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by
David Grann
Read between
March 1 - May 20, 2025
For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.
And they weren't wrong
Dr. H. H. Holmes, who had murdered at least twenty-seven people, many of them during the 1893 World’s Fair, in Chicago?
I read that book!
By 1877, there were virtually no more American buffalo to hunt—a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words of an army officer, “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
Roan,
Chappell?!
Mollie. In 1902, more than a decade before meeting Ernest, she and Roan had been briefly married.
!!!!!!
before disappearing, Roan had said that he was going to get whiskey at Grammer’s ranch—the same place, coincidentally or not, where Mollie’s sister Anna often got her whiskey, too.
!!!!!!
Many Osage had come to believe that local authorities were colluding with the killers and that only an outside force like Davis could cut through the corruption and solve the growing number of cases. Yet within days Davis was spotted consorting with some of the county’s notorious criminals. Another investigator then caught Davis taking a bribe from the head of a local gambling syndicate in exchange for letting him operate his illicit businesses. And it soon became clear that the state’s special investigator in charge of solving the Osage murder cases was himself a crook.
!!!!!
Then Davis and several conspirators proceeded to rob—and murder—a prominent attorney; this time, Davis received a life sentence.
Holy shit!!
Thirty-six hours later, Vaughan’s body was spotted lying by the railroad tracks, thirty miles north of Oklahoma
Jesus!!!
The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.
She admitted that Rose had never told her any such story about the killing. In fact, a strange white man had come to her house, written up the statement, and forced her to sign it, even though none of it was true. White realized that the conspirators were not only erasing evidence—they were manufacturing it.
he’d never really been hired to solve the murder of Anna Brown; in fact, he’d been asked to conceal Bryan’s whereabouts on the night of the crime.
scalping our souls
chills
had no need to get an insurance policy on his friend’s life—a
fellas, is it unethical to take out life insurance on your friends?
WITH $10,000 BONDS IN ONE HAND AND WINCHESTER CLUTCHED IN THE OTHER, FAMOUS BANDIT DIES IN HIS BOOTS WHILE HILLS WHICH GAVE HIM SHELTER IN LIFE ARE HIS SEPULCHER IN DEATH.)
Buzzfeed could neverrr
“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.
GASP
Some of the town’s doctors, including the Shoun brothers, had been giving her injections of what was supposed to be insulin, but instead of improving, Mollie seemed to be getting worse.
HOLY SHIT THATS SO FUCKED
Kelsie Morrison, their undercover informant who had supposedly been working with the agents to identify the third man. Morrison had not just been a double agent who had funneled information back to Hale and his henchmen. It was Morrison, Ernest said, who had put the fatal bullet in Anna Brown’s head.
!!!
It was like a miracle; he had been shot to pieces, and yet he was still breathing in the cold December air, and then he felt the butt of the rifle smashing into his face and he crumbled, all 225 pounds of him, and fell into a ditch, bleeding out and left to die.
Oh shit
“To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
In 1947, while Ernest was still in jail, Hale was released, having served twenty years at Leavenworth.
!!!
Altogether, of his nine listed wards, seven had died. And at least two of these deaths were known to be murders.
Another Osage ward, Hlu-ah-to-me, had officially died of tuberculosis. But amid the files was a telegram from an informant to the U.S. attorney alleging that Hlu-ah-to-me’s guardian had deliberately denied her treatment and refused to send her to a hospital in the Southwest for care. Her guardian “knew that was the lone place she could live, and if she stayed in Gray Horse she must die,” the informant noted, adding that after her death the guardian made himself the administrator of her valuable estate.
!!!!
