October 20, 2023 • 41 mins
Minnie Smith grew sick quite suddenly. She had been young, fit and healthy - and the doctors were baffled when she died. "A peculiar wasting illness," they called it. Then, her sister Anna went missing. Her rotting corpse was found a week later, a bullet hole through her skull. When a third sister, Rita, was blown up in her own bed, a grim pattern was clear: the family was being targeted.
Lawman Tom White strode into town to investigate - and uncovered a vicious plot that chilled him to the bone...
This episode is based on David Grann's book, Killers of the Flower Moon, and is the first of two cautionary tales produced in association with Apple Original Films. The film of the same title is in movie theaters now. It's directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone.
Next week, we'll hear more on this story from former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation Jim Roan Gray.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This cautionary tale is based on David Grand's book
Killers of the Flower Moon and produced in association with
Apple Original Films. The film of the same title is
now exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O
(00:46):
Sage nation stretched across the center of the North American continent,
from the Rocky Mountains through to what is now Missouri, Kansas,
and Oklahoma. President Thomas Jefferson viewed the Osage people with
where we respect? When in eighteen oh four he met
with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at the
(01:07):
White House, he remarked, but they were the finest men
we have ever seen. The wary respect did not last.
By eighteen seventy, the O Sage people had been pushed
into buying land that one observer described as broken, rocky, sterile,
(01:27):
and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death
of the buffalo, and brutal attacks from settlers, only a
few thousand of them remained alive. The O Sage chief
wati Ankhar, tried to look on the bright side. My
people will be happy in this land.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
He said.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
There are many hills here. White man does not like country.
Whether a hills and he will not come, but the white.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Man did come.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
O Sage children were forcibly enrolled in Catholic boarding schools,
days travel away from their parents, and made to change
their names and their clothes to the European style. The
United States policy was that the Indian must conform to
the white man's ways peacefully if they will, forcibly if
(02:22):
they must. In nineteen oh six, the US government wanted
to create a new state, Oklahoma and hand it over
to white settlers. They pressed the Oceage nation to agree
to a new deal concerning the rights to the land
(02:44):
they'd purchased. The Oceage negotiators played a weak hand well.
Under the deal that they agreed, the entire tribe of
two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine souls collectively held
the rights to whatever lay beneath their land. And what
lay beneath, as the Oceage negotiators suspected and the white
(03:07):
Man had not guessed, was oil vast reserves of black gold.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
As the oil.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Started to flow, so did the money. Every quarter, every
member of the Osage tribe received a check to reflect
the money being paid.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
By the oil men.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
At first, it was little more than a pocket money.
Soon each check each individual was the equivalent of tens
of thousands of dollars in today's money every quarter, and
the checks kept growing. Newspapers couldn't get enough of stories
about what they called the red millionaires. O Sage girls
(03:49):
dressed in the latest Parisian fashions. O Sage cookouts, a
circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire where the
bronzed and blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style.
Osage elders arriving for a ceremonial dance in a private
plane had finally smiled on the O Sage nation? Or
(04:14):
had it? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.
(04:44):
Minnie Smith was the first of the four sisters to die.
She'd been young, fit and healthy, and then she'd grown
ill quite suddenly. The doctors in Osage County were baffled
by her death, but of course they had a diagnosis,
a peculiar wasting illness. Maybe peculiar, it certainly was. Minnie
(05:11):
left behind a husband, a white man called Bill Smith.
A few months after Minnie's death in nineteen eighteen, Bill
married another of the sisters, Rita. Then there was Anna.
She had also married a white man, but she had
divorced him, and at the age of thirty four, she
had a habit of disappearing on wild nights of drinking
(05:34):
and dancing. She had plenty of places to go as
the oil flowed in Osage County, once modest settlements became
bustling towns full of oil workers, bootleggers, and gangsters. One
overnight oil rush town was named wiz Bang, where people
whizzed all day and banged all night. Anna enjoyed such
(05:58):
places that they were risky. She always kept a small
pistol in hot purse. And then one night in nineteen
twenty one, she went out parting and didn't come home.
Not the first night, not the second, and not the third,
(06:18):
Which brings us to Sister number four, Molly, the serious,
responsible sister, the one who ended up taking care of
all the others and their mother too. In her hunt
for her missing sister, Molly could call on perhaps the
most influential man in Osage County, her husband's uncle, William Hale,
(06:39):
the man they called the King of the Osage Hills.
Hale had been a cowboy when he was young, now
he was a bespectacled, three piece suit wearing pillar of
the community. Behind his owlish glasses, he remained a formidable character.
He was not the kind of man to ask you
(06:59):
to do something he told you, said Molly's husband Ernest.
But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering, he was
also a reverend and a deputy sheriff, and widely regarded
as the most public spirited man in Osage County. He
had supported local schools and charities before the O Sage
(07:21):
people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to
remember how many sick people have received medical attention at
his expense, nor how many hungry mouths have tasted of
his bounty. William Hale himself once wrote, I never had
better friends in my life than the o Sages. Uncle
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William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If
anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him.
In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began
(08:07):
to observe a pattern striking oil is not the guarantee
of national prosperity that you might expect. Indeed, the reverse
is often true. Think of Iraq and Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria.
There are plenty of countries with vast reserves of oil,
and few of them seem to have flourished as a result.
(08:30):
Even the wealthy exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia, often have
a thin and brittle kind of wealth. It's a challenge
to build foundations for enduring prosperity for something that will
last longer than wizbang when the oil money is gone.
Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem, and
(08:52):
they call it the resource curse. But I prefer a
more lyrical description by a former Minister of Oil rich Venezuela,
when he was asked to describe the effect of all
that black gold on his country. It is the devil's excrement.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
He declared.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
We are drowning in the devil's excrement. The oce age
had never heard of the resource curse or the devil's excrement,
though one of their elders seemed to anticipate the idea.
Someday this oil will go, he said, and there will
(09:34):
be no more fat checks every few months from the
Great White Father. There'll be no fine motor cars and
new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.
But were those fat checks involved in the peculiar death
(09:55):
of one sister and the disappearance of another. Uncle William
Hale had quietly expressed his doubts about Bill Smith. He'd
married Minnie, Remember then she had died suddenly and mysteriously.
Months later he married her sister Rita. Marrying one o
(10:15):
sage woman would set a man up for life. Marrying two.
You had to wander about Bill's motives. But then it
wasn't as if Bill had stood to gain financially from
Minnie's death. Under the system of head rights, it wouldn't
be Bill who'd keep getting those fat checks. Instead, Minnie's
(10:36):
head right passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's
head wright if anything had happened to Anna. And after
Anna had been missing for a week, there was news
a rotting corpse had been discovered. The undertakers scattered salt
and ice on it to reduce the swelling and the stink.
(11:01):
By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the
vultures were wheeling overhead. Was it Anna? The face of
the corpse was unrecognizable, but Molly knew the traditional blanket
and the clothes were Anna's. She had washed them freshly
for her sister the last time she saw her alive
(11:23):
a week ago, and there was Anna's distinctive gold filling.
It was her for sure. Rita wept. Molly was resolute.
She hired private detectives, and she had help from her
husband's uncle, William Hale, who swore he'd get justice for Anna.
(11:46):
He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They
found a bullet hole in the woman's skull, although even
after chopping her brain into mints, they never could find
the bullet. Curious, but as both the sheriff and the
private investigators started to look into the mystery, wasn't just
(12:09):
Mini's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve another
one of the sisters did not have long to live.
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must
(12:29):
conform to the white man's ways. But not like this,
decided the federal government. Not with luxury cars and private planes.
Congressional committees took to pouring over reports of o sage expenditure,
like disapproving parents scrutinizing the bank account of a teenager,
(12:50):
and they devised a system just like the one you'd
impose on a child. If the US Department of the
Interior decided that a member of a Native American tribe
wasn't competent to manage their own affairs, their finances would
be handed over to a guardian. The idea of competence
(13:11):
was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was
purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people
would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian. Guardianship
was supposedly intended to protect O Sage people from themselves.
(13:34):
In fact, and of course, and by design, it made
them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item
of expenditure, down to toothpaste and groceries. The guardians were
the ones writing the checks, and it was the easiest
thing in the world for a guardian to steal from
(13:54):
their O Sage ward. One's gam for example, was for
a guardian to buy a car for a couple of
hundred dollars, then parted onto their ward for a thousand.
Since O Sage people were forbidden to have direct control
of their own money, they might not have known about
the deception, but in any case, they were powerless to
(14:17):
do much about it. At least some o sage people
had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some
exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian.
That meant she had as much control over her money
(14:37):
as most women of the day, and just as you'd
expect from the nephew of the upstanding William Hale, Ernest
took good care of Molly. She suffered from diabetes. He
made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors,
the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her
(14:58):
the regular injections of insulin she needed to stay alive.
But the private detectives that Molly hired weren't making much
progress in figuring out who had shot Anna and why.
They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive.
Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing
(15:20):
to gain from her death. Anna's money went to her mother, Lizzie.
The evidence to charge anyone seemed thin anyway. The local
sheriff and his deputies were busy, busy taking bribes, busy
colluding with bootlegging gangs. And soon enough they were busy
dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set
(15:44):
in o Sage. People began to install electric lights outside
their homes, pushing back the darkness in the hope of
dissuading the creep of the assassins who would be next.
At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage,
(16:05):
William Hale, seemed to be a target on the known
men set fire to his pastures, and the flames spread
for mile upon mile. If the King of the Osage
Hills could be attacked, nobody was safe. Rita's husband, Bill Smith,
(16:25):
developed his own suspicions about what was going on. He
hired his own private detectives. He told friends he was
determined to get to the bottom of the killings and
that he was getting warm, but perhaps his enemies were
getting warm too. On several nights, Bill and his wife
(16:46):
Rita were awoken by movement outside the house. It sounded
like intruders scouting around getting the lay of the land.
Rita and Bill were scared. Leaving many of their possessions behind,
they abruptly moved to a neighborhood in the town of Fairfax.
(17:07):
Most people there had a guarden dog, but over the
course of a few days, one by one the neighborhood
guard dogs began to sicken, lay down, and die. In
the early hours of March tenth, nineteen twenty three, the
entire town was jolted awake. Close to the blast, windows shattered, timber, snatched,
(17:37):
doors flew from their hinges. People were not flat Further away,
The town shook and shook and wouldn't stop. A rush
of bewildered townsfolk headed towards the epicenter. It was Bill
and Rita's new house. There was nothing left of it
(17:58):
but rubble and choking black smoke. Apparently Bill Smith's investigation
had got a little too warm. Molly was the only
one of her sisters left, and despite regular injections to
treat her diabetes, Molly herself was getting sicker and sicker.
(18:32):
In nineteen twenty five, a law man strode into Osage County, Oklahoma.
Tom White was a movie caricature of a Western hero.
Six foot four square, jawed, incorruptible, and fearless. He wore
a big cowboy hat even when in the office of
(18:53):
the office itself was the Bureau of Investigation at Washington, DC,
a new organization run by an ambitious young man, j
Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted to make the reputation of his
new bureau by solving a high profile case, a case
that had gripped the nation, so he had sent Tom
(19:16):
White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made
no progress in solving any of the crimes, neither the
deaths of Molly's family nor around twenty other murders of
the o Sage and their allies. There were too many
(19:38):
possible suspects, too many rumors and stories, and no hard evidence.
