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

by David Grann

remained certain contr...

January 4, 1926. Because agents could not make arrests,

Freas,

reel...

Hale, however, could not be found.

ordered a new suit of clothes and had said that he was planning to leave town at a moment’s notice.

suddenly strolled into Sheriff Freas...

“We all picked Ernest Burkhart the one to break.”

A doubt seized White,

Or maybe the whole confession had been orchestrated by Hale—another one of his plots within a plot.

If this was true—and White was inclined to believe that it was—then Lawson had indeed been lying all along.

He said that Burkhart and Hale had once approached him and his old buddy Curley Johnson to kill Bill and Rita Smith.

“Did you tell me the truth when you told me Ernest gave you an automobile as part payment of that job?” “Yes, sir.” Blackie, evidently enjoying himself, looked squarely at Burkhart and said, “Ernest, I have told them everything.”

“Burkhart’s ready to tell his story,” he said. “But he won’t give it to us. Says it’s got to be you.”

John Ramsey,”

And Ramsey threw up his hands and said, “I guess it’s on my neck now. Get your pencils.”

in early 1923 Grammer told Ramsey that Hale had “a little job he wanted done.

White observed the way Ramsey kept saying “the Indian,” rather than Roan’s name. As if to justify his crime, Ramsey said that even now “white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.”

Kelsie Morrison, their undercover informant

“It is an established fact that when she was removed from the control of Burkhart and Hale, she immediately regained her health.”

An attorney assisting the prosecution explained to her, “We are all your friends and working for you.” He informed her that her husband, Ernest, had confessed that he knew something about these murder cases and that Hale had apparently engineered them, including the bombing of her sister Rita’s house.

who did this to her family to be punished.

according to several people close to Anna Brown, Hale had had an affair with Anna and was the father of her baby.

Burkhart once described Hale as the best man you “ever saw until after you found him out and knowed him,” adding, “You could meet and you’d fall in love with him. Women were the same way. But the longer you stayed around him, he’d get to you. He’d beat you some way.”

Hale seemed unperturbed,

Hale was certain that “money will buy the protection or acquittal of any man for any crime in Osage County.”

Hale had been seen with Bigheart just before he was rushed to the hospital, and that after his death Hale made a claim upon his estate for $6,000, presenting a forged creditor’s note.

Bates, an Osage Indian, in 1921. After Bates, who was married and had six children, suddenly died, Hale had produced a dubious deed to his land.

husband drunk for over a year. Hale would come to the house and ask him to sell his inherited shares in land.

Well, Hale got the land.

A newsreel about the murders, titled “The Tragedy of the Osage Hills,”

We Indians cannot get our rights in these courts and I have no chance at all of saving this land for my children.”

Many lawyers and judges were on the take. Witnesses were coerced, juries tampered with. Even Clarence Darrow, the great defender of the downtrodden, had been charged with trying to bribe prospective jurors.

Hale held enormous influence over Oklahoma’s fragile legal institutions; as

If a murder occurred on Indian territory, then the federal authorities could claim jurisdiction. The Osage territory, however, had been allotted, and much of the surface land where the murders had occurred, including the slaying of Anna Brown, was no longer under the tribe’s control. These cases, Justice Department officials concluded, could only be tried by the state.

Henry Roan was killed on an Osage allotment that hadn’t been sold to whites; moreover, the Osage property owner was under guardianship and considered a ward of the federal government. Prosecutors working with White decided to move forward with this case first,

Mollie, meanwhile, still didn’t believe that Ernest was “intentionally guilty.”

On March 1, 1926, White and the prosecution received a devastating setback.

even though Roan’s murder had occurred on an individual Osage allotment, this was not the equivalent of tribal lands, and therefore the case could be adjudicated only in state court.

“Very few, if any, believe that we can ever be able to get a jury in Osage County to try these parties,

It was Mollie Burkhart, cast out from the two worlds that she’d always straddled: whites, loyal to Hale, shunned her, while many Osage ostracized her for bringing the killers among them and for remaining loyal to Ernest. Reporters portrayed her as an “ignorant squaw.”

Hale glowered at his nephew, whom one of Hale’s lawyers denounced as a “traitor to his own blood.”

Ernest Burkhart refused to testify for the state.

Instead, Burkhart took the stand as a defense witness.

Hale said that Smith had threatened to beat his brains out and that White had told him, “We will have to put you in the hot chair.” Then, he said, the agents shoved him in a special chair, attached wires to his body, and put a black hood over his head and a device like a catcher’s mask over his face. “They kept talking about putting the juice to me and electrocuting me and did shock me,” Hale said.

When he thought that Hale was more powerful than the U.S. government, he’d served as a double agent for the King of the Osage; once he was caught and realized that the government controlled his fate, he flipped sides and admitted his role in the conspiracy.

“That put us back in federal district courts,” White noted.

On June 21, 1926, Burkhart was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor.

Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”

The temperature outside was ninety degrees, and it was hard to breathe in the courtroom.