Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

by David Grann

Inquests were a remnant of a time when ordinary citizens largely assumed the burden of investigating crimes and maintaining order. For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.

Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots—after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state—did police departments emerge in the United States.

In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that they had solved the riddle by studying the phases a body passes through after death: the stiffening of the limbs (rigor mortis), the corpse’s changing temperature (algor mortis), and the discoloring of the skin from stagnant blood (livor mortis).

death. It was someone whom the agents knew, knew all too well: Kelsie Morrison, their undercover informant who had supposedly been working with the agents to identify the third man. Morrison had not just been a double agent who had funneled information back to Hale and his henchmen. It was Morrison, Ernest said, who had put the fatal bullet in Anna Brown’s head.

Burkhart never admitted having any knowledge that Mollie was being poisoned. Perhaps this was the one sin that he couldn’t bear to admit. Or perhaps Hale had not trusted him to kill his own wife.

National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Records of the Center for Legislative Archives NARA-FW National Archives and Records Administration, Fort Worth, Tex. Record Group 21, Records of District Court of the United States, U.S. District Court for the Western District

Tom White practiced firing his six-shooter. It was the Rangers who had recognized the revolutionary power of these repeat revolvers, after long being overmatched by American Indian warriors who could unleash a barrage of arrows before the lawmen could reload their single-shot rifles. In 1844, while testing out a Colt five-shooter, a group of Rangers overran a larger number of Comanche. Afterward, one of the Rangers informed the gun maker Samuel Colt that with improvements the repeat revolver could be rendered “the most perfect weapon in the world.”