The lawyer pulled his wife aside before he left, and he told her something she would never forget. If anything happened to him, he said, he had hidden away important documents, ones that would lead her straight to his killer. His wife, born Rosella Claudel, the daughter of a well-off merchant, must have been terrified by the words. But if she lodged any objection to her husband’s travels, he did not heed them.

William W. Vaughn was a father of ten, a respected attorney who had served as county attorney and who had been asked to teach sheriffs and other county attorneys about the law and criminal investigations. Now his client, a man named George Bigheart, was wasting away in a hospital in Oklahoma City, some 140 miles from the lawyer’s home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Vaughn boarded the train and went to him.

The meeting went surprisingly well, considering George was dying. He had been poisoned, and he was certain he knew who was to blame. George handed over yet more documents to his lawyer, ones damning enough that Vaughn called the sheriff back home and said, “I’ve got enough here to nail at least one of these murderous bastards. ” Then he boarded the train back home.

He never arrived. The next morning, George Bigheart succumbed to the poison coursing through his body. It would be twenty-four more hours before a search party discovered his lawyer’s body near the railroad tracks. Vaughn had been viciously beaten, stripped naked, and tossed from the train.

The documents George had given him had vanished. Rosella, Vaughn’s wife, at least took heart that her husband had shared with her the location of other important documents, so she went to retrieve them. They too had disappeared. The June 1923 murders of Bigheart and Vaughn were not the first victims tied to the Osage Nation of Oklahoma.

In fact, the two men brought the body count to at least twenty-four, though some historians think the tally could actually be measured in scores, if not hundreds. Today, that era in the Osage Nation is known as the Reign of Terror. And unraveling it would reveal a horrifying conspiracy in which white people aimed to steal money from nation members. The investigation not only changed federal laws, it helped birth the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It is hard to know for sure who the first victim was in this gruesome tale, because so many of the deaths were explained away as accidents. The first one that got any attention was in 1921, but it seems likely that the murders began years earlier. The backstory goes like this. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Osage Nation, a Midwestern Native American tribe dating back to 700 BC, was tired of being pushed around by settlers, forced to leave one chunk of land after another.

They had most recently been run out of Kansas, uprooted because the federal government decided it wanted to make Kansas a state. Finally, they settled in rough terrain that would later become Oklahoma. They actually chose this land and bought it themselves, so they were the rightful deed owners. Because it was such rocky, inhospitable land, they knew white men would not want to farm on it, and thus they would be left alone.

But then something happened. At the turn of the century, the Osage Nation struck oil on their reservation land. Though the process began slowly, production began to boom in 1907 when the Osage oil fields produced over five million barrels. The tribe was able to retain collective ownership of the surface mineral rights.

The useless land that the Osage had bought was actually sitting atop an ocean of black liquid gold, some of the largest deposits of oil in the United States. The federal government might well have relocated them again had this land been allocated to them through a treaty, but it had not been. The nation had bought the property, all one and a half million acres of it, already. That made the Osage stand out.

They were the only Native American nation that had paid for their land. They had a title to it. The funds that were not used to purchase the reservation went into a trust fund for the tribe. If you took the trust fund and divided it equally among all Osage, the Osage were the richest people in the world.

That was in 1893, four years before oil had ever been struck. Predictably, and this was still before anyone had any real clue about the oil beneath the surface, the federal government tried to pressure the Osage again. They wanted to make the territory a state. In order for the state to exist, they had to break up the land holdings of the tribes.

They wanted the land allotted, as in individuals had to own chunks of land. The Osage overall could not just have this one and a half million acre chunk. The Osage were not keen on being pressured, though, because they bought this land themselves. They ended up striking an agreement: the tribe would allot the surface rights, but retain the mineral rights, meaning the Osage would still own everything beneath the surface of the land.

This was the sole such agreement with any Native American nation in the country, and it happened only because the Osage had bought their land outright. The agreement with lawmakers said the headrights could never be sold. They could only be inherited. The federal government settled the agreement, and Oklahoma eventually became a state in 1907.

And then came the oil. At first the profits were in the hundred-dollar range, then the thousand range, then tens of thousands. By the time 1923 came around, the Osage people split thirty million dollars, which translates to more than four hundred million dollars in today’s money. At that point, there were about two thousand Osage, and that money was split evenly among them.

