Osage Indian murders

In 1897, oil was discovered on the Osage Indian Reservation, or present-day Osage County, Oklahoma. The U.S. Department of the Interior managed leases for oil exploration and production on land owned by the Osage Nation through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and later managed royalties, paying individual allottees. As part of the process of preparing Oklahoma for statehood, the federal government allotted 657 acres (266 ha) to each Osage on the tribal rolls in 1907. Thereafter, they and their legal heirs, whether Osage or not, had headrights to royalties in oil production, based on their allotments of lands.[6] The headrights could be inherited by legal heirs, including non-Osage. The tribe held the mineral rights communally and paid its members by a percentage related to their holdings.

By 1920, the market for oil had grown dramatically and brought much wealth to the Osage. In 1923 alone, "the tribe took in more than thirty million dollars, the equivalent today of more than four hundred million dollars."[7] People across the U.S. read about the Osage, called "the richest nation, clan or social group of any race on earth, including the whites, man for man."[1] Some Osage used their royalties to send their children to private schools. Others bought luxury cars, clothes, jewelry, and travels to Europe, as newspapers across the country covered their activities.[1] Along with tens of thousands of oil workers, the oil boom attracted many white opportunists to Osage County. As the writer Robert Allen Warrior characterizes them, some were entrepreneurial, while others were criminal, seeking to separate the Osage from their wealth by murder if necessary.[8]

Believing the Osage would not be able to manage their new wealth, or lobbied by whites who wanted a piece of the action, the United States Congress passed a law in 1921 which required that courts appoint guardians for each Osage of half-blood or more in ancestry, who would manage their royalties and financial affairs until they demonstrated "competency". Under the system, even minors who had less than half-Osage blood had to have guardians appointed, regardless of whether the minors had living parents. The courts appointed the guardians from local white lawyers or businessmen. The incentives for criminality were overwhelming. Such guardians often maneuvered legally to steal Osage land, their headrights or royalties. Others were suspected of murdering their charges to gain the headrights.[6][8]

At that time, eight lawyers were working in Pawhuska, the Osage County seat, which had 8,000 residents. The number of lawyers was said to be the same as in Oklahoma City, which had 140,000 residents.[9] In 1924, the Department of the Interior charged two dozen guardians of Osage with corruption in the administration of their duties related to their charges. All avoided punishment by settling out of court. These guardians were believed to have swindled their charges out of millions of dollars. In 1929, $27 million was reported as still being held by the "Guardian System", the organization set up to protect the financial interests of 883 Osage families in Osage County.[10]

Henry Roan, Rita Smith, and William Vaughn

In the early 1920s, eighteen Osage and three non-natives in Osage County were reported murdered within a short period of time. Colorado newspapers reported the murders as the "Reign of Terror" on the Osage reservation. Some murders seemed associated with several members of one family.

On May 27, 1921, local hunters discovered the decomposing body of 36-year-old Anna Brown in a remote ravine of Osage County. Unable to find the killer, local authorities ruled her death as accidental because of alcohol poisoning and put the case aside.[11][lower-alpha 1] Brown was divorced, so probate awarded her estate to her mother, Lizzie Q. Kyle.[12] Kelsie Morrison, a petty criminal, later admitted to murdering Brown and testified that William Hale, a prominent local cattleman, had asked him to do so.[13][lower-alpha 2] Along with his admission, Morrison implicated Hale's nephew and Brown's ex-boyfriend, Byron Burkhart,[14] in her murder.[15] Morrison testified that, after meeting Brown earlier at her sister Mollie's home, he and Burkhart took a heavily intoxicated Brown to Three Mile Creek, where Morrison shot and killed her. Morrison was also responsible for the murders of William Stepson, who died of a suspected poisoning in 1922, and Tillie Powell Morrison, who died of a suspected poisoning in 1923. One of Morrison's associates later said he'd confessed to both murders to him.[14]

The body of another Osage, Brown's cousin Charles Whitehorn, also known as Charles Williamson, was discovered near Pawhuska on the same day as hers. Whitehorn had been shot to death.[12] Two months later, Lizzie Q. Kyle was killed.[lower-alpha 3] By that time, Lizzie had headrights for herself and had inherited the headrights from her late husband and two daughters. Her heirs became fabulously wealthy.

