August 14, 2025 • 50 mins
On today’s episode, Karen covers the Osage oil murders.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hello, and welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
It's my favorite murder.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's Georgia hertstart.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
That's Karen and Kilgarriff, and we're about.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
To podcast for you. Watch this.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
This is like we have to think of something to
say after welcome every week, and we're doing it every
week for ten years almost ten years, ten years.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Ten years ten.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
So here's what I came up with for Georgia for
this week. Okay, I started this sentence, how did I
say it? And we're going to podcast that you oh
yo oh, just now. Right before we started, you said
I'm going to right, I'm going to get that's right,
you said I'm going to get and then you said
I'm gonna save it for the podcast. And yes, in
my wildest dreams, I can't imagine. I can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Top three.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm going to get another tattoo? Is that what it was?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Another fish tattoo? Another a second fish, second salmon tattoo.
But this one is five times the size of.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The first one.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
I'm going to get ready to walk out of here.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, storm out. The best storm out is when you
warn people seven minutes in advance that you're going to
angrily stand up and walk out.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
And you're waiting until you're on your being recorded.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yes, exactly as many witnesses as possible.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Could the last one be I'm going to get more dogs?
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Oh I am, But I mean that's not what it was, Okay,
and it's going to.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Be so about what is it?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
When you play games like this, you can't help but
set yourself up to be like, I'm going to have
to get a bunch of Kleenex because my nose has
started randomly, all the sudden running when I have no allergies.
That's not the way I live my life. No, all
of a sudden just it's menopause. Do you know? It's
the single stream of just something coming out of your nose.
(01:56):
You're like, what the hell? And then what it is?
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Is that a thing too?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yes, because I just blame everything on menopause. Now that
would be I mean I kind of do already, but
the nose is going to start running.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
It's the thing you used to talk about during the
show where you were like, I have to have cleans
because all of a sudden, my nose will just run,
and I'm like okay, okay. And then like some point
this weekend, I was just sitting outside literally like sipping
a diet coke and it was like, go oh, onto
my lips. I was not ready.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Well, welcome to the fucking tissue world, socks. It's annoying.
Although my allergies are much better.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
I've been taking these drops you can get like allergy
drops made. They test you and then they like gave
you the fascinating stuff for a true crime podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
What the people they want to hear about compounding pharmacies
on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
They want to tune into.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
I always think of the beginning of these when we're
talking stupid shit like this, of the girl who's playing
it for her sister or her mom.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Be just wait, they get it gets better.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It's not always like this.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Let me pass forward, Let me let me pass forward.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Are you telling me that people aren't gripped by my
story of I'm about to get dot dot dot.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
And my guesses? Let me nothing to nobody.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
None of this means anything that anybody.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Means anything to anyone, And that's what we're here for.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And that's the lesson of ten years of podcasting.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Hey, hey, I'm going to be in Ireland when this
gets posted and this gets what art dublin?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Hell yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
And then We're going to Edinburgh, which I'm a little
nervous about because the fringe Fest is going on and
it looks like every street performer is just up in
your face the whole time.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yes, but it's Ireland, so they're more low key the
up Irish up in your face.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Now they're Scottish.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Oh that's right. Oh sorry, I was thinking about when
I went to the Galway. You're talking fringe Fest. I
was thinking of the Galway Arts Festival.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Okay, now that sounds great.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Your vacation is my vacation this world.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
I'm going to this same my were places.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Edinburgh is one of the greatest cities there is.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, I'm really excited.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Have you been before?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I went as a broke twenty five year old with
my friends who were doing a festival tour all over Europe,
and so I just like bummed along with them. So
I didn't have any money for anything. We were there
for like twenty four hours. So now I'm going back
all fresh. We're gonna see Oasis on Vince's fiftieth birthday.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So excited.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
This is this is it?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Are you going to spare your beer cup full of pea?
Remember that moment?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
But they always Oh my god, dear, that's the thing.
Thank god, that doesn't happen in my favorite murder Oh
live shows. Well you don't, I mean not anything.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, that's a great fiftieth birthday. Yeah, that'll be very fun.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
But then there's all the witchy things that you can
do in Edinburgh.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, castlely things and witchy things.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Okay, yeah, blood of tours and I mean there's just
the oldest of cultures.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I feel like I have to say that someone's going
to be living at my house while we're gone, so
no one breaks in.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Okay, is that what Marty's on duty?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Yeah, that's what ten years of this podcast will do you,
because you get so paranoid.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
That you have to, you know, do that.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
People should know though, I have pat So clearly someone's
going to be staying there, you know, like, yeah, Goesa's.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Going to be watching the house for me, me and
angrily watching that.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
She'll scratch your fucking eyes out.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Be careful of MEMI all right, anything else exciting going on?
I mean, that's a great exciting trip to take.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
No. I mean, we're just planning for our live shows.
It feels like it's coming up so fast.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
It is coming up back.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Go to my favorite murder dot com slash live to
get tickets.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Please, that's right, and we do want to thank everybody
for all of your excitement. We announced and you showed
up and you've bought tickets and we were scared that
maybe you wouldn't and you really did, so thank you
so much. There are a couple tickets left Pasadena, San Diego,
Salt Lake City. I think those cities still have a couple.
So go to my favorite murder dot com slash live
(05:40):
and get what is now available. At the airing of
this podcast.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
I'm picking out so many dresses, you guys are gonna
I'm picking out dresses that I looked at it and
my Karen's dad would say, what.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
The hell is she wearing? I don't know why. That's
my goal, Yes, for your dad to what in the
hell is she wearing?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Jesus's from the nineteen sixties?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Why would she wear that?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
You were Kathleen out a dress like that? Yes, that's
a great idea. Yeah, I'm always dressing for the opposite
where it's like I.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Don't want to hear it, don't comment on my clothes.
Do want to hear it, But I have to say.
I was doing some shopping this week, and it's so
great to have an excuse like that. Was like, I
have to go to the.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Mall and I did try something on that I loved
and it didn't have pockets, and I was like, this
just doesn't even make sense anymore for women of today. Yeah,
you better put pockets in your dresses.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I bought a pair of pajama shorts recently and they
didn't have pockets.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Come on, like, where I am?
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Where am I going to put that little Apple remote?
Speaker 3 (06:32):
I'm not gonna be in bed the whole time. I'm
going to be walking around.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Rocking around with the Apple remote in your pockets and shit,
it's gone forever.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And I put my headphones.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yes, yeah, so we're preparing to Are you prepared?
Speaker 2 (06:45):
For sure? Prepared? Please come and don't throw your pee.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Please don't pull an Oasis audience on us. Oh that
was legendary. Well we'll go into highlights. Let's do it.
Would you like to live deliciously? Well now you can
with ad free episodes of my favorite murder. You get
that and so much more. When you join our fan cults.
You can also get exclusive audio video content. You get
(07:09):
merch discounts. You get access to the private discord page
where all the other fan cult members are chatting it up.
Get in there.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, they're talking about meeting up before the shows live shows.
To get in there. If you're going alone and you
want to like have a drink with some murderinos beforehand,
yeah boom, get in the discord.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So if you want to be in the fan cult
and you haven't joined yet, head to fancult dot supercast
dot com and join it now.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Thank you for doing that. Yeah, all right, Well this
is a solo episode because summer it's vacation. The live
shows are coming up, so you tell me a story.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
That's right, it's my chance to shine.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
There was a very famous movie very recently about these
murders that I'm going to tell you about.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
We begin today in Osage.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
County, Oklahoma, home to the O Sage Nation. Holy shit,
this wasn't always the O Sage Nation's home. In the
eighteen seventies, after having already been pushed out of their
ancestral lands in what are now Missouri and Arkansas, the
Osage are then forced to relocate from Kansas to eastern
Oklahoma on land that white authorities have deemed worthless for farming,
(08:22):
but decades later, underneath that same worthless land, oil deposits
are discovered. So when the O Sage realize that they're
sitting on a gold mine, they meet with the federal
government and shrewdly negotiate to maintain their reservation's mineral rights,
flipping a very racist power dynamic on its head. So
in nineteen twenty three alone, those oil royalties brought in
(08:45):
around thirty million dollars for the Osage nation. Do you
want to guess what that would be in today's money?
One hundred and seventy five, four hundred and eighty million dollars. Shit, yes,
and that's in one year.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
The person who did the accounting, a fucking white manager.
The accounting like just send them there?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yes, fired? Well, because yeah, exactly, they're like, this is
not our colonial plan where we're trying to oppress these people. Right,
So how the Osage decide to handle it is they
pulled that money and then they divide it equally among
the two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine people listed
on the official O Sage tribal role. Wow, everybody gets
(09:23):
a cut jam and there's more than enough to go, right,
is there? Yes, And so each person's share become known
as their head rights, and will refer to head rights
kind of for the rest of the story. Okay. So
by the nineteen tens and into the twenties, the Osage
were said to be the wealthiest people per capita in
the entire world.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Oh my god, like that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yes, But of course with that money came an increase
in tribal member deaths. Between nineteen oh seven and nineteen
twenty three, it's estimated that members of the o Sage
nation died at about one and a half the national rate. Okay,
and many of these deaths were suspicious, but as grieving
families fought for accountability and justice, they were often dismissed
(10:07):
by the white authorities. No shock there. Writer Dennis mccauliffe
Junior is an Osage tribal member who learned that his
own grandmother's nineteen twenties murder was covered up as welllia
and he writes, quote, deliberate poisonings were chalked up to
drinking bad liquor. Shootings got labeled as suicides, Autopsies were
often skipped, burials rushed, and death certificates falsified.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
So then in the early twenties in Osage County, driven
by the persistence of the Osage people, one of the
FBI's very first major homicide cases is going to be investigated,
and decades later it will serve as the subject of
David Grant's best selling book Killers of the Flower Moon,
which was then adapted into Martin Scorsese's twenty twenty three
(10:52):
Oscar winning film This is the Story of the Osage
Oil Murders.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Wow, this is an epic, right, this is yeah, good job.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Because when we're doing solos, we still want to give
the people what they want.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
I definitely, yeah, you want a little bit of it
like a showstopper.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Right right, jazz hands all around of talking about what
is essentially it typifies a true crime story in the
most government signed on worst way, horrifying way possible.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah. Like, oh, people say that this is the government's
not after you, and it's like, well, here's a story
where they literally are after.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
You entirely kind of like you say, government say, you
know your town, whatever it is, where it's so much
worse than you can even begin to imagine. So we
begin to day with the Osage family that play key
figures in this FBI investigation and whose experiences serve as
the backbone for the book Killers of the Flower Moon.
