Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is about the Osage Reign of Terror—a series of organized killings of members of the Osage Indian tribe that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma during the 1920s. Throughout a five-year period of mayhem and slaughter running from approximately 1921-1926, prominent white members of the community conspired to murder their Osage neighbors—men, women, and children.
The motive for these murders was profit—specifically the oil wealth of the Osage, which they had come into when oil was discovered on their reservation in the late 19th century. Whites in Oklahoma had long schemed to expropriate and defraud the Osage out of their money, largely through a legally mandated system under which individual Osage would be declared financially “incompetent” and court-appointed white guardians installed to oversee their assets. These guardianships offered unbounded opportunities for graft and embezzlement—in many ways, the murderous campaign of the 1920s was merely the logical extension of this long history of exploitation.
The murders were also the catalyst for a major reformation of American law enforcement. The Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor agency of the FBI) and its fiercely ambitious director, J. Edgar Hoover, used the high-profile Osage case to assert the role of the federal government into the world of local law enforcement on an unprecedented level. In doing so, Hoover made great publicity of the Bureau’s exploits and forever reshaped the image of law enforcement in the American popular imagination—away from the old romantic ideal of untrained frontier lawmen and amateur local sheriffs, and toward his vision sober, rational, scientific, and procedural G-Men.
In the late 19th century, oil had been discovered on the tribal reservation of the Osage people, who lived primarily in Osage County, Oklahoma. The tribe had suffered the loss of its tribal lands and been decimated by both smallpox epidemics and military defeats by the United States throughout much of the century. But, overnight, the oil discovery turned the tribe into one of the wealthiest per-capita groups in the world, with the total tribal income from leases to the oil companies running into the tens of millions and leases on individual tracts climbing as high as $2 million.
To manage this influx of money, the Osage tribal leadership instituted a headright system, under which each member of the tribe was entitled to annual royalties from the oil production, distributed in equal measure to members of the tribe. Although individuals could sell their surface land, they could not buy or sell headrights—these could only change hands through inheritance. This system was meant to ensure tribal control of the oil wealth in perpetuity.
The wealth of the Osage, however, attracted the jealousy and greed of whites in Oklahoma. These attitudes would soon be given the force of law. In 1921, Congress instituted a financial guardianship system, under which Osage were declared financially “incompetent” and unable to spend their own money as they saw fit. The rationale for this paternalistic policy was that the Osage were seen as childish, helpless people who could not be trusted to manage their own financial affairs. Left to their own devices, supporters of this policy argued, the Osage would squander their wealth on foolish and impulsive purchases. Worse, the decision to subject an Osage to the burden of a guardianship was nearly always racially based—full-blooded members of the tribe were virtually guaranteed to have a guardian; those of mixed ancestry rarely were.
The courts appointed white guardians, usually drawn from the ranks of white attorneys, politicians, and bankers in the community, would guard the Osage assets. This system kept the Osage in day-to-day poverty, despite being wealthy on paper—while providing ample opportunities for whites to embezzle and defraud them through a variety of schemes. By 1925, the government estimated that unscrupulous guardians had swindled the Osage out of $8 million.
The guardianship system was not the only way in which the paternalistic white authorities sought to “help” the Osage. In Oklahoma, the federal government ran a program of forced cultural assimilation. The ostensible goal of this program was to help integrate the Osage into mainstream American (i.e., white) society.
The real purpose, however, was to wipe out any traces of Osage religion and language—especially among children. Official government policy stipulated that native peoples like the Osage were morally and culturally unfit for self-government, and needed to be taught the ways of the white man in order to fully participate in American economic and political life. Thus, young Osage were forced to attend schools (often Christian parochial schools), where they would be taught to reject traditional Osage religion and culture, to be remade in the white man’s image.
These schools were English-only—children were not allowed to speak the language of their ancestors inside the walls of these harsh and forbidding institutions. By the early 1920s, speakers of the Osage tongue were dwindling, traditional modes of dress had all but disappeared, and most members of the tribe had converted to Christianity, with only faint vestiges of the old religion still observed.
The five-year-long Reign of Terror began in May 1921 with the discovery of the body of a murdered Osage woman named Anna Brown. Anna had been married to a white man, as were her sisters, Mollie Burkhart and Rita Smith.
In these parts of rural Oklahoma in the 1920s, elements of the frontier justice system still remained. Police forces were not yet fully professionalized, so ordinary citizens still assumed some of the responsibilities of criminal justice, including investigation of evidence and even pursuit of suspects.
One of the remaining vestiges of this rough-and-tumble approach to criminal justice was the citizens inquest, in which members of the community would visit the scene of a homicide with the county coroner to collect evidence and record any witness testimony. Anna Brown’s inquest and on-the-scene autopsy were gruesome, hasty, unprofessional, unscientific, and amateurish even by the standards of the day, with no proper protocol or procedure followed and a crowd of onlookers (including Anna’s family) witnessing the whole grisly spectacle.
This was how law enforcement and criminal justice were still practiced in remote parts of the American West, even as late as the 1920s. Many rural sheriffs were not professionally trained law enforcement officials, but were instead rugged frontiersmen, so-called “lawmen” who were often corrupt, violent, and connected to criminal elements within their jurisdiction. Private investigators were little better. Many agents of the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency were criminals themselves, with no respect for people’s civil liberties or proper protocol in criminal investigations. Many, similarly, used their position to extort and terrorize the very people they were meant to be protecting.
As the death toll rose and more Osage were killed, it became clear that state and local law enforcement was either too incompetent or corrupt to restore order and safety in Osage County. One special investigator or private detective after another would be found either taking bribes or participating in illicit criminal activities. To make things worse, red herrings and false leads repeatedly hampered the investigation, as the conspirators worked to manufacture evidence and throw the investigators off. By July 1921, the local authorities wrapped up the investigation, concluding that Anna Brown had been murdered by “parties unknown.”
More and more people were being found dead across Osage County, including the few white members of the community who had made genuine efforts to help the now panic-stricken Osage people. It was clear that the murders were the work of a well-organized and ruthless conspiracy.
In March 1923, Rita and Bill Smith (the sister and brother-in-law, respectively, of Mollie Burkhart) were killed when their house went up in an explosion. Mollie Burkhart was convinced that her family was being systematically eliminated, and that she would be the next target. She was also getting sick, despite the treatment of local doctors who claimed to be giving her insulin for her diabetes. Mollie, in fact, wasn’t sick with diabetes—she was being slowly poisoned.
In the summer of 1925, the U.S. Justice Department decided that the federal government needed to take a more direct role in the Osage case, as most of the murders had taken place on federally controlled Indian land. The director of the Bureau of Investigation, now tasked with overseeing the investigation, was the fiercely ambitious and publicity-seeking J. Edgar Hoover. He saw in the Osage case and opportunity to transform his obscure federal agency (which was soon to become the famous and powerful FBI) into the new face of American law enforcement and massively increase his own power and influence.
Hoover appointed an agent named Tom White to head up the investigation in Oklahoma. White had a background as an old-style “lawman” and had never received any formal police training. A former Texas Ranger who had chased outlaws and robbers through the hills of West Texas, he seemed the very antithesis of Hoover’s ideal of the procedural, rational, scientific, and professional investigative agent.
Despite this background, White was actually a careful and methodical law enforcement agent who shunned violence and found rational inquiry to be a much better tool for apprehending criminals. Hoover selected him for the job because he knew White would be familiar with the kinds of unscrupulous characters he and his team of agents would meet in Oklahoma as they unpeeled the layers of the Osage murder case.
After arriving in Oklahoma, White and his handpicked team of agents had to pierce through a web of lies and deceit. Informants who appeared to be working to assist the investigation were revealed to be double agents who were feeding the Bureau misinformation and helping the conspirators get away with their crimes. The unreliability of sources, reluctance of witnesses to come forward, and blatant corruption of local law enforcement officials made pursuing leads a bewildering exercise, especially once it became clear that the perpetrators were deliberately manufacturing evidence.
But White and his team were undaunted. Through a combination of undercover sleuthing, combing through financial records, and extracting confessions from key witnesses, the agents identified the businessman, power broker, and self-styled “True Friend of the Osage” William Hale as the mastermind behind the Reign of Terror. Hale had powerful business and political connections and had supported the establishment of charities, schools, and hospitals for the Osage. Hale was more than just any local grandee, moreover—he was the uncle of Ernest Burkhart, Mollie Burkhart’s husband. He had been at Anna Brown’s funeral and even vowed to the family that he would seek justice for Anna.
The Bureau agents discovered that Ernest Burkhart and his brother, Bryan, had been willing and active accomplices in their uncle’s murderous conspiracy—Ernest Burkhart had been a party to the murder of his wife’s sisters. In piecing together the puzzle, White’s team saw that the motive for all the murders was simple: profit.
While individual Osage had been barred by the Tribal Council from buying or selling headrights, they could be inherited. An Osage who suffered many deaths in their family could find themselves with title to multiple headrights. As White studied the probate records dealing with the estates of murdered Osage, the outline of the murderous plot began to make sense.
Many of the headrights of the victims had been willed to Mollie Burkhart. When all of this money came to Mollie, it would be easy for Hale to exercise control of it through his easily manipulated nephew Ernest—though it would be even easier if Mollie were to be killed, too. This was why Mollie’s family was being systematically eliminated. Through oil headrights and life insurance policies, Hale and his conspirators had a direct financial stake in the deaths of many Osage.