On February 6, 1923, Henry Roan, another cousin of Brown's, also known as Henry Roan Horse, was found in his car on the Osage Reservation, dead from a shot in the head.[11] Roan had a financial connection with Hale, having borrowed $1,200 from the cattleman. Hale fraudulently arranged to make himself the beneficiary of Roan's $25,000 life insurance policy.[17] On March 10, 1923, a bomb destroyed the Fairfax residence of Anna's sister Rita Smith, killing Rita and her servant, Nettie Brookshire. Rita's husband, Bill Smith, sustained massive injuries from the blast and died four days later. Shortly before his death, Bill gave a statement implicating his suspected murderers and appointed his wife's estate. Later investigations revealed that the bomb contained 5 US gallons (19 L) of nitroglycerin.[12]

On June 28, 1923, Hale and Burkhart put George Bigheart on a train to Oklahoma City to be taken to a hospital.[lower-alpha 4][lower-alpha 5] There, doctors suspected that he had ingested poisoned whiskey. Bigheart called attorney William "W.W." Watkins Vaughan[lower-alpha 6] of Pawhuska, asking him to come to the hospital as soon as possible for an urgent meeting. Vaughan complied, and the two men met that night. Bigheart had said he had suspicions about who was behind the murders and had access to incriminating documents that would prove his claims.[19]

Vaughan boarded a train that night to return to Pawhuska,[19] but was missing the next morning when the Pullman porter went to wake him. His berth on the train had not been used. Vaughan's body was later found with his skull crushed beside the railroad tracks near Pershing, about 5 miles (8 km) south of Pawhuska.[16][lower-alpha 7] Bigheart died at the hospital that same morning.

Thirteen other deaths of full-blooded Osage men and women, who had guardians appointed by the courts, were reported between 1921 and 1923. By 1925, at least sixty wealthy Osage had died and their land had been inherited or deeded to their guardians, who were local white lawyers and businessmen.[1] The Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the preceding agency to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), found a low-level market in contract killers to kill the Osage for their wealth.[1] In 1995, the writer Robert Allen Warrior wrote about walking through an Osage cemetery and seeing "the inordinate number of young people who died during that time."[8]

In 1925, Osage tribal elders, with the help of local law officer James Monroe Pyle, sought assistance from the BOI when local and state officials could not solve the rising number of murders. Pyle presented his evidence of murder and conspiracy and requested an investigation. The BOI sent Tom White to lead an investigation. Because of the large number of leads and the perception that the police were corrupt, White decided he would be the public face of the investigation, while most of the agents would work undercover. The other agents recruited were: a former New Mexico sheriff; a former Texas Ranger; John Burger, who had worked on the previous investigation; Frank Smith; and John Wren, an American Indian of the Ute Nation who had previously been a spy for the Mexican revolutionaries.[20]

Political cartoon depicting Mollie Burkhart and William Hale from the Enid Morning News sunday edition on February 7, 1926.

The Osage Tribal Council suspected that Hale was responsible for many of the deaths. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior sent four agents to act as undercover investigators. Working for two years, the agents discovered a crime ring led by Hale, known in Osage County as the "King of the Osage Hills". Hale and his nephews, Ernest and Byron Burkhart, had migrated from Texas to Osage County to find jobs in the oil fields. Once there, they discovered the immense wealth of members of the Osage Nation from royalties being paid from leases on oil-producing lands. Hale's goal was to gain the headrights and wealth of several tribe members, including his nephew's Osage wife, the last survivor of her family.

To gain part of the wealth, Hale persuaded Ernest to marry Mollie Kyle, a full-blooded Osage.[21] Hale then arranged for the murders of Mollie's sisters, her brother-in-law, her mother, and her cousin, Henry Roan, to cash in on the insurance policies and headrights of each family member.[21] Other witnesses and participants were murdered as investigation of the conspiracy expanded. Mollie and Ernest Burkhart inherited all of the headrights from her family. Investigators soon discovered that Mollie was already being poisoned.[13]

Ernest Burkhart's attempt to kill his wife failed. Mollie, a devout Catholic, had told her priest that she feared she was being poisoned at home. The priest told her not to touch liquor under any circumstances. He also alerted one of the FBI agents. Mollie recovered from the poison she had already consumed and after the trials divorced Ernest. Mollie Burkhart Cobb died of unrelated causes on June 16, 1937. Her children inherited all of her estate.[12]

William Hale in 1926 (second from the left) and John Ramsey (third from left) flanked by two U.S. marshals

Hale, his nephews, and one of the ranch hands they hired were charged with the murder of Mollie Kyle's family. Hale was charged with the murder of Roan, who had been killed on the Osage Reservation land, making it a federal crime.[11] Two of his accomplices had died before the BOI investigation was completed. Hale and his associates were convicted in state and federal trials from 1926 to 1929, which had changes of venue, hung juries, appeals, and overturned verdicts. In 1926, Ernest pleaded guilty to being part of the conspiracy. In 1928, Reverend P.C. Hesser, a member of the grand jury which indicted Hale and Ramsey, was convicted of perjury for lying that Ramsey's confession was not signed. He was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $100 (equivalent to $1,700 in 2022).[22] In 1929, Irving Claude Hale, a half-brother of Hale, was sentenced to 60 days in prison for contempt of court. Theodore Cavalier, a local farmer, said that Irving Hale had approached him and offered him money to sit on the jury and vote for an acquittal.[23]

