Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

A true story of immense wealth, a string of mysterious murders, and the birth of the FBI.

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Welcome to our summary of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. This gripping work of narrative nonfiction unearths a chilling, forgotten chapter of American history. In the 1920s, the Osage Nation became the wealthiest people per capita in the world after oil was discovered beneath their land. What followed was a sinister conspiracy of murder, known as the Reign of Terror. Grann meticulously investigates these crimes, revealing how the case became a crucial test for the fledgling FBI and exposed a horrifying depth of greed and racial injustice.
Part I: The Marked Woman
In the beginning, there was the land. To the Osage people, forced onto a stretch of northeastern Oklahoma in the 1870s, it seemed a place of final exile. The terrain was rocky, hilly, and contemptuously dismissed by government surveyors as unfit for cultivation. It was a reservation intended as a terminus, a final, forgotten corner of a nation that had relentlessly pushed them to its margins. But beneath this worthless soil, hidden from the avarice of the settlers who had taken their ancestral homes, lay a geologic miracle. An ocean of oil, black and viscous, waited. When the first derricks pierced the earth in the late 19th century, they unleashed not just a torrent of crude but a flood of unimaginable wealth that inundated the Osage Nation.

By the early 1920s, this small tribe of barely two thousand people had become, per capita, the richest on earth. The money flowed through a unique and, as it would turn out, fatal mechanism: the headright system. The tribal council had shrewdly retained the mineral rights to their land, and every person on the 1906 tribal roll was granted a single headright—a share in the staggering oil royalties. A single headright could generate thousands, then tens of thousands of dollars a year, an astronomical sum at a time when the average American worker earned less than a thousand. These headrights could not be sold by the Osage; they could only be inherited. This fact, seemingly a safeguard, transformed each Osage man, woman, and child into a walking repository of fortune, and in doing so, it painted a target on their backs.

The world looked upon Osage County with a mixture of awe and contempt. Newspapers ran sensational stories of Indians in raccoon coats driving Pierce-Arrow automobiles, of brick mansions rising from the prairie, complete with white servants. Yet this spectacle of wealth was shadowed by a deep-seated prejudice, a belief that the Osage were children, incapable of managing their own affairs. This sentiment was codified into law. The government, in its paternalistic wisdom, declared many Osage “incompetent” and assigned them white guardians to oversee their finances. This system was not a shield but a siphon, a legalized framework for grand-scale larceny. Guardians plundered their wards’ accounts, charging exorbitant fees for simple transactions, selling them overpriced goods, and often leaving them with a pittance of their own money. And then, a more sinister form of plunder began.

For Mollie Burkhart, a full-blood Osage woman who spoke her native tongue and adhered to the old ways, the world was contracting into a space of bewildering fear. She had married a white man, Ernest Burkhart, a transplant from Texas who seemed devoted to her. But around her, a darkness was gathering. The Osage called it the Reign of Terror. It began not with a thunderclap but with a series of quiet, inexplicable disappearances and sudden, violent deaths.

In May of 1921, Mollie’s older sister, Anna Brown, vanished. Anna was vibrant and defiant, a woman who moved freely between the Osage world and the booming, lawless frontier towns. A week after she disappeared, a hunter found her body slumped in a remote ravine. A single bullet had entered the back of her head. The local authorities conducted a perfunctory investigation that quickly went cold; in a county awash with oil money and bootleg whiskey, the death of an Indian woman was hardly a priority. Mollie was consumed by grief, a feeling soon compounded by a chilling dread.

A few months later, her mother, Lizzie Q, began to fade. She was afflicted with a peculiar “wasting illness,” a diagnosis of convenience offered by the white doctors who attended to the family. She grew thinner, weaker, her life force seemingly draining away day by day. The Osage whispered a different word: poison. It was a method that was becoming disturbingly common, a silent and easily concealed form of murder that could be masked by a doctor’s complicit signature on a death certificate. When Lizzie died, her valuable headright passed to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita.

