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Head of the FBI for 5 decades, J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI during the Osage Murders. This article reviews his history as head of FBI

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J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, serving under every president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard M. Nixon. His supporters praised him for building the FBI into one of the world's outstanding law-enforcement agencies. His critics accused him of abusing power, failing to combat organized crime, intruding the FBI into state and local cases in order to take credit for other organizations' work, avoiding crimes that the FBI might not be able to solve, and violating individuals' First Amendment rights. (Photo by Marion S. Trikosko, 1961, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, serving under every president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard M. Nixon. His supporters praised him for building the FBI into one of the world's outstanding law-enforcement agencies. His critics accused him of abusing power, failing to combat organized crime, intruding the FBI into state and local cases in order to take credit for other organizations' work, avoiding crimes that the FBI might not be able to solve, and violating individuals' First Amendment rights.

Hoover was appointed head of the then Bureau of Investigation

Hoover was a lifetime resident of Washington, D.C. After earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1917, he joined the Department of Justice. He served (1919-1921) as special assistant to the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, and played a leading role in the "Red raids," a mass roundup and deportation of suspected Bolsheviks and anarchists who had emigrated from Europe but who had not acquired U.S. citizenship. When Coolidge became President, Hoover was appointed head of what was then the Bureau of Investigation. Hoover eliminated partisan politics from the organization's appointments and improved recruiting and training methods. In 1924 he expanded the agency's fingerprint files, which became the world's largest such collection. In the 1930s Hoover won fame for tracking down so-called public enemies - bank robbers and gangsters such as John Dillinger and George "Machine Gun" Kelly.

In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the FBI wide intelligence and counterespionage functions. These powers originally were directed largely against the Nazis. Hoover extended their functions to include monitoring and disruption of groups that he thought were affiliated with Communists. He later published an anti-Communist book, Masters of Deceit (1958).

Hoover's FBI was suspected of using illegal methods to gain information

For years Hoover's FBI was widely suspected of using questionable or illegal methods to gain information. The existence of a Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, became known in 1971. COINTELPRO penetrated suspect organizations and used FBI resources to disrupt and discredit them. The full extent of Hoover's misconduct became clear in 1975, after his death, through the work of a Senate select committee on intelligence activities, commonly known as the Church Committee, after its chair, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho. The committee documented Hoover's surveillance of groups and individuals with whom he disagreed - many of whom had done no more than exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize the government. Congressional investigators disclosed that Hoover had often abused his powers: committing burglaries, spying illegally on U.S. citizens, and persecuting those who opposed his agency. Hoover believed that communists used racial discontent to further their cause and that they were behind the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He used COINTELPRO and other means to try to prove that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Communist tool, but with no success.

Hoover's longevity as FBI director can in part be attributed to his secret files. These enabled him to intimidate even sitting presidents by threatening to leak damaging disclosures about them. He died in office.
This article was originally published in 2009. Martin Gruberg was President of the Fox Valley Civil Liberties Union in Wisconsin.
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J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, serving under every president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard M. Nixon. His supporters praised him for building the FBI into one of the world's outstanding law-enforcement agencies.

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Article about the rise of the FBI in America and other cases that helped get the FBI going and well established.

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The Rise of the FBI | American Experience | PBS

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Read about the growth from Bureau of Investigation (BOI) to Division of Investigation (DOI) to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

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If I'm feeling artsy I might decide to break out the pen and draw a comic based on the Osage Murders.

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Facts about the 1920-1925 60 murders that occurred during the mineral rights for the Osage Indians. Many lost their lives during this period.

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David Grann's true crime tale "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" is our second pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up for our newsletter. For an FAQ on how book club works, see here. Below, Grann recounts the history of the Osage Nation, and why they began to be mysteriously murdered off, in a photo essay.
In the early 20th century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation, in Northeast Oklahoma. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off. The case became one of the FBI's first major homicide investigations.

In telling this largely forgotten history in my new book, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," I drew on many archival and contemporary photographs to help document what happened. Here are some of the most powerful images.

In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma.

An early Osage camp on the reservation:

This land, it turned out, was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits then in the United States. To extract that oil, prospectors had to pay the two thousand or so Osage for leases and royalties. In 1923, these Osage received collectively what would be worth today more than $400 million. Many of the Osage lived in mansions and had chauffeured cars.