Witnesses had a tendency to die in strange circumstances, the
car crash, bad whiskey falling down the stairs. When the
cowboy hatted Tom White agreed to go to Osage County,
(19:59):
he knew that investigations had been stalled for years, that
the local officials were corrupt, and that some previous investigators
had been murdered themselves. If he took the job, he'd
have a target on his back. It wasn't going to
stop him. Tom White summoned a posse of undercover agents
(20:22):
to join him in Oklahoma City. The only member of
a native American tribe who worked for the bureau, John Wren,
who was part ute several experienced gunslingers who could easily
pose as cowboys or rustlers, a former insurance salesman whose
cover story was that he was an insurance salesman. More
(20:47):
than twenty o sage people had been murdered, along with
several other locals. White decided to focus on a few,
including the sisters Anna who was shot Rita whose house exploded.
In his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Gran
(21:10):
describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness
of mirrors. Evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctors managed
to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking leads
turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially said
(21:31):
Anna had been killed by a jealous wife after fooling
around with the husband, but later admitted that a strange
White man had come to her house and forced her
to sign a fake statement. And Tom White realized something else.
Some unknown person in his team was a double agent,
(21:53):
leaking the bureau's internal reports, feeding back everything to the
men they were pursuing. Who were those men? After spending
the summer of nineteen twenty five, Trying to navigate the
wilderness of mirrors, Tom White started to piece together a theory.
(22:14):
One of the murdered o Sage men had a life
insurance policy for twenty five thousand dollars, a huge sum,
but rather than naming his wife as a beneficiary, he
had named his wealthy friend, William Hale, the king of
the Osage Hills. That seemed strange, although Hale explained to
(22:40):
White that the poor man had discovered his wife was
having an affair and Hale had comforted him in his distress.
That would explain everything. Then, a woman who lived near
Hale's farm told investigators that when Hale's land had been
set ablaze, it was by Hale's workers on Hale's orders.
(23:04):
He had collected thirty thousand dollars in insurance money. Hale
controlled everything around here, she told the agents. White looked
more and more closely at Hale's affairs. Those head rights,
the unbelievably lucrative rights to the money from oce Age
(23:25):
County's oil fields, couldn't be bought or sold. They could
only be inherited. Minnie's and Anna's head rights had gone
to their mother Lizzie. Then Lizzie herself had died from
a mysterious illness, all of her accumulated head rights went
to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow burning family
(23:50):
tragedy started to develop a remorseless logic in Tom White's mind,
even the use of a bomb to murder Rita and
her husband Bill, because their will specified that if they
died simultaneously, everything would pass to Molly. Molly herself was
(24:11):
very ill, despite the close attention she was receiving from
William Hale's personal physicians. She hadn't died, not yet, But
perhaps the killers weren't in a hurry. Since Molly's money
was all controlled by her husband, Earnest, a man who
(24:33):
was absolutely loyal to his uncle William Hale. Earnest, it seemed,
might be complicit in the plot to murder every member
of his wife's family and presumably his wife herself. Solving
(24:58):
the mystery was one thing, Securing a conviction was quite another.
In an Oklahoma court, everyone from the sheriff to the
juries would be bought and paid for by William Hale.
Even if Tom White could get the case tried in
a federal court, would a white jury convict. As one
(25:21):
O Sage elder commented, the question for them to decide
is whether a white man killing an O sage is
murder or merely cruelty to animals. The trials were a sensation,
(25:42):
I say trials, since there were several murders and several
murderers working for Hale. One was declared a mistrial after
it became clear that members of the jury had been bribed.
Ernest made a full confession of his and his uncle's crimes,
then withdrew it and agreed to testify for his uncle's defense,
(26:06):
then repented and confessed again. It's hard to know why
he changed his mind, but perhaps it was the sight
of his wife, Molly, sitting silently in the courtroom day
after day, solemnly watching as it became clear that the
man she had loved had conspired to murder every member
(26:31):
of her family, including her. Finally, a jury reached a verdict.
The clerk read it out to the charge of first
degree murder. William KA Hale had been found guilty, but
(26:53):
the jury ruled out the death penalty that would normally
be a foregone conclusion. Hale and others would serve long
prison terms for their appalling crimes. Awson Wells once said
that if you want a happy ending, it depends on
(27:17):
where you stop the story. It's tempting to stop the story.
On November seventeenth, nineteen twenty six, Tom White has gone
out on a high, retiring from the Bureau to take
a more settled job, does the warden of Leavenworth Prison,
And he's just learning the ropes of the new job.
(27:39):
When some new inmates, shackled, pale and blinking in the sunlight,
are warped up the prison driveway.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Are the US Marshals.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
White recognizes the distinctive round face of William K. Hale,
and Hale recognizes him too by Hello, Tom offers Hale. Hello, Bill,
says Warden Tom. He shakes William Hale's hand and watches
(28:14):
as Hale is marched off to his self. But I
can't end the story there. When Tom White and the
Bureau of Investigation convicted Hale and his immediate conspirators, they
declared victory and got out of town, but the killings
(28:35):
didn't stop.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Then you can.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Still drown in the devil's excrement, even if the devil
himself has gone to jail. Cautionary tales will return after
the break. This cautionary tale relies on David Grand's magisterial
(29:05):
book Killers of the Flower Moon. I told David I
was hoping to base an episode on it. He told me,
take a look at the final section of the book.
That's the part of the history that often gets left out.
