October 31, 2023 • 42 mins
Today, we’re bringing you an episode from another Pushkin show, Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford. This episode is based on Killers of the Flower Moon, with permission from its author, David Grann.
Minnie Smith grew sick quite suddenly. She had been young, fit and healthy; the doctors were baffled when she died. "A peculiar wasting illness," they called it. Then, her sister Anna went missing. She was found a week later, dead, with a gunshot wound to her head. When a third sister, Rita, died in an explosion at her home, the grim pattern was clear: the family was under attack.
Lawman Tom White came to town to investigate, and uncovered a vicious plot.
This episode is the first of two cautionary tales produced in association with Apple Original Films. The Killers of the Flower Moon movie is in theaters now. It's directed by Martin Scorsese, and stars Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone.
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, wealth, greed, desire, murder. These are just some of
the plagues that befell the Osage people after vast oil
reserves were discovered beneath their land. Killers of the Flower
Moon tells a story of the disregard for human life
and betrayal and greed. Today on Revision's History, we're presenting
(00:36):
a special episode of Cautionary Tales. You'll hear the story
behind David Grant's book Killers of the Flower Moon, which
has been adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and
is now exclusively in theaters. Plus hear about the investigation
that began almost ninety years later. Here's the episode. Listen
to Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This cautionary Tale is based on David Gran's book Killers
of the Flower Moon and produced in association with Apple
Original Film. The film of the same title is now
exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O Sage
(01:29):
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 O Sage people
with where we respect When in eighteen oh four, he
met with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at
the White House. He remarked that they were the finest
(01:52):
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,
and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death
(02:15):
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. He said, there
are many hills here. White man does not like country
(02:37):
whether a hills, and he will not come. But the
white man did come. 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
(02:57):
Indian must conform to the white man's ways peacefully if
they will, forcibly if they must. In nineteen oh six,
the US government wanted to create a new state, Oklahoma
(03:18):
and hand it over to white settlers. They pressed the
Osage nation to agree to a new deal concerning the
rights to the land they had purchased. The Osage 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
(03:42):
their land. And what lay beneath, as the Osage negotiators
suspected and the white Man had not guessed, was oil
vast reserves of black gold. As the oil started to flow,
so did the money. Every quarter, every member of the
(04:04):
Osage tribe received a check to reflect the money being
paid by the oil men. At first, it was little
more than 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
(04:25):
get enough of stories about what they called the red millionaires.
O Sage girls 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. O Sage elders arriving for a
(04:46):
ceremonial dance in a private plane. Luck had finally smiled
on the o Sage Nation, or had it. I'm Tim
Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Minnie Smith was
(05:28):
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 left behind a husband,
(05:54):
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 wife man,
but she had divorced him, and at the age of
thirty four, she had a habit of disappearing on wild
(06:15):
nights of drinking 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
(06:39):
enjoyed such places that they were risky. She always kept
a small pistol in her purse. And then one night
in nineteen twenty one, she went out partying and didn't
come home. Not the first night, not the second, and
not the third. Which brings us to Sister number four, Molly,
(07:04):
the serious, responsible sister, the one who ended up taking
care of all the other 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, the man they called the King of the
Osage Hills. Hale had been a cowboy when he was young.
(07:29):
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 to do something he told you, said Molly's
husband Ernest. But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering,
(07:51):
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 Osage
people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to
remember how many sick people have received medical attention at
(08:12):
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
William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If
anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him.
(08:45):
In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began
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,
(09:08):
and few of them seem to have flourished as a result.
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 wiz bang when the oil money is gone.
(09:30):
Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem, and
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,
(09:53):
he declared. 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, it seemed
to anticipate the idea. Someday this oil will go, he said,
(10:16):
and there will 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 of one sister and the disappearance of another?
(10:41):
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
sage woman would set a man up for life. Marrying two.
(11:02):
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
head right passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's
(11:24):
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.
By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the
(11:47):
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
a week ago, and there was anna distinctive gold filling.
(12:11):
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.
He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They
(12:32):
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, it wasn't
just Minnie's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve.
(12:56):
Another one of the sisters did not have long to live.
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must
conform to the white man's ways. But not like this,
(13:16):
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,
and their devised a system just like the one you'd
impose on a child. If the US Department of the
(13:39):
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
was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was
purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people
(14:02):
would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian guardianship
was supposedly intended to protect O sage people from themselves.
In fact, and of course, and by design, it made
them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item
(14:25):
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
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.
(14:48):
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
do much about it. At least, some O sage people
had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some
(15:11):
exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian.
That meant she had as much control over her money
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
(15:32):
made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors,
the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her
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.
(15:54):
They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive.
Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing
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
(16:17):
colluding with bootlegging gangs, and soon enough they were busy
dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set
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.
(16:44):
At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage,
William Hale, seemed to be a target. Unknown 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, developed
(17:08):
his own aspisions 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 Rita
(17:29):
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.
Most people there had a guard dog, but over the
(17:53):
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,
(18:19):
doors flew from their hinders. 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
(18:41):
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.
(19:14):
In nineteen twenty five, a lawman 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. The
(19:35):
office itself was the Bureau of Investigation of 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
(19:58):
White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made
no progress in solving any of the craft Tis, neither
the deaths of Molly's family, nor around twenty other murders
of the Osage and their allies. There were too many
(20:20):
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,
(20:41):
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
(21:04):
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
(21:29):
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
(21:52):
describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness
of mirrors, evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctor has
managed to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking
leads turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially
(22:12):
said 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
(22:34):
double agent, 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. One of the murdered o Sage men
(22:58):
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
(23:21):
Hale explained to 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
(23:43):
workers on Hale's orders. 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
(24:06):
from o Sage 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
(24:26):
rights went to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow
burning family 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.
(24:51):
Molly herself was 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, Ernest,
(25:14):
a man who 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.
(25:39):
Solving 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
(26:03):
as one 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, I say trials, since there were several
(26:27):
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, then repented and confessed again.
(26:52):
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 of her family, including her. Finally,
(27:18):
a jury reached a verdict. The clerk read it out
to the charge of first degree murder. William K. Hale
had been found guilty, but the jury ruled out the
death penalty that would normally be of foregone conclusion. Hale
(27:41):
and others would serve long prison terms for their appalling crimes.
Orson Wells once said that if you want a happy ending,
it depends on where you stop the story. It's tempting
(28:02):
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
wardens and Leavenworth Prison, and he's just learning the rope
of the new job when some new inmates, shackled, pale
(28:26):
and blinking in the sunlight, are warped up the prison
driveway are the US Marshals. 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 White.
(28:52):
He shakes William Hale's hand and watches as Hale is
marched off to his cell. 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
(29:14):
got out of town. But the killings didn't stop. Then
you can 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
(29:45):
Grand's magisterial book Killers of the Flower Moon. When 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,
(30:07):
almost ninety year years 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. Gran had questions in
(30:32):
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. Wizbang is
long gone, the clues that it ever existed covered by grass.
(30:55):
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. It isn't managed by the
(31:17):
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
(31:38):
their capital, Poor Huskar. The Osage have an elected government
and ratified a new constitution in two thousand and six.
In some ways, the Sage Chief's prophecy has come true.
Someday this oil will go and there will be no
(31:59):
more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father.
Then I know my people will be happier. The terror
of the nineteen twenties is a low bar for happiness.
One O Sage historian Lewis F. Burns wrote, to believe
(32:20):
that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a
delusion of 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 Grant visited the
(32:54):
region several 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
(33:15):
introduced herself. 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. Mollie who'd watched
(33:38):
her sisters and mother die one by one, Ernest, who'd
conspired in their murder. Margie talked about her father, Cowboy Burkhart,
how much he had doted on his mother, Molly, and
how haunted he had been by the crimes of his father.
(34:00):
She drove 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
(34:22):
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 Graham visited Osage County and the
(34:43):
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 Oceage haven't forgotten in the
(35:07):
Oceage Nation Museum 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 to David
(35:32):
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 appeal to
the federal authorities for help in solving the Osage murders.
(35:56):
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 the same
time as Anna. He was found under a bush, a bloated,
(36:20):
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, where she
staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't seem to
(36:47):
be behind the death of George Bigheart, who died in
an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three after being poisoned,
or W. W. Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to
his deathbed to hear his testimony and collect some vital
incriminating documents. Vaughn then phoned the Osage County sheriff to
(37:12):
tell him that he knew who killed big Heart, and
a lot more than that. Vaughan boarded a train home
but never made it. His body was found by the
tracks north of Oklahoma City, neck broken, incriminating documents god
(37:34):
In his conversations with O Sage people, Gran kept hearing
similar stories O Sage grandparents who died young in the
nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties, 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
(37:58):
Flower Moon, Gran's detective work reveals the identity of the
influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan, but some of
them ers will never be solved. Too much evidence was
deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then there are other
(38:18):
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 never even recognized as
murder at all. The resource curse is seen as a
(38:43):
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 basic truth of the
resource curse isn't subtle at all. It's that money brings trouble,
(39:05):
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 rich and hemmed on
all sides by a society with no respect for you
(39:25):
at all, it brings murder. The Oceage was surrounded by murderers.