Then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances. The family of Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman, became a prime target.

In the spring of 1921, Mollie's older sister, Anna, disappeared.

A week later, Anna was found in this ravine, shot in the back of the head.

Less than two months after Anna's murder, Mollie's mother, Lizzie, died. Evidence would later suggest that she had been poisoned.

Mollie had a younger sister named Rita.

Rita was so frightened by these killings that she moved with her husband closer to town. Their house, where a maid also lived, was not far from Mollie's.

Late one evening in March 1923, Mollie was woken by a loud explosion. She got up and went to her window and looked in the direction of her sister's house, and all she saw was an orange ball rising into the sky. Somebody had planted a bomb under her sister's house, killing Rita and her husband as well as the maid.

And it wasn't just Mollie's family that was being targeted. Other Osage were being systematically murdered, and several of those who tried to catch the killers were also killed. One attorney, W.W. Vaughan, was thrown off a speeding train.

In 1923, after the official death toll had climbed to more than two dozen, the Osage Tribal Council issued a resolution demanding that federal authorities investigate the murders. And the case was eventually taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Bureau initially badly bungled the investigation. Agents released Blackie Thompson, a notorious outlaw, from jail, hoping to use him as an informant. Instead, he robbed a bank and killed a police officer. Thompson would later be gunned down himself.

J. Edgar Hoover had been appointed acting director of the Bureau in 1924. He was 29 years old, and he feared the potential scandal from the bureau's handling of the Osage case could undermine his dreams of building a bureaucratic kingdom.

In 1925, in desperation, he brought in a field agent named Tom White to take over the case.

White was a former Texas Ranger and an old frontier lawman, and he put together an undercover team, including an American Indian agent. One of the agents posed as an insurance salesman; others pretended to be cattlemen.

By following the money to see who was profiting from the murders, White and his team were able to capture some of the killers. But one of the things I try to document in the book is that there was a much deeper and darker conspiracy that the bureau never exposed. As Mary Jo Webb, a retired Osage teacher, told me, "This land is saturated with blood."
All photos courtesy of Doubleday

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The forgotten murders of the Osage people for the oil beneath their land

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David Grann's true crime tale "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" is our second pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up for our newsletter.

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A review on Mollie Burkhart's history will help guide the format of the comic strip I intend to make for the multigenre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This interview is held with Margie Burkhart who is the granddaughter of Mollie Burkhart. Margie discusses her life now as an Osage Indian and her connection to her Osage past.

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Mollie Burkhart's descendants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The family tree of Mollie Burkhart and money connections

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This family tree is a good reminder of the family relations when writing and reading.

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This interview with Grann really digs deep in connections with the Osage and money. This interview could be useful when needing more input on racism, money, family history, and oil funding costs.

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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.

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Largely Forgotten Osage Murders Reveal A Conspiracy Against Wealthy Native Americans

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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.

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David Grann is interviewed on PBS the reasons why he decided to write Killers of the Flower Moon and how he stumbled upon the story first himself.

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As part of the NewsHour and New York Times book club, Now Read This, author David Grann answers your questions about "Killers of the Flower Moon," his true crime book on the 20th century Osage murders. And Jeffrey Brown announces the March pick, a book that takes a surreal look at modern migration.

Jeffrey Brown:
In the 19th century, the Osage Indians were driven from their lands several times. By the early 20th century, they lived in part of Oklahoma that no one else wanted, but there was oil under the ground there, and the Osage became very wealthy.

And then in the 1920s came a series of murders and suspicious deaths.

Our Now Read This pick for February, "Killers of the Flower Moon," is a powerful work of investigative history. It clearly captivated many of you who read along with us.

And Author David Grann is here now to answer some of the questions you have sent in.

So, hello, David. Thank you for being our February pick.

Jeffrey Brown:
One, a lot of people wondered how you came to this story.

So, Don C. from San Francisco, "What inspired you to collect this story, turn it into a book?"

Lisa from Asheville, "With so many of us never having heard of this, how did you come to it?"

David Grann:
Yes.

I too had never heard of it. And at one point, a historian had mentioned it to me. And I made a trip out to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. And I visited the museum there. At that point, I had no plans of writing a book or even necessarily a story or anything.

And when I was at the museum, there was this great photograph on the wall that was taken in 1924. And it showed members of the Osage Nation with white settlers. It looked very innocent. But I noticed that a portion of the photograph was missing.

