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

by David Grann

A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act. —Don DeLillo,

Repeat killers tend to rigidly adhere to a routine, yet the Osage murders were carried out in a bewildering array of methods. There was no signature. This, along with the fact that bodies turned up in different parts of the state and country, suggested that this was not the work of a single killer.

These cases underscored that the murders of the Osage for their headrights were not the result of a single conspiracy orchestrated by Hale. He might have led the bloodiest and longest killing spree. But there were countless other killings—killings that were not included in official estimates and that, unlike the cases of Lewis or Mollie Burkhart’s family members, were never investigated or even classified as homicides.