# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Has a discussion on the oil boom and how everything started. Includes information on the headrights, which will be useful for my project. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Million Dollar Elm - American Oil & Gas Historical Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By the 1920s, Oklahoma’s petroleum exploration leases auctioned in the shade of a “Million Dollar Elm” brought prosperity to the Osage Nation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Goes over the background of the case, as well as, goes into details of the murders that happened. Has more information that is not as detailed in the book. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The "Reign of Terror" that overtook the Osage Reservation in 1921 is just one chapter in the long story of mistreatment of Native Americans by whites-but is one of the most horrifying. Before the chapter ends, untold dozens of Osage tribal members (and those who dared support them) are murdered. Many are poisoned, others blown up as they sleep in their homes, shot in the head, thrown off moving trains, or killed in other gruesome ways. And it's all for money. In the end, there will be a series of trials from 1926 to 1929. Some of the murderers will pay a price for their evil, but many others will escape prosecution.
Background
As was so often the case for Native Americans, the Osage were forced to cede their ancestral lands-lands between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. First moved to a reservation in Kansas, the Osage in 1870 sold their Kansas lands for $1.25 an acre to settlers and were driven to land in northeastern Oklahoma that, until 1866, had belonged to the Cherokee. The reservation encompasses all of Osage County, about a million and a half acres. Unsurprisingly, the reservation land in Oklahoma is hilly, thickly wooded in places, and was deemed at the time largely unsuitable for most agricultural purposes.

Pawhuska, Osage Nation, Oklahoma (1906)

But not for all purposes. Oil was discovered on the Osage reservation-lots of oil. And the Osage Act of 1906 had given each of the 2,229 members of the tribe "headrights" for money received for the production of oil on reservation land. As the oil production boomed, the Osage became rich. Net per capita distribution of funds from oil rose from $221 in 1915 to $12,400 in 1923 (roughly comparable to $200,000 today), the year of the murders that will lead to the trials of 1926 to 1929.

The enormous wealth of the Osage attracted criminal elements and unscrupulous traders and business people. The notorious Al Spencer gang of bank robbers hid out in Osage County. Gangs of bootleggers operated a privately owned power plant and used the county as a distribution center. Dozens of bank and train robbers even held a convention of sorts in Osage County in the free-wheeling 1920s. But the biggest game around was taking money from the wealthy Osage, by overcharging for goods and services, by fraud, or by murders that might enable the murderer to acquire money either through insurance or (for those whites who married into Indian families) gaining greater shares of the valuable head rights. We will never know exactly how many Osage died for their money. Osage historian Louis Burns said, "I don't know of a single Osage family that didn't lose at least one family member because of head rights." A federal agent who investigated the reign of terror on the reservation said, "There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds."

The killing began in earnest in1921. Charles Whitehorn, a full-blooded Osage, was last seen alive on May 14. Two weeks later his body was discovered on a hill about a mile from downtown Pawhuska. Whitehorn had been shot twice between the eyes. After Whitehorn's murder, his widow Hattie married a disreputable white man named LeRoy Smitherman. Investigators would later conclude that the murder was orchestrated for Charles's valuable head rights by Hattie, Smitherman, and a boarding house operator in Pawhuska named Minnie Savage, but no one would ever be prosecuted. Hattie told an investigating agent, "If I tell you [what happened], you will send me to the electric chair." And so she said nothing and escaped punishment, like most of the Osage murderers.

This account will focus largely on the murders that did result in prosecutions. Five murders in particular: The May 22, 1921 shooting of Anna Brown, the February 6, 1923 shooting of Henry Roan, and the March 10, 1923 explosion that took the lives of Bill and Rita Smith, as well as their servant, Nettie Brookshire.
The Murder of Anna Brown
Anna Brown, age 34, was a registered member of the Osage tribe and one of four daughters of Lizzie Q. Her sister Minnie had died three years earlier of what doctors called "a peculiar wasting illness." Minnie was just 27 when she died--and had been in excellent health until the onset of her confounding disease. Anna was the wildest of the three sisters. She had divorced her husband, Oda Brown, and taken to drinking, dancing, and carousing with friends until the sun rose. According to her servants, Anna had "very loose morals with white men."

On May 21, 1923, Anna--at the urging of her younger sister Mollie--came to Gray Horse to take care of her bedridden mother. But Anna was drunk on bootleg whiskey and things did not go well. After she sobered up a bit and had a bite to eat, Bryan Burkhart, the younger brother of Mollie's husband Ernest, offered to drop Anna off at her home. Anna said goodbye to Mollie and headed out the door with Bryan. It was the last time Mollie ever saw her sister.

Anna Brown (left), with her mother, Lizzie, and her sister, Mollie

A week later, a boy who was squirrel hunting near a ravine north of the town of Fairfax found a rotting corpse. The gold fillings and the blanket meant it had to be the body of Anna Brown. Two local doctors, James and David Shoun, performed an autopsy. The autopsy revealed Anna had been dead for about a week and that she had been shot in the head with a .32-caliber bullet.

Mollie had, she thought, a powerful ally in support for her quest for justice for the murder of her sister Anna, William Hale. Hale was the uncle of her husband Ernest and his brother, Bryan. Called "King of the Osage Hills," Hale was wealthy, powerful, and well-connected. He was a neat dresser with a ruddy complexion and "a self-confident and military air." He signed his letters "Rev. W. K. Hale" and called himself a "true friend" of the Osages. He donated money to schools and hospitals, acted as a deputy sheriff in Fairfax, owned 45,000 acres of prime grazing land, and recited poetry to boot. He controlled a Fairfax bank and owned a stable of fine horses. Hale told Mollie he would help find Anna's killer. He described Anna as a "mighty good friend."

A coroner's inquest into Anna's murder provided few answers. Bryan Burkhart told inquest jurors that he had dropped Anna off at her house on the day of her murder around "5 or 4:30" and never saw her afterwards. Some suspected Anna's murderer came from off the reservation, while others considered her ex-husband, Oda Brown, to be the prime suspect. But prosecutors had little solid evidence. Mollie's family offered a $2000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Anna's killer, but still no one stepped forward. Hale also promised his own rewards, both for the killer of Anna and the killer of Charles Whitehorn, saying "We've got to stop this bloody business."

Meanwhile, Lizzie got weaker and weaker--from what many assumed to be the same strange wasting disease that claimed the life of her daughter, Minnie. Lizzie died in July. Mollie's brother-in-law, Bill Smith, suspected that Lizzie's death had nothing to do with a peculiar disease. He believed she was poisoned--and that Lizzie's death, as well as Minnie's and Anna's, had a lot to do with the valuable headright in Osage oil that her family claimed. No one could buy or sell headrights. But they could be inherited.

As detectives continued their investigations, other Osage members died under suspicious circumstances. William Stepson, a 21-year-old champion steer roper, fell into convulsions and suffocated--both classic indications of strychnine poisoning. A month later, an Osage woman died of what was also believed to be a poisoning. In August 1922, Barney McBride --a wealthy oilman trusted by the Osage--traveled to Washington DC to urge a federal investigation of the string of murders in Oklahoma. After an evening playing billiards in the capital, McBride stepped outside the club where someone tied a burlap sack around his head and then stabbed him over twenty times. McBride's murder attracted national attention. A headline in the Washington Post stated what was becoming obvious to many in Oklahoma: CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS.
The Murder of Henry Roan
In February 1923, two men out hunting spotted a car down a steep slope northwest of the town of Fairfax, Oklahoma. The hunters reported their discovery to local authorities who found in the car the body of a man slumped behind the steering wheel. He had been shot in the back of the head. The victim was 40-year-old Henry Roan. Roan was married and the father of two children. J. Edgar Hoover later described Roan as "a picturesque, full-blood Osage Indian, six-foot tall and a fine looking specimen."

Bill Hale, of course, was one of the first to be told by authorities of Roan's murder. The mayor of Fairfax said Roan "considered W. K. Hale his best friend." At Roan's well-attended funeral, where Osage elders sang their traditional death songs, Hale served as a pallbearer. Only a couple of weeks before Roan's murder, Hale had visited Roan and attempted to help him deal with his recent discovery that his wife was having an affair with a man named Roy Bunch. Could Bunch have been the murderer? Hale suggested that he should at least be considered a suspect. Hale, meanwhile, had to be thinking about the $25,000 he would soon receive, having been listed as Roan's beneficiary on his life insurance policy.

With Roan's death, the level of fear among the Osage reached new heights. They lighted their homes against the darkness and wondered who would be next. Among the worried were Bill and Rita Smith, who decided to leave their isolated home in the country in favor of the relative safety of a new home in Fairfax. Like many Osage, the Smiths kept a dog as a measure of protection. But in March of 1923, dogs around their neighborhood began to die--poisoned.
The Murders of Bill and Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire
Bill Smith had been one of the most outspoken Osage in demanding that murders be tracked down. When he appeared before the Tribal Council to call for justice, some Osage suggested that an "evil spirit" was stalking their community. "No!" said Smith. "There is no evil spirit except one in human form." When some in the crowd asked him to name the murderer, Smith remained silent. To name the killer or killers would be a virtual death sentence.

On March 9, after checking out an investigative lead into Roan's murder with a friend, Bill Smith drove his Studebaker back to his home in Fairfax. His wife, Rita, was waiting for him. Their white servant, seventeen-year-old Nettie Brookshire, was also spending the night at the Smith home. At 2:50 in the morning, a loud explosion blew the Smith home to smithereens. Rita and Nettie died almost instantly, but--miraculously--Bill Smith managed to survive for several days, even though burned almost beyond recognition. Hovering near death, Smith would cry out, "They got Rita and now it looks as though they've got me."

