Speaker 1: Pushkin, wealth, greed, desire, murder. These are just some of
Speaker 1: the plagues that befell the Osage people after vast oil
Speaker 1: reserves were discovered beneath their land. Killers of the Flower
Speaker 1: Moon tells a story of the disregard for human life
Speaker 1: and betrayal and greed. Today on Revision's History, we're presenting
Speaker 1: a special episode of Cautionary Tales. You'll hear the story
Speaker 1: behind David Grant's book Killers of the Flower Moon, which
Speaker 1: has been adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and
Speaker 1: is now exclusively in theaters. Plus hear about the investigation
Speaker 1: that began almost ninety years later. Here's the episode. Listen
Speaker 1: to Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: This cautionary Tale is based on David Grand's book Killers
Speaker 2: of the Flower Moon and produced in association with Apple
Speaker 2: Original Film. The film of the same title is now
Speaker 2: exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O Sage
Speaker 2: Nation stretched across the center of the North American continent,
Speaker 2: from the Rocky Mountains through to what is now Missouri, Kansas,
Speaker 2: and Oklahoma. President Thomas Jefferson viewed the O Sage people
Speaker 2: with wherey respect when in eighteen oh four, he met
Speaker 2: with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at the
Speaker 2: White House. He remarked that they were the finest men
Speaker 2: we have ever seen.
Speaker 3: The wary respect did not last.
Speaker 2: By eighteen seventy, the O Sage people had been pushed
Speaker 2: into buying land that one observer described as broken, rocky
Speaker 2: step and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the
Speaker 2: death of the buffalo, and brutal attacks from settlers, only
Speaker 2: a few thousand of them remained alive. The O Sage
Speaker 2: chief wati Ankhar, tried to look on the bright side.
Speaker 2: My people will be happy in this land.
Speaker 4: He said. There are many hills here.
Speaker 2: White man does not like a country whether a hills,
Speaker 2: and he will not come.
Speaker 4: But the white man did come.
Speaker 2: O Sage children were forcibly enrolled in Catholic boarding schools,
Speaker 2: days travel away from their parents, and made to change
Speaker 2: their names and their clothes to the European style. The
Speaker 2: United States policy was that the Indian must conform to
Speaker 2: the white man's ways peacefully if they will, forcibly if
Speaker 2: they must. In nineteen oh six, the US government wanted
Speaker 2: to create a new state, Oklahoma, and handed over to
Speaker 2: white settlers. They pressed the Osage nation to agree to
Speaker 2: a new deal concerning the rights to the land they
Speaker 2: had purchased. The O Sage negotiators played a weak hand well.
Speaker 2: Under the deal that they agreed, the entire tribe of
Speaker 2: two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine souls collectively held
Speaker 2: the rights to whatever lay beneath their land. And what
Speaker 2: lay beneath, as the Osage negotiators suspected and the white
Speaker 2: man had not guessed, was oil vast reserves of black gold.
Speaker 2: As the oil started to flow, so did the money.
Speaker 2: Every quarter, every member of the Osage tribe received a
Speaker 2: check to reflect the money being paid by the oil.
Speaker 2: Then at first it was little more than a pocket mine.
Speaker 2: Soon each check each individual was the equivalent of tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of dollars in today's money every quarter, and
Speaker 2: the checks kept growing. Newspapers couldn't get enough of stories
Speaker 2: about what they called the red millionaires. O Sage girls
Speaker 2: dressed in the latest Parisian fashions. O Sage cookouts a
Speaker 2: circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire where the
Speaker 2: bronzed and blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive
Speaker 2: style O Sage elders arriving for a ceremonial dance in
Speaker 2: a private plane. Luck had finally smiled on the O
Speaker 2: Sage nation, or had it. I'm Tim Harford and you're
Speaker 2: listening to cautionary tales. Minnie Smith was the first of
Speaker 2: the four sisters to die. She'd been young, fit and healthy,
Speaker 2: and then she'd grown ill quite suddenly. The doctors in
Speaker 2: Osage County were baffled by her death, but of course
Speaker 2: they had a diagnosis, a peculiar wasting illness. Maybe peculiar,
Speaker 2: it certainly was. Minnie left behind a husband, a white
Speaker 2: man called Bill Smith. A few months after Minnie's death
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighteen, Bill married another of the sisters, Rita.
