testify for the state and instead testifies for the defense. He denies that Hale asked anyone to kill Roan.

March 17, 1926 Ernest Burkhart sues various federal agents, alleging his confession was coerced by putting a loaded revolver at his side and forcing him to sign.

March 18, 1926 State murder charges are filed against Ernest Burkhart.

May 18, 1926 Kelsie Morrison confesses to killing Anna Brown. The killing, he said, was arranged for and paid for by Hale and Byron Burkhart.

May 1926 At the state court trial of Ernest Burkhart, Hale testifies (falsely) that agents tried to get him to confess by "shoving a big gun in my face." Burkhart and Ramsey claim their confessions were similarly coerced.

June 1, 1926 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Hale-Ramsey case for the murder of Roan can proceed in federal court.

June 9, 1926 Ernest Burkhart withdraws his plea of not guilty and pleads guilty and says that, following the instructions of Hale and Ramsey, he had informed Asa Kirby it was time to blow up the Smith home.

June 21, 1926 Eernest Burkhart is sentenced to life imprisonment.

July 8, 1926 A federal grand jury in Guthrie, Oklahoma indicts Hale and Ramsey for the murder of Henry Roan.

July 26, 1926 The federal trial of Hale and Ramsey begins in Guthrie.

July 30, 1926 Ernest Burkhart testifies that Hale originally planned to kill Roan with poisoned moonshine (Hale's usual method of committing murder), not shoot him.

August 25, 1926 The jury in the Hale-Ramsey trial announces that it is unable to reach a verdict and a mistrial is declared.

October 1926 A grand jury indicts Hale's defense attorney, Jim Springer, and several witnesses for attempting to obstruct justice in the first Hale-Ramsey trial.

October 20, 1926 The second trial of Hale and Ramsey opens.

October 29, 1926 Hale and Ramsey are found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at Leavenworth.

April 1927 The jury is unable to reach a verdict in the state court trial of Bryan Burkhart for the murder of Anna Brown.

November 1927 Kelsey Morrison is tried and convicted in state court in Bartlesville for the murder of Anna Brown. Morrison is sentenced to life. Bryan Burkhart was given immunity and testifies for the prosecution.

1927 The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Hale and Ramsey were tried in the worng district court of Oklahoma and reverses their convictions.

1928 Mollie Burkhart, having divorced Bryan Burkhart, marries John Cobb.

Jan. 26, 1929 Hale is again convicted of murders, this time in the federal court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, and again sentenced to life imprisonment.

Nov. 20, 1929 John Ramsey is convicted for the murder of Henry Roan and sentenced to life in prison.

1937 Ernest Burkhart is paroled (but later returns to prison after committing a robbery).

1947 After serving 20 years at Leavenworth, William Hale is paroled at age 72.

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The Osage "Reign of Terror" Murder Trials: A Chronology

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Welcome to Famous Trials, the Web's largest and most visited collection of original essays, trial transcripts and exhibits, maps, images, and other materials relating to the greatest trials in world history. "Famous Trials" first appeared on the Web in 1995, making this site older than about 99.97% of all websites.

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I will likely use this Video as a reference within my essay. It digs deeper to the wealth of the Osage and the background information of the oil group wealth. This can help in providing information of Mollie's background of which she came.

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Osage Murders/The Reign of Terror Analysis

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Also known as "The Marked Women" Mollie Burkhart would be an incredible women to study for my essay to understand a women's side of the story during the Osage murders. She is not just an ordinary women either, she is a broken, but strong, women, which makes me want to dig deeper into furthering my knowledge about her.

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In the early twentieth century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation, in Oklahoma. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off. In 1923, after the death toll reached more than two dozen, the case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case was among the F.B.I.'s first major homicide investigations. After J. Edgar Hoover was appointed the bureau's director, in 1924, he sent a team of undercover operatives, including a Native American agent, to the Osage reservation.
David Grann, a staff writer at the magazine, has spent nearly half a decade researching this submerged and sinister history. In his new book, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.," which is being published by Doubleday, in April, he shows that the breadth of the killings was far greater than the Bureau ever exposed. This exclusive excerpt, the book's first chapter, introduces the Osage woman and her family who became prime targets of the conspiracy.