Building the case against Hale was difficult as, one after another, witnesses and co-conspirators who had participated in the plot kept dying under mysterious circumstances before they had the opportunity to cooperate with the investigation. Tom White knew he needed to act quickly to apprehend the perpetrators before Mollie Burkhart died of poisoning and the plot succeeded. Fortunately, Bureau agents arranged to have her moved to a hospital, where her condition began to improve once she was away from the machinations of her husband and his family.
In January 1926, White and his team decided to move forward with the testimony and evidence that they already had. The Justice Department handed down indictments for Ernest Burkhart and William Hale. U.S. Marshals arrested Ernest Burkhart, while Hale confidently and politely self-surrendered.
White knew that his case was shaky—much of it relied on the testimony of jailhouse snitches and known outlaws. If Hale’s lawyers were able to rebut the charges or if his influence and bribery succeeded in corrupting the trial, it would be a major source of embarrassment for the Bureau—one for which J. Edgar Hoover would hold Tom White responsible. But White bolstered his case by using the sworn testimony of another, unindicted co-conspirator, to extract a confession from Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart admitted his role in orchestrating the murders and helping his uncle manufacture false evidence.
Even with this, White faced daunting odds of convicting the conspirators. The Oklahoma state judicial system was wracked with corruption, and Hale would easily be able to manipulate it. White knew that white jurors would be especially reluctant to convict white defendants for murdering Osage Indians.
At the trial, Hale and his legal team transformed the proceedings into a circus. They told outrageous lies and blatantly attempted to tamper with and intimidate witnesses, including Ernest Burkhart, who, for a time, recanted his testimony and switched sides to become a witness for the defense. Tom White was outraged and appalled by the utter brazenness and arrogance of Hale’s conduct.
But when White was able to produce direct testimony from one of the men who, along with Ernest’s brother Bryan, had murdered Anna Brown, the defense began to collapse. Ernest Burkhart and William Hale were both found guilty. Hale was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In response to the murders, the Osage Tribal Council persuaded Congress to pass a law barring anyone who was not at least half-Osage from inheriting a headright, removing some of the incentive for whites to murder them. Anna divorced Ernest shortly after he was sent to prison, revolted and outraged by what he and his family had done to her loved ones. She remarried and was restored to full financial competence (freeing her from the corrupt guardianship system), before passing away in 1937.
Tom White became the warden of the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was known for his relatively humane treatment of inmates and support for a more rehabilitative approach to criminal justice. In 1931, he was shot in the arm by a gang of inmates attempting to escape. Although he survived, he permanently lost the use of his left arm. After retiring in 1951, White attempted to publicize his role in cracking the Osage case, but was coolly rebuffed by the self-aggrandizing Hoover, who had little use for his former star agent. After failing to find a publisher for his memoirs, White died in 1971, an obscure and largely forgotten figure.
Today, much of the wealth of the Osage has evaporated, as oil prices plunged beginning in the 1930s, thanks to overdrilling and the discovery of new petroleum sources elsewhere in the world. As early as 1931, the value of an Osage annual headright had plummeted to $800. In 2012, a sale of three leases went for less than $25,000. The former boomtowns had turned into decaying and desolate ghost towns.
Although the Reign of Terror took place nearly a century ago, its memory haunts the Osage today. The archival research by historians today strongly suggests that Hale and his gang were not the sole perpetrators of the Reign of Terror. There were likely many more perpetrators and victims—for whom justice was never done. Some accounts place the true death toll in the scores, and possibly in the hundreds.
The Osage community has managed to persevere—the tribe now operates several casinos that generate tens of millions of dollars annually and, in 2011, received a $380 million settlement from the U.S government in compensation for the decades of fraud and abuse. The Osage Nation has its own tribal government within Oklahoma and operates its own health, education, and welfare programs. And although the oil money is mostly gone, the old fear that the white man’s money would erase their identity has not come to pass, and the tribe proudly maintains its cultural heritage.
But the past can never be erased and the pain never forgotten. The fields and prairies of Osage County are forever soaked in blood.
In the late 19th century, the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe of the Great Plains, unexpectedly became one of the wealthiest per-capita groups in the world. Military incursions by the U.S. Army and land expropriation by white settlers over the course of the century had confined the Osage people to a reservation in a small corner of northern Oklahoma, a sliver of their once-extensive tribal territory.
The forced migration brought poverty, sickness, and misery—by the 1870s, the population of the tribe was a mere 3,000, just a third of what it had been at the dawn of the 19th century, with many people succumbing to smallpox and violent attacks by white settlers. But when oil was discovered in Osage County, Oklahoma in 1897, the Osage were suddenly rich beyond their wildest dreams, with the total tribal income from oil leases running into the tens of millions.
What had once been a forgotten corner of the Great Plains overnight became a focal point of the American economy. Every three months when new Osage leases became available for auction, the major oil trusts of the day flocked to the county to bid, often bribing officials of the U.S. Department of the Interior to claim the most promising leases. Leases on individual tracts could climb as high as $2 million. At one auction, the oil companies bid a collective $14 million. In 1923 alone, the Osage drew an income of more than $30 million (more than $400 million in inflation-adjusted figures). Owners of the mineral rights to the oil that lay beneath their lands, the Osage gained unimaginable wealth from these bidding wars.
The tribal leadership instituted a headright system, under which each member of the Osage Nation was entitled to annual royalties from the oil production. Although individuals could sell their surface land, there was no right to buy or sell headrights. This ensured tribal control of the oil wealth.
Each member was allotted an equal share, providing a steady and lucrative income. Not all Osage were happy about the new wealth, however. Many, particularly the elders, believed that the influx of oil money would lead to the erasure of the traditional Osage way of life, creating a moral and spiritual void that could never be filled by material wealth. When the checks stopped coming, these elders warned, the Osage would be left with nothing.
Unfortunately, this oil wealth came at a terrible price. The wealth of the Osage attracted the jealousy and greed of whites in Oklahoma, who resented people they perceived as being their cultural and racial inferiors getting rich for simply having the good fortune to own land above a massive oil deposit.
The popular press at the time nurtured these sentiments by portraying members of the tribe as lazy, indolent, ignorant, un-thrifty, and undeserving of their wealth. Although these stories treated Osage wealth as a national scandal, they often wildly exaggerated the actual wealth that most Osage families enjoyed. The hard work and intelligence of white people, argued this racist narrative, was making the oil fields profitable, while the Osage were merely profiting while contributing nothing. The press played upon the racial resentments of white Americans by running stories detailing the supposedly extravagant lifestyles of the Osage, complete with expensive cars, lustrous jewelry, and exotic travel. Journalists made particular hay of the fact that some Osage even dared to have white servants in their employ.
Federal law, reflecting the pervasive racist attitudes of the time, did not deem the Osage to be fully competent to enjoy the fruits of their wealth. In 1921, Congress mandated that full-blooded Osage were to have their assets “protected” by court-appointed guardians, usually drawn from the ranks of local white attorneys, politicians, merchants, and bankers.
The rationale for this paternalistic policy was that the Osage were seen as childish, helpless people who could not be trusted to manage their own financial affairs. Left to their own devices, supporters of this policy argued, the Osage would squander their wealth on foolish and impulsive purchases. Worse, the decision to subject an Osage to the burden of a guardianship was nearly always racially based—full-blooded members of the tribe were virtually guaranteed to have a guardian; those of mixed ancestry rarely were. This was one of the reasons that full-blooded Osage often sought white spouses—because their mixed-ancestry children would be more likely to be able to control their own assets.
A guardian had full control of the financial resources of an Osage—they could restrict their income from the headright, allowing them to live only on a pittance. The Osage were not free to spend their own money, as federal law restricted them from withdrawing more than a few thousand dollars per year. This had the result of keeping many of them in day-to-day poverty, despite being wealthy on paper. The Osage had no recourse to prevent this loss of financial autonomy.
The guardian system also provided ample opportunities for corruption and graft. While some guardians certainly took their positions as financial stewards seriously, many others used the position as an opportunity to embezzle and defraud the Osage. As guardian, one could use Osage money to purchase goods at one’s own business (ostensibly on behalf of their Osage wards) at inflated prices; or direct their Osage wards to only give their business to certain banks and stores, from which the guardian would receive a kickback; or borrow money cheaply from white creditors only to lend it back to their Osage victims at usurious interest rates. The financial pillaging of Osage families, in some cases, even resulted in the starvation deaths of infants and children. Before 1925, the government estimated that guardians had swindled the Osage out of a collective $8 million.
The practice of exploiting the Osage was so widespread and so deeply embedded in the culture of this part of Oklahoma that whites simply described it as “the Indian business.” Swarms of unscrupulous whites descended on Osage County, eager to take advantage of the opportunities for pilfery. These white guardians didn’t see what they were doing as acts of criminal fraud—robbing the Osage was just another way of making a living.
Not only were the Osage financially expropriated by whites—they were systematically robbed of their culture as well. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States Department of the Interior was responsible for the governance of Indian territories and greatly controlled the lives of those under its jurisdiction.
Official government policy stipulated that native peoples like the Osage were morally and culturally unfit for self-government, and needed to be taught the ways of the white man in order to fully participate in American economic and political life. In Oklahoma, the federal government ran a program of forced assimilation, the goal of which was to wipe out any traces of Osage religion and language. The economic foundations of tribal life had already been unmoored by the near-extinction of the buffalo herds of the Great Plains, which had been the main food and fuel supply of Plains Indians like the Osage. The Department of the Interior compelled the tribe to adopt agriculture. Mass starvation was the result of this involuntary social engineering, as the Osage were unprepared to survive in an economy based on sedentary farming and private property.