(11:48):
The patriarch of this household is Nakai sa Why, who
prefers his Osage name, but many people call him Jimmy
again colonialism, So he passes away before much of our
story takes place, and his widow is named Lizzie Q
and they have four daughters together that are born in
(12:10):
the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties. The oldest daughter
is Anna, then there's Molly, followed by Minnie and Rita,
and we spend most of our time in this story
with Mollie, who in Scorsese's movie is played by Lily
Gladstone amazingly, and she earned lots of awards for that portrayal,
and she became the first Native American woman ever to
(12:32):
be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, and
she won the Golden Globe for the same category. So
lots of firsts and groundbreaking, kind of glass ceiling breaking
took place during that which is amazing, And also just
the fact that getting this story to the general public
is the kind of history that we all need to learn.
(12:52):
So Molly's family experiences this huge transformation of Osage County firsthand.
They lived in the abject poverty after being pushed out
of Kansas and forced by the government to assimilate into
mainstream American culture, which meant that they had to either
abandon or hide their Osage identities, customs, traditions, or else
food and funds would be with help. Then when Molly's
(13:15):
around ten, and her sisters, being close and aged to her,
are also close to that age, that's when the oil's discovered.
Suddenly o Sage families go from barely scraping by to
moving into large homes that are often staffed with white
domestic servants.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
I mean, god, what a fucking moment.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
What a moment.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
This should be a TV show that that should be
a peace downstairs. Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Is it a comedy?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
I think it could be. I think the people who
made reservation dogs, oh yeah, could easily give us a
kind of a retro let's capture this for the moment.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
That it is. Yeah, all right, there's your pitch.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Not for me to say though, not for me to pitch,
but okay, so there's nothing that a member of the
Osage nation who is getting a cut of this oil
money can't buy, including cotour from Paris, expensive cars and
chauffeurs to drive them, anything that basically you could dream of.
One New York newspaper reports that quote, lo and behold,
(14:16):
the Indian, instead of starving to death, enjoys a steady
income that turns bankers green with envy.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Jesus yeah, end quote.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
So this materializes as an influx of white settlers into
Osage County in the nineteen tens and twenties. Their numbers swell,
and many of these transplants are bad news. An FBI
report will later note that quote the rich oiled fields
produced not only an abundance of oil, but also grift,
easy money, gambling, whiskey, and parasites bent on milking the
(14:48):
Osage out of all he owned. So that's pretty typical.
But these schemes used by white settlers are endless. Some
open businesses that sell goods or services to Osage Cus
customers at extremely inflated prices. There's also a rash of
robberies and con men in the area. And then they
are also these so called guardians who are mandated by
(15:10):
the federal government. So guardians are basically white people who
monitor Osage men and women's bank accounts because the government
has deemed them quote incompetent when it comes to handling
their oil wealth.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Wow, so it's in the bank and they still have
to have someone keep an eye on it a white man.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, they force someone to yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
To keep tabs. It's not only overtly racist. These so
called guardians aren't trained accountants. Many of them are just
local white businessmen, but they oversee every aspect of their
wards spending, approving or denying whatever expenditures they see fit.
It's so infuriating.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
So I bet they like can't just take all their
money out and leave, you know what I mean, You're thinking, like,
go move to New York City. It's like they don't
have access to that money, even though it's theirs. Yes,
I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Their spending is controlled in a way that serves the
white infrastructure, and unsurprisingly, many of these guardians abuse this
power and steal directly from Osage accounts. Another type of
grifter are the white settlers, typically single men, who swoop
into Osage County looking to marry into oil head rights.
(16:19):
By law, head rights can only be passed along through
an inheritance or marriage. They cannot be sold or given away,
so joining an O sage household is a direct way
for white men to access the oil money, as they
often wind up serving as the guardian for their osage wives.
So love it's like everything is a scam. Everything. So
(16:40):
by the late nineteen tens, Molly and her sisters Anna,
Mini and Rita are in their late twenties to early thirties.
Like every osage person, they know that white people are
here to swindle and con them, so trust is not
something that comes easily. But at the same time, there's
only around two thousand people on the official tribal role
and so the number of young eligible O sage men
(17:02):
and women is a small pool. Because of that, many
of them do wind up marrying white settlers in the
face of the very real possibility that their partners have
ulterior motives. God nasty, just like the worst feeling. Absolutely,
he's like, oh, I'm going to hold out and wait
for the big associopath who is the most rising to
(17:25):
basically be like no, no, no, but I really love
him at this time.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
It's real, even though look around, my God, how terrifying, horrible.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So in nineteen seventeen, when Mollie's around thirty years old,
she meets a World War One vet named Ernest Burkhart.
He is in his mid twenties and he's new to town,
so at first Molly's not so sure about Ernest. He's
a good looking guy. In the movie, he's played by
Leonardo DiCaprio, and he's often described as simple and passive,
which probably makes him feel safe to Molly.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Totally right.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
He's not a scheming and like smooth talker. Also, the
power he would have over their household it seems to
be a green flag that Ernest doesn't seem particularly shrewd
or ambitious. It also doesn't hurt that Ernest is the
nephew and sort of adoptive son of one of the
most powerful men in Osage County, a man named William
(18:16):
King Hale. So Hale is in his forties and he's
a white cowboy from Texas who's got our rags to
riches story that mirrors the O Sage's own rise to wealth.
He started out leasing grazing land from the O Sage
tribe and slowly acquired more acres and more cattle, and
then a bank, and then a general store, and ultimately
he became one of the county's wealthiest ranchers. It's unclear, though,
(18:39):
if he came by all of that money honestly, every
time and every deal. Dennis mccaulloff Junior reports that quote
a portion of his fortune allegedly came from ensuring his
pasture for a dollar an acre and having his cowboys
torch thirty thousand acres in one night.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah. But in the area and the county, Hale has
a great reputation. He's seen as easygoing and generous, the
kind of guy who donates to schools, gives money to
build hospitals, and positions himself as the quote best friend
of the o sage.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
So like a lot of scheming going on in Caws, a.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Lot of high level It's kind of that thing where
people get scammed and then they're so embarrassed or like
how could I fall for it? And it's like because
the person who is scamming you was dedicated their life
to scam totally, that's what they do. So you're just
like you're having this like oh my god, we won
the lottery. Except for it turns everyone into an enemy.
(19:36):
So Molly and her family know William Hale very well.
So when Ernest begins to pursue Mollie, there's some just
kind of pre established trust. She figures that Ernest must
like her for her and not her money, because he
doesn't need the money. William Hale will always take care
of him, presumably, So Mollie eventually marries Ernest, and they
(19:56):
do seem like a loving couple. She has diabetes, wh
which can be fatal at that time, so she depends
on Ernest to care for her. And even though Molly
speaks English fluently, Ernest learns to speak the Osage language
so that the two can communicate in her native language. Okay,
an act of love, Yeah, some might say, I would
(20:16):
think you, one would like to assume. About a year later,
in nineteen eighteen, Minnie, who's Molly's second youngest sister, suddenly dies.
She was only in her late twenties. She'd always been
very healthy. The doctors, the white doctors, chalk it up
to quote a wasting illness, and that's that they never.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Look further wasting illness.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Just a few months later, Minnie's widower, who's a white
man named Bill Smith marries the younger sister Rita, who's
the youngest daughter in Molly's family. It sounds weird, but
it's actually an antiquated custom that many cultures around the
world practice, which is kind of like if someone dies,
you marry back into the family another sibling. So Minnie's
(21:01):
head rights are now split between their mother Lizzie and
Minnie's widower Bill, and now Bill also has claim to
Rita's head rights. Three years later, it's nineteen twenty one.
Molly and Ernest now have two small children, and Mollie's mother, Lizzie,
has moved into their house. But Mollie's oldest sister, Anna
is struggling. She's recently divorced a white settler named Oda Brown,
(21:24):
and her sisters have noticed that she's been drinking a
lot lately. And then in May of that year, Anna
goes to visit Molly in Ernest and she gets a
ride home from Ernest's brother Brian, who she's actually gone
on a few dates with. After that, Anna vanishes. Her
family members don't hear from her for several days, which
(21:44):
is extremely out of character for her. A week later,
squirrel hunters find the body of thirty six year old
Anna dumped in an Osage County ravine. She's been shot
twice in the head, and even though there are no
exit wounds, the White doctors who perform her autopsy can't
seem to find the bullets in her skull.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
God like her last moments realizing that it was all scam.
They've been betrayed. Her sister's husband like he's about to
go back to her, is fucking.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
It's her sister's husband's brother is one away. But still, yeah,
you're totally right where it's like, all of a sudden,
it all is a plot. Ye, Like this is the
confirmation she can't tell anybody.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Yeah, horrifying.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So those bullets could be critical evidence, but of course
they just simply quote unquote can't find them. On the
same day that Anna's body is found, a second body
is found under some brush near the town of pah Husca,
which is also an Osage County. The victim here is male,
but like Anna, he is Osage, he's wealthy, he's in
(22:50):
his thirties, and he's been shot twice in the head.
There's a letter addressed to a Charles Whitehorn in his pocket,
and that's how authorities identify him. So these two murders
send shockwaves through the Osage nation, and the expectation, of course,
is that both deaths will be properly investigated and the
perpetrators will be brought to justice. But despite a few
(23:13):
people being brought in for questioning, including Anna's ex husband
and ernest brother Brian, the man who drove Anna home
the night she went missing, no one is charged in
either case, and police don't even determine whether or not
the murders are connected.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Two bullets each, yeah, and maybe they're not connected.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Exactly m O same day.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
In July of nineteen twenty one, about two months after
those bodies are found, the inquiry into Anna's death is
officially closed with the determination that she was murdered quote
at the hands of parties unknown. That's just as far
as it's going to go. The case cold, case closed.
This is the same verdict reached in the Charles Whitehorn investigation.
So with the white authorities failing to take real action,
(23:55):
the victims loved ones are forced to investigate themselves. So
that is the advantage of this oil boon, is that
now instead of being put in this place of like
having to beg people, they can hire private investigators, so
that's what they do. Both families hire private investigators, and
they soon uncover a bombshell. It turns out that Anna
(24:16):
was pregnant at the time of her murder. Oh shit,
no one knows who the father might be. So now
the families post rewards for any information that could help
solve the cases, with Molly's family offering two thousand dollars,
which is thirty five thousand dollars in today's money.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
They also enlist William Hale's help, who talks to his
buddies down at the police station and at the DA's office.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
That's the head guy guy around town.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, so he is like, like, I'm going to help.