Various residents of Pawhuska petitioned Oklahoma Governor Jack C. Walton to conduct a full investigation of the deaths of George Bigheart and his attorney, William Vaughan. Walton assigned Herman Fox Davis to the investigation. Shortly after the assignment, Davis was convicted of bribery. Although Walton later pardoned Davis, the investigation of Bigheart and Vaughan was never completed.[17][lower-alpha 8] On November 9, 1923, Davis and three other men, Frank Brumley, Eustace Knight, and Tom Rudolph, robbed and murdered Paul J. McCarthy, a prominent attorney. All four men were found guilty or pleaded guilty to this murder and were each sentenced to life in prison with hard labor.[24]

In the case of the Smith murders, Ernest suddenly changed his plea to guilty, saying he wanted to tell the truth. He was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. He turned state's evidence, naming his uncle as responsible for the murder conspiracy. Ernest said that he had used a person named Henry Grammer as a go-between to hire a professional criminal named Asa "Ace" Kirby to perform the killings. Both Grammer and Kirby were killed before they could testify. Grammer died in a car crash on June 14, 1923. Kirby was killed while robbing a store on June 23, 1923. The shopkeeper had been tipped off in advance, and had been waiting for Kirby. It was later discovered that the man who'd tipped off the shopkeeper about the upcoming robbery was Hale. After his parole, Hale's relatives said he once remarked, "If that damn Ernest had kept his mouth shut we'd be rich today."[19][25]

John Ramsey confessed to participation in the murder of Roan as soon as he was arrested. He said that Hale had promised him five hundred dollars (equivalent to $8,600 in 2022) and a new car for killing Roan. Ramsey met Roan on a road outside of Fairfax, and they drank whiskey together. Then Ramsey shot Roan in the head. Ramsey changed his story, claiming that the actual killer was Curly Johnson. His accomplice, Byron Burkhart, another nephew, had turned state's evidence. The trials received national newspaper and magazine coverage. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Hale, Ramsey, and Ernest Burkhart later received parole despite protests from the Osage. Hale and Ramsey were both paroled in 1947. Hale died in 1962, and Byron died in 1985.

Ernest was paroled in 1937. However, in 1940, he and a woman named Clara Mae Goad robbed the Osage home of Lillie Morrell Burkhart, his former sister-in-law, stealing $7,000 in valuables (equivalent to $150,000 in 2022).[26] In 1941, Ernest and Clara were both found guilty of federal burglary charges. Clara was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Ernest was sentenced to 7 years in prison and had his parole revoked. U.S. District Judge Franklin Elmore Kennamer granted Ernest's request to not be sent to the USP Leavenworth, where Hale and Ramsey were serving their life sentences.[27] After completing his federal sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta, he was returned to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary to resume his life sentence. Ernest was paroled once more in October 1959. During his parole hearing, he downplayed his own involvement in the murders, referring to himself as an "unwitting tool" of his uncle.

"All I did was deliver a message. Other than that I'm as innocent as you. I delivered a message from my uncle to John Ramsey and that's all I did."[28]

In 1966, Ernest applied for a pardon. Citing his cooperation with the investigation (White had credited his confession as vital for the convictions of Hale and Ramsey), the Oklahoma Parole Board voted 3-2 in favor of a pardon, which was granted by Governor Henry Bellmon.[13] Ernest Burkhart died in 1986.

In the early 1990s, journalist Dennis McAuliffe of The Washington Post investigated the suspicious death of his grandmother, Sybil Beekman Bolton, an Osage with headrights who died in 1925 at age 21. As a youth he had been told she died of kidney disease, then as a suicide. His doubts arose from a variety of conflicting evidence. In his investigation, McAuliffe found that the BOI believed that the murders of several Osage women "had been committed or ordered by their husbands."[6]

Most murders of the Osage during the early 1920s went unsolved.[6] McAuliffe found that when Bolton was a minor, the court had appointed her white stepfather, attorney Arthur "A.T." Woodward, as her guardian. Woodward, who died in 1950, also served as the federally appointed Tribal Counsel,[29] and he had guardianship of four other Osage charges, each of whom had died by 1923.[1]

McAuliffe learned that his grandmother's murder had been covered up by a false death certificate. He came to believe that Woodward was responsible for her death.[6] His book about his investigation, Bloodland: A Family Story of Oil, Greed and Murder on the Osage Reservation (1994), presents an account of the corruption and murders during this period.[1]

Osage County officials sought revenge against Pyle for his role in bringing the murders to light. Fearing for his life, Pyle and his wife fled to Arizona, where he again served as an officer of the law. He died there in 1942.

