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Ernest
and Mollie Burkhart married in 1917. Unbeknownst to Mollie,
a member of the Osage tribe, the marriage was part of a larger
plot to steal her family's oil wealth.
Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoman Collection/Courtesy
of Doubleday
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Generations ago, the American Indian Osage tribe was compelled
to move. Not for the first time, white settlers pushed them off
their land in the 1800s. They made their new home in a rocky, infertile
area in northeast Oklahoma in hopes that settlers would finally
leave them alone.
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Killers
of the Flower Moon
The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
by David Grann
Hardcover, 338 pages
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As it turned out, the land they had chosen was rich in oil,
and in the early 20th century, members of the tribe became spectacularly
wealthy. They bought cars and built mansions; they made so much
oil money that the government began appointing white guardians to
"help" them spend it.
And then Osage members started turning up dead.
In his new book, Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann
describes how white people in the area conspired to kill Osage members
in order steal their oil wealth, which could only be passed on through
inheritance. "This was a culture of complicity," he says,
"and it was allowed to go on for so long because so many people
were part of the plot. You had lawmen, you had prosecutors, you
had the reporters who wouldn't cover it. You had oilmen who wouldn't
speak out. You had morticians who would cover up the murders when
they buried the body. You had doctors who helped give poison to
people."
Interview Highlights
On how the conspiracy worked
What makes these crimes so sinister is that it involved marrying
into families. It involved a level of calculation and a level of
betraying the very people you pretended to love. And the way these
murders would take place is that people would marry into the families
and then begin to kill each member of the family. ... That's exactly
what happened to [Osage woman Mollie Burkhart]. She had married
a white man, and his uncle was the most powerful settler in the
area. He was known as the King of the Osage Hills ... and he had
orchestrated a very sinister plot played out over years where he
directed his nephew, who had married Mollie Burkhart, to marry her
so that he could then begin to kill the family members one by one
and siphon off all the wealth.
On how Mollie Burkhart's family was killed
One day in 1921, her older sister disappeared and Mollie looked
everywhere for her and couldn't find her. And about a week later,
her body was found essentially in a ravine, decomposed. She'd been
shot in the back of the head.
Then just a few weeks later, Mollie's mother began to grow increasingly
sick. She seemed to be almost disappearing, withering in front of
her. And within two months she, too, had died. And evidence later
suggested that she had been secretly poisoned.
Not long after that, Mollie was sleeping in her bed in her house
with her white husband; they had a couple children. And she heard
a loud explosion. She got up in panic and terror. ... She had another
sister who lived not far away, and in the area where her sister's
house was she could see almost this orange fire ball rising into
the sky. It almost looked as if the sun had burst into the night.
And her sister's house had been blown up killing that sister as
well as her sister's husband and a servant who lived in that house.
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Mollie
Burkhart (second from right) lost all three of her sisters
under suspicious circumstances. Rita Smith (left) died in
an explosion, Anna Brown (second from left) was shot in the
head and Minnie Smith (right) died of what doctors referred
to as a "peculiar wasting illness."
The Osage National Museum/Courtesy of Doubleday
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On how far the conspirators went to cover up
their crimes
Almost anyone who tried to investigate the killings or
at least stop them in the area they, too, were killed. One
attorney tried to gather evidence and one day he was thrown off
a speeding train and all the evidence that he had gathered had disappeared.
Another time, an oilman had traveled to Washington, D.C., to try
to get help. ... He checked into a boarding house in Washington,
D.C. ... He was then found the next day stripped naked. He had been
stabbed more than 20 times; his head had been beaten in. The
Washington Post at the time said what everyone at that point
knew, which was there was a conspiracy to kill rich Indians.
On how authorities reacted to the deaths
It's really important to understand back then that there was
so much lawlessness. That was one of the things that shocked me
when I began researching the story, that even in the 1920s much
of America remained a country that was not fully rooted in its laws.
Its legal institutions were very fragile; there was enormous corruption,
particularly in this era and in this area. And the conspirators
were able to pay off lawmen, they were able to pay off prosecutors.
There was so much prejudice that these crimes were neglected.
Mollie Burkhart beseeched the authorities to try to investigate,
to get help, but because of prejudice they often ignored the crimes.
And she issued money for a reward, she hired private investigators,
but the crimes for years remained unsolved, and the body count continued
to increase. By 1924 there were at least 24 murders alone. ...
Finally, the Osage, in desperation, they issued a resolution,
a tribal resolution, beseeching the federal authorities to help.
And finally a then-very obscure branch of the Justice Department
intervened. It was known as the Bureau of Investigation and it was
what ... would later be renamed the FBI.
On the FBI's investigation
J. Edgar Hoover ... was the new director, and it became one
of the FBI's first major homicide cases that it ever dealt with.
... The bureau initially badly bungled the case. ... [Hoover] turned
the case over to a frontier lawman at the time who finally put together
an undercover team that included ... probably the only American
Indian agent in the bureau at the time. They went undercover. ...
They were able, through some dogged investigation and at great danger,
to eventually capture some of the ringleaders. And those ringleaders
included not only Mollie Burkhart's husband, it also included [his]
uncle, a man who was seen as this great protector of the community.
On what the FBI missed in their investigation
The bureau was so anxious to wrap up the case that they ignored
many, many other unsolved crimes and many, many other killers. ...
When you begin to look at the documents and you begin to collect
the evidence from the Osage, it becomes abundantly apparent. ...
I pulled some of the guardian papers and there was this little
booklet that came out. It had a little fabric cover. All it was
was essentially identifying the name of a guardian and which Osage
they were in charge of. And when I opened up the book, I could see
the name of the guardian and when I began to look at the names of
the Osage under them I could see written next to many of them simply
the word "Dead. Dead. Dead." It was almost like a ledger;
it was like this forensic, bureaucratic accounting.
But when you're looking at it, you're beginning to realize you're
looking at hints of a systematic murder campaign, because there's
no way all these people died in a span of just a couple years. It
defied any natural death rate. The Osage were wealthy, they had
good doctors. ... And then when you begin to look into each of those
individual cases, you start to find trails of evidence suggesting
poisonings, a murder. You start to try to trace the money ... and
where the wealth went. And what you begin to discover is something
even more horrifying than the bureau ever exposed.
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