He just is like, I'm friendly, I'm friends to the
Osh people. He's also basically saying I'm going to pull
some strings, being the uncle that kind of Orzat's uncle
of Ernest. Around the same time, Molly's mother Lizzie gets
very sick and dies. Lizzie did have some underlying medical issues,
(25:00):
and some people wonder if the grief of losing two
daughters within just a couple of years was just too
much for her to handle. But Molly, Rita, and Rita's
husband Bill share a nagging suspicion that there is more
to that story, but no doctors are interested in investigating
Lizzie's cause of death any further. So Meanwhile, Lizzie owns
(25:21):
several valuable head rights. She has her own, she has
her late husbands, and then she has the partial ones
she inherited back from both Mini and Anna. So now,
following her death, these headrights will be divided between two households,
Molly and Ernests and Rita and Bill's. OK, this is
a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Molly and Rita have now lost two sisters and their mother,
all in close succession, and they are deeply in grief.
But Rita's husband Bill is becoming very vocal about his
belief that their family is systematically being murdered.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Oh God, I'm scary. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
He even takes it upon himself to investigate the murders
alongside the private investigators they've hired, but he always stop
short of accusing anyone by name, because he's not an idiot.
They are surbrounded. Meanwhile, across the county, more members of
the Osage nation are dying under strange circumstances. In nineteen
twenty two, a twenty nine year old champion steer roper
(26:16):
named William Stepson picks up the phone at his home
in the Osage County town of Fairfax, where he lives
with his wife and two children, and he receives some
sort of message that then prompts him to leave the
house immediately. When he comes back later that night, he
is very, very sick. He dies within hours of making
it back home.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
So someone called and we're like, you got to get
over here, and then something the faery has happened.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, okay, and he makes it back home, just basically
to die at home. Many Osage immediately suspect William was
poisoned that night, but beyond hiring private investigators and posting rewards,
there are very few avenues to meaningfully investigate, as local
police just refuse to acknowledge the possibility that it was
a murder. A few months later, an Osage man in
(27:02):
his thirties named Joe Bates starts quote, frothing at the
mouth after drinking whiskey he'd purchased from a stranger. He
collapses and dies not long after, leaving behind a wife
and six kids. The Osage Nation suspects yet another poisoning,
but again local officials decide not to investigate. So now
the Osage Nation of a completely lost faith in the
(27:23):
local whiteworn institutions and they basically feel forced to take
matters into their own hands. So about a month after
Joe Bates's murder, tribal leaders enlist a white, fifty five
year old oil man named Barney McBride, whom the Osage
trust and consider to be an ally, to head up
to Washington, d C and lobby the federal government to
(27:43):
send investigators to Osage County. But shortly after arriving in DC,
Barney is ambushed, stabbed to death, and dumped in an alleyway.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Holy sh okay that now you're like, we're not being paranoid.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
No one's being paranoid. They weren't being paranoid the first time.
And now it's like confirmation after confirmation. How terrifying, and
the suspicious deaths continue. In January of nineteen twenty three,
the body of forty year old Henry Ruin, who is
Molly and Rita's cousin, is found north of Fairfax in
his car, slumped over the steering wheel having been shot
(28:17):
in the back of the head. This is another clear homicide,
and the police do not meaningfully investigate it. Makes months later,
in June of nineteen twenty three, an osage man in
his forties named George Bigheart becomes very sick. He suspects
he's been poisoned, and from his deathbed, he asks to
see a fifty four year old white lawyer named W. W. Vaughan, who,
(28:40):
like Barney McBride, is widely seen as a true o
sage ally, and he shares with him what he claims
is key information about the murders, along with a stack
of incriminating documents. After George dies, W W. Vaughn calls
his wife, who has just given birth to their tenth child,
Oh my God, to tell her where he stashed some
(29:02):
money in case anything happens to him, because he knows.
He then contacts the sheriff. He's saying he's on the
way with evidence. Once he leaves that hospital, he vanishes.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah, he's got to be scary.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
That's got to be the scary. Yeah, to be that guy.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, but he did it anyway, He sure did it.
What I mean, like, he fucking did it anyway.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
He truly was acting on the Osage's behalf clearly.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
A few days later, W. W. Vaughan's dead body is
found near some railroad tracks, having clearly been thrown from
a moving train. Jesus, neither his nor George Bigheart's killers
are ever found, nor are the documents that George gave
Vaughn at the hospital just gone. Now it's spring of
nineteen twenty three, and the violence and lack of accountability
are so extreme that many Osage believe that white officials,
(29:50):
the cops, doctors, politicians, all of them aren't just covering
up their white friend's murders. They're actively participating in what
is like a conspiracy to ostensibly steal their victim's fortunes.
There's the sense that any O Sage person might be next.
This fear is so intense that Rita and Bill move
(30:10):
from the countryside into a more populated Fairfax neighborhood, hoping
that being around other people will help keep them safe.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Like a systematic execution of the whole of the whole family,
community and family. Yeah, Molly and Ernest, who have just
welcomed the third daughter named Anna, named after her aunt.
They live just down the Street. So one night in
March of nineteen twenty three, Molly and Ernest wake up
to the sound of a massive bang. Mollie jumps out
(30:38):
of bed, runs to the window, and sees a huge
orange fireball rising.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Above her sister's house. Rita in Bill's home has just
been bombed. The property is reduced to rubble. Rita and
the family's teenage maid, a woman named Neddie Brookshire, die instantly.
Bill lives through the explosion. He hangs on for several days,
and then Sue comes to his injuries. Holy shit, his
doctors inject him with so much morphine that he isn't
(31:05):
able to say much before he dies. Aside from this quote, Okay,
they got Rita and now it looks like they've got me.
Damn end quote. So, aside from Ernest and their children,
Mollie is now the only member of her immediate family
that's left alive. This means all of their assets and
head rights, her father's, her mothers, and her three sisters
(31:27):
are transferred to her in Earnest.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
Oh shit, yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
So now, meanwhile, up in Washington, DC, a twenty nine
year old j Edgar Hoover, who Leonardo DiCaprio has also
played in a film has just been made the acting
director of the Bureau of Investigation, which is the early
incarnation of the FBI, And even though homicides aren't really
the Bureau's purview at the time, they're more known for
(31:52):
tackling white collar crimes. They've technically been working on the
Osage case for a couple of years, even though it
is a complete mess. So in nineteen twenty five, Hoover
sends a respected law man named Thomas B. White to
take over the Oklahoma Field Office and to shake up
this investigation. Agent White is a six foot tall Texan
in his forties with a no nonsense, incorruptible reputation. He
(32:15):
has a sterling background as a Texas ranger and as
a special agent for railroad companies. We've actually talked about
this man before in episode four to ten, which was
entitled The Bossy One, because he will eventually become a
prison warden that gets taken hostage during the Levenworth prison
break of nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
That's right, I remember that.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Wow, Yeah, So that's same guy. So Agent White is
his younger years. He assembles a team of agents, including
undercover operatives, to go into Osage County, but right away
they hit a wall of silence because people are very
afraid to share what they do no or even what
they suspect.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Everyone could be the enemy, yes.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Because if you aren't acting with the enemy, then then
you'll just get killed too. So as Agent White interviews
people and digs around in the case files, he's finding
signs of a clear conspiracy which corroborate with the Osage
have been suspecting all along. Important pieces of evidence go missing,
Autopsies are hastily prepared, witness statements are never followed up
(33:17):
on alibis go unchecked, and one of the people that
Agent White really wants to speak to about this is
Molly Burkhart, but when he first meets her, he is
stunned by how sick she is. Ernest explains that Molly
suffers from diabetes and that she's recently started taking insulin,
which is hard to come by and considered experimental at
(33:37):
the time, But instead of improving, Molly seems to be
getting worse. Because of this insulin, Agent White suspects that
Molly is being poisoned by someone. He can't do much
with the suspicion until he pulls some evidence together, but
fortunately a tip comes in. An incarcerated man named Bert
Lawson spills that back in nineteen twenty three, he was
(34:00):
ed to blow up Bill and Rita Smith's home using nitroglycerin.
He was paid five thousand dollars to do this, which
is ninety thousand in today's money, and the man who
hired him none other than self professed best friend of
the Osage himself, William Hale, and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart,
Molly's doting husband, served as his intermediary agent. White then
(34:25):
learns that William Hale was the beneficiary of victim Henry
Rowan's twenty five thousand dollars life insurance policy, which is
worth nearly four hundred and fifty thousand dollars today, despite
Henry leaving behind a wife and children, So for some reason,
he's got a life insurance policy that names this dude
and not his immediate family. Not long before Henry's murder,
(34:47):
Hale shopped around to different insurers before finding one that
was willing to sign off and such a suspicious policy,
and insurer will eventually claim he'd actually asked Hale if
he was planning on killing Henry for the payout, and
Hale reportedly said back, quote, oh God, I am hell.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Yes, okay, and then just sign here, sir, Like what
the fuck?
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Just sign here so I can go on my White
Way and never say a fucking word about it.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
Oh my god, on my White Way. It's the new
follow the elepric road.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Please know, every time we tell a story about the
White Way, it's not great.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Gotta say yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Agent White theorizes that the motive here is obvious and straightforward.
William Hale profited from Henry Rohan's death and stood to
gain even more with the help of his compliant nephew, Ernest.
Molly's mother and sister's estates and oil head rights funneled
hundreds of thousands of dollars straight into Earnest's control and
by proxy, William Hale's. Yeah, these estates are worth millions
(35:51):
and millions in today's money. As the investigation closes in,
people who Agent White believes are tied up in this
conspiracy wind up dead. Any of these are white men
suspected of working with Hale, who were then silenced before
they could talk, turn on him, or testify. Yeah, the
three d's I threw the second t in because I
wanted it to be three. Agent White himself becomes a target.
(36:14):
One of his relatives will later tell David Grant that
quote once when he went to open his window, he
found sticks of dynamite behind the curtain. No end quote,
just by chance, like.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
A fucking cartoon, Lennytun's cartoon.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
So White starts sleeping with a gun, and he keeps
his head on a swovel anytime he's out in public,
knowing that William Hale wants him dead and actually has
enough power to make that happen in Osage County for sure.