Those murderers weren't all orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't
need to be. They had their own reference and their
own motives, and they were protected by a white society
(39:47):
that didn't much care about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a
conspiracy is so big you simply can't call it a conspiracy.
(40:33):
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 Lilli Gladstone.
This episode was produced in association with Apple Original Films.
(40:56):
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.
(41:18):
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, Jammas Saunders,
and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible
without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(41:38):
Dital 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
(42:00):
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
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Pushkin, wealth, greed, desire, murder. These are just some of
the plagues that befell the Osage people after vast oil
reserves were discovered beneath their land. Killers of the Flower
Moon tells a story of the disregard for human life
and betrayal and greed. Today on Revision's History, we're presenting
(00:36):
a special episode of Cautionary Tales. You'll hear the story
behind David Grant's book Killers of the Flower Moon, which
has been adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and
is now exclusively in theaters. Plus hear about the investigation
that began almost ninety years later. Here's the episode. Listen
to Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This cautionary Tale is based on David Gran's book Killers
of the Flower Moon and produced in association with Apple
Original Film. The film of the same title is now
exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O Sage
(01:29):
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 O Sage people
with where we respect When in eighteen oh four, he
met with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at
the White House. He remarked that they were the finest
(01:52):
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,
and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death
(02:15):
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. He said, there
are many hills here. White man does not like country
(02:37):
whether a hills, and he will not come. But the
white man did come. 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
(02:57):
Indian must conform to the white man's ways peacefully if
they will, forcibly if they must. In nineteen oh six,
the US government wanted to create a new state, Oklahoma
(03:18):
and hand it over to white settlers. They pressed the
Osage nation to agree to a new deal concerning the
rights to the land they had purchased. The Osage 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
(03:42):
their land. And what lay beneath, as the Osage negotiators
suspected and the white Man had not guessed, was oil
vast reserves of black gold. As the oil started to flow,
so did the money. Every quarter, every member of the
(04:04):
Osage tribe received a check to reflect the money being
paid by the oil men. At first, it was little
more than 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
(04:25):
get enough of stories about what they called the red millionaires.
O Sage girls 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. O Sage elders arriving for a
(04:46):
ceremonial dance in a private plane. Luck had finally smiled
on the o Sage Nation, or had it. I'm Tim
Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Minnie Smith was
(05:28):
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 left behind a husband,
(05:54):
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 wife man,
but she had divorced him, and at the age of
thirty four, she had a habit of disappearing on wild
(06:15):
nights of drinking 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
(06:39):
enjoyed such places that they were risky. She always kept
a small pistol in her purse. And then one night
in nineteen twenty one, she went out partying and didn't
come home. Not the first night, not the second, and
not the third. Which brings us to Sister number four, Molly,
(07:04):
the serious, responsible sister, the one who ended up taking
care of all the other 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, the man they called the King of the
Osage Hills. Hale had been a cowboy when he was young.
(07:29):
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 to do something he told you, said Molly's
husband Ernest. But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering,
(07:51):
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 Osage
people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to
remember how many sick people have received medical attention at
(08:12):
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
William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If
anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him.
(08:45):
In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began
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,
(09:08):
and few of them seem to have flourished as a result.
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 wiz bang when the oil money is gone.
(09:30):
Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem, and
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,
(09:53):
he declared. 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, it seemed
to anticipate the idea. Someday this oil will go, he said,
(10:16):
and there will 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 of one sister and the disappearance of another?
(10:41):
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
sage woman would set a man up for life. Marrying two.
(11:02):
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
head right passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's
(11:24):
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.
By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the
(11:47):
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
a week ago, and there was anna distinctive gold filling.
(12:11):
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.
He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They
(12:32):
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, it wasn't
just Minnie's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve.
(12:56):
Another one of the sisters did not have long to live.
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must
conform to the white man's ways. But not like this,
(13:16):
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,
and their devised a system just like the one you'd
impose on a child. If the US Department of the
(13:39):
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
was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was
purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people
(14:02):
would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian guardianship
was supposedly intended to protect O sage people from themselves.
In fact, and of course, and by design, it made
them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item
(14:25):
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
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.
(14:48):
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
do much about it. At least, some O sage people
had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some
(15:11):
exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian.
That meant she had as much control over her money
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
(15:32):
made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors,
the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her
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.
(15:54):
They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive.
Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing
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
(16:17):
colluding with bootlegging gangs, and soon enough they were busy
dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set
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.
(16:44):
At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage,
William Hale, seemed to be a target. Unknown 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, developed
(17:08):
his own aspisions 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 Rita
(17:29):
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.
Most people there had a guard dog, but over the
(17:53):
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,
(18:19):
doors flew from their hinders. 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
(18:41):
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.