And I asked the then museum director what had happened to it. And she said it had contained a figure so frightening that she decided to remove it. And she then pointed to the missing panel. And she said, the devil was standing right there.

The book grew out of trying to understand who that figure was. And she went down into the basement. And she brought up an image of the missing panel. And it contained an image of one of the killers of the Osage who had murdered many of them for their oil money.

And I kept thinking, the Osage had removed that picture not to forget what happened, but because they can't forget. And yet so many people, including me, had no knowledge of this event. And so that was the real impetus to fill in my own ignorance.

David Grann:
Yes.

It took me close to five years to research and write. It took a long time for two reasons. There were basically two avenues of research. One avenue was archival. And one avenue was trying to track down the descendants of both the murderers and the victims, many of whom still live in the same neighborhoods in Oklahoma side by side, their fates intertwined, which is in many ways the story of America.

And it was meeting with many of them that gave me a real sense of how this history still reverberates to this day.

David Grann:
And when I was looking through this book, I pulled a box on the guardians. I found this old logbook. And I was looking through it. I would see the name of one guardian, and I would often see, for example, five Osage whose wealth they had managed.

If the Osage had died, somebody, some bureaucrat had just written the word dead next to their name. And I noticed, in one case, it was an Osage, and it had the word dead. The next Osage, dead. Dead, dead, dead, all five.

And then I looked at another guardian. And I saw they had about 12 Osage whose fortunes they had overseen; 50 percent of them were dead. This defied any national death rate. And it was documents like that, going back to your question about research, that gave you the sense of the breadth of this conspiracy.

David Grann:
Well, I don't think you can understand our country unless you understand a part - this part of our history.

This is one of the worst racial injustices and criminal conspiracies in American history. And it was never taught in school. It was never taught to me. It wasn't taught in most Oklahoma schools.

The Osage were intimately aware of their history, but others weren't. And I don't think you can understand this country unless you understand events like this.

I think stories like this were marginalized and neglected. And they belong as part of our history.

Jeffrey Brown:
But, before we go, I get to announce our next book club pick for March.

We're turning back to fiction to a much acclaimed recent novel, "Exit West" by writer Mohsin Hamid. It's a beautifully written and deeply imaginative take on contemporary issues of migration and displacement.

And if you're already part of Now Read This, you know how it works. And if you're not, now is time to go to our Facebook page and join nearly 50,000 other readers.

Now Read This is a partnership with The New York Times, and we are very glad to have you reading along with us.

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'Killers of the Flower Moon' author David Grann answers your questions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As part of the NewsHour and New York Times book club, Now Read This, author David Grann answers your questions about "Killers of the Flower Moon," his true crime book on the 20th century Osage murders. And Jeffrey Brown announces the March pick, a book that takes a surreal look at modern migration.

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David Grann on Oklahoma's 1920's Osage Murders

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David Grann on Oklahoma's 1920's Osage Murders

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I was able to listen to nearly all of this podcast before Sunday but David Grann was very informative and broke down the murder history and the research he did that contributes to his book.

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‎Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast: Oklahoma’s 1920s Osage Murders w/ David Grann - A True Crime History Podcast on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast, Ep Oklahoma’s 1920s Osage Murders w/ David Grann - A True Crime History Podcast - Feb 13, 2020

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Quick journal of the book by David Grann with a brief interview discussing Osage history.

Hoffert, Barbara. “Spotlight: David Grann.” Library Journal, vol. 142, no. 7, Apr. 2017, p. 111. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=122467805&site=eds-live.

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"Native Narratives, Mystery Writing, and the Osage Oil Murders: Examining Mean Spirit and The Osage Rose"

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"Native Narratives, Mystery Writing, and the Osage Oil Murders: Examining Mean Spirit and The Osage Rose"

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"Native Narratives, Mystery Writing, and the Osage Oil Murders: Examining Mean Spirit and The Osage Rose" by Mary Stoecklein goes over the murders along with other murders around this time of the oil industry and Indians. It gives a broader understanding of the history at the time of the murders.

Stoecklein, Mary. “Native Narratives, Mystery Writing, and the Osage Oil Murders: Examining Mean Spirit and The Osage Rose.” AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL, vol. 42, no. 3, Jan. 2018, pp. 137–154. EBSCOhost,doi:10.17953/aicrj.42.3.Stoecklin