Then Agent White starts meeting with Ernest Burkhart, who, little
by little starts talking. It all gets very complicated, but
(36:48):
essentially Ernest shares just enough to implicate one of William
Hale's goons, who then in turn says just enough information
about Hale and Earnest to implicate hate them. As the
men slowly reveal more and more information, a tangled web
of White settlers is exposed and taken into custody for
(37:09):
the murders of Anna Rita Bill, the Smith's maid, Nettie Berkshire,
and Henry Rohane. And the only reason Minnie and Lizzie's
deaths are not part of this FBI investigation, is because
their cause of death remained unclear. Meanwhile, Mollie has now
become so sick that she's actually nearing death, so she's
(37:30):
rushed to a hospital and while she's there, her condition
quickly improves, and that's how it's determined that her insulin
injections were being laced with poison. Those shots were being
administered by the same white doctors known as the Shawn Brothers,
who had quote treated her mother Lizzie before her death,
injected Bill Smith with so much morphine following the blast
(37:51):
that he couldn't speak, and determined her sister Minnie had
died of a quote wasting illness, and suspiciously the ones
who couldn't find the fatal bullets in Anna's head during
her op top seating. So here's your conspiracy made real. Yeah, horrifying,
And of course these doctors just happen to have a
very chummy relationship with William Hale. So in nineteen twenty six,
(38:13):
the first trial in this case kicks off, but there
will be many in the coming years as prosecutors unravel
this conspiracy and work to convict William Hale, Ernest Burkhardt,
and their accomplices. The Tulsa Tribune describes the packed courtroom
as filled with quote, well groomed businessmen and society women,
as well as cowboys in broad brimmed hats and Osage
(38:35):
chiefs and bearded garb It's.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Pretty surprising that they even were brought to trial.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
I mean, I would suspect that they would just never
get caught and never brought to justice.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
But yeah, it's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
They get brought to justice and then in this way
where like people get to show up. I mean, it's
why they cut people off from money, because money is power.
Money is that voice that you get to hire in
a lawyer that makes that real. So Mollie herself is
there and with Hale and Ernest both pleading not guilty,
she seems to be standing by her husband, presumably because
(39:07):
she can't fathom what he's being accused of. A conspiracy
to this level and because of her support of her husband.
Mollie is shut out by much of the Osage community.
At the same time, she's shunned by the white people
who blame her for William Hale's downfall. Mollie is also
enduring the horrific testimony about her beloved family members and
(39:29):
their debts. For example, in a particularly shocking twist, prosecutors
reveal in court that her sister Anna had confided in
close friends the identity of her unborn child's father. Oh shit,
she believed it was William Hale's baby. No, this is
a married man, so if he did get Anna pregnant,
(39:50):
presumably be because they had an affair. This suggests another
possible motive for her murder. Tragically, Molly and Ernest's youngest daughter,
Anna then eyes of whooping cough around this time, and
that seems to fundamentally shift something in Ernest Burkhart. He
decides to rescind his not guilty plea and come clean,
(40:11):
and he names Hale as the mastermind of this entire conspiracy,
while duly admitting to facilitating the bombing at the smith
House and the shooting death of Henry Rowan. Ernest wasn't
the guy who lit the fuse or pulled the trigger
in either of those murders, but he found men willing
to do it, and he made sure the jobs got done.
And while Ernest's exact knowledge on the plan to kill
(40:34):
Anna isn't clear. We do know that his brother Brian
was directly implicated. A man named Kelsey Morrison eventually confesses,
claiming that William Hale hired him to kill Anna. Kelsey
testifies that Brian was right beside him as he pulled
the trigger that night, and he'd even driven Anna to
the ravine in Ernest's car. Oh god. When Brian is
(40:56):
eventually charged in connection with Anna's murder, his trial ends
in hung jury and he's a quitted No. The one
thing Ernest does always maintain is that he had no
idea that they were poisoning Molly's insulin, and no one
knows if that's true. Suspect right, well, yes, I mean,
(41:16):
like if other people are dying of poison, you should
have suspected it before you, Like, I mean, if you
were clear on that, that would have been something you
would have been all over. Regardless, Ernest admitting to everything
shifts something in Molly. Of course, she can no longer
cling to the hope that he is somehow innocent. She
(41:36):
files for a divorce and refuses to ever look at
him again. Wow, I mean yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
For sure, Yeah, yeah, good for her.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
The betrayal. It's someone your thought.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
He it's so heartbreaking, and that you had a family with.
And it's like Bill was her sister's husband. Bill was
the real deal.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah, it's like, also did he love the kids? Who?
The fuck?
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Right?
Speaker 3 (42:02):
You'll never know for sure?
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Right? Who were you this whole time? Could there be
love if you're also then killing my mother, killing my sister?
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Like, that's not how love works? No?
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Is your love good enough?
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Oh? My god?
Speaker 1 (42:16):
David Grant writes that quote. Whenever her husband's name was mentioned,
she recoiled in horror. In the end, some semblance of
justice is served, which many o Sage were not expecting.
Both Ernest Burkhart and William Hale are sentenced to life
in prison. Of course, Hale serves just twenty one years
before being paroled in nineteen forty seven, although he is
(42:38):
barred from ever going back to Oklahoma. He dies quietly
in an Arizona nursing home in nineteen sixty two at
the age of eighty seven. What's weird is when Hale
goes to jail for this stint, He's sent to Leavenworth
and that's where Thomas White will soon become the warden Wow,
Agent White, So they overlap weird at that jail. Ernest
(43:02):
Burkhart also gets parole, but it happens a bit earlier
in nineteen thirty seven. He's arrested not long after that
for robbing a house. Somehow, he still receives a full
pardon from the then Oklahoma governor in nineteen sixty five,
ostensibly pardon ostensibly because his confession helped put Hale and
the others away. But the pardon does allow him to
(43:25):
go back to Oklahoma. Ernest winds up moving into a
trailer in Osage County that he shares with his brother Brian,
and he dies there in nineteen eighty six at the
age of ninety four as a pariah. Wow. So it's
not like he doesn't go back to life as he
knew it in.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Any way, bad fucking loaners who live out in a
trailer together.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
And also but.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Long Yeah, whether he is a tool of his evil
uncle or a part of the plan. This idea that
you think you could go anywhere where people will be like, hey,
you served your time for a betrayal that to that
lie level.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, of your own wife, yeah, and children of course children.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
As for Mollie Burkhart. She maintains a low profile for
the rest of her life. We know she eventually remarries,
and that she dies young at the age of fifty
in nineteen thirty seven of an unspecified illness. Mollie's death
is not considered suspicious, except for maybe by me and you,
maybe coincidental that she dies the same year Ernest is paroled. Yeah,
(44:28):
so Mollie's two children and earnest two children inherit her estate.
But at this point, by the time they inherit it,
it's dwindled because of the Great Depression, so it's nothing
like it was before. But this isn't the end of
the story. Despite Agent Thomas White's commendable work in Oklahoma,
this case does not conclude it with the FBI swooping
in and catching the bad guys, even though Jay Edgar Hoover, ever,
(44:50):
the egotistical, power hungry guy, was very eager to frame
it that way. Hoover, like his agents and just about
everyone in the oce Age Nation, knew very well that
there was a much larger, more insidious conspiracy going on here,
and he chose to ignore it. But not before he
built the Osage Nation twenty thousand dollars the equivalent of
(45:11):
three hundred and seventy thousand dollars in today's money, for
what for the work his agents did on the William.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Haleka Sorry, this is not like a fucking cleaning service
that came and cleaned. You don't get to charge Yeah,
FBI built taxes, bro Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
And that is something that was not captured in the movie.
But it's a point David Grant drives home in the
book Killers of the Flower Moom. Basically, William Hale was
not some homicidal mob boss behind every unsolved o Sage
County murder like Jaya gar Hoover wanted him to seem. Instead,
he was one bad actor of many who were all
(45:50):
operating within a culture of complicity and violence geared at
making white settlers richer at the expense of Osage Nation members,
and also at the expense of their neighbors, their friends,
and even their family members, which is essentially colonialism. As
David gran has put it, quote, this is not a
(46:10):
story about who did it, It's a story about who
didn't do it.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Damn. Just give me a yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
For example, Charles Whitehorn, the man whose body was found
the same day as Anna's body is widely assumed to
have been murdered by a white man in collusion with
Whitehorn's white widow, Hattie, presumably for his head right. Ye
Hattie once even told investigators quote, if I tell you
what happened, you will send me to the electric chair.
The other suspicious deaths, the ones of William steps and
(46:40):
Joe Bates, George Bigheart, Barney McBride, and W. W. Vaughn,
are never solved, but they are not thought to be
directly tied to the William Hale conspiracy, which means they're
just from their own either conspiracy of a different group,
or anyone else that these people were exposed to with
no protection from.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
Yeah who had the same goal in mind.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
So in the mid nineteen twenties, laws are finally passed
that make it more difficult to transfer head rights to
non Osage people, even through marriage. But for many this
happens way too late. We will almost certainly never have
a conclusive death toll for this period of time in
Osage County. The most modest estimates put that number in
the dozens, but a historian named Lewis Burns has said quote,
(47:28):
I don't know of a single Osage family that didn't
lose at least one family member because of head rights.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah end quote. Today, the o Sage Nation as a
population of around ten thousand people, many of them live
outside of Oklahoma. And of course the oil boom days
are over, as are the big checks that came with it,
but the ripple effects of this dark chapter are still
widely felt among the Osage people. In Killers of the
(47:54):
Flower Moon, David Grant interviews the great grandson of Henry Rowan,
who says that the murders are quote still in the
back of our minds. You just have it in the
back of your head that you don't trust anybody end quote.
And that is a story of the Osage oil murders. Wow.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
I'm so glad the book was written about it because
you'd never heard of it before. Yes, And it's a
huge historical story.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
And it's the kind of thing I think that when
white people hear about that, it's like, oh, yeah, bad
things happen, and we know that bad things happen, but
it's like, no, we should actually.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Talk about specific moment.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
How it happened. Yeah, so it doesn't happen anymore. Then
the responsibility of people who are going to go in
there and say, we are the police, we are the sheriff,
we are the people who hold people accountable. And how
do you make it so that everyone's a bad actor
on that side of the fence.
Speaker 3 (48:46):
There's no hope.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Wow, got a change. Good job, thank you.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
That was an epic story.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
It was a big one. Mary mclatchan. When the great
researchers of our time, all right, well, great job, thank
you so much. That's a solo episode.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
That's how it's done.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Feels like a tripler.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
We hope your sister enjoyed this.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
We hope your mother takes you up on this and
comes back right right.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
We hope your road trip's going well.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
We promise we won't swear as much next time. It's right,
and stay.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Sexy, don't get murdered.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
Goodbye, Elvis.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
Do you want a cookie?
Speaker 1 (49:29):
This has been an exactly right production.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Our senior producers are Alejandra Keck and Molly Smith.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Our editor is Aristotle Oscevedo.
Speaker 3 (49:36):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Our researchers are Maaron McGlashan and Ali Elkin.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
Email your Homecounts to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
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Speaker 3 (49:47):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Speaker 1 (49:52):
And now you can watch us on Exactly Wright's YouTube page.