The web of kinship, once a source of strength, was now a blueprint for annihilation. White men had flocked to Osage County, their intentions thinly veiled. They were prospectors of a different sort, mining not for oil but for marriage certificates. They courted and wed Osage women, positioning themselves to inherit fortunes. Ernest, Mollie’s husband, was nephew to William K. Hale, a wealthy cattleman and reserve deputy sheriff who styled himself the “King of the Osage Hills.” Hale was a towering figure of influence, a purported friend and benefactor to the Osage, a man who spoke their language and lent them money. He served as a pallbearer at Anna Brown’s funeral.

The terror escalated. In March 1923, Mollie’s cousin, Henry Roan, was found in his car, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. It was ruled a suicide, another convenient closing of a file. Then, the conspiracy, no longer content with the subtlety of poison or the staged suicide, revealed its most brazen face. Mollie’s remaining sister, Rita, had married a white man named Bill Smith. One night, as Mollie was trying to sleep, the world outside her window erupted. A deafening explosion ripped through the darkness, shattering the prairie quiet. She knew, with a certainty that froze her blood, what it was. Rita and Bill Smith’s house, just down the hill from her own, had been obliterated by a nitroglycerin bomb. Investigators would later find pieces of their bodies strewn across the property.

Now, only Mollie was left. Of her immediate family, she was the sole inheritor of a cluster of headrights that generated a fortune. And she, too, was becoming ill. She suffered from diabetes, but a strange lethargy had taken hold of her, a familiar wasting that mirrored her mother’s final days. Her loving husband, Ernest, was always there to administer her injections, to mix her medicine. She was a marked woman, the final obstacle in a systematic plot of extermination, and the killers were not anonymous phantoms in the night. They were seated at her dinner table. They were smiling at her children. They were in her home.
Part II: The Evidence Man
By 1925, the body count in Osage County had grown so high, and the nature of the crimes so monstrous, that the murders could no longer be dismissed as a local affair. The Osage Tribal Council, having exhausted every avenue of justice in a state where lawmen were either corrupt or complicit, sent a representative to Washington D.C. with a desperate plea for federal intervention. The plea landed on the desk of a man for whom the case represented not just a moral imperative, but a profound opportunity. His name was J. Edgar Hoover. He was just thirty years old, the newly appointed director of the obscure Bureau of Investigation, and he was consumed by a burning ambition to transform his agency from a backwater refuge for political cronies into a disciplined, scientific, and indispensable arm of the federal government. The Osage murders, with their lurid headlines and baffling complexity, would be the crucible for his new F.B.I.

To lead the perilous inquiry, Hoover did not choose one of his new, college-educated agents, the button-downed ideal he was trying to cultivate. Instead, he turned to a man who seemed a relic of a bygone era: Tom White. A former Texas Ranger, White was tall and imposing, a man of few words and unassailable integrity. He had spent his life chasing outlaws across the sun-blasted plains, and he possessed a quiet patience and an innate understanding of the criminal mind that no textbook could teach. He was incorruptible in a land where everything and everyone seemed to have a price. In an age leaning toward the laboratory, White was a throwback to the frontier lawman, yet he was precisely the man the situation demanded. He assembled a small, clandestine team, and together they descended into the venomous atmosphere of Osage County.

White understood that a conventional investigation was impossible. The conspirators had woven a tapestry of silence, held together by fear and complicity. Witnesses disappeared. Jurors were bought. The entire power structure of the county, from bankers to lawmen, seemed to be aligned against any inquiry. So White’s team went underground. The agents assumed aliases, melting into the landscape they hoped to decipher. One posed as a cattle buyer, another as an oil prospector. A third, a handsome agent named John Wren, became an insurance salesman, a role that gave him a pretext to ask probing questions about life and, more importantly, death. They moved through the saloons and boarding houses, listening to the whispers, trying to find a loose thread in the tightly wound conspiracy. It was treacherous work; one agent who began to uncover the truth was abducted, tortured, and nearly killed before he managed to escape.