What's left of the Smith house after the March 10, 1923 explosion

After the Smith murders, the Tribal Chieftain said: "We must appeal to the white father in Washington. Our people, once peaceful and happy, are afraid for their lives....No one knows when he will be called to the Happy Hunting Grounds." The Tribal Council adopted a resolution asking "the Honorable Secretary of the Interior be requested to obtain the services of the Department of Justice in capturing and prosecuting the murderers of the members of the Osage Tribe."
The Investigation
The explosion lent even more urgency to the search to find the killers, but many Osage saw corruption everywhere and didn't know who to trust. One local attorney and former prosecutor, W. V. Vaughan, tried as best he could to solve the crimes. In June 1923, Vaughan received word that an Osage member named George Bigheart had information about the murders but was dying of a suspected poisoning in an Oklahoma City hospital. (Not coincidentally, most likely, Bigheart had been seen with Hale shortly before Bigheart began failing and was taken to the hospital.) The only person Bigheart would share his information with was Vaughan--he trusted no one else. So Vaughan rushed to Oklahoma City to meet with Bigheart. After Bigheart died in his company, Vaughan phoned the sheriff of Osage County to report he had new critically important information about the series of Osage killings and that he was leaving on the first train. Thirty-six hours later, Vaughan's body was discovered lying near railroad tracks north of Oklahoma City. He had been stripped, his neck broken, and thrown off the train.

In the summer of 1925, the new boss man at the Bureau of Investigation (later to be better known as the FBI), thirty-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, summoned Tom White, head of the Bureau's Houston office, to Washington. White had a reputation for competence and straight-shooting--and Hoover had an important job for him. He asked him to direct the Bureau's investigation, which had begun in 1923, into the Osage murders. Hoover called the situation "acute and delicate." The job meant moving his family to Oklahoma City, to head up the field office there, and would--given recent history--put him at significant personal risk of death or injury. But White told Hoover, "I am human enough and ambitious enough to want" the job.

Tom White and J. Edgar Hoover

When White took over the investigation, he poured through voluminous records on the case. Agents had concentrated on the cases they considered most likely to be solved and prosecuted--specifically, the bombing deaths of Bill and Rita Smith and their servant, and the shootings of Henry Roan, Anna Brown, and Charles Whitehorn. The investigation had been difficult. As might be expected, almost anyone who knew anything was reluctant to talk, fearing that they might be the killers' next victim. With the exception of White, almost all agents operated undercover as an insurance salesman, a "medicine man,".a cattleman, and a prospector. In a 1953 history of the Osage murder cases, the Bureau describes "the general class of the citizenry in the territory" as "very low. The rich oil fields produced not only an abundance of oil, but also graft, easy money, gambling, prostitution, whisky and parasites bent on the milking the Indian out of all he owned." According to the FBI report, Osage distrust of whites was "almost universal" and "agents had to rebuild their confidence in law enforcement."

The investigation into the murder of Anna Brown raised questions before it produced answers. Why, if there was no exit wound in the front of Anna's skull, was no bullet found at the autopsy? Could the examining doctors, David and James Shoun, have taken it? What about the report by a Kaw Indian woman that Rose Osage had Anna killed because she tried to seduce his boyfriend? But Rose Osage's alibi checked out and the Kaw Indian's story didn't add up. Why would she lie to investigators? Is she being paid to protect the real killer?

The first significant break in the Anna Brown case came when an elderly farmer told agents he had seen Anna on the night of her murder. She was sitting inside a car that stopped by a hotel in Ralston. She said hello to someone in his group. The farmer's wife added critical information. The man driving the car was Bryan Burkhart. When they pulled away from the curb, she said, Burkhart headed "straight west from there." Burkhart, agents knew, had said he had dropped Anna off at her home around "5 or 4:30" and never saw her after that alive. If the farm couple were right, then Burkhart was lying. Gathering information from other sources, the agents began to create a timeline that put Burkhart and Anna, and an unidentified "third man," at a speakeasy until about 1:00 a.m. Another witness reported seeing Bryan shouting at Anna around 3:00 a.m., saying "Stop your foolishness, Annie, and get into this car." Bryan Burkhart was not seen again until about sunrise, when he finally returned home.

Another break in the investigation came when a private eye, supposedly hired by W. K. Hale, found himself arrested for robbery in Tulsa. The "private eye" revealed to agents that he had actually been hired by Hale to "shape an alibi" by producing witnesses willing to lie. He offered another useful piece of information. He said that when he met with Hale and Bryan Burkhart to discuss his muddying-the-waters campaign, Ernest Burkhart was often present as well.

Tom White interviewed people who had been in the hospital room with Bill Smith in the four days before he died of injuries from the explosion. No one he talked to said Smith actually named his murderers, but Smith's lawyer reported that Smith had told him as Smith lay in his hospital bed: "You know, I only had two enemies in the world," Hale and Ernest Burkhart. In addition, Smith's nurse revealed she had been visited by Hale, and that Hale asked her whether Smith had named his likely killers.

White saw in the $25,000 insurance policy held by Hale for Henry Roan's life a possible key clue to that murder. The policy provided an obvious motive. An insurance salesman told agents that Hale's story that Roan insisted on making Hale, a close friend, his beneficiary was not true. In fact, the salesman said, Hale had asked for the policy. "Hells bells, that's just like spearing fish in a keg," Hale had told him. Further investigation revealed that Hale had to shop around for a doctor who would approve Roan for the policy. Many doctors would balk at approving a man with a history of heavy drinking and a prior driving accident while intoxicated. But Dr. James Shoun was willing to authorize the medical approval. White found another interesting connection between Hale and Roan. Hale had previously attempted to purchase Roan's headright, but the transaction never occurred after an expected change in the law allowing such sales failed to pass.

White also began to piece together a thread linking the Brown and Smith murders. With Anna, unwed and without children, being the first victim, her headright passed to her still-living mother, Lizzie. Then Lizzie's death, probably through poisoning, meant that her headright passed to her two surviving daughters, Rita and Mollie. If Rita and Bill were to be killed simultaneously, as they almost were in the explosion, the headrights for them would pass entirely to the last remaining sister, Mollie. And Mollie, of course, was married to Ernest Burkhart, Hale's nephew. White wondered whether Ernest's marriage to Mollie in 1919 might actually have been the first step in a long and murderous plot.

Ernest Burkhart and Mollie

An informer told White the name of the "soup man," the explosives expert who designed the bomb that blew up the Smith house. The man's name was Asa Kirby. But Kirby was dead, and it seemed, Kirby's death was also Hale's doing--another potential witness disposed of. Kirby had been killed when he attempted to rob diamonds from a jewelry store. The shopkeeper had been informed by William Hale about the planned robbery and was waiting with a shotgun when Kirby showed up. In turned out, Hale even had set up the robbery, telling Kirby about the stash of diamonds and suggesting the perfect time to rob them. Not so perfect for Kirby.

In the fall of 1925, Mollie revealed to a priest that she believed someone was trying to poison her. Mollie had been getting injections of what she assumed was insulin from the Shoun brothers, but her condition was worsening, not improving. White and other agents found her illness to be "very suspicious" and arranged to have her taken to a hospital for treatment. Once she was no longer receiving "insulin injections" from the brothers Shoun, her condition improved markedly. An agent's report stated, "It is an established fact that when she was removed from the control of Hale and Burkhart, she immediately regained her health." Asked later about the injections he administered to Mollie, James Shoun was evasive. "Weren't you giving her insulin?" a prosecutor asked. "I may have been," Shoun answered.

Mollie's illness, fear and impatience in the Osage community, and other factors convinced the Department of Justice it was time to act. Warrants for the arrest of Hale and Ernest Burkhart for the murders of Bill and Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire were issued on January 4, 1926. On his way to jail in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Hale refused the opportunity to make a statement to the press about his case other than to say, "I'll not try my case in the newspapers, but in the courts of this country." In Guthrie, White and Agent Frank Smith questioned Burkhart, hoping to secure a confession. They brought to Guthrie an incarcerated outlaw named Blackie Thompson. Thompson told Burkhart that he had revealed to agents that Burkhart had had asked him to kill Bill Smith in return for a new automobile.

Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire, two of the bombing victims

Later that night, Burkhart decided to talk. Burkhart said he initially objected to the plan to blow up the Smith home. But, he said, he "relied on Uncle Bill's judgement--and Hale pointed out that his wife would get the additional money from the inherited headrights. Burkhart said he tried to get Blackie Thompson to do the job, but when he wouldn't do it, Hale turned to Asa Kirby. "Acie would do it, that's what Hale told me." Burkhart said that shortly before Hale left for Texas he told him to deliver a message to a thief and bootlegger named John Ramsey. The message was that the time had come to pull off the Smith job. As soon as the blast went off, Burkhart said, "I knew what it was." Burkhart also identified Ramsey as the triggerman in the Henry Roan murder. After Burkhart's confession, White sent orders to agents to pick up Ramsey and take him into custody.

When Ramsey was shown Burkhart's signed statement, he said "I guess it's my neck now. Get your pencils." In his confession, Ramsey admitted to killing Roan--"a little job Hale wanted done." He said he described drinking whiskey with Roan on the running board of his car. The when "the Indian got in his car to leave, I shot him in the back of the head." Ramsey seemed to think of Indians as less than fully human. He told the agents "white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724."

Burkhart, in his statement, refused to implicate his brother Bryan in the murder of Anna Brown, but he did identify the "third man" that had been seen with Anna shortly before her murder. The man turned out to be a person the agents had enlisted to help them in getting to the bottom of the very murder he participated in, Kelsie Morrison. Morrison, according to Burkhart, was Anna's killer. Authorities had yet one more person to bring in for questioning.