While you're there, please like and subscribe.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Goodbyeye he
Hello, and welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
It's my favorite murder.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's Georgia hertstart.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
That's Karen and Kilgarriff, and we're about.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
To podcast for you. Watch this.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
This is like we have to think of something to
say after welcome every week, and we're doing it every
week for ten years almost ten years, ten years.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Ten years ten.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
So here's what I came up with for Georgia for
this week. Okay, I started this sentence, how did I
say it? And we're going to podcast that you oh
yo oh, just now. Right before we started, you said
I'm going to right, I'm going to get that's right,
you said I'm going to get and then you said
I'm gonna save it for the podcast. And yes, in
my wildest dreams, I can't imagine. I can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Top three.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I'm going to get another tattoo? Is that what it was?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Another fish tattoo? Another a second fish, second salmon tattoo.
But this one is five times the size of.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The first one.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
I'm going to get ready to walk out of here.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, storm out. The best storm out is when you
warn people seven minutes in advance that you're going to
angrily stand up and walk out.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
And you're waiting until you're on your being recorded.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yes, exactly as many witnesses as possible.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Could the last one be I'm going to get more dogs?
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Oh I am, But I mean that's not what it was, Okay,
and it's going to.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Be so about what is it?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
When you play games like this, you can't help but
set yourself up to be like, I'm going to have
to get a bunch of Kleenex because my nose has
started randomly, all the sudden running when I have no allergies.
That's not the way I live my life. No, all
of a sudden just it's menopause. Do you know? It's
the single stream of just something coming out of your nose.
(01:56):
You're like, what the hell? And then what it is?
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Is that a thing too?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yes, because I just blame everything on menopause. Now that
would be I mean I kind of do already, but
the nose is going to start running.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
It's the thing you used to talk about during the
show where you were like, I have to have cleans
because all of a sudden, my nose will just run,
and I'm like okay, okay. And then like some point
this weekend, I was just sitting outside literally like sipping
a diet coke and it was like, go oh, onto
my lips. I was not ready.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Well, welcome to the fucking tissue world, socks. It's annoying.
Although my allergies are much better.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
I've been taking these drops you can get like allergy
drops made. They test you and then they like gave
you the fascinating stuff for a true crime podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
What the people they want to hear about compounding pharmacies
on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
They want to tune into.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
I always think of the beginning of these when we're
talking stupid shit like this, of the girl who's playing
it for her sister or her mom.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Be just wait, they get it gets better.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It's not always like this.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Let me pass forward, Let me let me pass forward.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Are you telling me that people aren't gripped by my
story of I'm about to get dot dot dot.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
And my guesses? Let me nothing to nobody.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
None of this means anything that anybody.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Means anything to anyone, And that's what we're here for.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And that's the lesson of ten years of podcasting.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Hey, hey, I'm going to be in Ireland when this
gets posted and this gets what art dublin?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Hell yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
And then We're going to Edinburgh, which I'm a little
nervous about because the fringe Fest is going on and
it looks like every street performer is just up in
your face the whole time.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yes, but it's Ireland, so they're more low key the
up Irish up in your face.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Now they're Scottish.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Oh that's right. Oh sorry, I was thinking about when
I went to the Galway. You're talking fringe Fest. I
was thinking of the Galway Arts Festival.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Okay, now that sounds great.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Your vacation is my vacation this world.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
I'm going to this same my were places.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Edinburgh is one of the greatest cities there is.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, I'm really excited.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Have you been before?
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I went as a broke twenty five year old with
my friends who were doing a festival tour all over Europe,
and so I just like bummed along with them. So
I didn't have any money for anything. We were there
for like twenty four hours. So now I'm going back
all fresh. We're gonna see Oasis on Vince's fiftieth birthday.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So excited.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
This is this is it?
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Are you going to spare your beer cup full of pea?
Remember that moment?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
But they always Oh my god, dear, that's the thing.
Thank god, that doesn't happen in my favorite murder Oh
live shows. Well you don't, I mean not anything.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, that's a great fiftieth birthday. Yeah, that'll be very fun.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
But then there's all the witchy things that you can
do in Edinburgh.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, castlely things and witchy things.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Okay, yeah, blood of tours and I mean there's just
the oldest of cultures.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I feel like I have to say that someone's going
to be living at my house while we're gone, so
no one breaks in.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Okay, is that what Marty's on duty?
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Yeah, that's what ten years of this podcast will do you,
because you get so paranoid.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
That you have to, you know, do that.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
People should know though, I have pat So clearly someone's
going to be staying there, you know, like, yeah, Goesa's.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Going to be watching the house for me, me and
angrily watching that.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
She'll scratch your fucking eyes out.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Be careful of MEMI all right, anything else exciting going on?
I mean, that's a great exciting trip to take.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
No. I mean, we're just planning for our live shows.
It feels like it's coming up so fast.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
It is coming up back.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Go to my favorite murder dot com slash live to
get tickets.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Please, that's right, and we do want to thank everybody
for all of your excitement. We announced and you showed
up and you've bought tickets and we were scared that
maybe you wouldn't and you really did, so thank you
so much. There are a couple tickets left Pasadena, San Diego,
Salt Lake City. I think those cities still have a couple.
So go to my favorite murder dot com slash live
(05:40):
and get what is now available. At the airing of
this podcast.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
I'm picking out so many dresses, you guys are gonna
I'm picking out dresses that I looked at it and
my Karen's dad would say, what.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
The hell is she wearing? I don't know why. That's
my goal, Yes, for your dad to what in the
hell is she wearing?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Jesus's from the nineteen sixties?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Why would she wear that?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
You were Kathleen out a dress like that? Yes, that's
a great idea. Yeah, I'm always dressing for the opposite
where it's like I.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Don't want to hear it, don't comment on my clothes.
Do want to hear it, But I have to say.
I was doing some shopping this week, and it's so
great to have an excuse like that. Was like, I
have to go to the.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Mall and I did try something on that I loved
and it didn't have pockets, and I was like, this
just doesn't even make sense anymore for women of today. Yeah,
you better put pockets in your dresses.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
I bought a pair of pajama shorts recently and they
didn't have pockets.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Come on, like, where I am?
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Where am I going to put that little Apple remote?
Speaker 3 (06:32):
I'm not gonna be in bed the whole time. I'm
going to be walking around.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Rocking around with the Apple remote in your pockets and shit,
it's gone forever.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And I put my headphones.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yes, yeah, so we're preparing to Are you prepared?
Speaker 2 (06:45):
For sure? Prepared? Please come and don't throw your pee.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Please don't pull an Oasis audience on us. Oh that
was legendary. Well we'll go into highlights. Let's do it.
Would you like to live deliciously? Well now you can
with ad free episodes of my favorite murder. You get
that and so much more. When you join our fan cults.
You can also get exclusive audio video content. You get
(07:09):
merch discounts. You get access to the private discord page
where all the other fan cult members are chatting it up.
Get in there.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, they're talking about meeting up before the shows live shows.
To get in there. If you're going alone and you
want to like have a drink with some murderinos beforehand,
yeah boom, get in the discord.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So if you want to be in the fan cult
and you haven't joined yet, head to fancult dot supercast
dot com and join it now.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Thank you for doing that. Yeah, all right, Well this
is a solo episode because summer it's vacation. The live
shows are coming up, so you tell me a story.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
That's right, it's my chance to shine.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
There was a very famous movie very recently about these
murders that I'm going to tell you about.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
We begin today in Osage.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
County, Oklahoma, home to the O Sage Nation. Holy shit,
this wasn't always the O Sage Nation's home. In the
eighteen seventies, after having already been pushed out of their
ancestral lands in what are now Missouri and Arkansas, the
Osage are then forced to relocate from Kansas to eastern
Oklahoma on land that white authorities have deemed worthless for farming,
(08:22):
but decades later, underneath that same worthless land, oil deposits
are discovered. So when the O Sage realize that they're
sitting on a gold mine, they meet with the federal
government and shrewdly negotiate to maintain their reservation's mineral rights,
flipping a very racist power dynamic on its head. So
in nineteen twenty three alone, those oil royalties brought in
(08:45):
around thirty million dollars for the Osage nation. Do you
want to guess what that would be in today's money?
One hundred and seventy five, four hundred and eighty million dollars. Shit, yes,
and that's in one year.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
The person who did the accounting, a fucking white manager.
The accounting like just send them there?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yes, fired? Well, because yeah, exactly, they're like, this is
not our colonial plan where we're trying to oppress these people. Right,
So how the Osage decide to handle it is they
pulled that money and then they divide it equally among
the two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine people listed
on the official O Sage tribal role. Wow, everybody gets
(09:23):
a cut jam and there's more than enough to go, right,
is there? Yes, And so each person's share become known
as their head rights, and will refer to head rights
kind of for the rest of the story. Okay. So
by the nineteen tens and into the twenties, the Osage
were said to be the wealthiest people per capita in
the entire world.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Oh my god, like that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yes, But of course with that money came an increase
in tribal member deaths. Between nineteen oh seven and nineteen
twenty three, it's estimated that members of the o Sage
nation died at about one and a half the national rate. Okay,
and many of these deaths were suspicious, but as grieving
families fought for accountability and justice, they were often dismissed
(10:07):
by the white authorities. No shock there. Writer Dennis mccauliffe
Junior is an Osage tribal member who learned that his
own grandmother's nineteen twenties murder was covered up as welllia
and he writes, quote, deliberate poisonings were chalked up to
drinking bad liquor. Shootings got labeled as suicides, Autopsies were
often skipped, burials rushed, and death certificates falsified.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
So then in the early twenties in Osage County, driven
by the persistence of the Osage people, one of the
FBI's very first major homicide cases is going to be investigated,
and decades later it will serve as the subject of
David Grant's best selling book Killers of the Flower Moon,
which was then adapted into Martin Scorsese's twenty twenty three
(10:52):
Oscar winning film This is the Story of the Osage
Oil Murders.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Wow, this is an epic, right, this is yeah, good job.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Because when we're doing solos, we still want to give
the people what they want.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
I definitely, yeah, you want a little bit of it
like a showstopper.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Right right, jazz hands all around of talking about what
is essentially it typifies a true crime story in the
most government signed on worst way, horrifying way possible.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah. Like, oh, people say that this is the government's
not after you, and it's like, well, here's a story
where they literally are after.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
You entirely kind of like you say, government say, you
know your town, whatever it is, where it's so much
worse than you can even begin to imagine. So we
begin to day with the Osage family that play key
figures in this FBI investigation and whose experiences serve as
the backbone for the book Killers of the Flower Moon.