The program of forced assimilation was especially targeted at children. Young Osage were forced to attend schools (often Christian parochial schools), where they would be taught to reject traditional Osage religion and culture and be remade in the white man’s image. These schools were English-only—children were not allowed to speak the language of their ancestors inside the walls of these schools, which were often harsh and grim. The children were also forced to conform to white society’s ideal of the “proper” social and economic roles for men and women, roles that applied far more to a settled, agricultural economic system (like that of European-Americans) than a semi-nomadic, hunting-based economic system (like that of most American Indians). Thus, Osage boys were taught farming and carpentry; girls were taught sewing, baking, laundering, and housekeeping. Those who tried to escape were dragged back by force.
The traditional culture of the Osage began to fade away and die, as generations of children were subjected to this regime of forced cultural assimilation. By the early 1920s, speakers of the Osage tongue were dwindling, traditional modes of dress had all but disappeared, and most members of the tribe had converted to Christianity, with only faint vestiges of the old religion still observed.
It was in this context of coveted wealth, financial exploitation, and cultural change that the Osage murders took place. The Reign of Terror, as it became known, made headlines around the world and left a permanent mark on the psyche of the Osage Nation. The murders also helped to transform the practice and public image of law enforcement in the United States, providing the impetus for the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Every April, millions of tiny flowers burst into life across the vast plains of Osage County, Oklahoma. But their beauty is short-lived—In May, larger flowers bloom, killing the smaller ones by choking out their access to life-giving sun and water. This is why the Osage call May “the time of the flower-killing moon.” In 1921, May was to signal the start of a far more sinister season of death.
On May 27, 1921, the partially decomposed body of a 25-year-old Osage woman named Anna Brown was discovered in a ravine in Osage County, Oklahoma, dead from a bullet to the back of the head. Anna would be merely one of the first victims in a five-year-long Reign of Terror that would run from 1921-1926 and claim the lives of dozens (and possibly hundreds) of Osage men, women, and children.
Anna’s immediate family included her sisters, Mollie Burkhart and Rita Smith, and her mother, Elizabeth Kyle. Mollie was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhardt, a native of Texas who had moved to Osage County as a young man. Rita and Anna had also married white men.
(Shortform note: In this NPR interview, Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann explains that intermarriage between whites and Osage had become quite common by the early 20th century. Many white people from states bordering Oklahoma had been drawn to the area by the oil boom and the opportunity to get rich—by either striking oil or marrying an Osage.)
Anna had been a vivacious, outgoing young woman. In the days before her disappearance, Anna’s family had been concerned about her behavior—she had been staying out late at night at speakeasies, often in the company of Bryan Burkhart, the brother of her sister Mollie’s husband. Anna had been missing for three days, immediately sparking her family’s worst fears. They were no strangers to loss—just a few years before, a younger sister named Minnie had died of a mysterious and unexplained wasting illness.
Elements of the frontier justice system remained in these parts of rural Oklahoma in the 1920s. Police forces were not yet fully professionalized, so ordinary citizens still assumed some of the responsibilities of criminal justice, including investigation of evidence and even pursuit of suspects.
This was a relic of old American attitudes toward official police departments, dating back to the era of the Revolutionary War. Americans of that time feared that professional law enforcement agencies, like standing armies, would become instruments of oppression that would trample upon their rights and liberties. It was only with the spread of industrialization and urbanization, and public fear of the crime that was expected to follow in their wake, that professionally staffed police departments emerged.
One of the remaining vestiges of the former rough-and-tumble approach to criminal justice was the citizens inquest, to which the murder investigation of Anna Brown was subjected. In a citizens inquest, members of the community visited the scene of a homicide with the county coroner to collect evidence and record any witness testimony. The all-white members of Anna’s inquest were selected not for any particular expertise, but merely for being the first white men to arrive on the scene. The amateurish and careless examination that followed adhered to no forensic protocol. There was no canvassing of the area for footprints or shell casings and no dusting for fingerprints. To make matters worse, the presence of the large crowd contaminated and compromised the crime scene, significantly hampering the subsequent investigation.
Anna’s body was already badly decomposed when it was discovered, with the corpse emitting a nearly unbearable stench in the May heat. The primitive autopsy was an awful and grisly affair—onlookers gawked as the coroner dismembered Anna’s putrefying remains, using the most primitive of instruments and taking little care to respect her body or the mortuary practices of the Osage. Her mother and sister Mollie were present while the coroner performed his grim task on the barely recognizable body, identified only by her clothes and the gold fillings in her mouth. During the course of the gruesome procedure, Anna’s body was cut open and her cranium sliced open to extract her brain. After seeing a small bullet entrance wound at the back of the head, the coroner pronounced Anna’s death a homicide.
He was not alone in conducting the examination of Anna’s remains. He was joined by two local doctors, James and David Shoun. Although they had identified the entrance wound at the back of Anna’s head and pronounced her death a murder, they could not locate the bullet. Also on the scene was the sheriff of Osage County, a man named Harve Freas.
Freas represented the traditional, informal approach to law enforcement that was still the practice’s guiding philosophy in this remote region of the United States at this time. He, like many rural sheriffs, was not a professionally trained law enforcement official. He was a rugged frontiersman, a relic of the Old West, in which so-called “lawmen” were little more than criminals themselves. These lawmen tended to have little regard for the law itself, frequently administering violence while turning a blind eye to gambling and bootlegging activities. Freas was cut from this cloth, having connections to known outlaw figures in the area.
Mollie and her family were devastated by the loss of Anna. Mollie took the lead in organizing her sister’s funeral, incorporating elements of both Catholic and Osage funerary tradition. Unfortunately, because Anna’s body was in such a state of decomposition (not to mention having been manhandled by the Shoun brothers and the coroner during the autopsy), Mollie was unable to paint her sister’s face—which, according to Osage religious rites, would mean that Anna’s spirit would be lost. Adding insult to injury, the family was gouged by the undertaker, who charged them the exorbitant rate of $1,450 for Mollie’s casket, $80,000 in today’s dollars.
But Anna’s murder was to be just the beginning. About a week after her body was discovered, another Osage victim was found near an oil rig. This time, the corpse belonged to a man named Charles Whitehorn, who had been missing for about two weeks. Whitehorn was a well-known and popular figure in Osage County, married to a half-white, half-Cheyenne woman. Like Anna Brown, he had been shot in the head—and the bullets appeared to be the same kind as the ones that had killed Anna Brown.
The execution-style murders of two Osage, coming so quickly on the heels of one another, became a prominent story in the local news, as speculation began to mount about who could be responsible. The similar method of killing suggested a link between the two murders, as did their proximity in space and time.
Because she spoke English and was married to a white man, Mollie became the family’s natural liaison with the white authorities. But this was also due to the fact that she wasn’t married to just any white man. Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, was the nephew of William Hale, one of the most prominent figures in Osage County.
Hale was a widely respected businessman and influential force in the county, having made his fortune in the cattle business. Known as the “King of the Osage Hills,” Hale’s business interests were firmly entrenched throughout the county. He had powerful political connections and was even a reserve deputy sheriff in the town of Fairfax. The county prosecutor himself owed his election to Hale.
In an era when many white authority figures used their status to exploit and abuse the Osage, Hale positioned himself as a benevolent, if somewhat paternal, figure. His philanthropy had supported the establishment of charities, schools, and hospitals for the Osage, and he vowed to Mollie and her mother that he would see justice done for Anna.
Mollie testified to the local justice of the peace that she had last seen Anna in the company of her brother-in-law, Bryan Burkhart. Bryan testified that he had dropped Anna off at home early in the evening, after which he’d gone back into town. The authorities even briefly detained both Bryan and Ernest Burkhart, though the evidence against them at this time was purely circumstantial and they were soon released.
But there were competing theories about who the murderer could be, given the chaos and lawlessness that defined Osage County. The undeveloped wilderness of the area made it a prominent hideout for all manner of bandits, fugitives, and outlaws. Moreover, many unscrupulous characters had been drawn to the area by the oil money, making the county a hotbed of forgers, scam artists, and gangs of armed robbers.
In this environment, there was no shortage of red herrings, as unsavory informants with ulterior motives provided investigators with false leads. One man, a convicted and imprisoned forger, initially confessed to the crime. He claimed that he had been paid by Anna’s ex-husband to murder her and dump her body in the ravine. But officials quickly concluded that the man’s confession was false—he hadn’t been in the county at the time and had had no known contact with the ex-husband, who also had a proven alibi. The forger later confessed that he had made his story up, hoping to secure better prison conditions.
Other rumors surfaced that Anna’s slaying was part of a love triangle gone bad, with some of these rumors even positing a romantic relationship between Anna Brown and the other murder victim, Charles Whitehorn. Investigators pursued these leads, but they, too, proved to be lies.
Investigators thought they had a break in the case when they discovered that someone had placed a phone call to Anna’s house on the night she disappeared, with the call coming from a business in the nearby town of Ralston. But no operator in Ralston had any record of such a call. Authorities suspected that someone had arranged to have the phone records falsified to throw investigators off.
