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

by David Grann

The New York Times called Burns “perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him the moniker he longed for: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”

That summer, the team of operatives hired by Mathis began to infiltrate Osage County. Each agent identified himself, in his daily reports, only by a coded number.

Ralston,

Ponca City,

Perry, Oklahoma,

Pawnee County.

Rose Osage,

Joe Allen.

Bill Smith,

attaching himself to an Osage fortune: first by marrying Mollie’s sister Minnie, and then—only months after Minnie’s death from the mysterious “wasting illness” in 1918—by wedding Mollie’s sister Rita.

At the time, statutes governing electronic surveillance were nebulous, and Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph—a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier.

Just as Allan Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century, was known as “the eye,” Burns, in the twentieth century, had become “the ear.”

Anna leaned toward the driver. He could smell her liquored breath as she divulged a secret: she was going to have “a little baby.”

She had also confided to them the news of her pregnancy. Yet no one knew who the father was.

A. W. Comstock,

Osage Tribal Council

Hattie Whitehorn

Guthrie….Trailed

Tulsa

By February 1922, nine months after the murders of Whitehorn and Anna Brown, the investigations into the cases seemed to...

William Stepson, a twenty-nine-year-old Osage champion steer roper,

He returned home to his wife and two children several hours later, visibly ill. Stepson had always been in remarkable shape, but within hours he was dead. Authorities, upon examining the body, believed that someone he met during his excursion had slipped him a dose of poison, possibly strychnine—a bitter white alkaloid that, according to a nineteenth-century medical treatise, was “endowed with more destructive energy” than virtually any other poison.

In places like Osage County, where there was no coroner trained in forensics and no crime laboratory, poisoning was a perfect way to commit murder.

On March 26, 1922, less than a month after Stepson’s death, an Osage woman died of a suspected poisoning. Once again, no thorough toxicology exam was performed. Then, on July 28, Joe Bates, an Osage man in his thirties, obtained from a stranger some whiskey, and after taking a sip, he began frothing at the mouth, before collapsing. He, too, had died of what authorities described as some strange poison. He left behind a wife and six children.

Barney McBride,

When McBride checked in to a rooming house in the capital, he found a telegram from an associate waiting for him. “Be careful,” it said. McBride carried with him a Bible and a .45-caliber revolver. In the evening, he stopped at the Elks Club to play billiards. When he headed outside, someone seized him and tied a burlap sack tightly over his head. The next morning, McBride’s body was found in a culvert in Maryland. He had been stabbed more than twenty times, his skull had been beaten in, and he had been stripped naked, except for his socks and shoes, in one of which had been left a card with his name.

CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS

Hoover

(he had a phobia of germs and had installed in his home a special filtration system to purify the air),

white woman, Necia Kenny,

A. W. Comstock, the attorney who served as a guardian for several Osage,