Finally, White decided it was time to talk to Hale. White told Hale, "We have unquestioned signed statements implicating you as the principal in the Henry Roan and Smith family murders. We have evidence to convict you." Hale replied, "I'll fight it." And he likely thought he would win that fight. He had money and he had influence.
The Trials
The Department of Justice was well aware of Hale's influence and understood that convicting him in state court would be extremely difficult. So they examined the various murders to see if any might be the basis for a prosecution in federal court rather than state court. Crimes committed on Indian territory provided a basis for federal jurisdiction. On the other hand, crimes committed on lands sold to whites or that were otherwise not under tribal control could only be prosecuted in state court. The Roan case seemed the most promising for federal jurisdiction, as Roan's murder occurred on what was still an Osage allotment. Charges against Hale and Ramsey for the murder of Henry Roan were brought in federal district court in Oklahoma. The prosecution team included U. S. Attorney Roy St. Lewis and John Leahy, a lawyer hired by the Osage Tribal Council. Tom White later described Leahy as a man of "splendid character" and "one of the best attorneys in the state of Oklahoma."

U.S. Attorney Roy St. Lewis

Grand jury proceedings began in early January 1926. The New York Times reported: "Seldom in the long history of the white man's dubious dealings with the Indian has there been such a determined combination of craft and violence as that described by witnesses before the grand jury." The evidence convinced the grand jury to issue the requested indictments.

Hale's chosen lawyer to represent John Ramsey, Jim Springer (a local attorney with a reputation for playing fast and loose), wasted no time in getting his client to recant his confession. "I never killed anyone," Ramsey now declared. Beginning with the grand jury proceedings in January 1926, Springer would try every trick in the book. He and his associates enlisted witnesses to lie, intoxicated witnesses who might incriminate their clients to reduce the value of their testimony, threatened potential hostile witnesses, bribed jurors, and made outrageous claims that had no basis in fact. Springer claimed, for example, that the statements signed by Burkhart and Ramsey were made only after being subjected to torture by federal agents. (The tactics would so infuriate White and J. Edgar Hoover as to cause them to pressure the Department of Justice to prosecute Springer, as well as defense witnesses who committed perjury.) An FBI account of the case stated, "Hale's lawyers employed every device, legal and illegal, to obtain their client's freedom."

The biggest threat to Hale, as he saw it, was Ernest Burkhart. With justification, Burkhart feared for his life. On January 20, Burkhart told White that he felt he would soon be "bumped off," and White arranged for Burkhart to be transported out of state and guarded until trial. He was registered in hotels under an alias. In a letter to Hoover, White said that while "every precaution is being taken," he worried that someone hired by Hale might "slip poison" to Burkhart.

On March 1, prosecutors received bad news. The trial judge ruled that an Osage allotment is not the same as tribal land, and that the murder trial would have to proceed, if at all, in state court. The federal government immediately announced its intent to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, however, to prevent Hale and Ramsey from fleeing any prosecution, they arranged for the men's arrest on state murder charges. Getting a jury to convict in Osage County would be next to impossible, but they had no other option.

The preliminary hearing on March 12 in Pawhuska was a spectacle. "Seldom if ever has such a crowd been gathered in a courtroom before," reported the Tulsa Tribune. The crowd included "well-groomed businessmen" and "society women", as well as "cowboys in broad-brimmed hats" and "Osage chiefs in beaded garb." Mollie Burkhart was there. So was Hale's wife. Things went fairly predictably until the afternoon session when Ernest Burkhart took the stand. One of Hale's lawyers rose and asked permission to meet privately with Burkhart on the ground that he had not been advised of his rights. "This man is my client," he insisted. Asked by the judge if the attorney's assertion were true, Burkhart said, "He's not my attorney--but I'm willing to talk to him." To the dismay of prosecutors, Burkhart stepped down from the witness stand and trotted to the judge's chambers to meet with Hale's lawyers. Twenty minutes later, Hale's attorney Sargent Freeling emerged from the room to ask the court to give Burkhart the rest of the day to meet with the defense. The judge agreed.

When Burkhart showed up the next morning in court he took the stand again--but as a witness for the defense, not the state. Burkhart, contradicting his January statement, testified that he never discussed the murder of Roan with Hale. Hale looked on, grinning, as Burkhart recanted line after line of his statement.

The trial of Ernest Burkhart for his role in the bombing of the Smith house began in May. Burkhart was tried in state court in Pawhuska specifically for the murder of Bill Smith. Attorneys for Hale were anxious to secure acquittal for Ernest because they knew that if convicted he would likely testify for the prosecution in the Roan case.

The defense produced testimony to show that the confessions of Ramsey and Burkhart were coerced. None of it was true--but no matter. It was dramatic stuff. Hale testified that a federal agent cocked a pistol behind his head and, as he turned around to see it, Agent "Smith jumped across the room, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shoved a big gun in my face." He claimed that Tom White told him, "We will have you put in the hot chair." Then, he testified, agents pushed him into a chair, put a black hood over his head, and then attached a device that looked like a catcher's mask to his head. "They talked about putting the juice to me." One agent sniffed and exclaimed, "Don't you smell that human flesh burning?"

Testimony like that gets attention. The Washington Post and other national newspapers ran stories about the alleged shocking treatment of a prisoner by federal agents. When J. Edgar Hoover demanded an explanation from Tom White, White wrote back to call Hale's story a "fabrication from start to finish." In the courtroom, defense attorneys and prosecutors shouted at each other, with one prosecutor threatening to meet a defense attorney "out in the courtyard."

The Court excluded from evidence Burkhart's confession made in Guthrie in January, but not based on Hale and Ramsey's story of torture. The judge said he thought Hale and Ramsey's allegations were implausible. Nonetheless, Burkhart made his statement in the early morning hours after a long period of detention and this, the judge ruled, was enough reason to exclude it.

But the prosecutors had one key card to play in the Burkhart trial and his name was Kelsie Morrison. On May 18, in Guthrie, Morrison had confessed to his role in Anna Brown's murder. Morrison stated that he and Byran Burkhart got Anna drunk and then drove her to a place about three miles from Fairfax. He said he took Anna "about forty steps" down a ravine and "gave her a big drink and left her." Two or three hours later, he shot Anna with a gun furnished by Hale. Anna "fell back down" without a sound. Hale paid him, he stated, $1600 for the job.

Morrison also had much to say about the explosion at the Smith home. He stated Hale had approached him "any number of times" about shooting Bill Smith and his wife "at his home at night," but that he had refused. He said that killing the Smiths would make Mollie heir to the estates, "and then Ernest Burkhart would make it right with me." The triple murders could have added about $150,000 to the estate of the Ernest Burkhart family.

According to Tom White, who attended the trial, Burkhart "seemed to be very restless and nervous" throughout. On June 8, after his trial had been interrupted by the sudden death of his and Mollies' four-year-old daughter, Ernest Burkhart passed a note to a deputy sheriff who was escorting him from the courtroom back to jail. The note indicated that Burkhart wished to meet with prosecutor John Leahy. When the two men met in Burkhart's cell, Burkhart said he was "through lying" and didn't "want to go on with this trial any longer." He couldn't tell his own lawyer--Hale might have him killed. When Burkhart next appeared in court, he walked straight to the judge, said something to him, then announced to a stunned defense team and a courtroom full of spectators, "I wish to discharge the defense attorneys. Mr. [Flint] Moss will now represent me." Moss then said, "Mr. Burkhart wishes to withdraw his plea of not guilty and enter a plea of guilty." Burkhart read a statement indicating that he had delivered the message from Hale to his soup man, Asa Kirby, telling him the time had come to blow up the Smith house. "I feel in my heart that I did it because I was requested to do it by Hale, who is my uncle." Burkhart also admitted that the allegation of physical abuse by federal agents was a lie. The only duress, he said, was being questioned for long hours into the night. On June 21, 1926, Burkhart was sentenced to life in prison.

By May, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that the Hale-Ramsey trial for the murder of Henry Roan could take place in federal court after all. On July 26,1926, in the brick courthouse in Guthrie, the trial opened with prosecution witnesses under heavy guard. The prosecution knew it faced a challenge in finding twelve untainted jurors, and they asked each potential juror during voir dire whether they had been approached by anyone interested in obtaining a particular verdict. Each swore that they had not. But the prosecutors had another concern. The victim was a Native American and many white Oklahomans, in the view of one Osage, considered the murder of an Indian as a crime on par with "cruelty to animals."

Hale (center) leaving court

Ernest Burkhart was the prosecution's star witness. After his guilty plea, with tears in his eyes, he had told White he would from then on tell the truth in any courtroom, regardless of the consequences. Burkhart told jurors that Hale's original plan to kill Roan was to use poisoned moonshine, a method he had employed before with success. (In the years of the "reign of terror," more Osage were poisoned that killed by all other methods.) He testified that Hale became upset when he found out that Ramsey had shot Roan through the back of the head and taken the gun. Ramsey was supposed to have shot Roan through the front of the head, then left the gun by his side to make the death appear to be a suicide. If he'd only followed instructions, Hale had said, "nobody would have known."

Bootlegger Matt Williams testified that Hale revealed to him in January 1923 that he had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy on Henry Roan with the Denver Insurance company. Hale set that he had lent Roan some cattle and could make it look like the policy was "security for the cattle deal." He added that he had made arrangements with John Ramsey to "bump Roan off." Three days after Roan's murder, Williams testified, he met with John Ramsey who told him he shot Roan after luring him with whiskey. Interestingly, Williams said that Hale was already thinking about legal strategy. He told Williams that he had talked to his lawyers about whether "pulling off jobs" on Indian lands would allow federal prosecutions, and that his lawyer had assured him that "the government had no jurisdiction." Dick Gregg, a member of the notorious Al Spencer gang of bank robbers, testified that Hale had unsuccessfully tried to hire him to murder Osage members. O. C. Webb testified that before the Roan murder he heard Hale tell Ramsey, "We are ready to go--everything is ready to go." After Hale was arrested and concerned about what Webb knew, he said to Webb, "I want you to stand pat old boy--I'll depend on you!" Other witness testimony focused on Hale's policy on the life of Roan. An insurance examiner testified that when he asked Hale if he was planning to kill "that Indian" for his insurance, Hale answered "Oh God, I am--hell yes!"