By July 1921, the local authorities wrapped up the investigation, concluding that Anna was murdered by “parties unknown.” They had surrendered the quest for justice for Anna. And that same month, another tragedy befell Mollie Brown when her mother, Lizzie, died from her wasting illness, so similar to how Minnie had died a few years before—and to how many other healthy Osage seemed to have died of unexplained wasting sicknesses in recent months.
Bill Smith, a white man and the husband of Mollie’s sister, Rita, found the circumstances of Lizzie’s death to be highly suspicious. He began to believe that she and other Osage had been deliberately poisoned, and that her death was linked to those of Anna Brown and Charles Whitehorn.
The criminal justice system in Oklahoma was hopelessly corrupt, incompetent, and amateurish at this time. Sheriff Freas, nominally in charge of the murder investigations, was removed by the state attorney general shortly after the murders for his corrupt dealings with bootleggers and gamblers.
Given this sorry state of affairs, private investigators often stepped in to fill the void. But the private investigators were little better, and quite possibly worse. Many agents of the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency were criminals themselves, with no respect for people’s civil liberties or for proper protocol in criminal investigations. Many, similarly, used their position to extort and terrorize the people they were supposed to be protecting.
Scott Mathis, a local merchant who was also serving as the administrator of Anna’s estate (Anna having been deemed a financial “incompetent” by the government), hired a private investigator named William J. Burns to look into the Osage murders. Unfortunately, Burns proved to be just another in a long line of hustlers, scam artists, and charlatans, an unscrupulous character who was known to rig juries and break into law offices to steal evidence. He and his team of investigators pursued several false leads, with no results. The investigator hired by William Hale, a shadowy figure who went by the name of “Pike,” likewise failed to make any headway.
Think about how bias and prejudice shape our world.
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt you needed to hide or tone down some part of your identity, as the Osage were forced to? Briefly describe the situation.
How did you respond?
How would you resist pressure to subsume your identity in future situations?
In February 1922, nine months after the bodies of Anna Brown and Charles Whitehorn were discovered, a fit and healthy 29-year-old Osage man named William Stepson suddenly dropped dead. Authorities concluded that he had died of strychnine poisoning. Poison was an ideal way to commit murder in a remote locale like Osage County, with incompetent professional law enforcement professionals and a coroner untrained in forensics, without access to a crime lab.
The spate of mysterious poisonings of Osage men and women continued into July 1923. The community was, rightly, terrified. These were clearly not random homicides—the tribe was clearly being targeted by a well-orchestrated and coordinated campaign of murder. In their distress and desperation, the Osage prevailed upon a white oilman named Barney McBride to journey to Washington, D.C. and use his connections there to lobby the federal government to intercede in the case directly. McBridge was a trusted and benevolent figure among the Osage, and they believed he could intercede effectively on their behalf.
But McBride himself fell victim to the murderous conspiracy, even in faraway Washington, D.C. In August 1922, he was found dead in a culvert in Maryland, a short distance from the capital. Now, the Osage murders were national news. The Washington Post headline blared: “CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS.”
In February 1923, the body of a 40-year-old Osage man named Henry Roan was found slumped behind the steering wheel of a Buick, a few miles outside of Fairfax. Roan had been shot in the back of the head. Local authorities notified William Hale, whom Roan had considered a close friend and benefactor. In fact, Hale was the benefactor on Roan’s $25,000 life insurance policy. Hale was present when another gruesome citizens inquest and autopsy was performed on Roan’s remains. Of course, Hale didn’t reveal the existence of the life insurance policy—which had given him a direct financial interest in Roan’s death.
Roan’s death was shocking to Mollie, who had just given birth to her third child—a girl named Anna. Roan had briefly been Mollie’s husband, back in 1902, before she’d met Ernest. As it was a traditional Osage marriage, there was no legal record of it, but Mollie still had a deep and personal connection to Roan. She had never told Ernest about this marriage, however, and chose to keep her connection to this latest murder a secret.
The murder of Roan created an atmosphere of terror and paranoia that ripped the community apart. People began to suspect their neighbors, friends, and even family of being involved in the deadly conspiracy. Bill Smith, Mollie’s brother-in-law, had been looking into the killings on his own, unable to shake the suspicion that his mother-in-law, Lizzie, had been poisoned.
He and his wife Rita, Mollie’s sister, began to receive threats and intimidating “warnings” as Bill appeared to get closer to the truth, especially after he discovered a connection between Roan’s murder and local criminal kingpin and bootlegger Henry Grammer. It seemed that that Roan had told people he was headed to Grammer’s ranch to get some illegal whiskey right before he disappeared—and that Anna Burkhart had often visited Grammer’s ranch as well. Bill and Rita Smith fled their home in early 1923, believing that they were being targeted. Bill confided to his friends that he “didn’t expect to live long.”
On March 10, 1923, the house that Bill and Rita Smith had moved into exploded in a thunderous blast, just before three o’clock in the morning. Neighbors heard the explosion for miles around, with the force of the blast blowing out windows in the neighboring town of Fairfax. Nothing remained of the house but twisted metal and burnt furniture.
A party of searchers, including Ernest Burkhart, arrived on the scene and found Bill Smith, burnt nearly beyond recognition. Rita’s mangled and charred remains were pulled from the rubble. The body of their young servant, Nettie Brookshire, was never found—most likely, her body entirely melted away in the blast, leaving no remains.
Bill recovered consciousness two days later, in unbearable physical agony and emotional despair upon learning of his wife’s death. The doctor David Shoun, one of the two brothers who had presided over the autopsy of Anna Brown, claimed that Bill revealed no details of what he knew about the explosion or the murders that had preceded it before his death on March 14.
By this time, the spate of killings had become known as the Osage Reign of Terror. In April 1923, the Governor of Oklahoma sent the top state investigator, Herman Fox Davis, to Osage County. Some Osage held out hope that an outside agent would get better results than the local authorities. But Davis proved to be just the latest in a long line of corrupt and incompetent state and local law enforcement officials. Almost immediately after arriving in Osage County, he was caught taking a bribe from the operator of a local gambling ring. Davis would be convicted of bribery in June 1923.
But there were still white people who sought to obtain justice for the terrorized Osage. In June 1923, a local attorney named W.W. Vaughan spoke to an Osage friend of his named George Bigheart, who was in an Oklahoma City hospital, dying from what both men suspected was poisoning. At this meeting, Bigheart relayed critical information that he had obtained about the killings and passed along some documents that would point to those responsible for them. Vaughan stayed at Bigheart’s side until Bigheart finally passed away. Vaughan then called the Osage County sheriff, who had replaced the disgraced Freas, to tell him that he had new information on the case and was taking the first train back to the county to fully brief the authorities.
But Vaughan never got to share what he’d heard from Bigheart. The attorney’s body was found near the railroad tracks three days after he placed this call to the sheriff. He had been strangled to death, stripped naked, and thrown from the train. The documents he’d obtained from Bigheart were gone.
In the wake of the Smith bombing, Mollie’s situation became even more fraught. Mollie was convinced that there was a well-orchestrated plot afoot to eliminate her family, and that she would be the next target. She became a recluse, shuttering her windows and closing her home to guests. In this state of absolute terror, she even gave her new baby, Anna, to a relative to raise. Most troublingly, she was in ill health—she was a diabetic, and her condition appeared to be getting worse.
In response, the ever-present local doctors, the brothers David and James Shoun, visited Mollie regularly to give her injections of what they claimed was insulin. But the authorities weren’t so sure that Mollie was really sick. An anonymous letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs warned that Mollie’s life was in grave danger. Mollie wasn’t sick with diabetes—like George Bigheart, William Stepson, and her own mother, she was being poisoned. The only question was who was responsible.
By 1923, more than two years into the Reign of Terror, 24 lay dead. Even the local justice of the peace and county sheriff were terrified and they refused to open up new inquests into the murders. The campaign of terror looked to have won a complete victory over the forces of law and order.
By now, it was clear to the Osage that the local authorities were totally unable to deal with the situation. In 1923, the Tribal Council drafted a written appeal to U.S. Senator Charles Curtis, who was himself part-Osage.
(Shortform note: Charles Curtis would later serve one term as Vice President of the United States under President Herbert Hoover. He is, to-date, the only person of Native American ancestry to hold the office.)
Eventually, the Bureau of Investigation, a then-obscure branch of the federal Department of Justice, sent agents into Osage County to investigate the ongoing slaughter. The Bureau, outrageously, charged the tribe $20,000 for its services—$300,000 in today’s money. Even worse, they badly bungled the case when they released from prison a convicted bank robber named Blackie Thompson, whom they hoped would help the investigation by working as an undercover informant. Unfortunately, Blackie went on a crime spree upon his release, robbing a bank and killing a police officer, offenses for which he was captured and re-imprisoned.
The entire ordeal was another failure of law enforcement in Osage County, and a fiasco for the Bureau. It seemed there was little hope of justice for the Osage.
In the summer of 1925, Tom White was the special agent in charge of the Bureau’s Houston office. White straddled two worlds—on the one hand, he was an old-style lawman with no formal police training, a former Texas Ranger who had spent most of his career pursuing bandits on horseback throughout the Texas frontier, armed with a six-shooter. With his Stetson hat, he even looked like a caricature of the mythical Western lawman, still known to carry his trusty six-shooter when he was on dangerous assignments with the Bureau.