Speaker 2: Then there was Anna. She had also married a wife man,
Speaker 2: but she had divorced him, and at the age of
Speaker 2: thirty four, she had a habit of disappearing on wild
Speaker 2: nights of drinking and dancing. She had plenty of places
Speaker 2: to go as the oil flowed in Osage County, once
Speaker 2: modest settlements became bustling towns full of oil workers, bootleggers,
Speaker 2: and gangsters. One overnight oil rush town was named wiz Bang,
Speaker 2: where people whizzed all day and banged all night. Anna
Speaker 2: enjoyed such places that they were risky. She always kept
Speaker 2: a small pistol in a hot purse. And then one
Speaker 2: night in nineteen twenty one, she went out partying and
Speaker 2: didn't come home. Not the first night, not the second,
Speaker 2: and not the third. Which brings us to sister number four, Molly,
Speaker 2: the serious, responsible sister, the one who ended up taking
Speaker 2: care of all the other and their mother too. In
Speaker 2: her hunt for her missing sister, Molly could call on
Speaker 2: perhaps the most influential man in Osage County, her husband's uncle,
Speaker 2: William Hale, the man they called the King of the
Speaker 2: Osage Hills. Hale had been a cowboy when he was young.
Speaker 2: Now he was a bespectacled, three piece suit wearing pillar
Speaker 2: of the community. Behind his owlish glasses, he remained a
Speaker 2: formidable character. He was not the kind of man to
Speaker 2: ask you to do something he told you, said Molly's
Speaker 2: husband Ernest. But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering,
Speaker 2: he was also a reverend and a deputy sheriff, and
Speaker 2: widely regarded as the most public spirited man in Osage County.
Speaker 2: He had supported local schools and charities before the Osage
Speaker 2: people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to
Speaker 2: remember how many sick people have received medical attention at
Speaker 2: his expense, nor how many hungry mouths have tasted of
Speaker 2: his bounty. William Hale himself once wrote, I never had
Speaker 2: better friends in my life than the o Sages. Uncle
Speaker 2: William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If
Speaker 2: anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him.
Speaker 2: In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began
Speaker 2: to observe a pattern striking oil is not the guarantee
Speaker 2: of national prosperity that you might expect. Indeed, the reverse
Speaker 2: is often true. Think of Iraq and Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria.
Speaker 2: There are plenty of countries with vast reserves of oil,
Speaker 2: and few of them them seem to have flourished as
Speaker 2: a result. Even the wealthy exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia
Speaker 2: often have a thin and brittle kind of wealth. It's
Speaker 2: a challenge to build foundations for enduring prosperity for something
Speaker 2: that will last longer than whiz bang when the oil
Speaker 2: money is gone. Economists debate the causes and cures of
Speaker 2: this problem. And they call it the resource curse, but
Speaker 2: I prefer a more lyrical description by a former Minister
Speaker 2: of oil, Rich Venezuela, when he was asked to describe
Speaker 2: the effect of all that black gold on his country.
Speaker 2: It is the devil's excrement, he declared. We are drowning
Speaker 2: in the devil's excrement. The oce age had never heard
Speaker 2: of the resource curse or the devil's excrement, though one
Speaker 2: of their elders. He seemed to anticipate the idea. Someday
Speaker 2: this oil will go, he said, and there will be
Speaker 2: no more fat checks every few months from the Great
Speaker 2: White Father. There'll be no fine motor cars and new clothes.
Speaker 2: Then I know my people will be happier. But were
Speaker 2: those fat checks involved in the peculiar death of one
Speaker 2: sister and the disappearance of another? Uncle? William Hale had
Speaker 2: quietly expressed his doubts about Bill Smith. He'd married Minnie,
Speaker 2: remember then she had died suddenly and mysteriously. Months later
Speaker 2: he married her sister, Rita. Marrying one o sage woman
Speaker 2: would set a man up for life. Marrying two. You
Speaker 2: had to wander about Bill's motives but then it wasn't
Speaker 2: as if Bill had stood to gain financially from Minnie's death.
Speaker 2: Under the system of head rights, it wouldn't be Bill
Speaker 2: who'd keep getting those fat checks. Instead, Minnie's head right
Speaker 2: passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's head wright
Speaker 2: if anything had happened to Anna. And after Anna had
Speaker 2: been missing for a week, there was news a rotting
Speaker 2: corpse had been discovered. The undertakers scattered salt and ice
Speaker 2: on it to reduce the swelling and the stink. By
Speaker 2: the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the vultures
Speaker 2: were wheeling overhead. Was it Anna? The face of the
Speaker 2: corpse was unrecognizable, but Molly knew the traditional blanket and
Speaker 2: the clothes were Anna's.
Speaker 4: She had washed them.
Speaker 2: Freshly for her sister the last time she saw her
Speaker 2: alive a week ago, and there was anna distinctive gold filling.
Speaker 2: It was her for sure. Rita wept. Molly was resolute.
Speaker 2: She hired private detectives, and she had help from her
Speaker 2: husband's uncle, William Hale, who swore he'd get justice for Anna.