(11:48):
The patriarch of this household is Nakai sa Why, who
prefers his Osage name, but many people call him Jimmy
again colonialism, So he passes away before much of our
story takes place, and his widow is named Lizzie Q
and they have four daughters together that are born in
(12:10):
the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties. The oldest daughter
is Anna, then there's Molly, followed by Minnie and Rita,
and we spend most of our time in this story
with Mollie, who in Scorsese's movie is played by Lily
Gladstone amazingly, and she earned lots of awards for that portrayal,
and she became the first Native American woman ever to
(12:32):
be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, and
she won the Golden Globe for the same category. So
lots of firsts and groundbreaking, kind of glass ceiling breaking
took place during that which is amazing, And also just
the fact that getting this story to the general public
is the kind of history that we all need to learn.
(12:52):
So Molly's family experiences this huge transformation of Osage County firsthand.
They lived in the abject poverty after being pushed out
of Kansas and forced by the government to assimilate into
mainstream American culture, which meant that they had to either
abandon or hide their Osage identities, customs, traditions, or else
food and funds would be with help. Then when Molly's
(13:15):
around ten, and her sisters, being close and aged to her,
are also close to that age, that's when the oil's discovered.
Suddenly o Sage families go from barely scraping by to
moving into large homes that are often staffed with white
domestic servants.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
I mean, god, what a fucking moment.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
What a moment.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
This should be a TV show that that should be
a peace downstairs. Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Is it a comedy?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
I think it could be. I think the people who
made reservation dogs, oh yeah, could easily give us a
kind of a retro let's capture this for the moment.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
That it is. Yeah, all right, there's your pitch.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Not for me to say though, not for me to pitch,
but okay, so there's nothing that a member of the
Osage nation who is getting a cut of this oil
money can't buy, including cotour from Paris, expensive cars and
chauffeurs to drive them, anything that basically you could dream of.
One New York newspaper reports that quote, lo and behold,
(14:16):
the Indian, instead of starving to death, enjoys a steady
income that turns bankers green with envy.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Jesus yeah, end quote.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
So this materializes as an influx of white settlers into
Osage County in the nineteen tens and twenties. Their numbers swell,
and many of these transplants are bad news. An FBI
report will later note that quote the rich oiled fields
produced not only an abundance of oil, but also grift,
easy money, gambling, whiskey, and parasites bent on milking the
(14:48):
Osage out of all he owned. So that's pretty typical.
But these schemes used by white settlers are endless. Some
open businesses that sell goods or services to Osage Cus
customers at extremely inflated prices. There's also a rash of
robberies and con men in the area. And then they
are also these so called guardians who are mandated by
(15:10):
the federal government. So guardians are basically white people who
monitor Osage men and women's bank accounts because the government
has deemed them quote incompetent when it comes to handling
their oil wealth.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Wow, so it's in the bank and they still have
to have someone keep an eye on it a white man.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, they force someone to yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
To keep tabs. It's not only overtly racist. These so
called guardians aren't trained accountants. Many of them are just
local white businessmen, but they oversee every aspect of their
wards spending, approving or denying whatever expenditures they see fit.
It's so infuriating.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
So I bet they like can't just take all their
money out and leave, you know what I mean, You're thinking, like,
go move to New York City. It's like they don't
have access to that money, even though it's theirs. Yes,
I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Their spending is controlled in a way that serves the
white infrastructure, and unsurprisingly, many of these guardians abuse this
power and steal directly from Osage accounts. Another type of
grifter are the white settlers, typically single men, who swoop
into Osage County looking to marry into oil head rights.
(16:19):
By law, head rights can only be passed along through
an inheritance or marriage. They cannot be sold or given away,
so joining an O sage household is a direct way
for white men to access the oil money, as they
often wind up serving as the guardian for their osage wives.
So love it's like everything is a scam. Everything. So
(16:40):
by the late nineteen tens, Molly and her sisters Anna,
Mini and Rita are in their late twenties to early thirties.
Like every osage person, they know that white people are
here to swindle and con them, so trust is not
something that comes easily. But at the same time, there's
only around two thousand people on the official tribal role
and so the number of young eligible O sage men
(17:02):
and women is a small pool. Because of that, many
of them do wind up marrying white settlers in the
face of the very real possibility that their partners have
ulterior motives. God nasty, just like the worst feeling. Absolutely,
he's like, oh, I'm going to hold out and wait
for the big associopath who is the most rising to
(17:25):
basically be like no, no, no, but I really love
him at this time.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
It's real, even though look around, my God, how terrifying, horrible.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So in nineteen seventeen, when Mollie's around thirty years old,
she meets a World War One vet named Ernest Burkhart.
He is in his mid twenties and he's new to town,
so at first Molly's not so sure about Ernest. He's
a good looking guy. In the movie, he's played by
Leonardo DiCaprio, and he's often described as simple and passive,
which probably makes him feel safe to Molly.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Totally right.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
He's not a scheming and like smooth talker. Also, the
power he would have over their household it seems to
be a green flag that Ernest doesn't seem particularly shrewd
or ambitious. It also doesn't hurt that Ernest is the
nephew and sort of adoptive son of one of the
most powerful men in Osage County, a man named William
(18:16):
King Hale. So Hale is in his forties and he's
a white cowboy from Texas who's got our rags to
riches story that mirrors the O Sage's own rise to wealth.
He started out leasing grazing land from the O Sage
tribe and slowly acquired more acres and more cattle, and
then a bank, and then a general store, and ultimately
he became one of the county's wealthiest ranchers. It's unclear, though,
(18:39):
if he came by all of that money honestly, every
time and every deal. Dennis mccaulloff Junior reports that quote
a portion of his fortune allegedly came from ensuring his
pasture for a dollar an acre and having his cowboys
torch thirty thousand acres in one night.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah. But in the area and the county, Hale has
a great reputation. He's seen as easygoing and generous, the
kind of guy who donates to schools, gives money to
build hospitals, and positions himself as the quote best friend
of the o sage.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
So like a lot of scheming going on in Caws, a.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Lot of high level It's kind of that thing where
people get scammed and then they're so embarrassed or like
how could I fall for it? And it's like because
the person who is scamming you was dedicated their life
to scam totally, that's what they do. So you're just
like you're having this like oh my god, we won
the lottery. Except for it turns everyone into an enemy.
(19:36):
So Molly and her family know William Hale very well.
So when Ernest begins to pursue Mollie, there's some just
kind of pre established trust. She figures that Ernest must
like her for her and not her money, because he
doesn't need the money. William Hale will always take care
of him, presumably, So Mollie eventually marries Ernest, and they
(19:56):
do seem like a loving couple. She has diabetes, wh
which can be fatal at that time, so she depends
on Ernest to care for her. And even though Molly
speaks English fluently, Ernest learns to speak the Osage language
so that the two can communicate in her native language. Okay,
an act of love, Yeah, some might say, I would
(20:16):
think you, one would like to assume. About a year later,
in nineteen eighteen, Minnie, who's Molly's second youngest sister, suddenly dies.
She was only in her late twenties. She'd always been
very healthy. The doctors, the white doctors, chalk it up
to quote a wasting illness, and that's that they never.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Look further wasting illness.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Just a few months later, Minnie's widower, who's a white
man named Bill Smith marries the younger sister Rita, who's
the youngest daughter in Molly's family. It sounds weird, but
it's actually an antiquated custom that many cultures around the
world practice, which is kind of like if someone dies,
you marry back into the family another sibling. So Minnie's
(21:01):
head rights are now split between their mother Lizzie and
Minnie's widower Bill, and now Bill also has claim to
Rita's head rights. Three years later, it's nineteen twenty one.
Molly and Ernest now have two small children, and Mollie's mother, Lizzie,
has moved into their house. But Mollie's oldest sister, Anna
is struggling. She's recently divorced a white settler named Oda Brown,
(21:24):
and her sisters have noticed that she's been drinking a
lot lately. And then in May of that year, Anna
goes to visit Molly in Ernest and she gets a
ride home from Ernest's brother Brian, who she's actually gone
on a few dates with. After that, Anna vanishes. Her
family members don't hear from her for several days, which
(21:44):
is extremely out of character for her. A week later,
squirrel hunters find the body of thirty six year old
Anna dumped in an Osage County ravine. She's been shot
twice in the head, and even though there are no
exit wounds, the White doctors who perform her autopsy can't
seem to find the bullets in her skull.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
God like her last moments realizing that it was all scam.
They've been betrayed. Her sister's husband like he's about to
go back to her, is fucking.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
It's her sister's husband's brother is one away. But still, yeah,
you're totally right where it's like, all of a sudden,
it all is a plot. Ye, Like this is the
confirmation she can't tell anybody.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Yeah, horrifying.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So those bullets could be critical evidence, but of course
they just simply quote unquote can't find them. On the
same day that Anna's body is found, a second body
is found under some brush near the town of pah Husca,
which is also an Osage County. The victim here is male,
but like Anna, he is Osage, he's wealthy, he's in
(22:50):
his thirties, and he's been shot twice in the head.
There's a letter addressed to a Charles Whitehorn in his pocket,
and that's how authorities identify him. So these two murders
send shockwaves through the Osage nation, and the expectation, of course,
is that both deaths will be properly investigated and the
perpetrators will be brought to justice. But despite a few
(23:13):
people being brought in for questioning, including Anna's ex husband
and ernest brother Brian, the man who drove Anna home
the night she went missing, no one is charged in
either case, and police don't even determine whether or not
the murders are connected.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Two bullets each, yeah, and maybe they're not connected.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Exactly m O same day.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
In July of nineteen twenty one, about two months after
those bodies are found, the inquiry into Anna's death is
officially closed with the determination that she was murdered quote
at the hands of parties unknown. That's just as far
as it's going to go. The case cold, case closed.
This is the same verdict reached in the Charles Whitehorn investigation.
So with the white authorities failing to take real action,
(23:55):
the victims loved ones are forced to investigate themselves. So
that is the advantage of this oil boon, is that
now instead of being put in this place of like
having to beg people, they can hire private investigators, so
that's what they do. Both families hire private investigators, and
they soon uncover a bombshell. It turns out that Anna
(24:16):
was pregnant at the time of her murder. Oh shit,
no one knows who the father might be. So now
the families post rewards for any information that could help
solve the cases, with Molly's family offering two thousand dollars,
which is thirty five thousand dollars in today's money.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
They also enlist William Hale's help, who talks to his
buddies down at the police station and at the DA's office.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
That's the head guy guy around town.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, so he is like, like, I'm going to help.
