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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Grann
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April 15 - May 14, 2018
Years later, the bureau would release several of its files on the Osage investigation in order to preserve the case in the nation’s memory.
But there was something essential that wasn’t included in these and other historical records, something that White himself had missed. There was another layer to the case—a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy, which the bureau had never exposed.
“Stores gone, post office gone, train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone—only thing not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.”
Pawhuska is filled with its share of abandoned buildings, but it is one of the few towns that remain.
Osage Nation Museum,
Kathryn Red Corn.
section was missing,
“The devil was standing right there.”
William K. Hale,
Anna Brown’s skull,
“Hi, I’m Margie Burkhart,”
John Cobb, on the reservation. Margie was told that it had been a good marriage, a period of happiness for her grandmother.
Margie said that after Ernest got out, he robbed an Osage home and was sent back to prison. In 1947, while Ernest was still in jail, Hale was released, having served twenty years at Leavenworth.
but according to relatives he once visited them and said, “If that damn Ernest had kept his mouth shut we’d be rich today.”
In 1966, hoping to return to Oklahoma, Ernest applied for a pardon.
HEADRIGHTS KILLER WINS PARDON VOTE,
“Finally, one night my dad got real mad and took the box and just chucked it over a bridge.”
“That’s where I grew up,” Margie said. To my surprise, it was a small, spare, wooden house, more like a cabin than a mansion. The Great Depression had wiped out many Osage fortunes that had already been diminished by guardians and thieves.
“When I was little, I could hear the oil wells pumping,” Margie recalled. “Then one day they stopped.”
The Osage have found new sources of revenue, including from seven casinos that have been built on their territory. (They were formerly called the Million Dollar Elm Casinos.)
During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.
illuminated the dusty road. Margie said that her parents first told her what Ernest and Hale had done when she was a child.
She said that occasionally The FBI Story would air on local television, and she and her family would watch it and cry.
You just have it in the back of your head that you don’t trust anybody.”
“That was the Big Hill Trading Company,”
Margie then mentioned something that I had not seen in any of the FBI records. Her father had told her that on the night of the explosion he and his sister and Mollie had been planning to spend the night at the Smiths’ house.
“My dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him,” Margie said.
insisted
even though the bureau had not yet connected Hale to all twenty-four murders.
Whoever had murdered these men had seemed to get away scot-free.
Someone with influence had made sure that the inquest was a sham—the cause of death was listed as “unknown.”
physically powerful or helped by accomplices.
Vaughan, I recalled, had told his wife that he had stashed evidence on the murders—as well as money for the family—in a secret hiding place.
the killer either forced the information out of Vaughan before throwing him off the train, or the killer was someone whom Vaughan trusted enough to confide such information.
but he received an anonymous threat that if he and the family pressed the matter any further they’d all end up like W. W. Vaughan.
H. G. Burt,
Vaughan and Burt, who was the president of a bank in Pawhuska, were considered close friends, and Vaughan had long acted as one of Burt’s attorneys. According to Rosa, Burt owed her deceased husband $10,000, which she was seeking to recover.
George Bigheart.
Burt, however, had somehow collected the money. Days later, both Bigheart and Vaughan were dead.
who was represented by one of the same law firms that had represented Hale in the murder trials,
Much of his wealth, though, flowed from the deeply corrupt “Indian business”—the swindling of millionaire Osage. A court record noted that Burt had run a loan business targeting the Osage.
I’d never seen anywhere before: the secret testimony of the grand jury that in 1926 investigated the murders of the Osage. Among the witnesses who testified were many of the principal figures in the case, such as Ernest Burkhart and Dick Gregg.
with a trusted informant, who had indicated that Burt and Hale were “very intimate” associates. What’s more, the informant said that Burt and Hale had “split on the boodle”—the sum of money—obtained from Bigheart.
White and his men were deeply suspicious of Burt. In a second report that I found in the bureau files, agents described Burt as a “murderer.”
Bigheart’s daughter,
the name of her guardian: H. G. Burt.
Partway through the story, it mentioned that Burt had boarded the train with Vaughan in Oklahoma City and was on the journey when Vaughan disappeared from his berth. According to another story in the newspaper, it was Burt who reported Vaughan’s disappearance.
The informant was asked if he had any information regarding the murder of Vaughan. “Yes,” he replied. “I think Herb Burt pulled that.”
unpublished interview with the Fairfax town marshal, who had investigated the murders of the Osage. He indicated that Burt had been involved in Vaughan’s killing and that a mayor of one of the boomtowns—a local tough—had helped Burt throw Vaughan off the train. The
The Osage have long been linked to the world of classical dance, having produced two of the greatest ballerinas, the sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. Maria, considered America’s first major prima ballerina, was born in Fairfax in 1925.