It had been a prosperous nation before. Now, it was obscenely rich. They were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. Reporters, often with a great deal of prejudice and sensationalism, would head out to Osage territory and regale their readers with stories about the “plutocratic Osage” and the “red millionaires” with their terracotta mansions and their cars.

It was said at the time that whereas one American might own a car, each Osage owned eleven of them. Some people got jealous. They were criticized because people were jealous that they had all this money, and who were they to spend it? They could not speak English.

They were not white. They did not deserve it. The federal government decided that the Osage could not possibly know how to manage this vast wealth. Never mind that they had been smart enough to buy their own land and prosper even before the oil was struck.

The Osage people were seen by the European settlers as subhuman, childlike. It went so far that members of the US Congress passed legislation requiring that many Osage have white guardians, these businessmen, these bankers, these politicians, to manage their fortunes. And this system was not abstractly racist. It was literally racist, based on the quantum of Osage blood.

If you were a full-blooded Osage, you were deemed incompetent and given one of these guardians. It was for their own good. The guardianships of the day were in such a pernicious way that Osage just never really understood how much money they had, things that they bought that they did not know. If you were wondering how it could possibly be legal to pass a law like this, so did journalist David Grann, who wrote a phenomenal book called Killers of the Flower Moon.

For him, it was eye-opening to go back and dig up the debates that these members of Congress would have. You really get a sense, we are not talking that long ago, you are talking about the 1920s, you really get a level and the breadth of prejudice that existed at that time. So you had a setup in which the Osage were getting a ton of money from oil, but white men were assigned to oversee that money. The Osage could not sell their headrights, but they could bequeath them in death.

And wouldn’t you know it, it was not long at all before the Osage people began dropping dead left and right. Grann, speaking to various crowds and reporters during his book tour, described sifting through old records and log books during his research. He would often see, for example, five Osage whose wealth he had managed. If the Osage had died, some bureaucrat had just written the word “dead” next to their name.

And he noticed on one case there was an Osage and it had the word “dead. ” The next Osage, “dead,” “dead,” all five. And then he looked at another guardian and saw they had about twelve Osage whose fortunes they had overseen. Fifty percent of them were dead.

This defied any national death rate. The guardians, who were tasked with giving the Osage their royalty checks each quarter and advising them on how to spend it wisely, were only required to dole out one thousand dollars a quarter, even when headright earnings were three times that. It was up to the guardians to keep track of the rest. And wouldn’t you know it, a lot of times it would just disappear.

Not only that, but some guardians were assigned multiple Osage. Sometimes three, four, five people. One had twelve. Now, these guardians were not in line to inherit headrights.

Family members would. So if an Osage member died, that headright would be left to the next of kin, like their children or siblings. That is how a woman named Anna Brown got to be so wealthy. Anna was thirty-six years old.

She had been one of four daughters born to Jimmy Nix and Lizzie Q. Kyle. Jimmy died around 1895, leaving his wife his headright. His daughters, Minnie, Molly, and Rita, in addition to Anna, each grew up and eventually married.

In 1918, Minnie, who was married to a man named William Smith, fell ill. It was a strange ailment, one that seemed to just sap her energy and strength. She was simply wasting away. Despite the family’s money for good doctors, no one could pinpoint what was wrong with her, and she died.

Her husband was by no means a model spouse. He was said to be violent toward her on occasion, but it also seemed that he was genuinely grief-stricken. He had become part of her family. So much so that when he remarried, it was to Minnie’s sister, Rita.

Anna, who had married a white man named Oda Brown, was determined to have a good time. Come 1921, she had divorced her husband and was known to date other men and party pretty hard. Anna Brown was a kind-hearted, free spirit who loved to dress up in the latest flapper fashions, dance, and have a good time. She enjoyed the boomtown nightlife of Fairfax, Greyhorse, and Pawhuska.

She was the type of gal who kept whiskey in a flask and offered it around despite Prohibition having begun the year prior. On May 21st, 1921, Anna had gone to her sister Molly’s house for a little gathering and ticked a bunch of people off by showing up drunk. Molly was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhart. Ernest had come to Osage County to live with his uncle, a cattleman named William K.

