The Osage Murders

Another chapter in my recent book Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3OWWt4l concerns the Osage murders, made infamous by the book Killers of the Flower Moon and the 2023 movie of the same name. 

On May 27, 1921, the body of Anna Brown was found beside a road between Fairfax and Grayhorse in Osage County, Oklahoma. Brown had been shot through the head. Initial reports mentioned that, as a member of the Osage tribe, she was receiving about $1,000 per month in “oil royalties;” but the only theory of the crime local authorities could offer was that she had been the victim of highway robbery.

As it turned out, Anna Brown was not the victim of highway robbery but of one of the most diabolical get-rich schemes in American history. Because of a series of land deals made with the federal government going back to the late 1800s, the Osage held the rights to one of the largest deposits of oil in the United States. To divide up the profits from the commonly owned mineral rights, a system was adopted by which each Osage member would receive an equal share of the revenue. This came to be called a headright. Private companies could lease the land and then pay a percentage of their profits into a trust fund managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA would then distribute payments to the holders of the headrights.

During the Oklahoma oil boom of the early 1900s, the Osage people became some of the wealthiest in the world, as members of the tribe, like Anna Brown, received payments that today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

The sudden wealth of the Osage people drew lots of swindlers looking to cheat tribal members out of their money; so, the U. S Government established a system that was supposedly designed to help the Osage protect their wealth. White guardians were assigned to manage the money of any members of the tribe who were judged incompetent. In practice, the guardianship program was a racist system under which simply being Native American was sufficient reason to be deemed “incompetent."

The guardians often paid themselves from money they were supposed to be safeguarding for the Osage, but this was not the worst of the abuses. The law allowed that headrights could not be sold but they could be inherited. This provision spawned the "Reign of Terror" during which many white people married into the Osage tribe and then killed or hired someone else to kill their spouses and/or their spouse’s relatives in order to gain their headrights.

Anna Brown was not the first victim of the scheme, but most of the murders occurred in the early 1920s, and her case was the first to receive much publicity. In total, at least 24 members of the Osage tribe were killed or died under mysterious circumstances during the "Reign of Terror," and some estimates place the number much higher. Most of the murders occurred in the Fairfax-Grayhorse area, and many of the victims were members of the same family, relatives of Anna.

Several people were arrested for questioning or as suspects in Anna's death, including Ernest Burkhart, who was married to Anna’s sister Mollie, but the coroner ultimately ruled that Anna had been killed by parties unknown. 

During the two years following Anna's death, her mother died under suspicious circumstances, her ex-husband was found dead with a gunshot to the back of the head, and a second sister (Rita) and her husband were killed when their house exploded.

The coincidence of so many members of the Osage tribe, especially members of the same family, dying so close together in time and place was too obvious to ignore, and the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) finally initiated an investigation. The investigative team kept encountering the names of William K. Hale and Ernest Burkhart, the same Ernest Burkhart who was married to Anna's sister Mollie and who had been arrested for questioning in Anna's death. Hale, a wealthy, prominent citizen, was Burkhart's uncle, and he was eventually identified as the mastermind behind the murders of Anna and her family. The scheme was for Burkhart to inherit all the family's wealth and then turn a large portion of it over to his uncle. 

Hale and Burkhart were arrested for conspiring to kill the family members of Burkhart's wife, Mollie. Mollie herself was found to be dying of gradual poisoning, but the scheme was uncovered in time to save her life. Hale and Burkhart were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, but both were paroled after twenty years or so. 

My recent book contains a considerably more detailed account of the Osage murders than I've given here, or if you really want to delve into the subject, here's a link to Killers of the Flower Moon https://amzn.to/3DeN1qJ.