Investigating the perpetrators of the Reign of Terror

The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is in partnership with the Tulsa World to introduce the story of the Osage Reign of Terror and the feature film Killers of the Flower Moon. In this episode, show producer Ambre Moton is joined by three writers from the Tulsa World, Randy Krehbiel, Jimmie Tramel and Tim Stanley, to discuss how the Bureau of Investigation came to investigate the killings, the handling of the case, the people held responsible for the killings and why the federal government had jurisdiction. 

More coverage

• Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here.
• All episodes from this series can be found here.
• Also, for more on the movie, listen to the latest episode of Streamed & Screened: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' might be the best film you see this year.

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Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona who's taking some well-deserved time off. 

If you haven't listened to the first two episodes of our series about the Osage reign of terror, please go back and listen to those before starting this one. So far, we've talked about the history of the Osage tribe and how they ended up in what became the state of Oklahoma.

Their oil rich land. And how those rights were divided. And the horrible series of murders or suspicious deaths. Kidnappings and the environment of fear that made up what historians and journalists call the reign of terror. This week we're talking about the investigations into the crimes, what they found and more. Randy Krehbiel of The Tulsa World reminds us about how difficult it was to get proper investigations into the deaths of the Osage community.

Who hired a private detectives to find the cause for the suspicious deaths? The Osage Tribal Council finally petitioned the federal government to send investigators, and in April of 1923, the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI, assigned agents to the case. Here's what Randy had to say about the investigation.

Well, it was called the reign of terror, because people just lived in terror. They were afraid to to talk. And when the FBI came in there in 1923 to try and sort things out in their in their letters and reports and so forth from that time, you know, they talk about how people are just terrified to talk and and they would not talk to outsiders at all.

And, in fact, this is just been talked about a lot with with this book and movie. They wound up putting some some men undercover to try and insinuate themselves into the community so they could get information because people were afraid if they if they told what they knew or what they thought and they were honest about it, they they'd be killed.

And and this and this was true of a lot of a lot of people. And, you know, I think Mollie Burkhart, at one time, she told her priest that she was afraid. People just, you know, people people w