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

by David Grann

American Indians and Mexicans had long despised the Rangers for their brutal, shoot-first methods. But among white Texans they were widely mythologized.

Bill Smith had said, “You know, I only had two enemies in the world,” and that those enemies were William K. Hale, the King of the Osage Hills, and his nephew Ernest Burkhart.

“Yes, sir.” After further interrogation, he conceded, “A very wealthy estate.”

Although some white guardians and administrators tried to act in the best interests of the tribe, countless others used the system to swindle the very people they were ostensibly protecting.

“There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.”

The Osage were aware of such schemes but had no means to stop them. After the widow lost her baby, evidence of the fraud was brought before a county judge, only to be ignored.

Most people didn’t know who had started the blaze, but she did: Hale’s workers, on his orders, had torched the land for the insurance money—$30,000 in all.

How had Hale become the beneficiary of Henry Roan’s $25,000 life-insurance policy?

But the salesman told a different story.

all Hale would have had to do was present proof of the debt to Roan’s wealthy estate, which would have reimbursed him. Hale had no need to get an insurance policy on his friend’s life—a policy that wouldn’t have a significant return unless Roan, who was then in his late thirties, suddenly died.

no proof of the debt and that he had simply desired his commission.

produced a creditor’s note to prove that he was owed money by Roan.

Hale, laughing, said, “Hell, yes.”

Once, Hale had left a bottle of whiskey for her as a gift. But she refused to taste the moonshine: she feared that it was poisoned.

it did not provide a motive for the other Osage killings.

he had attempted to purchase Roan’s headright—his share in the tribe’s mineral trust,

Hale knew that the law prevented anyone from buying or selling a headright, but he’d been confident that lobbying pressure from influential whites would soon eliminate this prohibition.

As White examined probate records for many of the murder victims, it was evident that with each successive death more and more headrights were being directed into the hands of one person—Mollie Burkhart. And it just so happened that she was married to Hale’s nephew Ernest, a man who, as an agent wrote in a report, “is absolutely controlled by Hale.”

Anna Brown, divorced and without children, had bequeathed nearly all her wealth to her mother, Lizzie. By killing Anna first, the mastermind made sure that her headright would not be divided between multiple heirs.

Because Bill unexpectedly outlived Rita by a few days, he had inherited much of her wealth, and upon his death the money went to one of his relatives. Still, the bulk of the family’s headrights had been funneled to Mollie Burkhart,

brazen, so sinister,

There was no physical evidence or witnesses to prove that Hale had carried out or ordered any of the killings.

In a stark report, agents noted that Scott Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner and a guardian of Anna Brown and Lizzie, was “a crook and evidently in the power of Hale”

that the chief of police in Ponca City had “taken money from Bill Hale”; that the chief of police in Fairfax “will do nothing against Hale whatsoever”; that a local banker and guardian “will not talk against the Hale faction, for the reason that Hale has too much on him”; that the mayor of Fairfax, “an arch crook,” was Hale’s close friend; that a longtime county prosecutor was part of Hale’s political machine and was “no good” and “crooked”; and that even a federal official with the Office of Indian Affairs was “in the power of Bill Hale and will do what Hale says.”

Hoover wanted the new investigation to be a showcase for his bureau, which he had continued to restructure.

Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives—who tended to be middle-class white Protestants—held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures. This part of Progressivism mirrored Hoover’s darkest impulses.

They dictated how agents gathered and processed information. In the past, agents had filed reports by phone or telegram, or by briefing a superior in person. As a result, critical information, including entire case files, was often lost.

what Hoover hailed as “scientific policing,”

Hale told Spencer that he’d pay him and his gang at least $2,000 to bump off a couple—an old man and his blanket, meaning an Indian woman.

During one of his interrogations, Gregg said that agents should find Curley Johnson, an outlaw who ran with the stickup man Blackie Thompson. “Johnson knows all about the Smith blow up and will squeal if made to do so,” Gregg promised. But Johnson, it turned out, was also rotting underground. Less than a year earlier, he’d died suddenly—word was of poisoned alcohol.

Like the other potential witnesses against Hale, however, Grammer was dead.

Asa Kirby, the gold-toothed outlaw who had been an associate of Grammer’s.

“soup man”—the expert in explosives

But it turned out that Kirby couldn’t testify, either. A few weeks after Grammer’s fatal car crash, he’d broken into a store in the middle of the night in an attempt to steal a stash of diamonds, only to find that the shopkeeper had been tippe...

The person who had tipped off the shopkeeper about the robbery, White was hardly surprised to...

He inquired about Grammer’s car accident and was told by people who knew him that they believed his Cadillac’s steering wheel and brakes had been tampered with. Curley Johnson’s widow, meanwhile, was sure that her husband had been murdered—intentionally poisoned by Hale and his henchmen.

the Roan murder case, he discovered that this person had been bludgeoned to death.

Having failed to locate any living witnesses, White found himself stymied, and Hale seemed aware that agents were onto him. “Hale knows everything,” the informant Morrison had told agents, and there were signs that Morrison might be playing his own duplicitous game. Morrison, agents learned, had told a friend that he had all the dope on the murders and had saved Hale’s “damned neck till now.”

Out of the blue, White received a tip. In late October 1925, he was meeting with the governor of Oklahoma, discreetly discussing the case. Afterward, an aide to the governor told White, “We’ve been getting information from a prisoner at McAlester”—the state penitentiary—“who claims to know a great deal about the Osage murders. His name is Burt Lawson. Might be a good idea to talk to him.”

I want you to blow up and kill Bill Smith and his wife.’

On October 24, 1925, three months after White took over the case, he sent Hoover a telegram, unable to conceal a sense of triumph: “Have confession from Burt Lawson that he placed and set off the explosive that blew up Bill Smith’s home; that he was persuaded, prompted and assisted to do it by Ernest Burkhart and W. K. Hale.” Hoover was elated. Via telegram, he quickly sent White a message: “Congratulations.”

“Once, when he went to open the window, he found sticks of dynamite behind the curtain,”

White was also very concerned about the fate of Mollie Burkhart.

Hale had successfully arranged, corpse by corpse, for Mollie to inherit the majority of her family members’ wealth. Yet the plot seemed unfinished.

servant in Mollie’s house had told an agent that one night Ernest had muttered to her while drunk that he was afraid something would happen to Mollie. Even Ernest seemed terrified of the plan’s inevitable denouement.

“not to drink any liquor of any kind under any circumstances.”

Some of the town’s doctors, including the Shoun brothers, had been giving her injections

Mollie seemed to be getting worse.

It was urgent, the official went on, to “get this patient to some reputable hospital for diagnosis and treatment free from the interference of her husband.”

could no longer wait.