But on the other hand, despite his rough-and-tumble background, Tom had a reputation as a restrained, methodical investigator. Even during his days with the Rangers, a force well-known for its shoot-first methods, Tom had been different. He had discovered that careful observation and a methodical approach were more effective in catching criminals than running around the countryside, guns blazing. Tom recognized that many of his fellow Rangers were little more than violent criminals with badges and saw that it was a very fine distinction between a good man and a bad one. He knew that it was dangerous for one man to have the unrestrained ability to take a life, even if he was acting with the sanction of the law.
Tom’s father, Emmett, had been a sheriff in the wild land of Central Texas in the late 19th century. In those days, local sheriffs often were responsible for running the county jail and performing the executions of convicted criminals—Tom first saw his father hang a man from the gallows in 1894, when he was just an adolescent. The family lived next door to the jail, which held all manner of violent criminals, including murderers, rapists, arsonists, and robbers. Despite this harsh environment, Emmett did what he could to ensure relatively humane treatment of the prisoners in his custody and took a harsh stance toward anyone in the county who attempted to mete out vigilante justice—which, in Texas, often meant lynchings of black people.
Tom’s career in law enforcement was relatively bloodless, and he prided himself on the fact that he had never killed anyone in the line of duty, a rarity for an officer of his time and place. His approach to law enforcement was more modern and less bloodthirsty than his background would have suggested, and it earned him a strong reputation within the Bureau of Investigation.
Tom had joined the Bureau of Investigation in 1917, less than a decade after its creation. At the time, the Bureau’s jurisdiction was limited to a random assortment of crimes, including banking violations, interstate car theft, escapes by federal convicts, and, most importantly for the Osage case, crimes on Indian reservations.
In its early years, the Bureau was beset by a reputation for corruption and was embroiled in the scandals that had rocked the administration of President Warren G. Harding. With its propensity for accepting bribes and enabling all manner of corruption, it became known in the press of the early 1920s as “The Department of Easy Virtue.” In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge’s Attorney General, Harlan Fiske Stone, appointed the 29-year old J. Edgar Hoover to head up the Bureau. His post was meant to be temporary, with a mandate to clean up the agency and restore its tarnished public reputation—but Hoover was to remain in his position until his death in 1972, nearly half a century later.
Over the years, Hoover would amass enormous bureaucratic power, with his reign spanning eight presidencies. The Bureau of Investigation, which, in 1935, was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), would eventually come to operate as a state-within-a-state, immune from scrutiny or accountability by elected officials of either major U.S. political party. With its unmatched intelligence-gathering capabilities, the FBI would blackmail politicians and harass and intimidate its perceived enemies—often including alleged Communist sympathizers and civil rights activists.
But all that lay in the future. In 1925, Hoover was a mid-level bureaucrat, in charge of an obscure federal agency that had earned a sordid reputation for corruption and incompetence. That summer, Hoover summoned Tom White to headquarters in Washington, D.C. to assign him to the Osage case. Hoover had initially been leery of taking on the case again, especially after the Blackie Thompson catastrophe. He had strived to keep the Bureau’s involvement in the Osage case out of the press, fearing it would only amplify public scorn. But the affair was a growing scandal, one which threatened to engulf the Bureau and taint Hoover’s career. He was under great political pressure to correct the situation.
Hoover was a relentlessly ambitious figure, and he saw in the Osage case an opportunity to flex his agency’s muscle and impose his modern vision of law enforcement. He would use the Osage murders to build up the organization that would, in 1935, become the all-powerful FBI and change the image of American law enforcement, from one of rugged frontier lawmen to sober, rational, scientific, and professional investigative agents.
A product of the reform-minded Progressive Era of American governance, Hoover was obsessed with rules, procedure, and efficiency, running his agency with an almost fanatical zeal and exercising exacting control over his agents’ behavior. He demanded precision and consistency and required all agents to file their typed reports within a standardized system—a culture shock to the many cowboys and frontiersmen whom the Bureau still employed at this time. He had a concrete idea of how an agent ought to look and behave—they should be white, clinical and lawyerly in demeanor, dressed in dark suits, neckties, and black polished shoes. His ideal was a far cry from the cowboy hat-wearing, six-gun-shooting county sheriff of popular imagination.
Hoover now wanted Tom, an experienced agent and one of the last of the old-fashioned frontier lawmen, to head up the Osage investigation. It was an assignment fraught with danger for both men: failure could cost Hoover his job; it could cost Tom his life.
Tom White headed to the Oklahoma City field office in 1925 to lead the Osage investigation. Upon examining the case, he saw patterns in the killings: all were of wealthy Osage or their benefactors, and three (Anna Brown, Rita Smith, and, their mother, Lizzie) were direct blood relatives.
Tom methodically ruled out many of the suspects up to that point, including Anna’s ex-husband, by corroborating their alibis. One witness, a young Kaw Indian woman, claimed that another woman named Rose Osage had told her that she’d murdered Anna Brown as revenge for attempting to seduce her boyfriend, a man named Joe Allen. According to the Kaw Indian’s signed statement, Rose and Joe had shot Anna in the back of the head and then dragged the body to the ravine where it was discovered.
But this account failed to match the evidence at the crime scene—Anna’s body showed no signs of having been moved. The Kaw woman admitted that she was lying, and that she’d been coerced into signing her false statement by a strange white man who’d showed up at her house. Whoever the conspirators were, they were manufacturing evidence to derail the investigation.
The case was bewildering. The methods of killing were varied: some victims were poisoned, others were strangled, others shot. This strongly suggested that the murders were the work of more than one killer. And the unreliability of sources, reluctance of witnesses to come forward, and blatant corruption of local law enforcement officials made pursuing leads a bewildering exercise. It was near-impossible to separate fact from hearsay. One of the first red flags for Tom was the fact that the Shoun brothers had failed to locate the bullet that killed Anna Brown. He began to suspect that the brothers (who were also caring for Anna’s sister, Mollie) had stolen the bullet during the course of the autopsy.
To help him navigate this rough-and-tumble world, Tom recruited a team of agents who were well-versed in the frontier world and understood the dangers they would be facing. These men went undercover in Osage County, ingratiating themselves with local power brokers and figures of influence—including William Hale.
By July 1925, Tom began to think Bryan Burkhart, brother of Ernest Burkhart (Mollie’s husband) and brother-in-law to Mollie and Rita, was the most likely perpetrator of Anna’s murder. He was the last person to have seen her alive when he dropped her off back home the evening she disappeared. Tom believed this, even though Bryan’s alibi was well-corroborated by people who claimed to have been in his company at the time of the killing, including his brother Ernest and his uncle, William Hale.
But Tom was undaunted, choosing to pursue a lead that had been buried by the original investigators. A group of men claimed to have seen Bryan driving a car with Anna later that evening in the nearby town of Ralston, after the time when he’d testified that he dropped her off at home. Several of these men came forward on the record that they had seen the pair, even though they recognized that they were putting themselves in mortal danger by doing so.
It appeared that Bryan had picked Anna up later, after taking her home, and that he had committed perjury in his original testimony. Pursuing the lead further, Tom spoke with multiple witnesses who now claimed to have seen Anna and Tom together at various times that evening, in the company of a mysterious “third man.” The pair were last seen at 3 a.m, during which Bryan brusquely ushered Anna out of a speakeasy and into his car. This new timeline shattered Bryan’s alibi.
Tom needed to identify who this unknown man was who had been with the couple the night Anna disappeared. Through his sources, he learned that Pike, the shadowy investigator originally engaged by William Hale back in 1921, claimed to know the identity of this third man. But Pike refused to come forward and was only located when he was arrested trying to commit a highway robbery.
Under interrogation, Pike revealed that he had not been hired by WiIliam Hale and Bryan Burkhart to help the original investigation—he had been hired to destroy it by manufacturing evidence and generating false leads. One of the tasks he undertook in his mission to subvert justice was to conceal Bryan’s true whereabouts on the night of Anna’s murder. He also added that Ernest Burkhart was sometimes present with his brother and uncle when these plans were discussed.
If what Pike was saying was true, then the supposedly benevolent William Hale was guilty of obstruction of justice in a murder case. The only question was whether Hale had been acting solely to protect his nephew Bryan from the law, or whether he had been involved in orchestrating Anna’s murder—and possibly dozens of others. It also implicated Ernest Burkhart. Was Ernest guilty of conspiring to kill his wife’s sister, and possibly poisoning Mollie herself? And if so, what was the motive?
In September 1925, Tom spoke to the nurse who had been on duty the night Bill Smith died, following the explosion at his house. She revealed that Bill had spoken with his lawyer and with the brothers (and doctors) David and James Shoun shortly before he died, and that they had commanded her to leave the room. White was already suspicious of the brothers, suspecting them of stealing the bullet that killed Anna White during her autopsy.
Although neither the Shoun brothers nor the lawyer gave up much when questioned, Smith’s lawyer did reveal that Smith had told him that he considered Ernest Burkhart and William Hale to be enemies. Tom also learned that James Shoun had been named the administrator of Rita Smith’s estate at this clandestine bedside meeting, a position that would have put him in a lucrative position to pillage her wealth. Clearly, the Shoun brothers had summoned Smith’s attorney to this meeting to have Smith sign this paperwork surrendering his murdered wife’s estate into their hands, shortly before expiring himself. Given his state, there was no way Smith had done this of rational and sound mind.