Speaker 2: He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They
Speaker 2: found a bullet hole in the woman's skull, although even
Speaker 2: after chopping her brain into mints, they never could find
Speaker 2: the bullet. Curious, but as both the sheriff and the
Speaker 2: private investigators started to look into the mystery, it wasn't
Speaker 2: just Minnie's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve.
Speaker 2: Another one of the sisters did not have long to live.
Speaker 2: Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must
Speaker 2: conform to the white man's ways. But not like this,
Speaker 2: decided the federal government. Not with luxury cars and private planes.
Speaker 2: Congressional committees took to pouring over reports of O Sage expenditure,
Speaker 2: like disapproving parents, scrutinizing the bank account of a teenager,
Speaker 2: and their devised a system just like the one you'd
Speaker 2: impose on a child. If the US Department of the
Speaker 2: Interior decided that a member of a Native American tribe
Speaker 2: wasn't competent to manage their own affairs, their finances would
Speaker 2: be handed over to a guardian. The idea of competence
Speaker 2: was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was
Speaker 2: purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people
Speaker 2: would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian. Guardianship
Speaker 2: was supposedly intended to protect O sage people from themselves.
Speaker 2: In fact, and of course, and by design, it made
Speaker 2: them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item
Speaker 2: of expenditure, down to toothpaste and groceries. The guardians were
Speaker 2: the ones writing the checks, and it was the easiest
Speaker 2: thing in the world for a guardian to steal from
Speaker 2: their O sage ward. One's gam for example, was for
Speaker 2: a guardian to buy a car for a couple of
Speaker 2: hundred dollars, then parted onto their ward for one thousand.
Speaker 2: Since O sage people were forbidden to have direct control
Speaker 2: of their own money, they might not have known about
Speaker 2: the deception, but in any case they were powerless to
Speaker 2: do much about it. At least some O sage people
Speaker 2: had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some
Speaker 2: exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian.
Speaker 2: That meant she had as much control over her money
Speaker 2: as most women of the day, and just as you'd
Speaker 2: expect from the nephew of the upstanding William Hale, Ernest
Speaker 2: took good care of Molly. She suffered from diabetes. He
Speaker 2: made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors,
Speaker 2: the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her
Speaker 2: the regular injections of insulin she needed to stay alive.
Speaker 2: But the private detectives that Molly hired weren't making much
Speaker 2: progress in figuring out who had shot Anna and why.
Speaker 2: They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive.
Speaker 2: Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing
Speaker 2: to gain from her death. Anna's money went to her mother, Lizzie.
Speaker 2: The evidence to charge anyone seemed thin anyway. The local
Speaker 2: sheriff and his deputies were busy, busy taking bribes, busy
Speaker 2: colluding with bootlegging gangs, and soon enough they were busy
Speaker 2: dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set
Speaker 2: in o Sage. People began to install electric lights outside
Speaker 2: their homes, pushing back the darkness in the hope of
Speaker 2: dissuading the creep of the assassins who would be next.
Speaker 2: At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage,
Speaker 2: William Hale, seemed to be a target. Unknown men set
Speaker 2: fire to his pastures, and the flames spread for mile
Speaker 2: upon mile. If the King of the Osage Hills could
Speaker 2: be attacked, nobody was safe. Rita's husband, Bill Smith, developed
Speaker 2: his own suspicions about what was going on. He hired
Speaker 2: his own private detectives. He told friends he was determined
Speaker 2: to get to the bottom of the killings and that
Speaker 2: he was getting warm, but perhaps his enemies were getting
Speaker 2: warm too. On several nights, Bill and his wife Rita
Speaker 2: were awoken by movement outside the house. It sounded like
Speaker 2: intruders scouting around getting the lay of the land. Rita
Speaker 2: and Bill were scared. Leaving many of their possessions behind,
Speaker 2: they abruptly moved to a neighborhood in the town of Fairfax.
Speaker 2: Most people there had a guard dog, but over the
Speaker 2: course of a few days, one by one the neighborhood
Speaker 2: guard dogs began to sicken, lay down, and die. In
Speaker 2: the early hours of March tenth, nineteen twenty three, the
Speaker 2: entire town was jolted awake. Close to the blast, windows shattered,
Speaker 2: timber snaps, stors flew from their hindes. People were not
Speaker 2: flat further away. The town shook and shook, and wouldn't stop.
Speaker 2: A rush of bewildered townsfolk headed towards the epicenter.
Speaker 4: It was Bill and Rita's new house.