Hale. It was through working for his uncle that he had met Molly, who fell in love with him, much to the chagrin of some of Ernest’s racist relatives. The two were married in 1917. Ernest was at Molly’s party, as was his brother, Bryan.

Bryan had on occasion dated Anna, and on this evening, Anna was full force flirting with him. At the end of the night, Bryan offered to give Anna a ride home, which she accepted. Molly, who had been angry about the bad party behavior, still helped Anna sober up and even washed her clothes before sending her on her way. She never saw her sister again.

When Anna Brown left her sister Molly’s house and did not turn up the next day or the day after, her family got worried. It would not have been unheard of for Anna to go on a bender. But about a week before Anna was last seen, another man named Charles Whitehorn had disappeared. He was well known in the community, liked by both white men and his Osage people, and he was one of Anna’s cousins.

Searches for both missing people got underway, but turned up nothing. Then, on May 27th, an oil worker spotted something in a hillside brush as crews drilled about a mile north of Pawhuska. When he got closer, he realized he was looking at a corpse, one with a bullet through its head. The body was too decomposed to identify, but a letter found in the pocket was addressed to Charles Whitehorn.

About the same time, some thirty miles away in Fairfax, hunters stumbled across another body. This one was bloated and black, face up in a ravine. Like the other body, it was badly decomposed, but it at least appeared to be a Native American woman. Still, the body was in such rough shape that even people who knew Anna Brown could not be sure it was her.

Her two surviving sisters, Molly and Rita, came to the ravine, and while the features were too distorted to be sure, they recognized the gold fillings in the corpse’s mouth and the clothes it wore. It was Anna. Local authorities at first dismissed the death as accidental alcohol poisoning, but then the undertaker found a bullet hole in the back of her skull. The one murder that really seems to touch people was Anna Brown.

She was murdered brutally, and in her lifetime she was taken brutally. The community mourned. People from all over came by to pay their respects to the family. William Hale, Ernest’s uncle and thus relative by marriage, offered his heartfelt condolences.

Two months after Anna died, her mother Lizzie died of what appeared to be the same wasting disease that had killed Minnie three years prior. That left just Molly and Rita in a family that had originally numbered six. But the deaths were far from over. William Stepson was a steer roping champion.

Whether he was twenty-nine or thirty-two depends on which source you trust, but all sources agree that he was handsome and popular and seemed to be in stellar health. His mother-in-law later told investigators that Stepson had spent February 28th, 1922 at home until a phone call drew him into town at about 6:00 p. m. When he returned later that night, a neighbor found him on his porch, seemingly blackout drunk.

A couple of men helped Stepson get back into his own house, where his mother-in-law checked on him throughout the night. When she went to rouse him in the morning, he was dead. At first, alcohol poisoning was suspected, but a coroner’s inquest did not find evidence of booze in his system. The cause of death was ruled unknown.

Bernard McBride, called Barney by most, was a rich retired oil operator whom the Osage rightly considered an ally. McBride saw the bodies piling up and was outraged that they were not being properly investigated. The sixty-year-old traveled to Washington, DC to talk to lawmakers in hopes of convincing them to take these deaths more seriously. Soon after he left for DC, a headline ran: “Wealthy oil man found slain with 20 wounds and rope around neck.

”

A man who went to Washington DC to try to get federal authorities to look into these killings. He went into a boarding house. He received a telegram from an associate in Oklahoma that said, “Be careful. ” He left the boarding house that night.

He was abducted. His body was found in a cove the next day, and he had been stabbed more than twenty times and beaten to death. McBride’s murder was a turning point. Not only was this a rich white man, but his death showed how serious and insidious the situation was.

Here was a guy whose whereabouts should not have been well known to anyone not close to him, and the timing made it absolutely clear that someone did not want him talking to federal authorities. His death probably got the feds’ attention better than any speech he gave would have. Still, it was not going to be easy for investigators from DC to figure out what was happening more than twelve hundred miles away in Oklahoma. So even though their attention was piqued, nothing much really happened, except of course for more murders.