(19:14):
In nineteen twenty five, a lawman 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. The
(19:35):
office itself was the Bureau of Investigation of 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
(19:58):
White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made
no progress in solving any of the craft Tis, neither
the deaths of Molly's family, nor around twenty other murders
of the Osage and their allies. There were too many
(20:20):
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,
(20:41):
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
(21:04):
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
(21:29):
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
(21:52):
describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness
of mirrors, evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctor has
managed to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking
leads turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially
(22:12):
said 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
(22:34):
double agent, 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. One of the murdered o Sage men
(22:58):
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
(23:21):
Hale explained to 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
(23:43):
workers on Hale's orders. 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
(24:06):
from o Sage 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
(24:26):
rights went to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow
burning family 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.
(24:51):
Molly herself was 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, Ernest,
(25:14):
a man who 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.
(25:39):
Solving 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
(26:03):
as one 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, I say trials, since there were several
(26:27):
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, then repented and confessed again.
(26:52):
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 of her family, including her. Finally,
(27:18):
a jury reached a verdict. The clerk read it out
to the charge of first degree murder. William K. Hale
had been found guilty, but the jury ruled out the
death penalty that would normally be of foregone conclusion. Hale
(27:41):
and others would serve long prison terms for their appalling crimes.
Orson Wells once said that if you want a happy ending,
it depends on where you stop the story. It's tempting
(28:02):
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
wardens and Leavenworth Prison, and he's just learning the rope
of the new job when some new inmates, shackled, pale
(28:26):
and blinking in the sunlight, are warped up the prison
driveway are the US Marshals. 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 White.
(28:52):
He shakes William Hale's hand and watches as Hale is
marched off to his cell. 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
(29:14):
got out of town. But the killings didn't stop. Then
you can 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
(29:45):
Grand's magisterial book Killers of the Flower Moon. When 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,
(30:07):
almost ninety year years 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. Gran had questions in
(30:32):
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. Wizbang is
long gone, the clues that it ever existed covered by grass.
(30:55):
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. It isn't managed by the
(31:17):
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
(31:38):
their capital, Poor Huskar. The Osage have an elected government
and ratified a new constitution in two thousand and six.
In some ways, the Sage Chief's prophecy has come true.
Someday this oil will go and there will be no
(31:59):
more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father.
Then I know my people will be happier. The terror
of the nineteen twenties is a low bar for happiness.
One O Sage historian Lewis F. Burns wrote, to believe
(32:20):
that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a
delusion of 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 Grant visited the
(32:54):
region several 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
(33:15):
introduced herself. 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. Mollie who'd watched
(33:38):
her sisters and mother die one by one, Ernest, who'd
conspired in their murder. Margie talked about her father, Cowboy Burkhart,
how much he had doted on his mother, Molly, and
how haunted he had been by the crimes of his father.
(34:00):
She drove 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
(34:22):
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 Graham visited Osage County and the
(34:43):
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 Oceage haven't forgotten in the
(35:07):
Oceage Nation Museum 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 to David
(35:32):
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 appeal to
the federal authorities for help in solving the Osage murders.
(35:56):
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 the same
time as Anna. He was found under a bush, a bloated,
(36:20):
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, where she
staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't seem to
(36:47):
be behind the death of George Bigheart, who died in
an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three after being poisoned,
or W. W. Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to
his deathbed to hear his testimony and collect some vital
incriminating documents. Vaughn then phoned the Osage County sheriff to
(37:12):
tell him that he knew who killed big Heart, and
a lot more than that. Vaughan boarded a train home
but never made it. His body was found by the
tracks north of Oklahoma City, neck broken, incriminating documents god
(37:34):
In his conversations with O Sage people, Gran kept hearing
similar stories O Sage grandparents who died young in the
nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties, 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
(37:58):
Flower Moon, Gran's detective work reveals the identity of the
influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan, but some of
them ers will never be solved. Too much evidence was
deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then there are other
(38:18):
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 never even recognized as
murder at all. The resource curse is seen as a
(38:43):
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 basic truth of the
resource curse isn't subtle at all. It's that money brings trouble,
(39:05):
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 rich and hemmed on
all sides by a society with no respect for you
(39:25):
at all, it brings murder. The Oceage was surrounded by murderers.
Those murderers weren't all orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't
need to be. They had their own reference and their
own motives, and they were protected by a white society
(39:47):
that didn't much care about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a
conspiracy is so big you simply can't call it a conspiracy.
(40:33):
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 Lilli Gladstone.
This episode was produced in association with Apple Original Films.
(40:56):
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.
(41:18):
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, Jammas Saunders,
and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible
without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(41:38):
Dital 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
(42:00):
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
slash yes
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.