The final section begins in twenty twelve, almost ninety years
(29:27):
after our comic book hero Tom White strode into town.
Another investigator followed in his footsteps. He wasn't a former
Texas Ranger, standing tall, packing heat and wearing a cowboy hat.
He was a bespectacled writer from New York, David Gran himself.
(29:48):
Gran had questions in his mind about the murders, and
he wanted to see Osage County to meet some of
the twenty first century O Sage people. The oil boom
ended in the nineteen thirties. The boomtowns of the area
are depopulated. Now wiz Bang is long gone. Clues that
(30:09):
it ever existed covered by grass. There's still a little
oil and steal a little money for the people with
head rights, but not enough to change a life or
to end it. Under the head right system, some of
that money remains in a trust, and some things don't change.
(30:34):
It isn't managed by the O Sage Nation, but by
the US government, mismanaged, the Osage say, and their legal
struggle over the money continues. The O Sage Nation is
twenty thousand strong, of whom four thousand still live in
Osage County, in and around their capital, Poor Huskar. The
(30:59):
O Sage have an elected government and ratified a new
constitution in two thousand and six. In some ways, the
Osage Chief's prophecy has come true. Someday this oil will
go and there will be no more fat checks every
few months from the Great White Father. Then I know
(31:23):
my people will be happier. But the terror of the
nineteen twenties is a low bar for happiness. One O
Sage historian, Lewis F. Burns wrote, to believe that the
Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of
(31:44):
the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been
saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived.
But much of what the O Sage Nation had now
exists only in memory. David Gran visited the region several
(32:13):
times to meet people and hear their stories. He attended
a ceremonial dance, watching the drummers and the singers, the
dancers in headdresses stepping together counterclockwise, intensity building at the dance,
a woman came up to David gran and introduced herself.
(32:35):
She was in her fifties wearing a blue dress with
long black hair in a ponytail. She seemed familiar somehow, Hi,
she said, I'm Margie Burkhart. She was the granddaughter of
Ernest and Molly Burkhart, Molly who'd watched her sisters and
(32:57):
mother die one by one, Ernest who'd conspired in their murder.
Margie talked about her father, Cowboy Burkhardt, how much he
had doted on his mother, Molly, and how haunted he
had been by the crimes of his father. She drove
(33:18):
David Graham to the site of the bombed house, and
as they sat outside in the car, she told him
that little Cowboy and his sister had been due to
visit their aunt Rita the night her house blew up,
but Cowboy had earache, so it didn't go. Ernest would
(33:40):
have known very well what would happen to the house
that night, As Margie explained, to Gran, my dad had
to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him.
The more often David Grand visited Osage County and the
(34:01):
more stories he heard, the more he came to realize
that reality didn't quite squeeze into the neat story of
William Hale's murderous plot and Tom White's brilliant investigation. Hale
was guilty of organizing the murder of Molly Burkhardt's family,
to be sure, and the oce Age haven't forgotten. In
(34:25):
the Oceage Nation Museum in poor Huskar, there's an expansive
group photograph from nineteen twenty four depicting many members of
the tribe alongside the most influential and admired White locals.
A section of the picture has been cut away, the
section depicting William Hale. The museum director, Catherine Redcorn explained
(34:50):
to David Gran that it was too painful to show
the devil was standing right there. But there's no evidence
connecting Hale with the murder of Barney McBride, an oil
man who'd set off for Washington, d c determined to
appealed to the federal authorities for help in solving the
(35:12):
Osage murders. His naked body was found the next morning
a sack tied over his head. His skull smashed in
had been stabbed two dozen times. Nor was Hale apparently
connected with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn, who disappeared around
(35:32):
the same time as Anna. He was found under a bush,
a bloated, fly blown corpse, identified only by a letter
in his pocket. Between his eyes gaped two bullet holes.
His widow, Hattie, then seemed sure to die of a
mysterious illness until her sisters moved her away from the area,
(35:57):
where she staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't
seem to be behind the death of George Bigheart, who
died in an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three
after being poisoned.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Or W. W.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to his deathbed to
hear his testimony and collect some vital, incriminating documents. Vaughan
then phoned the Osage County sheriff to tell him that
he knew who killed big Heart, and a lot more
than that. Vaughan boarded a train home but never made it.
(36:40):
His body was found by the tracks north of Oklahoma City,
neck broken, incriminating documents gone. In his conversations with O
Sage people, Graham kept hearing similar stories O. Sage grandparents
who died young in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
(37:04):
with the family convinced of foul play and the authorities
showing no interest. Digging into the archives. He sometimes found clues.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, Grand's detective work reveals
the identity of the influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan,
(37:26):
But some of the murders will never be solved. Too
much evidence was deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then
there are other heartbreaking cases of white guardians with three,
four or more O Sage wards who all died young
for no apparent reason, deaths that at the time were
(37:51):
never even recognized as murder at all. The resource curse
is seen as a subtle economic problem. There's a lively
academic debate on why some nations seem to suffer more
than others and what policies they should adopt. But the
(38:14):
basic truth of the resource curse isn't subtle at all.
It's that money brings trouble, civil wars, nasty geopolitics, brutal dictatorships,
or if you're the last remaining two thousand, two hundred
and twenty nine members of the O Sage Nation suddenly
(38:37):
rich and hemmed on all sides by a society with
no respect for you at all. It brings murder. The
O Sage was surrounded by murderers. Those murderers weren't all
orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't need to be. They
had their own reforts and their own motives, and they
(39:01):
were protected by a white society that didn't much care
about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a conspiracy is so big
you simply can't call.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
It a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
This cautionary tale is based with permission, on David Grand's
book Killers of the Flower Moon. The film of the
same title is now in theaters, directed by Martin SCORSESEI
and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, and Lillie Gladstone.
