Osage murders

Osage murders, series of murders of Osage tribal members in Oklahoma principally in the 1920s. Many of the killings were part of a conspiracy to obtain the oil wealth of Osage members. The murders were the first major criminal investigation conducted by the U.S. government agency that became the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 2017 author David Grann brought attention to this long-forgotten story in his book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which was adapted as a major motion picture by Martin Scorsese released in 2023.

The Osage Nation and the oil boom

The Osage (Ni-u-kon-ska) Nation, pushed west by white settlement, negotiated a treaty in 1865 to purchase their own reservation land in what became northern Oklahoma. In the 1890s oil deposits were discovered on the reservation, which is now coterminous with Osage County. When the U.S. Congress passed the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, a tribal lawyer wisely reserved subsurface mineral rights for the Osage people. As it turned out, the reservation contained some of the largest oil deposits in the country, setting off the Oklahoma oil boom.

Although proceeds from the mineral rights were held in trust by the U.S. government, mineral lease royalties were paid to the tribe. Royalties were allotted equally to each tribal member in shares called headrights, which were passed along to a person’s legal heirs when the person died. At the height of the oil boom, headrights were worth several million dollars each. Osage tribal members became the wealthiest people per capita in the world, buying mansions, cars, and luxury goods and, in some cases, even hiring white servants. However, in March 1921, Congress created a system under which guardians—generally, prominent white citizens—were appointed by a court to manage the funds of Osage persons who were found to be “incompetent,” a designation that in practice usually meant that the individual in question was a full-blooded Osage as opposed to a “competent” mixed-race member of the tribe.

1921–26: the Reign of Terror

It was not long before local whites began targeting the Osage and their wealth. Dishonorable lawyers, bankers, and businessmen serving as guardians skimmed money from their wards’ oil royalties or sought to otherwise bilk them. William K. Hale, a prominent cattle rancher, businessman, and self-styled “King of the Osage Hills,” masterminded one of the deadliest schemes. Because the 1906 act allowed non-Osage people to inherit headrights, Hale urged his nephew Ernest Burkhart to marry Mollie Kyle, a full-blooded allottee. The two men, along with John Ramsey, Kelsey (sometimes spelled Kelsie) Morrison, and other accomplices, then began systematically murdering her family.

In 1921 Mollie Kyle’s mother, Lizzie Q. Kyle, who had inherited three additional headrights, died of suspected poisoning. Only months before her death, another of her daughters, Anna Brown, had been killed, and within two years Mollie Kyle’s cousin Henry Roan and her aunt and uncle Rita and William Smith were murdered. Their headrights now belonged to Kyle. If she died, Hale’s nephew stood to inherit them all, each one worth several million dollars.

Kyle’s family members were not the only ones killed by Hale, his accomplices, and other conspirators. Estimates of the number of Osage persons who were murdered vary but generally range from about two dozen to more than 60 during 1921–26, a time called the Reign of Terror. Such fear gripped the Osage community that many refused to leave their homes at night. Tribal appeals to local lawmen, medical examiners, and judges for help were largely ignored. Hale had either bribed or intimidated these officials to create a network of corruption that reached the state level. He even ordered the murder of a few honest white men who tried to stop the killings.

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Trial, conviction, and aftermath

Finally, in March 1923 the Osage Tribal Council appealed to the U.S. government for help. The Bureau of Investigation, led from May 1924 by J. Edgar Hoover, had jurisdiction over Native American reservations and was assigned the case, focusing its investigation on the death of Roan, which had occurred on the Osage Reservation. The Osage murders became the bureau’s first major homicide investigation.

Hoover appointed a former Texas Ranger, Thomas White, as the lead investigator. Although he identified Hale (who had collected $25,000 as the beneficiary of a fraudulent life insurance policy for Roan) and his accomplices as the main suspects, White needed three of his agents (John Burger, Frank Smith, and John Wren) to operate undercover to gather enough evidence to bring them to trial. A breakthrough finally came in May 1926 when Morrison, a petty criminal, confessed he had been hired by Hale to murder Anna Brown. He also implicated Hale and Burkhart in the killing of Rita and William Smith, who died in a bombing of their home.

In the corrupt Osage County climate, federal prosecutors were frustrated by a series of legal delays, hung juries, an overturned verdict, and the intimidation or disappearance of witnesses. Moreover, local prejudice against the Osage made it doubtful that a white jury would ever convict the men. But the horrific details of the murder scheme had focused national attention on Oklahoma. In 1926 Burkhart, having pled guilty, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Some three years later, Hale and Ramsey were likewise convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison—for the second time, their 1926 conviction having been reversed. Burkhart was paroled in 1937 (but later returned to prison after committing robbery); Hale was released in 1947, despite strong tribal protests.

To prevent another Reign of Terror, Congress amended the 1906 act to forbid any non-Osage from inheriting headrights of tribal members possessing more than one-half Osage blood. The publicity and successful prosecution of the cases also helped to create a reconstituted FBI under Hoover’s direction. In Osage County today, the descendants of both the victims and their killers still struggle with the difficult legacy of the murders and the partial justice that was rendered by the state’s legal system.