Tom was getting close to identifying William Hale as the mastermind. After interviewing more witnesses, he learned that Hale was the beneficiary of the murdered Henry Roan’s $25,000 life insurance policy. Obviously, Hale had a clear-cut financial interest in Roan’s death. And after speaking with the insurance salesman who had sold Hale the policy, Tom learned that Hale had forged a creditor’s note to make it look like he had loaned Roan money, and that the policy was merely collateral for this debt. After Roan’s murder, Hale had even schemed to frame another man (who had been having an affair with Roan’s wife) for the killing.
The Osage Tribal Council had decreed that each member of the tribe was to receive an equal share of the royalties from the oil money, known as headrights. Individuals were not permitted to buy or sell headrights—this was done in an attempt to keep the oil money in Osage hands. But they could be inherited. An Osage who suffered many deaths in their family could find himself or herself the owner of multiple headrights.
As he studied the probate records, Tom discovered that many headrights had come into the possession of Mollie Burkhart, married to Ernest Burkhart, nephew of William Hale. Ernest was known to be highly influenced by his domineering uncle. When all of this money came to Mollie, it would be easy for Hale to exercise control of it through his nephew—though it would be even easier if Mollie were to be killed, too.
This explained the precise pattern and order of deaths in Mollie’s family. The divorced and childless Anna had been the first to be eliminated, with her headright going to her mother Lizzie. Killing Anna first ensured that her assets would not be divided up between multiple heirs. Lizzie herself was the next target, having willed her headrights to Mollie and Rita, her surviving daughters.
This also explained why the next victims, Bill and Rita Smith, had died in a bombing attack, which was an unusual method of killing. In fact, the Smith murders were done this way because it was critical that the two died at the same time. If only Rita had died, her headrights would have gone to her husband Bill Smith. But because the couple died mere days apart, Rita’s headright reverted to her only surviving heir—Mollie. It all began to make sense as the outlines of the murderous plot became clear to Tom White. By conspiring to have all the members of Mollie’s family killed, Hale was maneuvering to have all their headrights bequeathed to her. Once Mollie herself was murdered, the oil wealth would be his to exploit.
Despite the progress Tom White had made in Osage County (which he had dutifully reported to the Bureau), J. Edgar Hoover was growing impatient with the state of the case by fall 1925. He wanted convictions and the glowing headlines they would bring. By this time, a full-fledged diaspora was taking place within the Osage community. Families fled the county and state in terror. Some even fled the United States altogether, choosing to settle in Canada or Mexico.
Tom knew that he would never be able to convict Hale and his conspirators in Osage County. Hale was too politically and financially connected within the white community for 12 white jurors to be found who would be willing to render a guilty verdict on him, especially in a case involving the murder of American Indians. Also, his case was still circumstantial. He needed corroboration from people who had actually been involved in the conspiracy.
Through a local attorney, Tom arranged a meeting with the stickup man Dick Gregg, known as a member of the fearsome Al Spencer gang. At that time, Gregg was serving a sentence in a Kansas penitentiary for armed robbery. Gregg agreed to meet with Tom White and share what he knew, in exchange for a possible sentence reduction.
At his meeting with Tom White, Gregg revealed that Hale had paid the Spencer gang $2,000 to murder Bill and Rita Smith. Gregg claimed that he had refused this assignment, deeming the contract killing of a woman to be dishonorable, even by outlaw standards. He also mentioned the name of another associate, Curley Johnson, who had knowledge of the Smith slayings. But Johnson, Tom learned, had died—apparently of alcohol poisoning, though it was quite possible he had been another victim of the Reign of Terror. Another potential witness, the bootlegger Henry Grammer, with whom Hale had been overheard talking about the conspiracy, had died in a car accident in June 1923.
Through another informant, Tom discovered that an outlaw named Asa Kirby had been responsible for rigging the charges that killed Bill and Rita. But Kirby was also unable to testify. Two weeks after Grammer’s death, he had been killed by a store owner during an attempted burglary. It came as no surprise to Tom to learn who had tipped off the store owner about the break-in—William Hale.
The conspiracy was eating its own. It was clear that Hale was systematically killing anyone who had been involved in the Osage murders and might be able to implicate him.
In October 1925, White received a new tip, this time from a prisoner in the Oklahoma state penitentiary named Burt Lawson. Lawson claimed that his wife had carried on an affair with Bill Smith, while he had been working as Smith’s ranch hand. His jealousy and bitterness toward Bill Smith had made him an easy target when the Hale conspiracy came to recruit him. Lawson claimed that, in early 1921, Ernest Burkhart and William Hale had offered him $5,000 to place the fuse under the Smith house that set off the explosion. Hale had even provided him with the tools for making the bomb, including the nitroglycerin and the coiled fuse. Lawson, after some pressure by Hale, agreed to set up the explosive device and detonate it. He had waited until he was sure Bill and Rita were asleep and then lit the fuse, watching the house blow up.
This was a genuine break in the case, a confession from an eyewitness who could directly implicate Hale. But Tom knew he had to act quick, because Hale’s murderous plot was getting closer and closer to succeeding. Mollie Burkhart was getting sicker and sicker, with the Shoun brothers’ “treatment” of her diabetes only making her condition worse. It seemed just a matter of time before she died, leaving her headright—and the accumulated headrights of all the other Osage murder victims—in her husband Ernest’s possession, in which position Hale would easily be able to exploit them. Mollie desperately needed to be moved to a hospital, away from the Shoun brothers and away from the machinations of her husband and his family.
In January 1926, U.S. Marshals arrested Ernest Burkhart. Hale, meanwhile, confidently and politely strolled in to the county sheriff’s office to surrender. In conversations with reporters after being taken into custody, Hale was cordial and polite but refused to discuss anything about the case.
White knew that he needed to “break” Ernest and get him to turn on his uncle. Without a confession from Ernest, his case was weak—all he had was jailhouse testimony from Burt Lawson, who may well have been lying. Things got worse when Hale’s attorneys produced a telegram signed by Hale in Texas at the time of the Smith bombing, proving that he couldn’t have been in Osage County at the time. This was a serious threat to the case and a potential source of major embarrassment for the Bureau. And J. Edgar Hoover would undoubtedly take out his wrath on Tom White if the case collapsed.
In his quest to shore up the case, Tom White turned to the man who had caused so much grief and embarrassment for the Bureau during its original investigation: the outlaw Blackie Thompson. Blackie Thompson had been released from prison by the Bureau in 1923 to work undercover and help solve the Osage murders. Instead, Blackie had gone on a criminal rampage, robbing a bank and slaying a police officer. By 1926, he was back in prison.
But White suspected that, for all his misdeeds and the Bureau’s disastrous bungling, Blackie really did have valuable information. So he arranged to have Blackie transferred to the federal prison in Guthrie, Oklahoma where he could be interrogated. White’s team told Blackie that his cooperation would not result in any reduction of his current prison sentence—thus, eliminating much of the convict’s incentive to lie. Upon questioning, Blackie revealed to federal agents that Hale and Burkhart had engaged him and the now-deceased Curley Johnson to murder Bill and Rita Smith. The only reason Blackie had never gone through with it was that he had been arrested and imprisoned for car theft before he had the chance to participate in the plot.
The agents used Blackie’s account to break Ernest Burkhart. They dramatically brought the two together in a room at the jail where Burkhart was being held, where Blackie told Ernest that he had shared everything he knew with the agents. Ernest was clearly scared and defeated. He finally confessed to Tom White, admitting that Hale had tasked him with recruiting the operatives to blow up the Smith house. Burkhart said that Asa Kirby (recruited through the bootlegger Henry Grammer) had actually made the bomb and ignited the fuse, not Burt Lawson—Lawson, like so many jailhouse informants throughout the case, likely in the hopes of getting his sentence reduced. He also revealed that Hale had travelled with Grammer to Texas on the day of the bombing, with the express purpose of manufacturing an alibi.
Ernest also linked Hale directly to the murder of Henry Roan, stating that a contract killer named John Ramsey (another associate of Grammer) had been hired to kill him. Agents in the field immediately apprehended Ramsey, brought him into custody and presented him with Burkhart’s signed confession. Ramsey, in turn, confessed to getting Roan drunk and shooting him in the back of the head.
Ernest, finally, gave key information about the murder of Anna Brown. He said that the mysterious “third man” spotted with Anna and his brother, Bryan Burkhart, on the last night Anna was seen alive was Kelsie Morrison—a man who was later engaged by the Bureau to work as an undercover operative. Ernest said that Morrison was, in fact, the man who had put the bullet in Anna Brown. All the awful pieces of the puzzle were finally coming together.
With her own husband now an admitted party to a plot to murder her entire family, Mollie Burkhart’s life was clearly in danger. She was moved to a hospital in Pawhuska. Once she was away from her husband and his family (and the duplicitous Shoun brothers), her condition markedly improved. Tom White’s team hauled the Shoun brothers in for questioning. But neither man admitted to knowing anything about the murders and both denied administering poison to Mollie. Mollie herself could not accept the idea that her own husband was a key player in the murder of her sisters.
With Burkhart and Ramsey’s confessions in the books, Tom decided that it was time to talk to Hale. And while White’s agents couldn’t conclusively link Hale to all 24 Osage murders from 1921-1926, they could at least prove that he had benefited financially from many of them, including that of George Bigheart. But the calm and confident Hale was entirely unperturbed by the mounting evidence against him and refused to yield anything to the investigators. He simply told them that he was prepared to have his day in court and fight the charges.
The national press covered the murders and the ensuing trial with a grisly fascination, often treating it as an entertaining spectacle, rather than as a tragedy defined by the exploitation and grief of a long-suffering and persecuted people. For their part, the Osage simply wanted to see justice done and do everything in their power to ensure that Hale’s powerful influence wouldn’t tamper with the trial.