When the defense had its turn, Hale testified, "I never devised a scheme to have Roan killed. I never desired his death." The defense also called to the stand a number of witnesses who either corroborated alibis for Hale or Ramsey, or tried to shift blame to Roy Bunch, who had been having an affair with Roan's wife, or to an outlaw (since deceased) named Curley Johnson. Much of the testimony was perjured--bought and paid for by Hale. Typical was the testimony provided by Buster Jarrett, residing in a Pawhuska jail on a bank robbery charge at the time of trial, who testified that he saw Roy Bunch pay Curley Johnson for killing Roan. (Jarrett later confessed that he was persuaded to give his perjured testimony during a 90-minute jail cell visit from Hale's attorney. Hale's attorney promised to "snatch him out of prison" if he testified as asked.)

In his closing argument, prosecutor Roy St. Lewis told jurors that the evidence proved that "the richest tribe of Indians on the globe has become the illegitimate prey of white men." And the worst predator of all has been the defendant, "the ruthless freebooter of death."

The jury deliberated for five days but could not reach a verdict. St. Lewis announced in court that he knew the reason why: at least one, and possibly more, jurors had been bribed. (Later, it was revealed that the jury stood 6 to 6 on the issue of guilt.) There would be another trial.

The retrial began on October 20 in Oklahoma City. The prosecution's witness list for the retrial was similar to the first trial, but the examination of witnesses was tighter and more focused. The defense made an effort to pin the blame for the Roan murder on Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart conceded that he had plead guilty to murdering his wife's sister, her husband, and their servant. Rattling off the list of Mollie's murdered, and probably murdered, relatives, Hale's attorney asked, "Has your wife now any surviving relatives outside of the two children she has by you?" "She has not," Burkhart answered.

After a day of deliberations, the jury announced that it had reached a verdict. When the clerk read the verdict, Hale and Ramsey appeared stunned. Guilty--guilty of murder in the first-degree. The vote on the first ballot had been unanimous. The two men were sentenced to prison for the "period of your natural lives." Hale and Ramsey were sent to Leavenworth, Kansas to serve their sentences. Just months later the two men would meet the newly appointed warden, Tom White.

Ravine where Anna Brown's body was found

In 1927, Kelsie Morrison faced trial for the murder of Anna Brown. Morrison had recanted his confession and even, as discovered from a letter sent to Hale and seized by prison authorities, threatened to "burn" down authorities "if I ever get the chance." Morrison promised his "old friend" Hale that if called as a witness in his trial, "I won't forget you" and "I will be there with bells on."

Bryan Burkhart, who had previously been acquitted in his own state court trial for the murder of Anna Brown, had immunity and testified for the prosecution. So did Morrison's former wife, Katherine Cole. Cole testified that she saw Morrison and Bryan Burkhart walk a very drunk Anna Brown from their car to a ravine. "I realized they were going to do something to Anna Brown, and it scared me very much. I was afraid to say anything to Kelsie for fear that he would do something to me." They returned, she testified, about a half hour later without Anna. Later that night, when she asked Kelsie about what happened, Kelsie "cursed me and told me to keep my mouth shut." Katherine Cole was right to worry. Another witness, Dewey Selph, testified that Kelsie asked him to "get shut of Katherine" (kill Katherine) "because she knew too much about the Anna Brown murder deal." Later, Selph met with Hale to discuss plans to murder Cole--plans which were never executed. Matt Williams, a bootlegger, testified that he saw Burkhart on the night Brown was killed. Burkhart told him "he had to take care of some business for Uncle Bill that night" and that Kelsie Morrison was going to meet them at the Arkansas River Bridge." Three or four days later, Williams said he met Morrison, who told him that Hale had "him do the worst job he ever pulled" and that now Hale was refusing to pay him what he'd promised for killing Anna. In Morrison's telling of the murder, Williams said, he knocked Anna from behind "while Bryan Burkhart was loving Anna" and then carried her from the car, where he shot her in the head. The jury found Morrison guilty.

Yet the trials were still not over. Hale and Ramsey appealed their convictions. The Eighth Circuit concluded that the trial took place in the wrong court. Hale and Ramsey were tried in federal court for the western district of Oklahoma, when they should have been tried in federal court for the northern district of Oklahoma, where the crime allegedly occurred. Hale and Ramsey asked that their trials be severed. They were tried separately. Hale was convicted in January 1929 and Ramsey was convicted ten months later.
Aftermath
The trials were over. The murders, for the most part, stopped. But that did not mean every murderer had been brought to justice. David Grann, author of the bestselling book about the Osage Reign of Terror, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, notes that the series of murders in the 1920s still ravages generations of Osage. He quotes a great-grandson of Henry Roan who says the murders are still "in the back of our minds....You just have it in the back of your head that you don't trust anybody."

Grann devotes a chapter of his book to describing his efforts to identify some of the killers who escaped justice. One likely killer identified by Grann was a bank president, and intimate associate of Hale, named Herbert G. Burt. Burt made a fortune lending money to the Osage "at astronomical interest rates." Grann makes a convincing case that Burt had a strong financial motive and was behind both the poisoning of George Bigheart and the murder of attorney W. W. Vaughan, who was thrown off a moving train after meeting with Bigheart as part of his investigation into the Reign of Terror murders.

Grann also re-examined evidence relating to the Charles Whitehorm murder. He concluded that the evidence suggested three people, including Whitehorn's half-white, half-Cheyenne wife, Hattie Whitehorn, and two other co-conspirators were responsible for the murder. The FBI initially looked at the evidence in the Whitehorn case but dropped it, Grann writes, because it "did not fit into the bureau's dramatic theory of the murders: that a lone mastermind (Hale) was responsible for all the killings." Grann draws an important lesson from the Whitehorn case: "the evil of Hale was not an anomaly." Far from the bureau's official estimate of twenty-four murders, Grann notes that scholars and investigators "now believe that the Osage death toll was in the scores, if not the hundreds." Most of the victims might well have died through hard-to-detect poisons, including the injection of massive amounts of morphine into already drunk Osage members. The resulting deaths, in almost all such cases, would be reported simply as deaths from alcoholic poisoning.

The list of murderers, and the "web of silent conspirators" who help them, included many of the most powerful whites in Osage County. The list includes bankers, doctors, traders, undertakers, lawyers, wealthy ranchers, and even lawmen. Grann quotes Osage leader Bacon Rind, who remarked in 1926, "There are men amongst the whites, honest men, but they are mighty scarce."

And what about the main players in the bureau's drama? Mollie divorced Ernest Burkhart during the series of federal trials. She remarried in 1928. In 1931, a court declared a previous order declaring Mollie to be incompetent was vacated and she became free to spend her money as she so wished. Mollie died in 1937 at the age of 50.

John Ramsey was paroled in 1947. Ernest Burkhart paroled in 1937, but then robbed a bank before being released again in 1959. He spent his last years in a trailer home with his brother Bryan.

William Hale served 21 years in Leavenworth before being paroled in 1947. He spent many of his prison years working on a pig farm. While working as the warden of Leavenworth, Tom White always insisted that Hale be treated just like any other prisoner. Hale never admitted ordering any killings. Before leaving jail, Hale wrote a letter in which he expressed the desire to return to Osage County. "I had rather live at Gray Horse than any place on earth." But it was not to be. As a condition of his parole, he was required to stay outside of the state of Oklahoma. Hale died in a nursing home in Arizona in 1962 and was buried in Wichita, Kansas.

The Osage Nation now includes over 10,000 members, though less than have live in Osage County. The boomtowns of the 1920s are all but gone. The gushing oil wells of an earlier day have mostly given way to "stripper" wells which generally produce less than 15 gallons a day. About 75% of the headrights to oil on the Osage reservation remain in member hands. Today, the Osage seem ready to move on from oil to a greener form of energy. In 2015, a new windmill farm sprang to life in Osage County. The times are a-changin'.

Casinos now bring in more money than oil. The Osage wealth allowed the Tribe to purchase media mogul Ted Turner's 43,000 acre Bluestem ranch in 2016. In Pawhuska, Oklahoma, visitors to the Osage Nation Museum, the oldest tribally owned museum in the United States, can explore exhibits on Osage art, culture, and history--including the Reign of Terror.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Osage "Reign of Terror" Murder Trials: An Account

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Goes into detail about the history of the reign of terror. It also includes snippets of interviews with modern day Osage women and their thoughts on the book. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
PAWHUSKA - The photographs are faded shades of sepia and gray, and the newspapers that chronicled the tragedies and trials are yellowed and embrittled.

But for members of the Osage Nation - especially those still deeply rooted in Osage County - the history of the 1920s "Reign of Terror" remains as fresh as the under-construction wooden facades and newly painted storefronts created for the making of Oscar winner Martin Scorsese's fact-based film "Killers of the Flower Moon."

With its starry cast and reported $200 million budget, Scorsese's under-production epic is making state history as it's believed to be the biggest movie production ever launched in Oklahoma. But it's also chronicling one of the most horrific chapters in the state's complicated history.

"I grew up in Fairfax. Margie Burkhart, the granddaughter of Mollie Burkhart, was my best friend. So, we always grew up knowing that story. We knew the traumas of what happened to her family and to other Osages. But most of the world does not," said Danette Daniels, an Osage businesswoman who still lives in Fairfax and owns the Water Bird Gallery in downtown Pawhuska, just a block away from where much of the filming is underway.

What does the title 'Killers of the Flower Moon' mean?

With a screenplay by Oscar winner Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump"), Scorsese's film is an adaptation of David Grann's 2017 New York Times best-seller "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI."

Grann's book begins by detailing why the Osage people refer to May as the "time of the flower-killing moon," a season when taller, heartier plants overgrow and choke out spring flowers. It becomes a metaphor for the greed, racism, treachery, death and injustice that plagued the Osage Nation in the 1920s, which should have been an era of unbridled prosperity.
More: Is Oklahoma the next Hollywood? How the state's film industry has thrived despite COVID-19
What is the history of the 'Reign of Terror?'