White’s strategy was twofold. While his undercover men gathered intelligence, he pursued a different kind of prey: informants. He knew the criminal underworld often fed on itself, and he targeted known outlaws and bootleggers who might have been involved on the periphery of the murders. He traveled to the state penitentiary to interview a notorious bank robber named Blackie Thompson, dangling the prospect of a pardon in exchange for information. He found Burt Lawson, a small-time crook and moonshiner, who had been tasked with the bombing of the Smith house. These men were unreliable, dangerous, and morally compromised, but they were the only ones who could offer a glimpse into the conspiracy’s inner sanctum. Squeezing them for information was a slow, agonizing process, a psychological battle of wills that Tom White, with his calm and unyielding demeanor, was built to win.

Simultaneously, the Bureau was deploying the new, scientific methods that Hoover championed as the future of criminology. While White worked the human angle, experts in Washington analyzed evidence sent back from the field. They examined forged documents related to insurance policies and fraudulent guardianship claims, with handwriting analysts meticulously comparing signatures. Though primitive by modern standards, forensic ballistics were used to try and link bullets from crime scenes to specific weapons. This combination of old-school detective work and nascent forensic science began to yield results. The disparate murders, once viewed as isolated tragedies, began to coalesce into a single, horrifying picture. And at the center of that picture was one man.

All threads of the investigation—the undercover work, the informant testimonies, the forensic clues—kept leading back to William K. Hale. The “King of the Osage Hills.” He was the benevolent patriarch, the man who had built a sprawling cattle empire, who served on school boards and donated to churches, and who called the Osage his “red brothers.” But beneath this veneer of civic virtue was a sociopathic mastermind of breathtaking cruelty. White and his team painstakingly reconstructed Hale’s labyrinthine plot. He had orchestrated the murders for one simple reason: to consolidate his family’s control over the Osage headrights. His nephew, Ernest Burkhart, had married Mollie. Another nephew had been married to Anna Brown. Henry Roan, another victim, owed Hale a substantial sum of money and had, under duress, named Hale the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Hale had ordered the murders of Mollie’s sisters and mother to ensure their headrights would pass down a single line of inheritance, a line that ended with Mollie—and that he controlled through Ernest.

The most chilling piece of the puzzle was Ernest Burkhart himself. He was not a strong man, but a weak one, easily swayed by his uncle’s domineering will and his own insatiable greed. He had actively participated in the conspiracy to murder his wife’s own family. He had driven the getaway car for the man who shot Anna. He had helped plan the bombing that vaporized Rita and Bill Smith. And all the while, he had been at Mollie’s side, playing the part of the devoted husband, even as he followed Hale’s instructions to slowly poison his wife, to complete the final step in their murderous scheme. The betrayal was almost too profound to comprehend.

Armed with confessions and corroborating evidence, Tom White arrested Hale and Ernest. The trials were a sensation, a clash between the nascent power of the federal government and the entrenched corruption of the old frontier. Hale, confident in his local influence, employed his usual tactics of witness intimidation and jury tampering. The first trials ended in hung juries. But White and the prosecutors were relentless. They moved the trials, protected their witnesses, and slowly, painstakingly, built an unassailable case. In the end, against all odds, justice seemed to prevail. William Hale, the untouchable King, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, as were several of his key accomplices, including Ernest Burkhart. For the Bureau of Investigation, it was a monumental victory. Hoover seized on it, publicizing the case as a triumph of modern law enforcement. It appeared that the Reign of Terror was finally over and its architect brought to justice.
Part III: The Reporter
Decades later, I went to Oklahoma to learn about the Osage murders. At first, the story seemed to have a clear, if tragic, narrative arc: a series of horrific crimes, a heroic investigation, and a satisfying, cinematic conclusion with the conviction of the arch-villain, William Hale. This was the official history, the one cemented in the archives of the FBI and immortalized by J. Edgar Hoover as a foundational myth of his agency. But as I began to speak with the descendants of the victims, and to delve into the dusty, forgotten records stored away in courthouses and basements, a disquieting feeling took root. The official story felt too neat, too contained. It felt incomplete.

The FBI case had officially centered on twenty-four murders. Yet in conversations with Osage elders, I repeatedly heard stories of other mysterious deaths from that era. Grandparents who had died in suspicious car accidents. Aunts who had succumbed to sudden, wasting illnesses. Uncles who had vanished without a trace. These deaths were often ruled accidents, suicides, or the result of alcohol poisoning, their files summarily closed. The official count of twenty-four, I began to realize, was not the sum of the crimes, but merely the number of murders the Bureau had been able to solve. It was a fraction of the true toll.