But this was a tall order. The Oklahoma state judicial system was wracked with corruption, with judges and prosecutors widely known to take bribes from wealthy defendants. A man like William Hale would easily be able to manipulate the system. White understood that his case was dead if he had to take it to state court. His only chance of securing a conviction was to take the case into federal court.
But because most of the surface land allotted to the Osage had already been sold to whites (the Osage retained the oil and minerals underneath), most of these murders had thus taken place on land that was under Oklahoma’s jurisdiction. There was one exception, however: the murder of Henry Roan, whose body had been discovered on Osage-controlled territory, and, theoretically, eligible for federal prosecution. This was the case they decided to bring Hale up on. But here, White and his team suffered another setback when a U.S. district court judge ruled, on technical grounds, that the Roan case had to be tried in state court.
Fortunately, White had also worked with the Oklahoma state attorney general to draft murder charges on the Smith bombing for use in state court, in the event that the federal government was found to be lacking jurisdiction. Hale and Ramsey were immediately re-arrested and put on trial for the murder of Bill and Rita Smith. Still, the trial would now be held in Hale’s domain of Osage County, presenting the prosecution with a steep uphill battle. The government assembled an all-star legal team for the prosecution, while Hale hired his own team of high-powered attorneys, which he was confident would help him defeat the charges.
The trial was devastating for Mollie, as she learned more about the plot to eliminate her family. The national press, which avidly covered the case, refused to respect her privacy, circulating photos of her around the country and generally portraying her as an ignorant, backwoods Osage. Hale, meanwhile, packed the gallery with his supporters, who would hoot and cheer at every motion made by the defense and jeer and boo the prosecution. It brought a circus-like atmosphere to the trial and amply demonstrated the difficulties of bringing a white man to justice for crimes against an Osage Indian.
During the trial, Hale’s team lied and blatantly tampered with the witness Ernest Burkhart and attempted to intimidate him into silence. Shockingly, the judge allowed all of this to happen in open court. On one occasion, Hale openly berated Burkhart personally, in full view of the judge and jury. Tom White was outraged and appalled by the utter brazenness and arrogance of Hale’s conduct.
Now, under the pressure of Hale’s backroom scheming, Ernest recanted his testimony, claiming that he knew nothing about the murders and taking the stand as a witness for the defense instead of the prosecution. Outrageously, he claimed that Tom White’s agents had only obtained his confession through torture—a lie that was echoed by Hale and Ramsey. White’s onetime star witness was being used against him.
Although J. Edgar Hoover back in Washington knew these charges against the Bureau to be totally baseless, he was fearful of anything that might bring further embarrassment or scandal to the Bureau. Behind the scenes, there was mounting political pressure to sack White and his team.
To bolster their position against Hale, the prosecution decided to first seek a conviction of Ernest Burkhart. With Ernest recanting, however, their case looked like it was falling apart. But the prosecution had one more card to play: Kelsie Morrison, the notorious bootlegger, outlaw, onetime Bureau informant, and the man whom Ernest had fingered as Anna Brown’s killer. The prosecutor brought Morrison in to take the stand. This time, Morrison decided to cooperate with the government against his former employer, Hale. Morrison confessed in open court that he had been recruited by Hale to help eliminate Mollie’s entire family. He then proceeded to narrate the awful details of Anna’s final moments.
He and Bryan Burkhart had gotten Anna drunk at a speakeasy before driving her out to Three Mile Creek. Bryan’s wife, Cole (who corroborated all the details of Morrison’s testimony) waited in the parked car to stand lookout. They then dragged the inebriated Anna down into the ravine. Bryan propped her up on a rock and held her still while Morrison shot her in the back of the head—with a gun that had been provided by Hale.
Ernest Burkhart could now see the tide turning in the case. On June 9, 1926, he notified the prosecutors that he wished to change his plea again, this time to “guilty.” He read a statement before the judge and jury that he had, in fact, hired Kirby to blow up Rita and Bill Smith’s house and admitted that his story about torture at the hands of federal agents was a fabrication.
Accordingly, Ernest Burkhart was sentenced on June 21, 1926 to life imprisonment. For Mollie, it was a day of devastation. During the trial, she had been ostracized by everyone she knew, both white and Osage. Her now four-year-old-daughter Anna, whom she had sent to live with a relative out of fear for her safety, had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Although there was no evidence of foul play in this latest awful tragedy in Mollie’s life, the Osage had come to regard every death as inherently suspicious. Now, Mollie learned that her beloved husband had conspired to murder her sisters and brother-in-law.
The conviction of Ernest Burkhart, especially in state court, was certainly a victory for White and his team. But the case was far from over. They still needed to put Hale, Bryan Burkhart, and John Ramsey behind bars. But they did receive one bit of good news in this uphill battle: the U.S. Supreme Court had finally ruled that Henry Roan’s murder had been on federal land after all, and thus Hale and his henchmen could be tried in federal court.
On July 29, 1926, Hale was put on trial for aiding and abetting the murder of Henry Roan, while Ramsey was charged with the killing itself. As the trial unfolded, the jury learned that the pair had originally plotted to kill Roan through the slow administration of poisoned moonshine—confirming to the Osage community that many of the slow, wasting deaths of their friends and family (likely including Mollie’s mother, Lizzie, and her other sister, Minnie) had actually been deliberate poisonings.
The prosecutor showcased to the jury the orgy of murder and mayhem that Hale had orchestrated for over five years. He said that Hale had turned the slaughter of wealthy Osage tribe members into a profitable business, turning men, women, and children into the prey of whites. But to the dismay of the prosecution and Tom White, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict—the hung jury was the product of Hale’s campaign of bribery, intimidation, and tampering.
The case against Hale and Ramsey would have to be retried. This time, Bureau agents would safeguard the jury, hoping to minimize the possibility of Hale corrupting or intimidating them. During this second trial, Hale’s attorneys called Mollie to the stand and forced her to admit that she had once been married, albeit briefly, to Roan. They implied that Mollie’s now-incarcerated husband, Ernest Burkhart, had killed Roan out of jealousy and that the murder had had nothing to do with Hale.
But this time, the tricks and lies did not work. On October 29, 1926, both Hale and Ramsey were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Neither man made any statement upon the conviction and sentencing. The next year, Morrison was convicted of Anna’s murder, although Bryan Burkhart was ultimately given immunity by the prosecution.
In response to the murders, the Osage Tribal Council persuaded Congress to pass a law barring anyone who was not at least half-Osage from inheriting a headright, removing some of the incentive for whites to murder them. Mollie divorced Ernest shortly after he was sent to prison, revolted and outraged by what he and his family had done. Treacherously, many of the co-conspirators—including Bryan and Ernest Burkhart, Morrison, and Hale—had been among the crowd of onlookers when Anna’s body was discovered, comforting Mollie in her hour of need. Little did Mollie know that she was being comforted by blood-stained hands.
The success in prosecuting the Osage murder case was a major coup for the Bureau of Investigation—and for its ambitious and attention-seeking director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover crowed to the media that the case had been deemed unwinnable by everyone, including local sheriffs, county prosecutors, and even the Oklahoma Attorney General, until the Bureau had stepped in.
Hoover used the glowing press from the Osage case to boost the Bureau’s image and position himself and his agency in the public imagination as the epitome of no-nonsense, professional, efficient, and effective law enforcement. Indeed, he was as relentless in his pursuit of headlines as he was of criminals. In the early 1930s, Hoover even arranged to have dramatized versions of the Bureau’s most famous cases (including the Osage case) serialized as popular radio dramas. In all of these fictionalized accounts, Bureau agents were presented as resourceful and quick-witted near-supermen, for whom criminals were no match.
As the years went on, Hoover’s power and influence only grew. In the 1930s, the FBI’s profile loomed larger when it took on infamous “Public Enemies” like John Dillinger, the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, organized crime figures, and other Depression-era outlaws.
But in his endless quest for publicity, Hoover neglected some key figures who had helped the Bureau achieve such great success—the actual agents in the field, men like Tom White. Although Hoover praised Tom’s work privately, he never shared the public spotlight with him. Over the years and decades that followed, Hoover maintained a cordial, if cool, public distance from the agent who had done so much to remake the Bureau’s image.
Tom White did at least enjoy an initial career boost from his work on the Osage case. In fall 1926, the U.S. Justice Department named him the new warden of the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Life had come full-circle for Tom, who had grown up in the shadow of the county jail that his father had operated in Texas.
Like he had when he was a boy, Tom and his family lived in housing directly on the prison grounds. He followed in his father’s footsteps as warden—although he was tough and uncompromising on matters of order and discipline, he also would not allow the men in his custody to suffer cruel or inhumane treatment. He was fair-minded with the inmates at Leavenworth and made genuine efforts to improve conditions at the notoriously unsafe prison.
For someone of his background and era, Tom White was progressive in his attitudes towards convicted criminals, seeing in many of them the potential for redemption and rehabilitation. He was personally opposed to capital punishment, although he was occasionally called upon to oversee executions at the prison—just as his father had been.
Shortly after he arrived at Leavenworth, Hale and Ramsey were transferred to the very same penitentiary. White treated them no differently than any other inmates, sometimes even going out of his way to make it easier for Hale’s wife to visit her husband. For his part, Hale never admitted any involvement in the Osage slayings. He was unrepentant throughout his time in prison, even attempting to bribe an appeals court to secure his early release.