In the 1870s, the Osage became the only American Indian nation to buy its own reservation, and a quarter-century later, oil was discovered under the land the tribe collectively owned.

Leading up to Oklahoma statehood, the U.S. Congress passed the 1906 Osage Allotment Act, legislating that property and mineral income be distributed equally among the more than 2,200 members of the tribe. One equal share became known as a headright, and a headright was hereditary, passing to the immediate legal heir of the deceased - even if that heir wasn't Osage.

In the 1920s, oil production in the Osage Nation reached a zenith, the tribal members had famously become the richest people per capita in the world, and the area became a magnet for schemers who plotted to relieve the Osage people of their headrights and wealth by any means necessary.

Between 1920 and 1925, there were more than 60 mysterious or unsolved murders in Osage County, all connected with Osage headright holders. Some were shot, some were poisoned, and a few were even bombed in what became known as the "Reign of Terror."

What was the government response?

In 1923, the tribe sent a delegation to Washington, D.C., to request the federal government investigate. The U.S. Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) dispatched agents to Pawhuska.

"We paid at that time, in the '20s, $20,000 to hire the FBI to find the killers of our people that were being murdered," Daniels said. "And a big part of the scandals are these guardianships. So, white business owners, the well-to-dos of the town, had these guardianships of the Osage people. A lot of the Osage people were given a $20 allowance, and then they (the white guardians) took off with the rest of the money."

In 1921, the federal government mandated that the Osage people were incapable of managing their own wealth. As Grann notes, for no other reason than that they were Osage, adults were assigned court-appointed white guardians who often swindled tribal members out of their fortunes.
Oscars 2021: Youn Yuh-jung wins historic Oscar for Oklahoma-made movie 'Minari'
"Even though I don't have relatives that I know of that were murdered, I had relatives who were alive in Osage County at that time. And it really brings to the fore for me the experience that they had to live. ... They were not really viewed as fully human. Their lives didn't have value to their neighbors here in the state of Oklahoma," said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, who is Osage.

Who was Mollie Burkhart?

"Killers of the Flower Moon" centers on Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman who lived on the tribal settlement of Gray Horse, near Fairfax.

"He (David Grann) told me he wanted to write this book about Mollie. He saw her as a real person, not some cardboard Indian but as a real human," Margie Burkhart, her granddaughter, said at a 2017 discussion of the book at Oklahoma City University.
More: OKC's deadCenter Film Festival announces record-breaking 2021 lineup for June 10-20 event
Despite the betrayal of her own husband, Ernest Burkhart, Mollie survived when her family was targeted during the Reign of Terror.

"David Grann, with the 'Killers of the Flower Moon,' he did five years of research on that book. He talked to lots of Osages, and he does such a fantastic job," said Daniels, who sells signed copies of the book in her Pawhuska gallery. "This thing is big. I mean, there were so many undocumented murders. The Mollie Burkhart family is a microcosm of the bigger picture."

Who are the actors playing in the movie?

Native American actress Lily Gladstone ("First Cow"), who is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, portrays Mollie Burkhart, while Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio, who is also producing through his Appian Way Productions, reunites with Scorsese to play her husband, Ernest, who is caught between his love for his wife and a deadly plot masterminded by his uncle, William K. Hale.

"There were some letters that showed he did care for her. She stuck with him, even going into trial, she believed him," Margie Burkhart said in 2017. "The tribe kind of ostracized her, so she had to sit in the courtroom by herself. She believed him until the end."

Roth confirmed in a recent Collider interview that DiCaprio shifted to the more complicated role of Mollie's husband after he was originally set to play Agent Tom White, who led the federal investigation. Jesse Plemons, a Primetime Emmy Award nominee for "Fargo" and "Black Mirror," portrays White.

Another frequent Scorsese collaborator, Oscar winner Robert De Niro portrays Hale, a powerful rancher and businessman who led the plot that killed Mollie's family as well as several other Osage people. Hale was eventually convicted of murdering Osage rancher Henry Roan (who will be played by indigenous Canadian actor William Belleau), but only served 18 years of his life sentence before he was paroled.

Native actress Tantoo Cardinal ("Dances with Wolves") who is Dene, Cree, Metis and Nakota, will take on the role of Mollie's mother, Lizzie Q. Cara Jade Myers (TV's "Rutherford Falls"), a member of the Wichita Tribe; JaNae Collins ("Longmire"), who is Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux and Apsáalooke (Crow); and Jillian Dion ("Into the West"), who is Plains Cree, Metis and French-Canadian, will play Mollie's three sisters.
More: As 'Killers of the Flower Moon' starts filming, rural Oklahoma gets boost from movie biz
Native American actor Tatanka Means (HBO's "I Know This Much Is True"), who represents the Navajo, Oglala Lakota and Omaha Nations, will portray federal agent John Wren, who was part Ute. Michael Abbott Jr. ("The Death of Dick Long") will play federal agent Frank Smith, and Pat Healy ("Bad Education") will portray federal agent John Burger, who were hand-picked by Plemons' White for the investigation.

In his live-action acting debut, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell will portray Bill Smith, Mollie's brother-in-law, while fellow Grammy winner Sturgill Simpson will play ex-rodeo champ and bootlegger Henry Grammer.

Louis Cancelmi (Scorsese's "The Irishman") will portray Kelsie Morrison, another bootlegger as well as a nefarious Hale connection. Scott Shepherd ("Jason Bourne") will play Bryan Burkhart, the younger brother of DiCaprio's Ernest Burkhart.

How is the story still relevant?

Although the book and movie are based on history, it's hardly ancient history, said Brandy Lemon, a member of the Osage Nation Congress who is working as a liaison on the film. Many tribal members who died in those dark days have family who still live in the area.

Her great-grandfather Eves Tall Chief is mentioned in the last chapter of Grann's book. His 1926 death, attributed at the time to alcohol, is considered suspicious under the circumstances.

Although the Osage murders happened a century ago - the U.S. Congress in 1925 passed a law prohibiting non-Osages from inheriting headrights of tribal members possessing more than one-half Osage blood to prevent another Reign of Terror - Grann still considers it "living history."

"I tracked down descendants of both the victims and the murderers. And many of them still live in the same neighborhoods, side by side," Grann told The Oklahoman in a 2020 interview.

"Margie (Burkhart) took me out to the graveyard where so many of her family members who were murdered were buried, and it was talking to her and to others that you realize that this is still living history. ... And you can feel how it still reverberates to this day."

The movie "Killers of the Flower Moon" is expected to be released in 2022.

MORE TO COME

Look for more from Osage Nation members and their thoughts about Martin Scorsese's fact-based film "Killers of the Flower Moon" in the coming days.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Martin Scorsese movie 'Killers of the Flower Moon' delves into tragic Osage tribal history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
PAWHUSKA - The photographs are faded shades of sepia and gray, and the newspapers that chronicled the tragedies and trials are yellowed and embrittled.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Good overview of the book. Includes deeper details that you cannot find directly in the book. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mollie Burkhart: Survivor of Her Husband's Osage Murder Plot

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Picture of Mollie; using this for the social media page I will be creating for the project.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Found via Boreham Library. Book review with information on Mollie and her family, this will be a good resource for my project. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
FAILED PROTECTORS: THE INDIAN TRUST AND KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Interview with David Grann where he discusses the main parts of his book. He goes into a recap of the struggles Mollie had to face throughout this time. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Members of the Osage Indian Nation became very wealthy in the 1920s after oil deposits were found on their land. Then local whites began targeting the tribe. Journalist David Grann tells the story.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest David Grann's new book tells the story of one of the biggest serial murder cases in American history and one of the most forgotten. The setting was the Osage Indian Nation in the 1920s when oil deposits had brought enormous wealth to the members of the tribe. Soon, Grann writes, the world's richest people per capita were becoming the most murdered. The Osage were being shot and poisoned in staggering numbers. And the murderers, it turned out, were local whites who had befriended and in many cases married their victims.

Grann's new book is both an absorbing murder mystery as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI takes on its first murder investigation and also a dark journey into the hard-edged racism that allowed whites to view Native Americans as subhumans who ought to be relieved of their newly acquired wealth. David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker, who's won a George Polk Award. His earlier book, "The Lost City Of Z," was adapted into a new feature film.

Grann spoke to FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his new book, "Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI."

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, David Grann, welcome to FRESH AIR. This story begins with a woman who is really at the heart of this tale, Mollie Burkhart. Tell us a bit about her.

DAVID GRANN: Mollie is a fascinating person. She was born in the 1880s, growing up in a lodge, practicing Osage tradition, speaking Osage. And then within about 30 years because of oil deposits under her land becomes one of the wealthier people in the United States and is living in a mansion and married to a white husband, has a couple children. And she's really somebody who is straddling not only two centuries, but in many ways two civilizations.

DAVIES: Right. And then something happens to her sister, Anna. Tell us about that.

GRANN: So her family becomes a prime target of a conspiracy. And one day in 1921, her sister, Anna Brown, disappears, and Mollie looks everywhere for her, searching along the prairie. A week later, Anna Brown's body is found in a ravine. She's been shot in the back of the head. And it is the first hint that Mollie's family has become a target of this conspiracy and that her tribe has also become a target of this conspiracy.

DAVIES: Mollie is married to a guy named Ernest Burkhart. One of the last people to be seen with her sister Anna is her husband Ernest's brother, Bryan Burkhart. Anna was known to be a heavy drinker. And questions arise about him.

GRANN: Yes. He - because he was last seen with Anna Brown, he is initially questioned. But at least early on, there is no evidence or witnesses connecting him to the crime other than the fact that he had dropped her off at her house earlier in that evening. But this is a case where there's a great deal of intrigue and mystery early on. And nobody at first knows who was responsible for the murder.

DAVIES: Right - a terrible, dramatic crime and a mystery around it. But let's back up a bit here and talk about the Osage Nation. I mean, like many Native American tribes, they were uprooted and pushed around from one reservation to another. But they ended up with a distinct advantage in their negotiations with the U.S. government. What happened there? How'd that happen?