In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the "gods had left confetti." In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart, a resident of the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, began to fear that something had happened to one of her three sisters, Anna Brown. Thirty-four, and less than a year older than Mollie, Anna had disappeared three days earlier. She had often gone on "sprees," as her family disparagingly called them: dancing and drinking with friends until dawn. But this time one night had passed, and then another, and Anna had not shown up on Mollie's front stoop as she usually did, with her long black hair slightly frayed and her dark eyes shining like glass. When Anna came inside, she liked to slip off her shoes, and Mollie missed the comforting sound of her moving, unhurried, through the house. Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains.

Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier. Her death had come with shocking speed, and though doctors had attributed it to a "peculiar wasting illness," Mollie harbored doubts: Minnie had been only twenty-seven and had always been in perfect health.

Like their parents, Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant that they were among the registered members of the tribe. It also meant that they possessed a fortune. In the early eighteen-seventies, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage in the form of leases and royalties. In the early twentieth century, each person on the tribal roll began receiving a quarterly check. The amount was initially for only a few dollars, but over time, as more oil was tapped, the dividends grew into the hundreds, then the thousands of dollars. And virtually every year the payments increased, like the prairie creeks that joined to form the wide, muddy Cimarron, until the tribe members had collectively accumulated millions and millions of dollars. (In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than thirty million dollars, the equivalent today of more than four hundred million dollars.) The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. "Lo and behold!" the New York weekly Outlook_ _exclaimed. "The Indian, instead of starving to death . . . enjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy."

The public had become transfixed by the tribe's prosperity, which belied the images of American Indians that could be traced back to the brutal first contact with whites-the original sin from which the country was born. Reporters tantalized their readers with stories about the "plutocratic Osage" and the "red millionaires," with their brick-and-terra-cotta mansions and chandeliers, and with their diamond rings, fur coats, and chauffeured cars. One writer marvelled at Osage girls who attended the best boarding schools and wore sumptuous French clothing, as if " une très jolie demoiselle_ _of the Paris boulevards had inadvertently strayed into this little reservation town."

At the same time, reporters seized upon any signs of the traditional Osage way of life, which seemed to stir in the public's mind visions of "wild" Indians. One article noted a "circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire, where the bronzed and brightly blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style." Another documented a party of Osage arriving at a ceremony for their dances in a private airplane-a scene that "outrivals the ability of the fictionist to portray." Summing up the public's attitude toward the Osage, the Washington Star_ _said, "That lament, 'Lo the poor Indian,' might appropriately be revised to, 'Ho, the rich red-skin.' "

Gray Horse was one of the reservation's older settlements. These outposts-including Fairfax, a larger, neighboring town of nearly fifteen hundred people, and Pawhuska, the Osage capital, with a population of more than six thousand-seemed like fevered visions. The streets clamored with cowboys, fortune seekers, bootleggers, soothsayers, medicine men, outlaws, U.S. marshals, New York financiers, and oil magnates. Automobiles sped along paved horse trails, the smell of fuel overwhelming the scent of the prairies. Juries of crows peered down from telephone wires. There were restaurants, advertised as cafés, as well as opera houses and polo grounds.

Although Mollie didn't spend as lavishly as some of her neighbors did, she had built a beautiful, rambling wooden house in Gray Horse near her family's old lodge of lashed poles, woven mats, and bark. She owned several cars and had a staff of servants-the Indians' pot-lickers, as many settlers derided these migrant workers. The servants were often black or Mexican, and in the early nineteen-twenties a visitor to the reservation expressed contempt at the sight of "even whites" performing "all the menial tasks about the house to which no Osage will stoop."