He just is like, I'm friendly, I'm friends to the
Osh people. He's also basically saying I'm going to pull
some strings, being the uncle that kind of Orzat's uncle
of Ernest. Around the same time, Molly's mother Lizzie gets
very sick and dies. Lizzie did have some underlying medical issues,
(25:00):
and some people wonder if the grief of losing two
daughters within just a couple of years was just too
much for her to handle. But Molly, Rita, and Rita's
husband Bill share a nagging suspicion that there is more
to that story, but no doctors are interested in investigating
Lizzie's cause of death any further. So Meanwhile, Lizzie owns
(25:21):
several valuable head rights. She has her own, she has
her late husbands, and then she has the partial ones
she inherited back from both Mini and Anna. So now,
following her death, these headrights will be divided between two households,
Molly and Ernests and Rita and Bill's. OK, this is
a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Molly and Rita have now lost two sisters and their mother,
all in close succession, and they are deeply in grief.
But Rita's husband Bill is becoming very vocal about his
belief that their family is systematically being murdered.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Oh God, I'm scary. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
He even takes it upon himself to investigate the murders
alongside the private investigators they've hired, but he always stop
short of accusing anyone by name, because he's not an idiot.
They are surbrounded. Meanwhile, across the county, more members of
the Osage nation are dying under strange circumstances. In nineteen
twenty two, a twenty nine year old champion steer roper
(26:16):
named William Stepson picks up the phone at his home
in the Osage County town of Fairfax, where he lives
with his wife and two children, and he receives some
sort of message that then prompts him to leave the
house immediately. When he comes back later that night, he
is very, very sick. He dies within hours of making
it back home.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
So someone called and we're like, you got to get
over here, and then something the faery has happened.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, okay, and he makes it back home, just basically
to die at home. Many Osage immediately suspect William was
poisoned that night, but beyond hiring private investigators and posting rewards,
there are very few avenues to meaningfully investigate, as local
police just refuse to acknowledge the possibility that it was
a murder. A few months later, an Osage man in
(27:02):
his thirties named Joe Bates starts quote, frothing at the
mouth after drinking whiskey he'd purchased from a stranger. He
collapses and dies not long after, leaving behind a wife
and six kids. The Osage Nation suspects yet another poisoning,
but again local officials decide not to investigate. So now
the Osage Nation of a completely lost faith in the
(27:23):
local whiteworn institutions and they basically feel forced to take
matters into their own hands. So about a month after
Joe Bates's murder, tribal leaders enlist a white, fifty five
year old oil man named Barney McBride, whom the Osage
trust and consider to be an ally, to head up
to Washington, d C and lobby the federal government to
(27:43):
send investigators to Osage County. But shortly after arriving in DC,
Barney is ambushed, stabbed to death, and dumped in an alleyway.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Holy sh okay that now you're like, we're not being paranoid.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
No one's being paranoid. They weren't being paranoid the first time.
And now it's like confirmation after confirmation. How terrifying, and
the suspicious deaths continue. In January of nineteen twenty three,
the body of forty year old Henry Ruin, who is
Molly and Rita's cousin, is found north of Fairfax in
his car, slumped over the steering wheel having been shot
(28:17):
in the back of the head. This is another clear homicide,
and the police do not meaningfully investigate it. Makes months later,
in June of nineteen twenty three, an osage man in
his forties named George Bigheart becomes very sick. He suspects
he's been poisoned, and from his deathbed, he asks to
see a fifty four year old white lawyer named W. W. Vaughan, who,
(28:40):
like Barney McBride, is widely seen as a true o
sage ally, and he shares with him what he claims
is key information about the murders, along with a stack
of incriminating documents. After George dies, W W. Vaughn calls
his wife, who has just given birth to their tenth child,
Oh my God, to tell her where he stashed some
(29:02):
money in case anything happens to him, because he knows.
He then contacts the sheriff. He's saying he's on the
way with evidence. Once he leaves that hospital, he vanishes.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah, he's got to be scary.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
That's got to be the scary. Yeah, to be that guy.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, but he did it anyway, He sure did it.
What I mean, like, he fucking did it anyway.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
He truly was acting on the Osage's behalf clearly.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
A few days later, W. W. Vaughan's dead body is
found near some railroad tracks, having clearly been thrown from
a moving train. Jesus, neither his nor George Bigheart's killers
are ever found, nor are the documents that George gave
Vaughn at the hospital just gone. Now it's spring of
nineteen twenty three, and the violence and lack of accountability
are so extreme that many Osage believe that white officials,
(29:50):
the cops, doctors, politicians, all of them aren't just covering
up their white friend's murders. They're actively participating in what
is like a conspiracy to ostensibly steal their victim's fortunes.
There's the sense that any O Sage person might be next.
This fear is so intense that Rita and Bill move
(30:10):
from the countryside into a more populated Fairfax neighborhood, hoping
that being around other people will help keep them safe.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Like a systematic execution of the whole of the whole family,
community and family. Yeah, Molly and Ernest, who have just
welcomed the third daughter named Anna, named after her aunt.
They live just down the Street. So one night in
March of nineteen twenty three, Molly and Ernest wake up
to the sound of a massive bang. Mollie jumps out
(30:38):
of bed, runs to the window, and sees a huge
orange fireball rising.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Above her sister's house. Rita in Bill's home has just
been bombed. The property is reduced to rubble. Rita and
the family's teenage maid, a woman named Neddie Brookshire, die instantly.
Bill lives through the explosion. He hangs on for several days,
and then Sue comes to his injuries. Holy shit, his
doctors inject him with so much morphine that he isn't
(31:05):
able to say much before he dies. Aside from this quote, Okay,
they got Rita and now it looks like they've got me.
Damn end quote. So, aside from Ernest and their children,
Mollie is now the only member of her immediate family
that's left alive. This means all of their assets and
head rights, her father's, her mothers, and her three sisters
(31:27):
are transferred to her in Earnest.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
Oh shit, yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
So now, meanwhile, up in Washington, DC, a twenty nine
year old j Edgar Hoover, who Leonardo DiCaprio has also
played in a film has just been made the acting
director of the Bureau of Investigation, which is the early
incarnation of the FBI, And even though homicides aren't really
the Bureau's purview at the time, they're more known for
(31:52):
tackling white collar crimes. They've technically been working on the
Osage case for a couple of years, even though it
is a complete mess. So in nineteen twenty five, Hoover
sends a respected law man named Thomas B. White to
take over the Oklahoma Field Office and to shake up
this investigation. Agent White is a six foot tall Texan
in his forties with a no nonsense, incorruptible reputation. He
(32:15):
has a sterling background as a Texas ranger and as
a special agent for railroad companies. We've actually talked about
this man before in episode four to ten, which was
entitled The Bossy One, because he will eventually become a
prison warden that gets taken hostage during the Levenworth prison
break of nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
That's right, I remember that.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Wow, Yeah, So that's same guy. So Agent White is
his younger years. He assembles a team of agents, including
undercover operatives, to go into Osage County, but right away
they hit a wall of silence because people are very
afraid to share what they do no or even what
they suspect.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
Everyone could be the enemy, yes.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Because if you aren't acting with the enemy, then then
you'll just get killed too. So as Agent White interviews
people and digs around in the case files, he's finding
signs of a clear conspiracy which corroborate with the Osage
have been suspecting all along. Important pieces of evidence go missing,
Autopsies are hastily prepared, witness statements are never followed up
(33:17):
on alibis go unchecked, and one of the people that
Agent White really wants to speak to about this is
Molly Burkhart, but when he first meets her, he is
stunned by how sick she is. Ernest explains that Molly
suffers from diabetes and that she's recently started taking insulin,
which is hard to come by and considered experimental at
(33:37):
the time, But instead of improving, Molly seems to be
getting worse. Because of this insulin, Agent White suspects that
Molly is being poisoned by someone. He can't do much
with the suspicion until he pulls some evidence together, but
fortunately a tip comes in. An incarcerated man named Bert
Lawson spills that back in nineteen twenty three, he was
(34:00):
ed to blow up Bill and Rita Smith's home using nitroglycerin.
He was paid five thousand dollars to do this, which
is ninety thousand in today's money, and the man who
hired him none other than self professed best friend of
the Osage himself, William Hale, and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart,
Molly's doting husband, served as his intermediary agent. White then
(34:25):
learns that William Hale was the beneficiary of victim Henry
Rowan's twenty five thousand dollars life insurance policy, which is
worth nearly four hundred and fifty thousand dollars today, despite
Henry leaving behind a wife and children, So for some reason,
he's got a life insurance policy that names this dude
and not his immediate family. Not long before Henry's murder,
(34:47):
Hale shopped around to different insurers before finding one that
was willing to sign off and such a suspicious policy,
and insurer will eventually claim he'd actually asked Hale if
he was planning on killing Henry for the payout, and
Hale reportedly said back, quote, oh God, I am hell.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Yes, okay, and then just sign here, sir, Like what
the fuck?
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Just sign here so I can go on my White
Way and never say a fucking word about it.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
Oh my god, on my White Way. It's the new
follow the elepric road.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Please know, every time we tell a story about the
White Way, it's not great.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Gotta say yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Agent White theorizes that the motive here is obvious and straightforward.
William Hale profited from Henry Rohan's death and stood to
gain even more with the help of his compliant nephew, Ernest.
Molly's mother and sister's estates and oil head rights funneled
hundreds of thousands of dollars straight into Earnest's control and
by proxy, William Hale's. Yeah, these estates are worth millions
(35:51):
and millions in today's money. As the investigation closes in,
people who Agent White believes are tied up in this
conspiracy wind up dead. Any of these are white men
suspected of working with Hale, who were then silenced before
they could talk, turn on him, or testify. Yeah, the
three d's I threw the second t in because I
wanted it to be three. Agent White himself becomes a target.
(36:14):
One of his relatives will later tell David Grant that
quote once when he went to open his window, he
found sticks of dynamite behind the curtain. No end quote,
just by chance, like.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
A fucking cartoon, Lennytun's cartoon.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
So White starts sleeping with a gun, and he keeps
his head on a swovel anytime he's out in public,
knowing that William Hale wants him dead and actually has
enough power to make that happen in Osage County for sure.