GRANN: So, yes, the Osage were typical of many American-Indian nations. They were driven off their lands. They once controlled much of the Midwest of the country. In the 1800s, President Thomas Jefferson referred to them as that great nation and promised to treat them as their friends. But within a few years, they began to be forced off their territory. Over two decades, they would have to cede more than 100 million acres of their land.

They were eventually bunched onto a reservation in Kansas and then once more were under siege. And in 1870, they needed to find a new homeland. And an Osage chief had stood up, and he said we should go to this territory. It was then Indian Territory. It would later become Oklahoma. We should go there because the earth is rocky and infertile. And the white man won't be able to farm there, and they'll finally leave us alone.

So the Osage purchased this land. It's about the size of Delaware. They resettled there. By that time, there were only a few thousand left. The forced migrations had depleted their numbers. Many of them were starving. And then it turned out that lo and behold, this land was sitting upon some of the largest deposits of oil then in the United States.

DAVIES: Right. And a fascinating little moment is that they send a lawyer, John Palmer, to Washington as they're negotiating this arrangement with the U.S., and he gets something.

GRANN: Yeah. So the Osage Tribe was allotted. And what allotted meant - this happened to many American tribes in that period - where the federal government was forcing them to break up the reservations, break up their communal way of life, turn them into, quote, unquote, "private property owners." Of course, this was an easier way for settlers - white settlers - to get their land. But the Osage because they owned their land, they had more leverage with the U.S. government. And they had very....

DAVIES: Because they'd bought it. It wasn't simply a reservation given to them, right? Yeah.

GRANN: Exactly. They bought it. They had a deed to it. And they had very shrewd negotiators, including this man Palmer who was described by one U.S. senator as the most eloquent Indian alive at that period. And they were able to slip into their treaty for allotment a very curious provision at the time which essentially said that they will maintain the subsurface mineral rights to their land.

And at that time, the Osage had some hint that there was some oil, but nobody thought they were sitting upon a fortune. And they were able to hold on to this last bit of their territory which they could not even see.

DAVIES: So each of the Osage families that owned a plot of land had what was called a headright, which means what?

GRANN: So - yeah. So there were only about 2,000 Osage who were registered on the tribal roll. And each one of them received a headright. And what a headright was essentially a share in the mineral trust. The Osage wanted to make sure that they maintained all the subsurface territory together.

And so what they did is they gave each person a headright. And you could not sell or buy a headright. It was collectively controlled by the Osage. And each one had a headright or a share. And what that meant is they would receive a check for any royalties or any leases that derived from the oil money.

DAVIES: And so how helpful, how beneficial was this to the Osage?

GRANN: Well, early on when - in the early 20th century, there was just a little bit of oil. And the Osage would receive a check every four months. Initially it was for maybe $100, and then it grew to 1,000. But then it continually grew. And by the 1920s, the Osage collectively had accumulated millions and millions of dollars. In 1923 alone, the Osage received what today would be worth more than $400 million. They had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

DAVIES: Wow. How did whites in Oklahoma react to seeing Native Americans with all that money?

GRANN: The public, the whites, not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States, were transfixed by the Osage wealth which belied images of Native Americans that could be traced back to the first brutal contact with whites. And reporters would go out and describe how they lived in these terra-cotta mansions, how they had chauffeured cars, how they had servants, some of whom were white.

It was said at the time whereas as one American might own a car, each Osage owned 11 cars. The press referred to them as, quote, unquote, "the red millionaires and the plutocratic Osage." There was a great deal of both envy and prejudice and eventually outrage. And eventually, the whites tried to find ways to get their own hands upon this money.

DAVIES: And it's worth noting that I guess particularly Osage women - their control of these assets were restricted in some ways. Weren't they?

GRANN: Yes, not just Osage women, all Osage - or all full-blooded Osage. So the government in - really looking back, just an outrageous system - decided somehow that the Osage were not capable of handling their money. Now, you have to remember this in the 1920s, and the period of Great Gatsby. White oil men are blowing fortunes and going bankrupt.

And yet members of the United States Congress would sit in these mahogany-paneled committee rooms and literally debate as if the nation's security was at stake, scapegoating the Osage about their wealth. And they imposed restrictions. They literally imposed a system where guardians - white guardians - were placed in charge of overseeing how the Osage spent their money. This was a deeply racist system, and it literally was based on the quantum of Osage blood. If you were a full-blooded Osage, you were deemed, quote, unquote, "incompetent" and given a guardian who oversaw your wealth.

DAVIES: OK. That said, there was a lot of wealth controlled by the Osage. Did intermarriage among the Osage tribe and whites increase as this happened?

GRANN: Certainly. By the early 20th century, because of this kind of clash of cultural forces, so many whites were coming into the area because of the well, so many oil workers and oil men. Many of the old traditions of the Osage were disappearing at this period, and there was a great deal of intermarriage. Mollie Burkhart married Ernest Burkhart, a white man who was very typical of the kind of people who was kind of drawn to this area because there were these kind of wild boom towns at the time.

DAVIES: We're speaking with David Grann. His new book is "Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, we're speaking with David Grann. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he has a new book about a series of crimes in the 1920s against members of the Osage Native American Nation in Oklahoma. It's called "Killers Of The Flower Moon." So we have a situation where Mollie Burkhart, this woman who is a wealthy member of the Osage Nation married to a white man, Ernest Burkhart, discovers her sister, Anna Brown, has been shot to death and found in a ravine some distance away - a horrible crime. Who would investigate this kind of murder at the time?

GRANN: There was a great deal of lawlessness then in the United States, and particularly in this region, which was really the last remnant of the Wild West or the frontier. So you had a local lawman. You'd have a sheriff. But the typical sheriff back then had no training in scientific detection, and there was also a great deal of corruption back then. It was very easy for the powerful to buy the law, to tilt the scales of justice.

Mollie Burkhart obviously pleaded for justice, crusaded for justice, but the white authorities really did nothing early on - or very little. Partly that was because the victims were Native Americans. There was an enormous amount of prejudice. They didn't treat these crimes with seriousness. But there was also a great deal of corruption. So it was very hard to know who to turn to, who you could trust, who would stop these crimes, who would truly investigate them.

DAVIES: Now, you used the word victims - plural. Anna Brown was not the only Osage who died under suspicious circumstances. Give us a sense of what else was going on.

GRANN: So not only was Anna Brown murdered, not long after Anna died, Mollie Burkhart's mother, who was kind of one of the last of the Osage elders who still practiced many of the old traditions, became mysteriously sick. Her body seemed to wither and become more insubstantial each day. Nobody could pinpoint what was happening. And within two months, she was dead. And evidence later surfaced that she had been poisoned. So within just two months, Mollie Burkhart had lost her sister to a gunshot, her mother to poisoning.

And not long after that, Mollie had another sister, a woman named Rita Smith who lived in a house not far away from Mollie. One night, there was a loud explosion in the community. It's about 3 in the morning. Mollie Burkhart heard it. She got up, and she went to her window. And she looked down in the direction of where her sister's house had stood, and she could see a large, orange fire rising into the sky. It literally looked as if the sun had burst into the night. And where her sister's house had been, there had been an explosion. Somebody had planted a bomb under the house, killing everyone in it, including Mollie's sister Rita, including her - Rita's husband and a white servant who lived in the house.

These are just the murders we're talking about now in Mollie Burkhart's family. There were other murders happening throughout the community, other Osage being targeted.

DAVIES: Many shot, others died of mysterious illnesses, right? Henry Roan was another guy who was murdered.

GRANN: Yeah. Yeah, so there were many shootings. Henry Roan was another Osage who was found in his car shot in the back of his head. One of the most prevalent means of murder and of killing the Osage was poison because of the lack of training. Even though scientists understood toxicologies for poison, the local police forces didn't. And so it was very easy to slip someone a poison.

There was one champion steer-roper Osage who got a call one night. He went out of his house. He came back and suddenly collapsed, frothing, his whole body shaking. Somebody had slipped him what was believed to be strychnine, which is just a horrible poison. It makes your whole body convulse as if with electricity. You slowly can't breathe, but you're conscious throughout until finally you mercifully suffocate. So this was just one of the many means of targeting the Osage in these very systematic and brutal ways.

DAVIES: Was this reported in the local press?

GRANN: There was certainly locally some coverage. It had not yet gotten much national coverage. But there was still a great indifference because the victims were Osage, were Native Americans. Here was a population being systematically murdered one by one.

DAVIES: Mollie Burkhart and relatives of the other victims would turn to private investigators. There are some real characters among them. You tell some fascinating stories about that.

GRANN: Yeah. So one of the things that happened back then because - you know, we think of ourself as a country of laws, but these institutions back in the '20s in the United States were very fragile. There was a great deal of lawlessness. And because of that, justice was often privatized, that if you had money and resources, you had to turn to private investigators.

So Mollie - who had an enormous amount of courage because, by crusading for justice, she was putting a bull's eye right upon herself, but she did. And she issued rewards, and she hired a team of private investigators. These private investigators were often, though, sordid characters. Often they had criminal backgrounds. They were also often susceptible to corruption. And you often didn't quite know who they were working for, who they were leaking to.

Just to give an example, the governor of Oklahoma eventually sent in his top state investigator, a guy named - his middle name was Fox, which always seemed appropriate. He had been a longtime private eye, had a criminal history. He shows up to look into the killings. He quickly takes a bribe, you know, from a bootlegger. He's then arrested. The governor quickly pardons him, and then he goes and commits an unrelated murder. So you get a sense just of the quality of the legal establishment who is supposed to be solving these crimes.

DAVIES: So the Osage looked to the federal government - let's get a federal investigation of this. And they enlist the help of a guy named Barney McBride. Tell us that story.