Mollie was one of the last people to see Anna before she vanished. That day, May 21st, Mollie had risen close to dawn, a habit ingrained from when her father used to pray every morning to the sun. She was accustomed to the chorus of meadowlarks and sandpipers and prairie chickens, now overlaid with the pock-pocking_ _of drills pounding the earth. Unlike many of her friends, who shunned Osage clothing, Mollie wrapped an Indian blanket around her shoulders. She also didn't style her hair in a flapper bob but, instead, let her long, black hair flow over her back, revealing her striking face, with its high cheekbones and big brown eyes.

Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, rose with her. A twenty-eight-year-old white man, he had the stock handsomeness of an extra in a Western picture show: short brown hair, slate-blue eyes, square chin. Only his nose disturbed the portrait; it looked as if it had taken a barroom punch or two. Growing up in Texas, the son of a poor cotton farmer, he'd been enchanted by tales of the Osage Hills-that vestige of the American frontier where cowboys and Indians were said to still roam. In 1912, at the age of nineteen, he'd packed a bag, like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory, and went to live with his uncle, a domineering cattleman named William K. Hale, in Fairfax. "He was not the kind of a man to ask you to do something-he told you," Ernest once said of Hale, who became his surrogate father. Though Ernest mostly ran errands for Hale, he sometimes worked as a livery driver, which is how he met Mollie, chauffeuring her around town.

Ernest had a tendency to drink moonshine and play Indian stud poker with men of ill repute, but beneath his roughness there seemed to be tenderness and a trace of insecurity, and Mollie fell in love with him. Born a speaker of Osage, Mollie had learned some English in school; nevertheless, Ernest studied her native language until he could talk with her in it. She suffered from diabetes, and he cared for her when her joints ached and her stomach burned with hunger. After he heard that another man had affections for her, he muttered that he couldn't live without her.

It wasn't easy for them to marry. Ernest's roughneck friends ridiculed him for being a "squaw man." And though Mollie's three sisters had wed white men, she felt a responsibility to have an arranged Osage marriage, the way her parents had. Still, Mollie, whose family practiced a mixture of Osage and Catholic beliefs, couldn't understand why God would let her find love, only to then take it away from her. So, in 1917, she and Ernest exchanged rings, vowing to love each other till eternity.

By 1921, they had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was two years old, and a son, James, who was eight months old and nicknamed Cowboy. Mollie also tended to her aging mother, Lizzie, who had moved in to the house after Mollie's father passed away. Because of Mollie's diabetes, Lizzie once feared that she would die young, and beseeched her other children to take care of her. In truth, Mollie was the one who looked after all of them.

May 21st was supposed to be a delightful day for Mollie. She liked to entertain guests and was hosting a small luncheon. After getting dressed, she fed the children. Cowboy often had terrible earaches, and she'd blow in his ears until he stopped crying. Mollie kept her home in meticulous order, and she issued instructions to her servants as the house stirred, everyone bustling about-except Lizzie, who'd fallen ill and stayed in bed. Mollie asked Ernest to ring Anna and see if she'd come over to help tend to Lizzie for a change. Anna, as the oldest child in the family, held a special status in their mother's eyes, and even though Mollie took care of Lizzie, Anna, in spite of her tempestuousness, was the one her mother spoiled.

When Ernest told Anna that her mama needed her, she promised to take a taxi straight there, and she arrived shortly afterward, dressed in bright red shoes, a skirt, and a matching Indian blanket; in her hand was an alligator purse. Before entering, she'd hastily combed her windblown hair and powdered her face. Mollie noticed, however, that her gait was unsteady, her words slurred. Anna was drunk.

Mollie couldn't hide her displeasure. Some of the guests had already arrived. Among them were two of Ernest's brothers, Bryan and Horace Burkhart, who, lured by black gold, had moved to Osage County, often assisting Hale on his ranch. One of Ernest's aunts, who spewed racist notions about Indians, was also visiting, and the last thing Mollie needed was for Anna to stir up the old goat.