To try to prevent further criminality and to protect the Osage, in 1925 Congress passed a law prohibiting non-Osage from inheriting headrights from Osage who had half or more Native American ancestry.[13][30]

The Department of Interior continued to manage the trust lands and pay fees to Osage with headrights. In 2000, the tribe filed a lawsuit against the department, alleging that federal government management of the trust assets had resulted in historical losses to its trust funds and interest income.[4][5] This was after a major class-action suit had been filed against the departments of Interior and Treasury in 1996 by Elouise Cobell (Blackfeet) on behalf of other Native Americans, for similar reasons.

In 2011, the U.S. government settled with the Osage for $380 million ($513 million in 2023[31] dollars). The settlement also strengthened management of the tribe's trust assets and improved communications between the Department of Interior and the tribe.[4] The law firm representing the Osage said it was the largest trust settlement with one tribe in U.S. history.[5]

• John Joseph Mathews, who was a member of the Osage Nation, set his novel Sundown (1934) in the period of the murders.[8]
• "The Osage Indian Murders", a dramatization of the case first broadcast on August 3, 1935, was the third episode of the radio series G-Men, created and produced by Phillips Lord with cooperation of the FBI.
• Western novelist Fred Grove, part Osage on his mother's side, was 10 years old when he was an "ear" witness to the bombing murders of Bill and Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire. This incident haunted him. Several of his novels were based on aspects of the case: his first novel, Flame of the Osage (1958), two written in roughly the middle of his career: Warrior Road (1974) and Drums Without Warriors (1976), and one of his last, The Years of Fear (2002).
• The Kyle family murders were featured as a dramatic part of the 1959 film The FBI Story, starring James Stewart as fictional FBI agent Chip Hardesty, a composite character who leads the investigation.[17]
• John Hunt portrayed this period in his novel The Grey Horse Legacy (1968).[32]
• Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit (1990) explores a fictionalized version of the murders.
• Tom Holm's novel The Osage Rose (2008) is a fictionalized account of murders on Osage Territory intended to strip Osage members of their royalties and land.
• American journalist David Grann investigated the case for his 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book is the basis for Martin Scorsese's 2023 film of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, and Tantoo Cardinal.[33]

• Osage Nation § Natural resources and headrights
• Tulsa race massacre

• Bill Burchardt, "Osage Oil," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 41 (Fall 1963)
• Doherty, Jim (2004). Just the Facts: True Tales of Cops & Criminals. Deadly Serious Press. p. 192. ISBN 9780966753479. Archived from the original on March 21, 2019. Retrieved March 21, 2019.
• Franks, Kenny Arthur (1989). The Osage Oil Boom. Oklahoma Heritage Association. p. 180. ISBN 9780865460751. Archived from the original on March 21, 2019. Retrieved March 21, 2019.
• Hogan, Lawrence J. (1998). The Osage Indian Murders: The True Story of a Multiple Murder Plot to Acquire the Estates of Wealthy Osage Tribe Members. Amlex. p. 282. ISBN 9780965917414. Retrieved March 21, 2019.
• Kennedy, Deanna M.; Harrington, Charles F.; Verbos, Amy Klemm; Stewart, Daniel; Gladstone, Joseph Scott; Clarkson, Gavin (2017). American Indian Business: Principles and Practices. University of Washington Press. p. 248. ISBN 9780295742106. Archived from the original on March 21, 2019. Retrieved March 21, 2019.
• Grann, David (2017). Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (First ed.). New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 9780385534253.
• Hess, Janet Berry (2015). Osage and Settler: Reconstructing Shared History through an Oklahoma Family Archive. North Carolina: McFarland. p. 232. ISBN 9781476621173. Archived from the original on March 21, 2019. Retrieved March 21, 2019.

• All FREE videos about The Osage Indian Murders found at The Internet Archive (a non-profit corporation)
• "Osage Indian Murders", FBI, scanned images of original casenotes, more than 3,000 pages
• Osage Reign of Terror. Encyclopedia of the American Indian in the Twentieth Century
• "Largely Forgotten Osage Murders Reveal A Conspiracy Against Wealthy Native Americans: Interview with David Grann". Fresh Air. NPR. April 17, 2017. Retrieved September 4, 2017.