GRANN: So yeah - so Barney McBride was an oilman in the area, a white man. The Osage - he was a friend of the Osage. The Osage trusted him. And so they asked him to go to Washington, D.C., to try to plead for help. And Barney McBride went. He showed up in Washington, D.C., and he brought with him a Bible and a pistol.

That night, when he arrived at his boarding house, he received a telegram, and it said be careful. Then, that evening, he walked out of the boarding house. He was abducted. Somebody put a bag over his head.

The next morning, he was found in a covert in Maryland. His head had been beaten in. He had been stabbed, I think, at least 20 times. His body had been stripped naked. It was clearly a warning. And The Washington Post later reported what had become increasingly evident, which was that - there was a conspiracy to kill rich Indians - was the title of their article.

DAVIES: So this was now a national story.

GRANN: This had now become a national story. And what it showed, though, and what is so important, is the reach and the power of the people who are carrying out these murders. Here they were able to track and follow a man all the way to Washington, D.C., had enough information to know he was going and had the power to follow him and to kill him, you know, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Oklahoma. And it terrified people.

DAVIES: There was an attorney, local attorney named W. W. Vaughn, a man with 10 kids, looks into things, thinks he has some evidence that might be helpful...

GRANN: Yeah.

DAVIES: ...And then what happens to him?

GRANN: Yeah, so W. W. Vaughn was a local white attorney. He had 10 children, as you said. And he was considered honorable and not corrupt. He had rushed - he had been - began to try to kind of fill in this void, this kind of corrupt void, to see if he could try to catch the killers and stop them. He went to Oklahoma City to meet with an Osage who was dying of suspected poisoning. Before he went, he told his wife that he had put money in a safe for her in case anything happened to him. And he had also stored away the evidence he had been gathering because he was afraid for his life.

He went to Oklahoma City to meet with this Osage Indian who was dying of suspected poisoning. And he spoke to them. He got documents from him. He then called the local sheriff and said, I've got enough evidence against one of the killers. I'm coming back. I'll be on the train. But then, he never arrived.

He never arrived in Osage County - disappeared. People began to look for him. Boy Scouts - local Boy Scouts took up the search. Bloodhounds ran through the prairie. His body was eventually found 24 hours later lying along the tracks. He, too, had been stripped naked. He had been thrown off the speeding train, and his neck was broken. And when his wife, the next day, went to the safe where he had stored his materials everything had been cleaned out.

DAVIES: So word of this spread. We're now over 20 victims at this point. What was the impact on the daily lives of members of the Osage?

GRANN: Well, by now, this was known as the Osage reign of terror. There were at least 24 Osage who had been murdered. Several people who had tried to catch the killers themselves had been killed. And there was a genuine sense of terror. The Osage would hang lights around their houses so that at night they would be illuminated. Doors were locked. Children were not allowed to wander the streets. Many Osage moved to California. Osage would later refer to this as a diaspora. It was a real time of terror.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with David Grann about his new book "The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI" (ph). We'll talk about how J. Edgar Hoover's FBI handled the murders after we take a short break. And Ken Tucker will review a new album by the Philadelphia-based band, The Menzingers, which features songs about getting older. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies recorded with David Grann, author of a new book about one of the biggest serial murder cases in American history. This was in the 1920s after oil was discovered on the reservation of the Osage Indian Nation and members of the tribe became wealthy. Local whites befriended them, in some cases, married them and targeted them for their money. The Osage were shot and poisoned in staggering numbers. It was the FBI's first murder investigation under Director J. Edgar Hoover.

DAVIES: So this becomes a federal investigation. What was the state of federal law enforcement in the day?

GRANN: So the Osage issue a tribal resolution where they plead for federal investigators to come in, those who will not be tainted or connected to the local power structure. And eventually a very obscure branch of the Justice Department which was then known as the Bureau of Investigations, which would later be renamed the FBI, take up the case.

It was a very fledgling period with federal law enforcement. The bureau - the Bureau Investigation, the FBI had been formed in 1906 under Theodore Roosevelt. But it had only a few investigators. Many of them were not very well-trained. The same problems that infected local enforcement were still plaguing the bureau where you had criminals who were often investigators. The bureau had had in the early 1920s - one of the worst con men in the history of the United States was working for the FBI. And they also had very limited jurisdictions over crimes, the FBI back then.

They could deal with escaped federal prisoners, smutty books crossing state lines. But they also had jurisdiction over American-Indian reservations which is why they got jurisdiction over this case and why it became one of their first major homicide investigations.

DAVIES: So the guy running who had just taken over the bureau at the time was none other than J. Edgar Hoover. This is in the 1920s. He was a young man. He wanted to remake the FBI. He had a particular profile of the kind of man he wanted to be an agent for the Bureau of Investigation. What was he looking for?

GRANN: Well, in some ways, he was looking for someone like himself who - he had never been an investigator himself, had never been a criminal detective. He was a master bureaucrat. He was looking for agents who were college-educated. They would refer to him as kind of Boy Scouts, who looked - had very clean-cut images and were very presentable.

Needless to say were generally white. He didn't like agents who were too tall because he didn't want them to overshadow him. But what they often lacked at least back then was real experience investigating real criminals. And so that was one of the problems the bureau had.

DAVIES: There's a part of the story that's not so well-known of an initial effort. Tell us about that.

GRANN: At one point, they released an outlaw, a man named Blackie - very appropriately - who they hoped to use as an informant. And they took him out of jail, and he was supposed to work for them. Instead, he slipped away, robbed a bank and murdered a police officer.

DAVIES: And you describe there was another kind of lawman who he would employ at times loosely described as cowboys. What are we talking about?

GRANN: Yeah. So in this case, there was a bunch of kind of wild or frontier lawmen who were very experienced including a man named Tom White. These were men who were kind of struggling to adapt to the new bureau to adapt to new scientific forms of detection which were slowly emerging such as fingerprinting, handwriting analysis. They have to suddenly file paperwork and wear suits, things that none of them were accustomed to, but they were very experienced lawmen including a man like Tom White.

DAVIES: Yeah. He's an interesting guy. Tell us about his history.

GRANN: You know, Tom White is in many ways like Mollie Burkhart in that he is a transitional figure in this country. He is somebody who is born around the same time on the frontier in a log cabin in Texas. He was part of a tribe of lawmen. His father had been a frontier lawman, a local sheriff. He watched his father when he was just a little kid hang a man, a convict. He grew up at a time and became a lawman at a time when justice was often meted out by the barrel of a gun.

And then by the 1920s when he has this case when he becomes an agent, he is trying to learn all these new modern methods of detection such as fingerprinting, such as ballistic analysis, learning how to file reports which he can't stand. He has to wear a suit and a fedora where he had once ridden on a horse back with a 10-gallon hat.

DAVIES: So Hoover personally selects this former Texas Ranger Tom White to lead the investigation into the Osage murders, and White assembles an interesting team to help him. What kinds of men does he pick? What are their methods?

GRANN: Yeah. So he puts together an undercover team of these cowboys. They were all frontier lawmen. He realizes given the danger, given the fear in the area, given the corruption the team will have to go in undercover. And he recruits one frontier lawman who will pose as a cattleman. He recruits a man who once sold insurance and now will sell insurance as his fake identity when he's in Osage County. And perhaps most interestingly, he recruits an American-Indian agent.

There are no statistics about how many American-Indian agents were in the bureau at the time, but I suspect he was the only one. And this team then is sent in undercover, and, of course, they do not represent the team the kind of agents that Hoover was touting as college boys. None of these people had college educations or whatnot.

DAVIES: In this period in which whites in Osage had a lot of social contact, a lot of intermarriage, many whites that were trusted by members of the Osage Nation - this FBI agent Tom White and his team begin to discover some pretty sinister stuff going on. Generally speaking, what are they finding?

GRANN: What they begin to discover is that there is a enormous criminal enterprise to swindle Osage money and that the system of guardians, for example, these white men - they were always men, usually men, often prominent members of society, they were lawmen, prosecutors, businessmen, bankers - were systematically stealing and skimming from the Osage money. And they begin to also realize that there is a complicity of silence.

And it becomes apparent that they are now moving into a realm in which it is very hard for them to know who they can trust and that the very power structure within the community is more than likely complicit within these crimes.

DAVIES: Two white men were arrested and brought to trial, people with access to resources and money. And a big question arose was regardless of the evidence, would a jury convict a white man for murdering an American-Indian? Just explore that with us for a moment.

GRANN: Yeah. I mean, what is amazing is that - and this was an open question. I mean, it was literally asked, and there was a belief that white men would not be convicted for these crimes and that white jurors would not find them guilty. And the challenges that Tom White and his men faced were just enormous, almost Herculean in that, one - there was enormous corruption. And the people who were being charged had enough power to buy jurors, to buy witnesses, to murder witnesses, to make witnesses disappear.

The case shifted from a question of who did it to can you actually convict them? And because of racial prejudice, it was a enormous challenge, and many people believe that the locals would never convict fellow white men for killing an Osage Indian.

DAVIES: What happened in the first trial?

GRANN: And the tragedy and shocking to Tom White was that it ended in a hung jury, and evidence later revealed that there had been a elaborate conspiracy to obstruct justice including buying a juror.

DAVIES: So plenty of jury tampering and all.

GRANN: Jury tampering.

DAVIES: Yeah. And maybe most heartbreaking is that this involved a man who had become very close to even married Osage women and had betrayed those relationships.

GRANN: These were deeply intimate crimes. And it's what makes this so barbaric. These were crimes committed by people who the victims trusted, many cases thought they loved, and it involved a level of betrayal, an almost Shakespearean level of dishonesty of hiding your face, hiding the conspiracy. And for someone like Mollie Burkhart to have to reckon when she begins to discover that the very people she knew enough and trusted were the very people who were targeting her family. I could never fully fathom what that must have been like for her.

DAVIES: It was in fact Mollie Burkhart's own husband Ernest Burkhart who was found to be a part of the conspiracy.

