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

by David Grann

she showed little surprise and told me to come see her at the museum the following morning.

She explained that after her grandfather divorced her grandmother, he wed a white woman, and in 1931 he began to suspect that he was being poisoned—by his second wife.

Red Corn’s grandfather dropped dead;

His wife made off with a lot of the money.” The family was convinced that he had been poisoned, but there was never an investigation:

“Back then, everyone covered these things up. The undertakers. The doctors. The police.”

“There were a lot more murders during the Reign of Terror than people know about. A lot more.”

I couldn’t find any trail of evidence to follow.

Charles Whitehorn.

case had never been solved, it had originally been a prime focus of investigators,

Vaughan had been eager to help the private eyes.

Despite all this, the private detectives somehow failed to secure enough evidence to prosecute any of the suspects, or perhaps the private eyes were bought off.

Before long, Hattie became incurably sick. Agents noted that she seemed “liable to die at any time.” Remarkably, none of the agents expressed suspicions over the nature of her illness, even though so many victims during the Reign of Terror had been poisoned. Faulkner had a wife, and she told agents that he was “refusing to allow Hattie to be sent to a hospital…in order to keep her under his influence.” According to Hattie’s sisters, Faulkner had begun to steal money from her while she was “under the influence of a narcotic.”

Yet, in hindsight, the fact that Hale appeared to have played no role in the Whitehorn plot was the very reason the killing was so important.

exposed the secret history of the Reign of Terror: the evil of Hale was not an anomaly.

Middleton’s sentence was commuted to life. Then, after he had served only six and a half years, he was pardoned by the governor of Texas;

As I went down the list, I noticed that a third Osage Indian had died under Mathis’s guardianship, and so had a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth. Altogether, of his nine listed wards, seven had died. And at least two of these deaths were known to be murders. I began to scour the log for other Osage guardians around this time. One had eleven Osage wards, eight of whom had died. Another guardian had thirteen wards, more than half of whom had been listed as deceased. And one guardian had five wards, all of whom died.

clearly defied a natural death rate.

Because most of these cases had never been investigated, it was impossible to determine precisely how many of the deaths were suspicious, let alone w...

guardian had deliberately denied her treatment and refused to send her to a hospital

adding that after her death the guardian made himself the administrator of her valuable estate.

no one was ever charged, and the identities of the citizens were never revealed.

Though the bureau estimated that there were twenty-four Osage murders, the real number was undoubtedly higher.

systematically covered up,

amount of morphine under the armpit of

Yet Osages were dying at more than one-and-a-half times the national rate—and those numbers do not include Osages born after 1907 and not listed on the roll.”

Louis F. Burns, the eminent historian of the Osage, observed, “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one family member because of the head rights.”

And at least one bureau agent who had left the case prior to White’s arrival had realized that th...

One of Morrison’s associates told the bureau that Morrison had admitted to him that he had killed Stepson so that he could marry Tillie and get control of her invaluable estate.

In most cases, the families of the victims have no sense of resolution. Many

“A murdered Indian’s survivors don’t have the right to the satisfaction of justice for past crimes, or of even knowing who killed their children, their mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters, their grandparents. They can only guess—like I was forced to.”

“The blood cries out from the ground.”