Anna slipped off her shoes and began to make a scene. She took a flask from her bag and opened it, releasing the pungent smell of bootleg whiskey. Insisting that she needed to drain the flask before the authorities caught her-it was a year into nationwide Prohibition-she offered the guests a swig of what she called the best white mule.

Mollie knew that Anna had been very troubled of late. She'd recently divorced her husband, a settler named Oda Brown, who owned a livery business. Since then, she'd spent more and more time in the reservation's tumultuous boomtowns, which had sprung up to house and entertain oil workers-towns like Whizbang, where, it was said, people whizzed all day and banged all night. "All the forces of dissipation and evil are here found," a U.S. government official reported. "Gambling, drinking, adultery, lying, thieving, murdering." Anna had become entranced by the places at the dark ends of the streets: the establishments that seemed proper on the exterior but contained hidden rooms filled with glittering bottles of moonshine. One of Anna's servants later told the authorities that Anna was someone who drank a lot of whiskey and had "very loose morals with white men."

At Mollie's house, Anna began to flirt with Ernest's younger brother, Bryan, whom she'd sometimes dated. He was more brooding than Ernest and had inscrutable yellow-flecked eyes and thinning hair that he wore slicked back. A lawman who knew him described him as a little roustabout. When Bryan asked one of the servants at the luncheon if she'd go to a dance with him that night, Anna said that if he fooled around with another woman, she'd kill him.

Meanwhile, Ernest's aunt was muttering, loud enough for all to hear, about how mortified she was that her nephew had married a redskin. It was easy for Mollie to subtly strike back because one of the servants attending to the aunt was white-a blunt reminder of the town's social order.

Anna continued raising Cain. She fought with the guests, fought with her mother, fought with Mollie. "She was drinking and quarrelling," a servant later told authorities. "I couldn't understand her language, but they were quarrelling." The servant added, "They had an awful time with Anna, and I was afraid."

That evening, Mollie planned to look after her mother, while Ernest took the guests into Fairfax, five miles to the northwest, to meet Hale and see "Bringing Up Father,"_ _a touring musical about a poor Irish immigrant who wins a million-dollar sweepstakes and struggles to assimilate into high society. Bryan, who'd put on a cowboy hat, his catlike eyes peering out from under the brim, offered to drop Anna off at her house.

Before they left, Mollie washed Anna's clothes, gave her some food to eat, and made sure that she'd sobered up enough that Mollie could glimpse her sister as her usual self, bright and charming. They lingered together, sharing a moment of calm and reconciliation. Then Anna said goodbye, a gold filling flashing through her smile.

With each passing night, Mollie grew more anxious. Bryan insisted that he'd taken Anna straight home and dropped her off before heading to the show. After the third night, Mollie, in her quiet but forceful way, pressed everyone into action. She dispatched Ernest to check on Anna's house. Ernest jiggled the knob to her front door-it was locked. From the window, the rooms inside appeared dark and deserted.

Ernest stood there alone in the heat. A few days earlier, a cool rain shower had dusted the earth, but afterward the sun's rays beat down mercilessly through the blackjack trees. This time of year, heat blurred the prairies and made the tall grass creak underfoot. In the distance, through the shimmering light, one could see the skeletal frames of derricks.

Anna's head servant, who lived next door, came out, and Ernest asked her, "Do you know where Anna is?"

Before the shower, the servant said, she'd stopped by Anna's house to close any open windows. "I thought the rain would blow in," she explained. But the door was locked, and there was no sign of Anna. She was gone.

News of her absence coursed through the boomtowns, travelling from porch to porch, from store to store. Fuelling the unease were reports that another Osage, Charles Whitehorn, had vanished a week before Anna had. Genial and witty, the thirty-year-old Whitehorn was married to a woman who was part white, part Cheyenne. A local newspaper noted that he was "popular among both the whites and the members of his own tribe." On May 14th, he'd left his home, in the southwestern part of the reservation, for Pawhuska. He never returned.