This episod was produced in association with Apple Original Films.
(40:14):
Next week, I'll be back discussing this story with Jim
Roan Gray, a former principal chief of the Osage Nation.
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
(40:36):
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemmy
Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(40:56):
Diteal Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
(41:18):
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Pushkin. This cautionary tale is based on David Grand's book
Killers of the Flower Moon and produced in association with
Apple Original Films. The film of the same title is
now exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O
(00:46):
Sage nation stretched across the center of the North American continent,
from the Rocky Mountains through to what is now Missouri, Kansas,
and Oklahoma. President Thomas Jefferson viewed the Osage people with
where we respect? When in eighteen oh four he met
with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at the
(01:07):
White House, he remarked, but they were the finest men
we have ever seen. The wary respect did not last.
By eighteen seventy, the O Sage people had been pushed
into buying land that one observer described as broken, rocky, sterile,
(01:27):
and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death
of the buffalo, and brutal attacks from settlers, only a
few thousand of them remained alive. The O Sage chief
wati Ankhar, tried to look on the bright side. My
people will be happy in this land.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
He said.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
There are many hills here. White man does not like country.
Whether a hills and he will not come, but the white.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Man did come.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
O Sage children were forcibly enrolled in Catholic boarding schools,
days travel away from their parents, and made to change
their names and their clothes to the European style. The
United States policy was that the Indian must conform to
the white man's ways peacefully if they will, forcibly if
(02:22):
they must. In nineteen oh six, the US government wanted
to create a new state, Oklahoma and hand it over
to white settlers. They pressed the Oceage nation to agree
to a new deal concerning the rights to the land
(02:44):
they'd purchased. The Oceage negotiators played a weak hand well.
Under the deal that they agreed, the entire tribe of
two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine souls collectively held
the rights to whatever lay beneath their land. And what
lay beneath, as the Oceage negotiators suspected and the white
(03:07):
Man had not guessed, was oil vast reserves of black gold.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
As the oil.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Started to flow, so did the money. Every quarter, every
member of the Osage tribe received a check to reflect
the money being paid.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
By the oil men.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
At first, it was little more than a pocket money.
Soon each check each individual was the equivalent of tens
of thousands of dollars in today's money every quarter, and
the checks kept growing. Newspapers couldn't get enough of stories
about what they called the red millionaires. O Sage girls
(03:49):
dressed in the latest Parisian fashions. O Sage cookouts, a
circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire where the
bronzed and blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style.
Osage elders arriving for a ceremonial dance in a private
plane had finally smiled on the O Sage nation? Or
(04:14):
had it? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.
(04:44):
Minnie Smith was the first of the four sisters to die.
She'd been young, fit and healthy, and then she'd grown
ill quite suddenly. The doctors in Osage County were baffled
by her death, but of course they had a diagnosis,
a peculiar wasting illness. Maybe peculiar, it certainly was. Minnie
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left behind a husband, a white man called Bill Smith.
A few months after Minnie's death in nineteen eighteen, Bill
married another of the sisters, Rita. Then there was Anna.
She had also married a white man, but she had
divorced him, and at the age of thirty four, she
had a habit of disappearing on wild nights of drinking
(05:34):
and dancing. She had plenty of places to go as
the oil flowed in Osage County, once modest settlements became
bustling towns full of oil workers, bootleggers, and gangsters. One
overnight oil rush town was named wiz Bang, where people
whizzed all day and banged all night. Anna enjoyed such
(05:58):
places that they were risky. She always kept a small
pistol in hot purse. And then one night in nineteen
twenty one, she went out parting and didn't come home.
Not the first night, not the second, and not the third,
(06:18):
Which brings us to Sister number four, Molly, the serious,
responsible sister, the one who ended up taking care of
all the others and their mother too. In her hunt
for her missing sister, Molly could call on perhaps the
most influential man in Osage County, her husband's uncle, William Hale,
(06:39):
the man they called the King of the Osage Hills.
Hale had been a cowboy when he was young, now
he was a bespectacled, three piece suit wearing pillar of
the community. Behind his owlish glasses, he remained a formidable character.
He was not the kind of man to ask you
(06:59):
to do something he told you, said Molly's husband Ernest.
But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering, he was
also a reverend and a deputy sheriff, and widely regarded
as the most public spirited man in Osage County. He
had supported local schools and charities before the O Sage
(07:21):
people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to
remember how many sick people have received medical attention at
his expense, nor how many hungry mouths have tasted of
his bounty. William Hale himself once wrote, I never had
better friends in my life than the o Sages. Uncle
(07:44):
William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If
anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him.
In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began
(08:07):
to observe a pattern striking oil is not the guarantee
of national prosperity that you might expect. Indeed, the reverse
is often true. Think of Iraq and Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria.
There are plenty of countries with vast reserves of oil,
and few of them seem to have flourished as a result.
(08:30):
Even the wealthy exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia, often have
a thin and brittle kind of wealth. It's a challenge
to build foundations for enduring prosperity for something that will
last longer than wizbang when the oil money is gone.
Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem, and
(08:52):
they call it the resource curse. But I prefer a
more lyrical description by a former Minister of Oil rich Venezuela,
when he was asked to describe the effect of all
that black gold on his country. It is the devil's excrement.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
He declared.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
We are drowning in the devil's excrement. The oce age
had never heard of the resource curse or the devil's excrement,
though one of their elders seemed to anticipate the idea.
Someday this oil will go, he said, and there will
(09:34):
be no more fat checks every few months from the
Great White Father. There'll be no fine motor cars and
new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.
