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by
David Grann
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April 15 - May 14, 2018
a batch of poisoned moonshine.
members of the tribe had been systematically killed with intentionally contaminated alcohol.
“Hale said to me if John Ramsey had done it the way I told him to nobody would have known but that Roan had attempted suicide,” Burkhart recalled.
In addition to Burkhart’s testimony, White had testified to Ramsey’s confession, and witnesses had described Hale’s fraudulent acquisition of the insurance policy.
five days of deliberations,
The foreman rose and said, “There is none.”
He added that he had been informed that at least one, if not more, members of the panel had been bribed.
White was stunned. More than a year of his work, more than three years of the bureau’s work, had reached an impasse. The jury was also hung when Bryan Burkhart was tried for the murder of Anna Brown. It seemed impossible to find twelve white men who would convict one of their own for murdering American Indians. The Osage were outraged, and there were murmurings about taking justice into their own hands. White suddenly had to deploy agents to protect Hale, this man whom he so desperately wanted to bring to justice.
White was asked by the Justice Department to investigate corruption during the first Hale trial. He soon uncovered that there had been a conspiracy to obstruct justice, including bribes and perjury.
I will kill you.”
By the next morning, word spread that the jurors had reached a decision,
the clerk read out that the jury found John Ramsey and William K. Hale guilty of first-degree murder.
Hale and Ramsey appeared shocked. The judge said to them, “A jury has found you guilty of the murder of an Osage Indian, Mr. Hale and Mr. Ramsey, and it becomes my duty to pass sentence. Under the law the jury may find you guilty and that carries the death penalty in a first-degree murder case. But this jury has qualified it with life imprisonment.”
sent to Hale in prison, in which he had promised to “burn” down the authorities “if I ever get the Chance.” Prosecutors gave Bryan Burkhart immunity, believing that it was necessary to obtain Morrison’s conviction.
For Hoover, the Osage murder investigation became a showcase for the modern bureau. As he had hoped, the case demonstrated to many around the country the need for a national, more professional, scientifically skilled force. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote of the murders, “Sheriffs investigated and did nothing. State’s Attorneys investigated and did nothing. The Attorney General investigated and did nothing.
Hoover was careful not to disclose the bureau’s earlier bungling. He did not reveal that Blackie Thompson had escaped under the bureau’s watch and killed a policeman, or that because of so many false starts in the probe other murders had occurred. Instead, Hoover created a pristine origin story, a founding mythology in which the bureau, under his direction, had emerged from lawlessness and overcome the last wild American frontier.
In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage.
he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology.
The Osage Tribal Council was the only governing body to publicly single out and praise White and his team, including the undercover operatives.
pass a new law. It barred anyone who was not at least half Osage from inheriting headrights from a member of the tribe.
The U.S. assistant attorney general, who oversaw the federal prison system, had asked White if he would take over as warden of Leavenworth prison, in Kansas.
country’s most dreaded places to be incarcerated.
but White recognized them: Hale and Ramsey.
The challenges of managing the prison—which was designed to hold twelve hundred inmates but instead had three times that number—were overwhelming.
115 degrees,
strict
would never stand for any mistreatment or heckling of them.”
he boasted, as the evaluator noted, of “his probable release through influence of friends.”
She and the Osage had fought to end the corrupt system of guardianships, and on April 21, 1931, a court ruled that Mollie was no longer a ward of the state: “IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED BY THE COURT, that the said Mollie Burkhart, Osage Allottee No. 285,…is hereby restored to competency, and the order heretofore made adjudging her to be an incompetent person is hereby vacated.”
December 11, 1931, White was in his warden’s office when he heard a noise. He stood and went to the door and found himself staring into the barrel of a gun.
Winchester rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, and six sticks of dynamite,
The convicts took White and eight members of his staff hostage and used them as shields
White—their insurance policy,
car
got stuck,
flee on...
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left to die.
Nearly a decade later, in December 1939, the acclaimed newspaper reporter Ernie Pyle stopped at La Tuna prison, near El Paso, Texas.
nearly sixty
None of the convicts managed to get away.
warden of La Tuna, a job that was less strenuous.
kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby and the Kansas City Massacre,
White’s old colleague, Agent Frank Smith, was among the convoy but survived.
In the wake of these incidents, Congress passed a series of New Deal reforms that gave the federal government its first comprehensive criminal code and the bureau a sweeping mission. Agents were now empowered to make arrests and carry firearms, and the department was soon renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Gone, too, were the days when special agents were merely investigators.”
three generations of White lawmen.
and his paranoid plots against an ever-growing list of perceived enemies, among them American Indian activists.
The FBI Story, starring James Stewart
“I would be glad to afford the information as I know it from start to finish,”
In October 1971, White collapsed from an apparent stroke. He was ninety and had no more miraculous escapes. On December 21, in the early morning hours, he stopped breathing.