Still, there was reason for Mollie not to panic. It was conceivable that Anna had slipped out after Bryan had dropped her off and headed to Oklahoma City or across the border to incandescent Kansas City. Perhaps she was dancing in one of those jazz clubs she liked to visit, oblivious of the chaos she'd left trailing in her wake. And even if Anna had run into trouble, she knew how to protect herself: she often carried a small pistol in her alligator purse. She'll be back home soon, Ernest reassured Mollie.

A week after Anna disappeared, an oil worker was on a hill a mile north of downtown Pawhuska when he noticed something poking out of the brush near the base of a derrick. The worker came closer. It was a rotting corpse; between the eyes were two bullet holes. The victim had been shot, execution-style.

It was hot and wet and loud on the hillside. Drills shook the earth as they bore through the limestone sediment; derricks swung their large clawing arms back and forth. Other people gathered around the body, which was so badly decomposed that it was impossible to identify. One of the pockets held a letter. Someone pulled it out, straightening the paper, and read it. The letter was addressed to Whitehorn, and that's how they first knew it was him.

Around the same time, a man was squirrel hunting by Three Mile Creek, near Fairfax, with his teen-age son and a friend. While the two men were getting a drink of water from a creek, the boy spotted a squirrel and pulled the trigger. There was a burst of heat and light, and the boy watched as the squirrel was hit and began to tumble lifelessly over the edge of a ravine. He chased after it, making his way down a steep wooded slope and into a gulch where the air was thicker and where he could hear the murmuring of the creek. He found the squirrel and picked it up. Then he screamed, "Oh, Papa!" By the time his father reached him, the boy had crawled onto a rock. He gestured toward the mossy edge of the creek and said, "A dead person."

There was the bloated and decomposing body of what appeared to be an American Indian woman: she was on her back, with her hair twisted in the mud and her vacant eyes facing the sky. Worms were eating at the corpse.

The men and the boy hurried out of the ravine and raced on their horse-drawn wagon through the prairie, dust swirling around them. When they reached Fairfax's main street, they couldn't find any lawmen, so they stopped at the Big Hill Trading Company, a large general store that had an undertaking business as well. They told the proprietor, Scott Mathis, what had happened, and he alerted his undertaker, who went with several men to the creek. There they rolled the body onto a wagon seat and, with a rope, dragged it to the top of the ravine, then laid it inside a wooden box, in the shade of a blackjack tree. When the undertaker covered the bloated corpse with salt and ice, it began to shrink as if the last bit of life were leaking out. The undertaker tried to determine if the woman was Anna Brown, whom he'd known. "The body was decomposed and swollen almost to the point of bursting and very malodorous," he later recalled, adding, "It was as black as a nigger." He and the other men couldn't make an identification. But Mathis, who managed Anna's financial affairs, contacted Mollie, and she led a grim procession toward the creek that included Ernest, Bryan, Mollie's sister Rita, and Rita's husband, Bill Smith. Many who knew Anna followed them, along with the morbidly curious. Kelsie Morrison, one of the county's most notorious bootleggers and dope peddlers, came with his Osage wife.

Mollie and Rita arrived and stepped close to the body. The stench was overwhelming. Vultures circled obscenely in the sky. It was hard for Mollie and Rita to discern if the face was Anna's-there was virtually nothing left of it-but they recognized her Indian blanket and the clothes that Mollie had washed for her. Then Rita's husband, Bill, took a stick and pried open her mouth, and they could see Anna's gold fillings. "That is sure enough Anna," Bill said.

Rita began to weep, and her husband led her away. Eventually, Mollie mouthed the word "yes"-it was Anna. Mollie was the one in the family who always maintained her composure, and she now retreated from the creek with Ernest, leaving behind the first hint of the darkness that threatened to destroy not only her family but her tribe.

David Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003, is the author of "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon." His latest book, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," was a finalist for the National Book Award.
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In the early twentieth century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation, in Oklahoma. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off.

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For this multi-genre essay, I would like to focus my writing on how Mollie had significant importance to the Osage murders in the book.