But were those fat checks involved in the peculiar death
(09:55):
of one sister and the disappearance of another. Uncle William
Hale had quietly expressed his doubts about Bill Smith. He'd
married Minnie, Remember then she had died suddenly and mysteriously.
Months later he married her sister Rita. Marrying one o
(10:15):
sage woman would set a man up for life. Marrying two.
You had to wander about Bill's motives. But then it
wasn't as if Bill had stood to gain financially from
Minnie's death. Under the system of head rights, it wouldn't
be Bill who'd keep getting those fat checks. Instead, Minnie's
(10:36):
head right passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's
head wright if anything had happened to Anna. And after
Anna had been missing for a week, there was news
a rotting corpse had been discovered. The undertakers scattered salt
and ice on it to reduce the swelling and the stink.
(11:01):
By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the
vultures were wheeling overhead. Was it Anna? The face of
the corpse was unrecognizable, but Molly knew the traditional blanket
and the clothes were Anna's. She had washed them freshly
for her sister the last time she saw her alive
(11:23):
a week ago, and there was Anna's distinctive gold filling.
It was her for sure. Rita wept. Molly was resolute.
She hired private detectives, and she had help from her
husband's uncle, William Hale, who swore he'd get justice for Anna.
(11:46):
He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They
found a bullet hole in the woman's skull, although even
after chopping her brain into mints, they never could find
the bullet. Curious, but as both the sheriff and the
private investigators started to look into the mystery, wasn't just
(12:09):
Mini's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve another
one of the sisters did not have long to live.
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must
(12:29):
conform to the white man's ways. But not like this,
decided the federal government. Not with luxury cars and private planes.
Congressional committees took to pouring over reports of o sage expenditure,
like disapproving parents scrutinizing the bank account of a teenager,
(12:50):
and they devised a system just like the one you'd
impose on a child. If the US Department of the
Interior decided that a member of a Native American tribe
wasn't competent to manage their own affairs, their finances would
be handed over to a guardian. The idea of competence
(13:11):
was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was
purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people
would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian. Guardianship
was supposedly intended to protect O Sage people from themselves.
(13:34):
In fact, and of course, and by design, it made
them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item
of expenditure, down to toothpaste and groceries. The guardians were
the ones writing the checks, and it was the easiest
thing in the world for a guardian to steal from
(13:54):
their O Sage ward. One's gam for example, was for
a guardian to buy a car for a couple of
hundred dollars, then parted onto their ward for a thousand.
Since O Sage people were forbidden to have direct control
of their own money, they might not have known about
the deception, but in any case, they were powerless to
(14:17):
do much about it. At least some o sage people
had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some
exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian.
That meant she had as much control over her money
(14:37):
as most women of the day, and just as you'd
expect from the nephew of the upstanding William Hale, Ernest
took good care of Molly. She suffered from diabetes. He
made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors,
the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her
(14:58):
the regular injections of insulin she needed to stay alive.
But the private detectives that Molly hired weren't making much
progress in figuring out who had shot Anna and why.
They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive.
Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing
(15:20):
to gain from her death. Anna's money went to her mother, Lizzie.
The evidence to charge anyone seemed thin anyway. The local
sheriff and his deputies were busy, busy taking bribes, busy
colluding with bootlegging gangs. And soon enough they were busy
dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set
(15:44):
in o Sage. People began to install electric lights outside
their homes, pushing back the darkness in the hope of
dissuading the creep of the assassins who would be next.
At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage,
(16:05):
William Hale, seemed to be a target on the known
men set fire to his pastures, and the flames spread
for mile upon mile. If the King of the Osage
Hills could be attacked, nobody was safe. Rita's husband, Bill Smith,
(16:25):
developed his own suspicions about what was going on. He
hired his own private detectives. He told friends he was
determined to get to the bottom of the killings and
that he was getting warm, but perhaps his enemies were
getting warm too. On several nights, Bill and his wife
(16:46):
Rita were awoken by movement outside the house. It sounded
like intruders scouting around getting the lay of the land.
Rita and Bill were scared. Leaving many of their possessions behind,
they abruptly moved to a neighborhood in the town of Fairfax.
(17:07):
Most people there had a guarden dog, but over the
course of a few days, one by one the neighborhood
guard dogs began to sicken, lay down, and die. In
the early hours of March tenth, nineteen twenty three, the
entire town was jolted awake. Close to the blast, windows shattered, timber, snatched,
(17:37):
doors flew from their hinges. People were not flat Further away,
The town shook and shook and wouldn't stop. A rush
of bewildered townsfolk headed towards the epicenter. It was Bill
and Rita's new house. There was nothing left of it
(17:58):
but rubble and choking black smoke. Apparently Bill Smith's investigation
had got a little too warm. Molly was the only
one of her sisters left, and despite regular injections to
treat her diabetes, Molly herself was getting sicker and sicker.
(18:32):
In nineteen twenty five, a law man strode into Osage County, Oklahoma.
Tom White was a movie caricature of a Western hero.
Six foot four square, jawed, incorruptible, and fearless. He wore
a big cowboy hat even when in the office of
(18:53):
the office itself was the Bureau of Investigation at Washington, DC,
a new organization run by an ambitious young man, j
Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted to make the reputation of his
new bureau by solving a high profile case, a case
that had gripped the nation, so he had sent Tom
(19:16):
White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made
no progress in solving any of the crimes, neither the
deaths of Molly's family nor around twenty other murders of
the o Sage and their allies. There were too many
(19:38):
possible suspects, too many rumors and stories, and no hard evidence.