In January 1923, two more Osage died. Big Annie Sanford and Joe Yellow Horse, both from some kind of poisoning. That same month, Henry Roan, who is alternately identified as Molly’s first husband and/or her cousin, disappeared. He had supposedly argued with his wife and driven away from his home, never to return.

Days later, two men noticed a car in a ravine. When they approached, they saw the body of a man sitting upright behind the wheel. It was Henry Roan, and he had been shot through the head with a revolver. Days after that, a middle of the night explosion rocked Osage County.

Molly Burkhart had been fast asleep, but the blast jolted her awake. She looked out the window, and in the distance, she could see this orange ball rising in the sky. Molly’s sister, Rita, had moved close to Molly’s home after the deaths of Anna and Lizzie, their sister and mother. The deaths had terrified her, and she felt safer with Molly near.

Now Molly stared out the window at what used to be Rita’s new home. Rita was killed instantly. When they blew that house up, it just blew stuff all over the city. There were arms and legs and stuff in people’s yards.

Rita did not die alone. Also killed was a woman she paid to keep house, Nettie Brookshire. The sad thing is there really was not much found of her body. The undertaker supposedly found enough of her body pieces to charge for a grave and a headstone, but it is another one of those things where they may have taken advantage of the Osage money.

Rita’s husband, William Smith, was pulled from the rubble alive. If you are thinking, “Hey, that’s the guy who was married to Minnie when she died, too, and now he survived a bombing. Oh my god, he must be the killer,” it is a fair line of thinking. But Smith was mortally wounded in the explosion.

It was clear he had been just as targeted as his wife. And before he died of his injuries, he was able to identify who he thought was to blame. He stated before he died that he had two enemies: William King Hale and Ernest Burkhart. William Hale, sometimes called Bill, was uncle to Ernest, who was married to Rita’s sister.

Smith said that Hale had gotten him drunk or mesmerized him, according to one news story, and forced him to sign a check for eight thousand dollars. The next day, Smith tried to stop payment, but Hale had managed to cash the check at 11 p. m. the night before.

Bill Hale was a man for all reasons, a man for all seasons. He was a friend to everybody and everybody’s enemy. He built houses. He was a big shot in a bank.

He was a cattleman through some ruthless undertakings. He became a fairly wealthy man, a man of respect. Hale had been born and raised in Greenville, Texas, but packed up and moved to Osage County around the turn of the century, lured by the oil and all the opportunity that oil promised. He did not come from money.

His roots were pretty humble, in fact. But he was ambitious and chatty, and he could win over a crowd with jokes and rope tricks. Plus, he was generous. He was known to buy townsfolk brand new suits like the ones he wore every single day.

He visited the sick and elderly and even bought ponies for kids just to cheer them up. In Osage, he got rich. He owned one house in Fairfax and another in the country, plus five thousand acres of grazing land. He leased another forty-five thousand from Osage landowners and invested in businesses all over town: a bank, a general store, a funeral home.

He eventually had so much wealth and power that he became known as the so-called king of the Osage Hills. Hale had been good friends with Henry Roan, the man found dead behind the steering wheel in January 1923, and he did not seem poised to gain anything by these Osage people dying. So Bill Smith’s accusations must have perplexed people at first. Then, in October 1923, Hale filed a lawsuit.

He said he was owed twenty-five thousand dollars on a life insurance policy he had taken out on Roan. He had made all the payments on the policy and was miffed that Capital Life Insurance and Roan’s estate executors were denying him payment. Suddenly, it became clear that Hale had stood to benefit from Roan’s death. Now, he would not benefit directly from the deaths of Rita and Bill Smith, but his nephew would.

Molly Burkhart was now the only surviving member of her family, and she had inherited the headrights of her father, mother, and three sisters. Suspicion was starting to ferment, but the Osage had no idea what to do about it. The police were bought. The police could not be trusted.

So in addition to local law enforcement, you had doctors that were also not trustworthy. You had medical examiners. You had coroners. It went all the way up, to the top.

The Osage tribal council felt there was no one local they could trust. It seemed that authorities decided it was okay for indigenous people to die left and right under mysterious circumstances. The council hoped that maybe they would have better luck with the federal government. So they tried their luck there.