I unearthed a trove of documents that exposed a conspiracy far broader and more insidious than the one Tom White’s team had uncovered. The guardianship records were a ledger of systemic fraud, but they also contained clues to something worse. Guardians who had bled their Osage wards dry, and then, when the ward died under suspicious circumstances, inherited what was left. I found death certificates for wealthy Osage signed by doctors who attributed the cause to “peculiar circumstances” or a vague “unknown.” I cross-referenced these with probate records and discovered that these same doctors, or local undertakers, or the white businessmen who sold the victims their cars and their groceries, often ended up as the beneficiaries of their estates. Hale was not an anomaly; he was simply the most successful and audacious practitioner of a widespread cottage industry of murder. The Reign of Terror was not the plot of a single mastermind and his few henchmen. It was a culture. It implicated doctors who administered poison instead of medicine, morticians who covered up bullet holes, lawyers who forged wills, and an entire society of so-called respectable citizens who were complicit, either through their actions or their silence, in a slow-motion genocide for profit.

The number of victims was not twenty-four. It was likely in the hundreds. An Osage historian once showed me a photograph of the 1924 graduating class from the local high school. He pointed to the Osage students. “This one,” he said, “his family was killed. This one, her parents were shot. And this one here, they blew up his home.” The photograph was a portrait of a generation decimated.

This history is not buried in the distant past; it lives on as a palpable trauma within the Osage community. I spoke with Mary Jo Webb, a retired teacher whose grandfather had been killed during that time, a case never investigated. She had spent years compiling evidence of other unsolved murders, a lonely crusade for an acknowledgment that never came. I met with Margie Burkhart, the granddaughter of Mollie and Ernest, a woman forced to grapple with the almost unthinkable legacy of a grandmother who was a target of genocide and a grandfather who was a killer. The pain has been passed down through generations, interwoven with a deep-seated distrust of outsiders and a silence born of fear. For decades, many Osage families dared not speak of the Reign of Terror, afraid that the killers, or their descendants, still lived among them. To speak of it was to risk reopening a wound that had never properly healed.

For these families, there has been no closure, no complete history—only a narrative riddled with voids, with ancestors whose stories end in a question mark. Tom White’s investigation, heroic as it was, had only cauterized the most visible wound, leaving the deeper infection to fester. And even that limited victory proved ephemeral. In a final, bitter injustice, William Hale and Ernest Burkhart were not forced to serve their full life sentences. Despite the monstrousness of their crimes, they were eventually paroled. They walked free.

What happened to the Osage is a story about the collision of systemic racism and unrestrained greed, a chilling illustration of how the dehumanization of a people can be used to justify the most heinous of crimes. It is a story about betrayal in its most intimate form—the horror of being murdered not by a stranger, but by a spouse, a friend, a trusted community leader. The case was indeed pivotal in the birth of the modern FBI, a testament to the power of a centralized, scientific investigation. But that is only part of the legacy. The truer, darker legacy is one of incomplete justice, of a historical amnesia that allowed a nation to forget one of its most sinister chapters. To uncover this story is not merely an act of historical inquiry; it is an act of bearing witness, of trying to restore a small measure of dignity to the victims by finally telling the full, brutal truth of what was stolen from them—not just their money, but their lives, their trust, and their history.
Killers of the Flower Moon’s lasting impact is its exposure of a systemic campaign of terror. The book’s stunning resolution reveals that the conspiracy's mastermind was William Hale, a powerful rancher posing as a friend to the Osage. He manipulated his own nephew, Ernest Burkhart—who was married to an Osage woman, Mollie—to orchestrate the murders of her family to inherit their oil headrights. While FBI agent Tom White’s investigation secured convictions, Grann's research uncovers a devastating truth: the official death toll was a fraction of the actual number, and countless murderers escaped punishment. The book’s strength is its meticulous correction of the historical record, giving a voice to victims whose stories were nearly erased. We hope this summary has shed light on this crucial story. Please like and subscribe for more content like this, and we'll see you for the next episode. Goodbye.