GRANN: He was found to be a part of the conspiracy. It was somebody who Mollie thought loved her. She had two children with him, and she learned that he was one of the many willing executioners. And she had to sit through the trials and listen to the evidence presented and learn the secrets of her husband, that the secrets of this murder were right inside her house. And it was utterly devastating to her as anyone would imagine.

DAVIES: David Grann's book is "Killers Of The Flower Moon." We'll continue our conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: We're speaking with David Grann. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book about the murders on the Osage American-Indian reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s is called "Killers Of The Flower Moon." You know, it's fascinating because you spoke with grandchildren of this era, and they would bring you documents and in some cases stories that they had heard of crimes that we didn't know about. You want to pick one, tell us about it?

GRANN: Yeah. That's exactly right. So Mary Jo Webb was somebody who I met. She's in her 80s now. She's one of the Osage elders, and I got to her house. And she had pulled out a box of documents, and she told me about the death of her grandfather who had been run over, who had been poisoned. And she had spent years doing her own investigation, gathering evidence trying to pinpoint the killers.

This went on in so many families I met with, and they would give me the documents, they would give me the trails of evidence to pursue. What you begin to realize, the deeper you dig, is that this was not a crime about who did it as much as who didn't do it - that there was a culture of killing taking place during this period and that there were scores if not hundreds of murders.

DAVIES: And one of the questions that occurred to me as I read this was it was so remarkable that so many of these men would target Osage women, that so many of these Osage women were open to these relationships and trusted these men. Do you have any insight into that?

GRANN: No, I mean, they lived in the community, and they presented a certain face and concealed often what they were about. This was a...

DAVIES: The white man you mean. Yeah.

GRANN: Yeah, the white man. And this was a time of great instability within the Osage Nation because of so much wealth, and it was a period where many of the traditions were disappearing. And there was a certain kind of unmooredness to the society. And it probably made this more possible. What is so hard to fathom is that the crimes involved a calculating quality where you had to befriend these people, you had to pretend to love them, you had to sleep in their house, in some cases you had children with them and then you systematically targeted them.

I've never encountered crimes like that before. And there was a complicity to these killings because they involved not only the perpetrators. They involve morticians who would then cover up the crimes. They involve lawmen who then would not investigate them. They involve neighbors who would never speak out, reporters who would not dig into the crimes. There were so many willing executioners. There were so many people who were either directly profiting from these crimes or were silently complicit in them. And that's why there were so many of them. That's why they went on for so many years. And that's why so many killers ultimately escaped justice.

DAVIES: And, you know, when you speak to these surviving members of the Osage Nation and you see the pain that they still feel generations later from this - the series of crimes, and when you think about how many white people were complicit in it, it makes me think there's another book to be done about descendants of white people and what stories their grandparents might have told them because surely some told stories and surely some felt some guilt about it.

GRANN: You know, it's - what's interesting and is, in many ways, the story of America, there are descendants of both the murderers and descendants of the victims who still live in the same community. And Mary Jo Webb, who's an Osage elder who I spoke to, you know, said, we try not to hold those descendants responsible. She said, in many cases, they don't fully know even what their ancestors did, but we live side by side. Thought that involved a certain level of forgiveness and understanding.

One descendant of a murderer I spoke with sent me a note at one point. And he said I'm very ashamed - this was a descendant of Ernest Burkhart - and said I'm very ashamed of what my ancestors did. And he said, if you speak to the Osage, will you please tell them that for me? But what is part of America is that you have these descendants living side by side in the same communities.

And one of the most powerful things in all of the research was meeting with the descendants. I met with a descendant of Mollie Burkhart. Margie Burkhart, who is the granddaughter, is a wonderful woman and told me about the crimes, told me about what it was like growing up without any cousins and aunts and uncles because so many members had been murdered, told me about what it was like for her father who had grown up in this house as a little kid where his mother was a victim and his father was the killer.

Her father literally referred to Ernest Burkhart as Old Dynamite - that's what he called his father - because he was participating in the blowing up of one of the houses. And you realize when you speak to someone like Margie Burkhart how much these crimes still reverberate in the present, how much this history is still living in the present.

DAVIES: And what became of the wealth of the Osage? Obviously, a lot was stolen in these crimes. What happened to the well-being of the nation?

GRANN: So so much of the Osage wealth was stolen. It's hard to even put a number on it. But hundreds of millions of dollars was swindled. And then the Great Depression came and a good deal of the money was lost. And gradually, a lot of the oil was depleted. And so while some of the Osage still receive royalties from oil money, it's nothing like the fortune that they had once had during the 1920s and the beginning of the 20th century.

DAVIES: And is the population of the Osage Nation about what it was or more or less?

GRANN: There are about 4,000 who still live in the area. And there are about 20,000 members who now belong to the nation. And it's a very vibrant nation. It has its own government. It's extremely resilient. As one person told me, yes, we were victims of this murder, but we don't live as victims. And I think that's certainly true when you visit Osage Nation, you meet with the Osage and you see what a remarkable place it is and the strength of its government institutions. And they've taken enormous efforts to protect themselves from this kind of criminal conspiracy again.

DAVIES: David Grann, thank you so much for speaking with us.

GRANN: Thank you.

GROSS: David Grann spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies, who is also WHYY's senior reporter. Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the new book "The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI" (ph). After a break, Ken Tucker will review the new album by the Philadelphia band The Menzingers. It features songs about getting older, a love letter to their 20s. This is FRESH AIR.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Largely Forgotten Osage Murders Reveal A Conspiracy Against Wealthy Native Americans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Members of the Osage Indian Nation became very wealthy in the 1920s after oil deposits were found on their land. Then local whites began targeting the tribe. Journalist David Grann tells the story. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
This is a book discussion of Killers of the Flower Moon and includes an interview with Mollie's granddaughter. Gives good info that was not included in book.

# data[].attributes.headline
Book discussion with Mollie's granddaughter 

# data[].attributes.subject
Book discussion with Mollie's granddaughter 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shootings, poisonings, explosions, a lot of deception and the birth of the FBI: David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" covers the Osage tribe and the murders that took place after they discovered oil on their land and became wealthy.

Margie Burkhart, a minor figure in the book and member of the Osage tribe, participated in a book discussion led by Oklahoma City University President Robert Henry on the campus on Nov. 8. Burkhart's grandmother, Mollie, is a main figure in the book.

"He (David Grann) told me he wanted to write this book about Mollie. He saw her as a real person, not some cardboard Indian but as a real human," Burkhart said.

The book, which is the Editor's Pick for Amazon's Best Book of 2017, details the circumstances leading to the deaths of many Osage people. After discovering oil on their land, members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma became the richest people per capita in the world. The book also follows the FBI's first case, as they tried to solve the murders.

"There's so many layers upon layers upon layers of evil that was done to the Osage tribe during that time. I mean, you can look at all this money that was flowing into the tribe," Burkhart said. "It just didn't sit well with the non-natives. They were jealous and trying to figure out how to get their hands on it."

Burkhart said she initially thought the author's interest in her grandmother's story was a scam until she Googled his name. They first met in Kansas, where Burkhart showed him several sites and answered questions about her family. About six months later, Grann called asking for more information.

He said he wanted to write about her in the time before Mollie's marriage.

"He writes about when she goes to boarding school. And then he wanted to do the second part where she was married to Ernest and where everything happened," Burkhart said.

William Hale, self-proclaimed "King of the Osage Hills," convinced his nephew Ernest to marry Mollie, which is when her family began to die. Some died of shootings, some of poisoning and several in a house explosion.

"It is a true tragedy as deep and dark as anything that our species has done. There was a reign of terror, a culture of killing, the most abject case of racism you can imagine," Henry said. "To marry into a family in order to murder them ... it's a tragedy almost beyond telling."

Despite what happened, Burkhart believed Ernest truly loved Mollie.

"There were some letters that showed he did care for her. She stuck with him, even going into trial, she believed him," she said. "The tribe kind of ostracized her, so she had to sit in the courtroom by herself. She believed him until the end."

Burkhart described Ernest as a slight man with gray hair and the "softest blue eyes." She said he was like a grandfather figure - people would never imagine he was capable of what he did.

Burkhart recalled going on vacation with her father and having Ernest watch their house.

"I had some goldfish and I thought, 'I sure hope those goldfish are alive when I get home,' " Burkhart said jokingly. "They made it!"

The book reveals that the murders actually began before and lasted longer than most people thought they did. In reading other historical depictions of the murders, Henry said many think the number of deaths was two dozen.

"It's a lot more than that," he said. "I guess one of the depressing things from reading this book is we'll never know exactly how many."

A third section of the book focuses on how Mollie coped after Ernest's confession and the end of the investigation. The book concludes with interviews of the murdered Osage people's grandchildren, including Burkhart.

Burkhart liked the fact that Grann told the story so well while including many subjects in the story.

"He did so much research - a little over five years of research," she said.

Burkhart's parents told her the story of her grandmother when she wasn't very old, although she waited until her own children were older to share it with them.

"I was always told at a young age the story and my parents didn't hold anything back. I kind of wish they did because it was kind of traumatic," she said. "I hope I didn't traumatize my children."

The book has received a lot of attention; a film adaptation is already in the works starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese.

"I hope they just tell this story in the movie because this is a great story," Henry said. "I think it can be very helpful to native people."

At the end of the discussion, Burkhart was given a shawl by Russ Tallchief, director of student engagement, inclusion and multicultural programming at OCU.

"In our native traditions - lots of different ones, including our Osage traditions - when we want to honor someone, we present them with a shawl," Tallchief said.

Burkhart signed books after the discussion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
OCU book discussion about 'Killers of the Flower Moon' included granddaughter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shootings, poisonings, explosions, a lot of deception and the birth of the FBI: David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" covers the Osage tribe and the murders that took place after they discovered oil on their land and became wealthy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Picture of Mollie and her family; using for the social media page I will be creating for the project.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Photo of Mollie and her husband; using this for the social media page I will be creating for the project. 