Finally, someone listened. During the Osage Reign of Terror, what we know of today as the Federal Bureau of Investigations was still called the Bureau of Investigation, either the BOI or BI for short. It had been formed in 1908, but was fast evolving. Just as the Osage investigation was getting underway, J.

Edgar Hoover was beginning his forty-eight-year career as head honcho there. The bureau’s genesis was pretty scattershot. It started under a different name as a clearing house to try and track down known criminals, then shifted focus to tracking domestic anarchists after the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. The focus shifted again after it became the BOI to supposedly target sex trafficking, though in truth it mostly just punished women who liked having sex.

Murder had never been in its purview. The FBI had very limited jurisdiction over crimes at that time in the United States. But one of the jurisdictions they had was over American Indian reservations. And so that is why this case fell to the FBI and why it became one of their first major homicide cases.

The bureau began working the case in 1923. And as Grann said, they completely bungled it. Hoover had pulled an outlaw named Blackie Thompson out of prison with the idea that he would work for the bureau as an informant, as in he would weasel his way into the Osage community and report back as an undercover mole. Instead, he slipped away and robbed a bank and killed a police officer.

Hoover wanted to dump the case, but he could not afford to politically. He was only twenty-nine at the time. He was new to the job, and he was afraid that the scandal might end it. Instead of bailing, Hoover handed over the case to a longtime agent named Tom White.

White had earlier in his career worked as a Texas Ranger, and he was a rough and tumble lawman compared to Hoover, who wanted his agents to wear jackets and ties. But the G-men of Hoover’s dreams just were not the kinds of guys who were going to infiltrate Osage County and learn any of its secrets. White recruited a team of undercover investigators with an array of skill sets. Some posed as businessmen, some cattlemen.

One was Native American, apparently the first indigenous person to serve as an FBI agent. It did not take long for the crew to develop a theory that centered on William K. Hale. They believed he was manipulating Ernest, who was known around town as his weak-willed nephew.

Every time someone in Molly Burkhart’s family died, she inherited control of more money. Well, in theory, anyway. Because America’s history is steeped in sexism as well as racism, it was Ernest who really controlled the money. And the feds figured that Ernest was the puppet to Hale’s puppet master.

Still, having a hunch is one thing. Proving it is another. Meanwhile, even with the feds paying attention, more bodies fell. Henry Grammer, who was thought to have some incriminating evidence against Hale, died June 14th, 1923 in a car accident.

Grammer had once been a world champion roper who consulted on a movie called Ranch Life in the Southwest. It is worth noting that news articles show that Grammer himself had killed at least two men. First, a guy in a saloon fight named Leonard Holing, then a farm hand named Jim Barry. He said both kills were in self-defense and only served two years in prison for one of them.

Around the same time Grammer died, George Bigheart, the ailing man who had called his lawyer to his deathbed, was hospitalized. He had supposedly had business dealings with William Hale that did not fully come to light until years later. George had inherited some 160 acres of land in Osage County, some of which he had sold to Hale, who later sold it to his wife, Marie. At least that is how Hale told it.

Those who knew George described the transaction differently. They said Hale got George drunk and induced him to sign the land over. From a 1926 news story: “Then while in Oklahoma City, according to the allegations, Bigheart was poisoned. It is even charged that a physician put quick lime in Bigheart’s body after his death to obliterate the traces of the poison.

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But before George died, he had called lawyer W. W. Vaughn, who traveled to the hospital and gathered enough evidence to prompt him to call the sheriff and say, “Hey, I’ve got the goods for you to finally arrest someone. ” But Vaughn, of course, never made it back to Pawhuska with the evidence.

In hindsight, it is kind of amazing that Vaughn’s death was not a more pronounced turning point. Cynically, one might say that because he was a white victim, but it is actually more than that. He was a well-respected attorney and family man, father to ten. Even with such a high-profile victim, the federal investigation was still coming up empty.

The locals were not talking. Hale had threatened or paid off many of them. But the feds did not give up. White was the face of the investigation.

Everyone knew he was with the feds. But the rest of the agents were undercover, still living in Osage County like regular Joes, and they were gathering bits and pieces of information that White would then flesh out. The work was slow going, but going nonetheless. In 1925, Molly Burkhart started getting sick, and there was a renewed sense of urgency to close the case.