In 1931, after five years on the job, Tom White was shot in the arm by a gang of inmates who had managed to break out of Leavenworth. Tom had tracked the gang to a nearby farm, where they were holding a teenage brother and sister hostage. His intervention saved their lives, though Tom forever lost the use of his left arm. When the members of the gang were returned to Leavenworth, Tom ordered his staff not to harm them, still maintaining his preference for order and justice over mindless vengeance.
Despite his ordeal, Tom White still believed that some inmates could be rehabilitated. One convict, Red Rudensky, a safecracker, had initially been recruited to join the escape plot. But Rudensky had refused, having seen that White was a humane and fair-minded warden who had made genuine attempts to help the men of Leavenworth reintegrate into society upon release.
White had taken an interest in Rudensky’s progress, and the inmate didn’t want to jeopardize his chance of rehabilitation with the dangerous escape attempt. Rudensky turned out to be one of the best success stories to come from White’s progressive approach to the penal system—after he was paroled in 1944, he went on to a successful career as an author and businessman. He credited Tom White with helping get his life back on track.
After White retired in 1951 at the age of 70, he tried several times to reestablish contact with Hoover, who rebuffed his former star agent. Hoover had no interest in sharing credit or the public spotlight with White and had no use for the old retired lawman. White was determined not to let the Osage case fade from public memory and wanted to share with the world his part in bringing the conspirators to justice. Spurned by Hoover, he tried his hand at writing memoirs, a project which he began in 1958.
To assist with this project, he asked Hoover if the FBI would be willing to release old files from the Osage case. But the FBI provided only the most perfunctory materials, and the now-elderly and frail White was left largely on his own to work on the memoirs. Sadly, his work was rejected by the publisher. Tom passed away in 1971, an obscure and largely forgotten figure, despite his extraordinary efforts in bringing down one of the most infamous criminal conspiracies to terrorize Americans in the early 20th century.
Following the elimination of her family and the conviction of her husband, Mollie was left to rebuild the shattered pieces of her life. Yet, somehow, she managed to find some measure of happiness and purpose in the years after the Reign of Terror.
In 1928, she married a half-white, half-Creek man named John Cobb. By all accounts, their love was true and genuine. As a full-blooded Osage woman, Mollie had been declared “incompetent” and, thus, unable to manage her assets throughout her adult life. She was determined to free herself from this unjust burden. In 1931, Mollie secured her personal victory over the cruel and inhumane guardian system when a court granted her full U.S. citizenship and ruled that, at age 44, she was competent to manage her own financial affairs. Until she passed away in 1937, Mollie would lead a life of financial autonomy. Although she could never recover what had been robbed from her, in her final years, she succeeded in lifting the chains that had shackled her for her entire life.
Hale was released from prison in 1947, although he was barred from returning to Oklahoma. He lived the rest of his life in quiet obscurity, before dying in 1962 at the age of 87.
In 1966, Ernest Burkhart was finally paroled and returned to Oklahoma to live with his brother Bryan (Ernest had briefly been set free before this time, but had committed another crime and swiftly been reincarcerated). Mollie’s surviving children and grandchildren were outraged that Ernest dared to set foot back in their community after the crimes he had committed. The family ostracized Ernest, who lived out most of the rest of his days in a vermin-infested trailer. Ernest’s son, nicknamed “Cowboy,” did occasionally visit him, possibly out of a desire for some connection with his estranged father. But even Cowboy couldn’t shut out his father’s crimes—when Ernest died in 1986 and was cremated, Cowboy chucked the ashes over a bridge in rage.
Today, much of the wealth of the Osage has evaporated, as oil prices plunged beginning in the 1930s. The cruel irony was that the Osage finally gained control of their wealth precisely when the source of that wealth began to lose much of its value. As early as 1931, the annual yield from an Osage headright had plummeted to $800. The situation became more dire as the oil wells dried up due to overdrilling, along with the discovery of new petroleum sources in other parts of the world. At one auction in the 1920s, prospectors had bid a collective $14 million for Osage oil leases—in 2012, three leases went for less than $25,000. The former boomtowns had turned into decaying and desolate ghost towns.
Although the Reign of Terror took place nearly a century ago, its memory haunts the Osage today. A great-grandson of the slaughtered Henry Roan told David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon, that the murders are always in the back of his mind, especially knowing how personally connected he was to all of it.
In his archival research and interviews with descendants of victims of the Reign of Terror, Grann made a shocking discovery—Hale and his gang were not the sole perpetrators of the murderous conspiracy. Although the Bureau had declared the case to be closed when Hale, Burkhart, Morrison, and Ramsey were convicted, many more people had taken part in the slaughter. Not all of the murders could be linked to Hale—and justice had never been done for these victims.
The Osage with whom the author spoke told him that there were many unsolved murders from the Reign of Terror that were never counted among the totals and never properly investigated by the Bureau. As he pored over the archival record, Grann discovered the stories of Osage who had been murdered before the Reign of Terror’s conventional start date of 1921. One Osage woman, Mary Lewis, had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer by two white men and her body left to rot in a swamp. This heinous crime had occurred in 1918, three years before Anna Brown was found in the ravine. The Burkhart-Hale saga may have been the bloodiest episode of the Reign of Terror, but it was just one thread in a vast web of murder and mayhem.
Grann made contact with Martha Vaughan, a granddaughter of W.W. Vaughan, the attorney and confidante of George Bigheart who had been mysteriously strangled and thrown from a train after he’d publicly declared his intention to intervene on behalf of the Osage in 1923. Vaughan had been Bigheart’s attorney and was helping him obtain a certificate of competence, which would have entitled Bigheart to freely spend his headright money instead of having it frozen in a guardianship. Yet a few days after Bigheart had conferred with Vaughan, both men were dead.
Martha believed that there was more to the murder than Hale simply wanting to eliminate someone he perceived as a threat. She said that a relative who had tried to investigate Vaughan’s death after Hale’s incarceration had received an anonymous letter threatening to kill the entire family if he looked into the matter any further. Whatever the conspiracy was, it went beyond Hale.
Martha also revealed that a shadowy and unscrupulous figure named H.G. Burt had embezzled Vaughan’s estate after his death. When Grann dug further, he discovered that Burt had been deeply involved in the “Indian business,” borrowing money on the cheap from whites before loaning it back out to Osage at usurious interest rates. In reality, he was little more than a loan shark. Agents of the Bureau had identified Burt as an associate of Hale during the original investigation, but never brought charges against him.
As it turned out, Burt had been named guardian of Bigheart’s daughter’s headright (as he had been for many other Osage) and would have been in a position to greatly profit from Bigheart’s death. Moreover, a news article at the time of Vaughan’s murder from the Pawhuska Daily Capital revealed that Burt had been a passenger on the very same train from which Vaughan was thrown. It may have been circumstantial, but the evidence in the historical record of Burt’s guilt was overwhelming—and he was merely one of the countless white Oklahomans of the time who stood to gain handsomely from the bloody “Indian business.”
The archival records showed a seemingly endless series of Osage wards who died under mysterious circumstances during this era. Because these cases were never investigated by local authorities, private investigators, or even the Bureau of Investigation, it was impossible to determine conclusively whether or not these individuals had been murdered. But their frequency and shared characteristics strongly hinted at a conspiracy.
Many deaths that looked innocuous were anything but. One Bureau agent wrote in the case files that white perpetrators would get an Osage drunk and take them to a doctor (like the Shoun brothers) who would declare them intoxicated. Poison would then be injected into the victim, after which the doctor would pronounce them dead of alcohol poisoning. Many scholars now believe that the official death count of 24 for the Reign of Terror is tragically off the mark, and that the true figure is in the hundreds.
One scholar has tabulated the Osage annual death rate from 1907-1923 to be 19 per 1,000. The comparable rate for whites during this period was 12 per 1,000: Osage were dying at more than 1.5 times the rate of white people. And this was all despite the vast wealth of the tribe, which, all other things being equal, should have made their death rates lower than those of white people. Another scholar has noted how many Osage from the era died in childhood, a chilling sign of the moral depravity of the killers.
So many prominent members of the white community had blood on their hands—business leaders like Hale; doctors like the Shoun brothers; merchants like Scott Mathis, owner of the Big Hill Trading Company and guardian of Anna Brown’s estate; bankers like H.G. Burt; not to mention attorneys, politicians, law enforcement officials, and judges.
The Osage community has managed to persevere—the tribe now operates several casinos that generate tens of millions of dollars annually and, in 2011, received a $380 settlement from the U.S government in compensation for the decades of fraud and abuse. The Osage Nation has its own tribal government within the state of Oklahoma and operates its own health, education, and welfare programs. And although the oil money is mostly gone, the old fear that the white man’s money would erase their identity has happily not come to pass, and the tribe proudly maintains its cultural heritage.
But the past can never be erased and the pain never forgotten. The fields and prairies of Osage County are forever soaked in blood.
Explore the main takeaways from Killers of the Flower Moon.
Why do you think local law enforcement was so ineffective in solving the Osage murders?
Briefly describe how the Bureau of Investigation’s prosecution of the Osage case was a major turning point in the history of American law enforcement.
Why do you think Tom White was able to overcome the prejudices of a white man of his time and place and genuinely pursue justice for the Osage?
Can you think of a modern parallel to the Osage murders? In a few sentences, explain how the Osage case bears similarities to your example.