Witnesses had a tendency to die in strange circumstances, the
car crash, bad whiskey falling down the stairs. When the
cowboy hatted Tom White agreed to go to Osage County,
(19:59):
he knew that investigations had been stalled for years, that
the local officials were corrupt, and that some previous investigators
had been murdered themselves. If he took the job, he'd
have a target on his back. It wasn't going to
stop him. Tom White summoned a posse of undercover agents
(20:22):
to join him in Oklahoma City. The only member of
a native American tribe who worked for the bureau, John Wren,
who was part ute several experienced gunslingers who could easily
pose as cowboys or rustlers, a former insurance salesman whose
cover story was that he was an insurance salesman. More
(20:47):
than twenty o sage people had been murdered, along with
several other locals. White decided to focus on a few,
including the sisters Anna who was shot Rita whose house exploded.
In his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Gran
(21:10):
describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness
of mirrors. Evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctors managed
to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking leads
turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially said
(21:31):
Anna had been killed by a jealous wife after fooling
around with the husband, but later admitted that a strange
White man had come to her house and forced her
to sign a fake statement. And Tom White realized something else.
Some unknown person in his team was a double agent,
(21:53):
leaking the bureau's internal reports, feeding back everything to the
men they were pursuing. Who were those men? After spending
the summer of nineteen twenty five, Trying to navigate the
wilderness of mirrors, Tom White started to piece together a theory.
(22:14):
One of the murdered o Sage men had a life
insurance policy for twenty five thousand dollars, a huge sum,
but rather than naming his wife as a beneficiary, he
had named his wealthy friend, William Hale, the king of
the Osage Hills. That seemed strange, although Hale explained to
(22:40):
White that the poor man had discovered his wife was
having an affair and Hale had comforted him in his distress.
That would explain everything. Then, a woman who lived near
Hale's farm told investigators that when Hale's land had been
set ablaze, it was by Hale's workers on Hale's orders.
(23:04):
He had collected thirty thousand dollars in insurance money. Hale
controlled everything around here, she told the agents. White looked
more and more closely at Hale's affairs. Those head rights,
the unbelievably lucrative rights to the money from oce Age
(23:25):
County's oil fields, couldn't be bought or sold. They could
only be inherited. Minnie's and Anna's head rights had gone
to their mother Lizzie. Then Lizzie herself had died from
a mysterious illness, all of her accumulated head rights went
to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow burning family
(23:50):
tragedy started to develop a remorseless logic in Tom White's mind,
even the use of a bomb to murder Rita and
her husband Bill, because their will specified that if they
died simultaneously, everything would pass to Molly. Molly herself was
(24:11):
very ill, despite the close attention she was receiving from
William Hale's personal physicians. She hadn't died, not yet, But
perhaps the killers weren't in a hurry. Since Molly's money
was all controlled by her husband, Earnest, a man who
(24:33):
was absolutely loyal to his uncle William Hale. Earnest, it seemed,
might be complicit in the plot to murder every member
of his wife's family and presumably his wife herself. Solving
(24:58):
the mystery was one thing, Securing a conviction was quite another.
In an Oklahoma court, everyone from the sheriff to the
juries would be bought and paid for by William Hale.
Even if Tom White could get the case tried in
a federal court, would a white jury convict. As one
(25:21):
O Sage elder commented, the question for them to decide
is whether a white man killing an O sage is
murder or merely cruelty to animals. The trials were a sensation,
(25:42):
I say trials, since there were several murders and several
murderers working for Hale. One was declared a mistrial after
it became clear that members of the jury had been bribed.
Ernest made a full confession of his and his uncle's crimes,
then withdrew it and agreed to testify for his uncle's defense,
(26:06):
then repented and confessed again. It's hard to know why
he changed his mind, but perhaps it was the sight
of his wife, Molly, sitting silently in the courtroom day
after day, solemnly watching as it became clear that the
man she had loved had conspired to murder every member
(26:31):
of her family, including her. Finally, a jury reached a verdict.
The clerk read it out to the charge of first
degree murder. William KA Hale had been found guilty, but
(26:53):
the jury ruled out the death penalty that would normally
be a foregone conclusion. Hale and others would serve long
prison terms for their appalling crimes. Awson Wells once said
that if you want a happy ending, it depends on
(27:17):
where you stop the story. It's tempting to stop the story.
On November seventeenth, nineteen twenty six, Tom White has gone
out on a high, retiring from the Bureau to take
a more settled job, does the warden of Leavenworth Prison,
And he's just learning the ropes of the new job.
(27:39):
When some new inmates, shackled, pale and blinking in the sunlight,
are warped up the prison driveway.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Are the US Marshals.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
White recognizes the distinctive round face of William K. Hale,
and Hale recognizes him too by Hello, Tom offers Hale. Hello, Bill,
says Warden Tom. He shakes William Hale's hand and watches
(28:14):
as Hale is marched off to his self. But I
can't end the story there. When Tom White and the
Bureau of Investigation convicted Hale and his immediate conspirators, they
declared victory and got out of town, but the killings
(28:35):
didn't stop.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Then you can.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Still drown in the devil's excrement, even if the devil
himself has gone to jail. Cautionary tales will return after
the break. This cautionary tale relies on David Grand's magisterial
(29:05):
book Killers of the Flower Moon. I told David I
was hoping to base an episode on it. He told me,
take a look at the final section of the book.
That's the part of the history that often gets left out.
The final section begins in twenty twelve, almost ninety years
(29:27):
after our comic book hero Tom White strode into town.
Another investigator followed in his footsteps. He wasn't a former
Texas Ranger, standing tall, packing heat and wearing a cowboy hat.
He was a bespectacled writer from New York, David Gran himself.