Then Agent White starts meeting with Ernest Burkhart, who, little
by little starts talking. It all gets very complicated, but
(36:48):
essentially Ernest shares just enough to implicate one of William
Hale's goons, who then in turn says just enough information
about Hale and Earnest to implicate hate them. As the
men slowly reveal more and more information, a tangled web
of White settlers is exposed and taken into custody for
(37:09):
the murders of Anna Rita Bill, the Smith's maid, Nettie Berkshire,
and Henry Rohane. And the only reason Minnie and Lizzie's
deaths are not part of this FBI investigation, is because
their cause of death remained unclear. Meanwhile, Mollie has now
become so sick that she's actually nearing death, so she's
(37:30):
rushed to a hospital and while she's there, her condition
quickly improves, and that's how it's determined that her insulin
injections were being laced with poison. Those shots were being
administered by the same white doctors known as the Shawn Brothers,
who had quote treated her mother Lizzie before her death,
injected Bill Smith with so much morphine following the blast
(37:51):
that he couldn't speak, and determined her sister Minnie had
died of a quote wasting illness, and suspiciously the ones
who couldn't find the fatal bullets in Anna's head during
her op top seating. So here's your conspiracy made real. Yeah, horrifying,
And of course these doctors just happen to have a
very chummy relationship with William Hale. So in nineteen twenty six,
(38:13):
the first trial in this case kicks off, but there
will be many in the coming years as prosecutors unravel
this conspiracy and work to convict William Hale, Ernest Burkhardt,
and their accomplices. The Tulsa Tribune describes the packed courtroom
as filled with quote, well groomed businessmen and society women,
as well as cowboys in broad brimmed hats and Osage
(38:35):
chiefs and bearded garb It's.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Pretty surprising that they even were brought to trial.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
I mean, I would suspect that they would just never
get caught and never brought to justice.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
But yeah, it's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
They get brought to justice and then in this way
where like people get to show up. I mean, it's
why they cut people off from money, because money is power.
Money is that voice that you get to hire in
a lawyer that makes that real. So Mollie herself is
there and with Hale and Ernest both pleading not guilty,
she seems to be standing by her husband, presumably because
(39:07):
she can't fathom what he's being accused of. A conspiracy
to this level and because of her support of her husband.
Mollie is shut out by much of the Osage community.
At the same time, she's shunned by the white people
who blame her for William Hale's downfall. Mollie is also
enduring the horrific testimony about her beloved family members and
(39:29):
their debts. For example, in a particularly shocking twist, prosecutors
reveal in court that her sister Anna had confided in
close friends the identity of her unborn child's father. Oh shit,
she believed it was William Hale's baby. No, this is
a married man, so if he did get Anna pregnant,
(39:50):
presumably be because they had an affair. This suggests another
possible motive for her murder. Tragically, Molly and Ernest's youngest daughter,
Anna then eyes of whooping cough around this time, and
that seems to fundamentally shift something in Ernest Burkhart. He
decides to rescind his not guilty plea and come clean,
(40:11):
and he names Hale as the mastermind of this entire conspiracy,
while duly admitting to facilitating the bombing at the smith
House and the shooting death of Henry Rowan. Ernest wasn't
the guy who lit the fuse or pulled the trigger
in either of those murders, but he found men willing
to do it, and he made sure the jobs got done.
And while Ernest's exact knowledge on the plan to kill
(40:34):
Anna isn't clear. We do know that his brother Brian
was directly implicated. A man named Kelsey Morrison eventually confesses,
claiming that William Hale hired him to kill Anna. Kelsey
testifies that Brian was right beside him as he pulled
the trigger that night, and he'd even driven Anna to
the ravine in Ernest's car. Oh god. When Brian is
(40:56):
eventually charged in connection with Anna's murder, his trial ends
in hung jury and he's a quitted No. The one
thing Ernest does always maintain is that he had no
idea that they were poisoning Molly's insulin, and no one
knows if that's true. Suspect right, well, yes, I mean,
(41:16):
like if other people are dying of poison, you should
have suspected it before you, Like, I mean, if you
were clear on that, that would have been something you
would have been all over. Regardless, Ernest admitting to everything
shifts something in Molly. Of course, she can no longer
cling to the hope that he is somehow innocent. She
(41:36):
files for a divorce and refuses to ever look at
him again. Wow, I mean yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
For sure, Yeah, yeah, good for her.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
The betrayal. It's someone your thought.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
He it's so heartbreaking, and that you had a family with.
And it's like Bill was her sister's husband. Bill was
the real deal.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah, it's like, also did he love the kids? Who?
The fuck?
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Right?
Speaker 3 (42:02):
You'll never know for sure?
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Right? Who were you this whole time? Could there be
love if you're also then killing my mother, killing my sister?
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Like, that's not how love works? No?
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Is your love good enough?
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Oh? My god?
Speaker 1 (42:16):
David Grant writes that quote. Whenever her husband's name was mentioned,
she recoiled in horror. In the end, some semblance of
justice is served, which many o Sage were not expecting.
Both Ernest Burkhart and William Hale are sentenced to life
in prison. Of course, Hale serves just twenty one years
before being paroled in nineteen forty seven, although he is
(42:38):
barred from ever going back to Oklahoma. He dies quietly
in an Arizona nursing home in nineteen sixty two at
the age of eighty seven. What's weird is when Hale
goes to jail for this stint, He's sent to Leavenworth
and that's where Thomas White will soon become the warden Wow,
Agent White, So they overlap weird at that jail. Ernest
(43:02):
Burkhart also gets parole, but it happens a bit earlier
in nineteen thirty seven. He's arrested not long after that
for robbing a house. Somehow, he still receives a full
pardon from the then Oklahoma governor in nineteen sixty five,
ostensibly pardon ostensibly because his confession helped put Hale and
the others away. But the pardon does allow him to
(43:25):
go back to Oklahoma. Ernest winds up moving into a
trailer in Osage County that he shares with his brother Brian,
and he dies there in nineteen eighty six at the
age of ninety four as a pariah. Wow. So it's
not like he doesn't go back to life as he
knew it in.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Any way, bad fucking loaners who live out in a
trailer together.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
And also but.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Long Yeah, whether he is a tool of his evil
uncle or a part of the plan. This idea that
you think you could go anywhere where people will be like, hey,
you served your time for a betrayal that to that
lie level.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, of your own wife, yeah, and children of course children.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
As for Mollie Burkhart. She maintains a low profile for
the rest of her life. We know she eventually remarries,
and that she dies young at the age of fifty
in nineteen thirty seven of an unspecified illness. Mollie's death
is not considered suspicious, except for maybe by me and you,
maybe coincidental that she dies the same year Ernest is paroled. Yeah,
(44:28):
so Mollie's two children and earnest two children inherit her estate.
But at this point, by the time they inherit it,
it's dwindled because of the Great Depression, so it's nothing
like it was before. But this isn't the end of
the story. Despite Agent Thomas White's commendable work in Oklahoma,
this case does not conclude it with the FBI swooping
in and catching the bad guys, even though Jay Edgar Hoover, ever,
(44:50):
the egotistical, power hungry guy, was very eager to frame
it that way. Hoover, like his agents and just about
everyone in the oce Age Nation, knew very well that
there was a much larger, more insidious conspiracy going on here,
and he chose to ignore it. But not before he
built the Osage Nation twenty thousand dollars the equivalent of
(45:11):
three hundred and seventy thousand dollars in today's money, for
what for the work his agents did on the William.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Haleka Sorry, this is not like a fucking cleaning service
that came and cleaned. You don't get to charge Yeah,
FBI built taxes, bro Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
And that is something that was not captured in the movie.
But it's a point David Grant drives home in the
book Killers of the Flower Moom. Basically, William Hale was
not some homicidal mob boss behind every unsolved o Sage
County murder like Jaya gar Hoover wanted him to seem. Instead,
he was one bad actor of many who were all
(45:50):
operating within a culture of complicity and violence geared at
making white settlers richer at the expense of Osage Nation members,
and also at the expense of their neighbors, their friends,
and even their family members, which is essentially colonialism. As
David gran has put it, quote, this is not a
(46:10):
story about who did it, It's a story about who
didn't do it.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Damn. Just give me a yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
For example, Charles Whitehorn, the man whose body was found
the same day as Anna's body is widely assumed to
have been murdered by a white man in collusion with
Whitehorn's white widow, Hattie, presumably for his head right. Ye
Hattie once even told investigators quote, if I tell you
what happened, you will send me to the electric chair.
The other suspicious deaths, the ones of William steps and
(46:40):
Joe Bates, George Bigheart, Barney McBride, and W. W. Vaughn,
are never solved, but they are not thought to be
directly tied to the William Hale conspiracy, which means they're
just from their own either conspiracy of a different group,
or anyone else that these people were exposed to with
no protection from.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
Yeah who had the same goal in mind.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
So in the mid nineteen twenties, laws are finally passed
that make it more difficult to transfer head rights to
non Osage people, even through marriage. But for many this
happens way too late. We will almost certainly never have
a conclusive death toll for this period of time in
Osage County. The most modest estimates put that number in
the dozens, but a historian named Lewis Burns has said quote,
(47:28):
I don't know of a single Osage family that didn't
lose at least one family member because of head rights.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah end quote. Today, the o Sage Nation as a
population of around ten thousand people, many of them live
outside of Oklahoma. And of course the oil boom days
are over, as are the big checks that came with it,
but the ripple effects of this dark chapter are still
widely felt among the Osage people. In Killers of the
(47:54):
Flower Moon, David Grant interviews the great grandson of Henry Rowan,
who says that the murders are quote still in the
back of our minds. You just have it in the
back of your head that you don't trust anybody end quote.
And that is a story of the Osage oil murders. Wow.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
I'm so glad the book was written about it because
you'd never heard of it before. Yes, And it's a
huge historical story.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
And it's the kind of thing I think that when
white people hear about that, it's like, oh, yeah, bad
things happen, and we know that bad things happen, but
it's like, no, we should actually.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Talk about specific moment.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
How it happened. Yeah, so it doesn't happen anymore. Then
the responsibility of people who are going to go in
there and say, we are the police, we are the sheriff,
we are the people who hold people accountable. And how
do you make it so that everyone's a bad actor
on that side of the fence.
Speaker 3 (48:46):
There's no hope.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Wow, got a change. Good job, thank you.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
That was an epic story.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
It was a big one. Mary mclatchan. When the great
researchers of our time, all right, well, great job, thank
you so much. That's a solo episode.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
That's how it's done.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Feels like a tripler.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
We hope your sister enjoyed this.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
We hope your mother takes you up on this and
comes back right right.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
We hope your road trip's going well.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
We promise we won't swear as much next time. It's right,
and stay.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Sexy, don't get murdered.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
Goodbye, Elvis.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
Do you want a cookie?
Speaker 1 (49:29):
This has been an exactly right production.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Our senior producers are Alejandra Keck and Molly Smith.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Our editor is Aristotle Oscevedo.
Speaker 3 (49:36):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Our researchers are Maaron McGlashan and Ali Elkin.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
Email your Homecounts to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Follow the show on Instagram at My Favorite Murder.
Speaker 3 (49:47):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
And now you can watch us on Exactly Wright's YouTube page.
While you're there, please like and subscribe.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Goodbyeye he
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Georgia Hardstark
Karen Kilgariff
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