She was the last in her family and worth an absolute fortune. The feds got more aggressive. Following their hunch, they put pressure on Ernest Burkhart especially, and he cracked. So did his brother, Bryan.

The story they told was of a vast criminal conspiracy years in the making. This is one of the worst racial injustices and criminal conspiracies in American history. Hale had arranged the slayings of some two dozen Osage. He had encouraged Ernest Burkhart to marry Molly Kyle.

And then he and Ernest and Bryan and others systematically killed off members of Molly’s family, plus people who might know something about that system. Henry Grammer, for example, had apparently solicited hitmen on Hale’s behalf. So his car accident had been orchestrated to keep him quiet. The level of commitment to this conspiracy was unbelievable.

Ernest had not only been married to Molly for eight years, he had fathered two children with her. These murder schemes were essentially inheritance schemes. And it is one of the things that made these crimes so deeply sinister. They involved these intimate levels of betrayal.

They involve people marrying into families, having sometimes children with an Osage while systematically plotting to murder them and sometimes their children as well, so they could then inherit those headrights. The feds also learned what happened to Anna Brown, the sister whose death finally drew some attention. After leaving her sister Molly’s house, Anna had gotten in a car with Bryan Burkhart, who had offered to drive her home. But instead, he had gotten her further drunk and, alongside a man named Kelsey Morrison, lured her to a canyon that would become her murder site.

Morrison’s wife at the time saw Anna Brown in a car with the two men. Soon after, a bootlegger named Matt Williams, who had come to the canyon to deliver whiskey, heard a woman scream followed by a gunshot. He then saw Kelsey Morrison and Bryan Burkhart walk from the direction of the scream. They said they just laid out an Indian woman.

Neither Morrison’s wife nor Williams came forward until years later, because both assumed they would be killed if they did. All the slayings went something like Anna’s, though with a rotating cast of killers. In Henry Roan’s case, the direct killers were Hale and a man named John Ramsey, a Fairfax cowboy and farmer. Hale made a crucial error when he filed the lawsuit to get Roan’s twenty-five thousand dollar life insurance policy.

Once Ramsey and Hale were charged, they fought to keep the case in state court. They figured those judges would be easier to bribe, but their efforts failed. They stood trial together. The jury could not reach a verdict after the first trial, but the men were convicted when tried again.

Then that was set aside. Long story short, come 1929, Ernest Burkhart flipped on his uncle, securing convictions for Hale and Ramsey. All three men were sentenced to life in prison, though none remained behind bars nearly as long as that. Hale and Ramsey managed to get paroled in 1947, having served less than twenty years.

Hale died a free man in 1962. His nephew, the one who had testified against him in a plea deal, actually spent way more time behind bars. Ernest was released in 1959. The Oklahoma governor inexplicably pardoned him in 1966.

Even more surprising, though, this was the only case to go to trial. Among the many names of other possible victims outlined in various newspapers of the day were Alfred McKinley, Joe Bates, Ray Bunch, Gilbert Cox, Dan Dugan, Bill Fletcher and his whole family. Then you have Molly’s family: her mother, three sisters, and brother-in-law. No one was charged.

As late as 1926, people connected to the case were still dying. In December of that year, Luther Bishop, an Oklahoma state agent who had been loaned to the feds for the Osage case, was shot to death while sleeping in his home. A report described him as instrumental in assembling evidence upon which W. K.

Hale and John Ramsey were convicted in federal court of the murder of Henry Roan. No one was ever charged in that death either. Bryan Burkhart and Kelsey Morrison, Anna Brown’s killers, walked scot-free. After Hale’s conviction, the mysterious deaths stopped, but the trauma endured by the families of his victims still reverberates.

It is still such a personal, horrible story because there are still so many murders that were unsolved, so many suspicious deaths. Our headrights have been taken from us, our land has been taken from us. And these murderers, they get royalty checks every quarter. Eventually, the federal government did change a law that helped protect the Osage people.

They made it so that only Osage could inherit headrights. If you were, say, a white husband, you had no claim. Thus throwing a wrench in the plans of anyone who would marry, create a life with, and then murder an innocent person they had tricked into falling in love with them.