(29:48):
Gran had questions in his mind about the murders, and
he wanted to see Osage County to meet some of
the twenty first century O Sage people. The oil boom
ended in the nineteen thirties. The boomtowns of the area
are depopulated. Now wiz Bang is long gone. Clues that
(30:09):
it ever existed covered by grass. There's still a little
oil and steal a little money for the people with
head rights, but not enough to change a life or
to end it. Under the head right system, some of
that money remains in a trust, and some things don't change.
(30:34):
It isn't managed by the O Sage Nation, but by
the US government, mismanaged, the Osage say, and their legal
struggle over the money continues. The O Sage Nation is
twenty thousand strong, of whom four thousand still live in
Osage County, in and around their capital, Poor Huskar. The
(30:59):
O Sage have an elected government and ratified a new
constitution in two thousand and six. In some ways, the
Osage Chief's prophecy has come true. Someday this oil will
go and there will be no more fat checks every
few months from the Great White Father. Then I know
(31:23):
my people will be happier. But the terror of the
nineteen twenties is a low bar for happiness. One O
Sage historian, Lewis F. Burns wrote, to believe that the
Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of
(31:44):
the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been
saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived.
But much of what the O Sage Nation had now
exists only in memory. David Gran visited the region several
(32:13):
times to meet people and hear their stories. He attended
a ceremonial dance, watching the drummers and the singers, the
dancers in headdresses stepping together counterclockwise, intensity building at the dance,
a woman came up to David gran and introduced herself.
(32:35):
She was in her fifties wearing a blue dress with
long black hair in a ponytail. She seemed familiar somehow, Hi,
she said, I'm Margie Burkhart. She was the granddaughter of
Ernest and Molly Burkhart, Molly who'd watched her sisters and
(32:57):
mother die one by one, Ernest who'd conspired in their murder.
Margie talked about her father, Cowboy Burkhardt, how much he
had doted on his mother, Molly, and how haunted he
had been by the crimes of his father. She drove
(33:18):
David Graham to the site of the bombed house, and
as they sat outside in the car, she told him
that little Cowboy and his sister had been due to
visit their aunt Rita the night her house blew up,
but Cowboy had earache, so it didn't go. Ernest would
(33:40):
have known very well what would happen to the house
that night, As Margie explained, to Gran, my dad had
to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him.
The more often David Grand visited Osage County and the
(34:01):
more stories he heard, the more he came to realize
that reality didn't quite squeeze into the neat story of
William Hale's murderous plot and Tom White's brilliant investigation. Hale
was guilty of organizing the murder of Molly Burkhardt's family,
to be sure, and the oce Age haven't forgotten. In
(34:25):
the Oceage Nation Museum in poor Huskar, there's an expansive
group photograph from nineteen twenty four depicting many members of
the tribe alongside the most influential and admired White locals.
A section of the picture has been cut away, the
section depicting William Hale. The museum director, Catherine Redcorn explained
(34:50):
to David Gran that it was too painful to show
the devil was standing right there. But there's no evidence
connecting Hale with the murder of Barney McBride, an oil
man who'd set off for Washington, d c determined to
appealed to the federal authorities for help in solving the
(35:12):
Osage murders. His naked body was found the next morning
a sack tied over his head. His skull smashed in
had been stabbed two dozen times. Nor was Hale apparently
connected with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn, who disappeared around
(35:32):
the same time as Anna. He was found under a bush,
a bloated, fly blown corpse, identified only by a letter
in his pocket. Between his eyes gaped two bullet holes.
His widow, Hattie, then seemed sure to die of a
mysterious illness until her sisters moved her away from the area,
(35:57):
where she staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't
seem to be behind the death of George Bigheart, who
died in an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three
after being poisoned.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Or W. W.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to his deathbed to
hear his testimony and collect some vital, incriminating documents. Vaughan
then phoned the Osage County sheriff to tell him that
he knew who killed big Heart, and a lot more
than that. Vaughan boarded a train home but never made it.
(36:40):
His body was found by the tracks north of Oklahoma City,
neck broken, incriminating documents gone. In his conversations with O
Sage people, Graham kept hearing similar stories O. Sage grandparents
who died young in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
(37:04):
with the family convinced of foul play and the authorities
showing no interest. Digging into the archives. He sometimes found clues.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, Grand's detective work reveals
the identity of the influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan,
(37:26):
But some of the murders will never be solved. Too
much evidence was deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then
there are other heartbreaking cases of white guardians with three,
four or more O Sage wards who all died young
for no apparent reason, deaths that at the time were
(37:51):
never even recognized as murder at all. The resource curse
is seen as a subtle economic problem. There's a lively
academic debate on why some nations seem to suffer more
than others and what policies they should adopt. But the
(38:14):
basic truth of the resource curse isn't subtle at all.
It's that money brings trouble, civil wars, nasty geopolitics, brutal dictatorships,
or if you're the last remaining two thousand, two hundred
and twenty nine members of the O Sage Nation suddenly
(38:37):
rich and hemmed on all sides by a society with
no respect for you at all. It brings murder. The
O Sage was surrounded by murderers. Those murderers weren't all
orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't need to be. They
had their own reforts and their own motives, and they
(39:01):
were protected by a white society that didn't much care
about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a conspiracy is so big
you simply can't call.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
It a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
This cautionary tale is based with permission, on David Grand's
book Killers of the Flower Moon. The film of the
same title is now in theaters, directed by Martin SCORSESEI
and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, and Lillie Gladstone.
This episod was produced in association with Apple Original Films.
(40:14):
Next week, I'll be back discussing this story with Jim
Roan Gray, a former principal chief of the Osage Nation.
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
(40:36):
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemmy
Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(40:56):
Diteal Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
(41:18):
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
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