Speaker 2: There was nothing left of it but rubble and choking
Speaker 2: black smoke. Apparently Bill Smith's investigation had got a little
Speaker 2: too warm. Molly was the only one of her sisters left,
Speaker 2: and despite regular injections to treat her diabetes, Molly herself
Speaker 2: was getting sicker and sicker. In nineteen twenty five, a
Speaker 2: lawman strode into Osage County, Oklahoma. Tom White was a
Speaker 2: movie caricature of a Western hero. Six foot four, square, jawed, incorruptible,
Speaker 2: and fearless. He wore a big cowboy hat even when
Speaker 2: in the office of the office itself was the Bureau
Speaker 2: of Investigation at Washington, DC, a new organization run by
Speaker 2: an ambitious young man, j Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted to
Speaker 2: make the reputation of his new bureau by solving a
Speaker 2: high profile case, a case that had gripped the nation,
Speaker 2: so he had sent Tom White to Osage County. The
Speaker 2: authorities in Oklahoma had made no progress in solving any
Speaker 2: of the craft times, neither the deaths of Molly's family,
Speaker 2: nor around twenty other murders of the Osage and their allies.
Speaker 2: There were too many possible suspects, too many rumors and stories,
Speaker 2: and no hard evidence. Witnesses had a tendency to die
Speaker 2: in strange circumstances, the car crash, bad whiskey falling down
Speaker 2: the stairs. When the cowboy hatted, Tom White agreed to
Speaker 2: go to Osage County. He knew that investigations had been
Speaker 2: stalled for years, that the local officials were corrupt, and
Speaker 2: that some previous investigators had been murdered themselves. If he
Speaker 2: took the job, he'd have a target on his back.
Speaker 2: It wasn't going to stop him. Tom White summoned a
Speaker 2: posse of undercover agents to join him in Oklahoma City.
Speaker 2: The only member of a Native American tribe who worked
Speaker 2: for the bureau, John Wren, who was part ute several
Speaker 2: experienced gunslingers who could easily pose as cowboys or rustlers,
Speaker 2: a former insurance salesman whose cover story was that he
Speaker 2: was an insurance salesman. More than twenty o Sage people
Speaker 2: had been murdered, along with several other locals. White decided
Speaker 2: to focus on a few, including the sisters, Anna who
Speaker 2: was shot, Rita, whose house exploded. In his book Killers
Speaker 2: of the Flower Moon, David gran describes Tom White's investigation
Speaker 2: as taking place in a wilderness of mirrors. Evidence inexplicably vanished.
Speaker 2: Why hadn't the doctors managed to find the bullet in
Speaker 2: Anna's skull? Useful looking leads turned out to be deliberate deceptions.
Speaker 2: One woman initially said Anna had been killed by a
Speaker 2: jealous wife after fooling around with the husband, but later
Speaker 2: admitted that a strange White man had come to her
Speaker 2: house and forced her to sign a fake statement. And
Speaker 2: Tom White realized something else. Some unknown person in his
Speaker 2: team was a double agent, leaking the bureau's internal reports,
Speaker 2: feeding back everything to the men they were pursuing. Who
Speaker 2: were those men? After spending the summer of nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: five trying to navigate the wilderness of mirrors, Tom White
Speaker 2: started to piece together a theory. One of the murdered
Speaker 2: o Sage men had a life insurance policy for twenty
Speaker 2: five thousand dollars, a huge sum, but rather than naming
Speaker 2: his wife as a beneficiary, he had named his wealthy friend,
Speaker 2: William Hale, the King of the Osage Hills. That seemed strange,
Speaker 2: although Hale explained to White that the poor man had
Speaker 2: discovered his wife was having an affair, and Hale had
Speaker 2: comforted him in his distress. That would explain everything. Then,
Speaker 2: a woman who lived near Hale's farm told investigators that
Speaker 2: when Hale's land had been set ablaze, it was by
Speaker 2: Hale's workers on Hale's orders. He had collected thirty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars in insurance money. Hale controlled everything around here, she
Speaker 2: told the agents.
Speaker 4: White looked more and more.
Speaker 2: Closely at Hale's affairs. Those head rights, the unbelievably lucrative
Speaker 2: rights to the money from o Sage County's oil fields,
Speaker 2: couldn't be bought or sold. They could only be inherited.
Speaker 2: Minnie's and Anna's head rights had gone to their mother, Lizzie.
Speaker 2: Then Lizzie herself had died from a mysterious illness, all
Speaker 2: of her accumulated head rights went to Molly and her
Speaker 2: sister Rita. This slow burning family tragedy started to develop
Speaker 2: a remorseless logic in Tom White's mind, even the use
Speaker 2: of a bomb to murder Rita and her husband Bill,
Speaker 2: because their will specified that if they died simultaneously, everything
Speaker 2: would pass to Molly. Molly herself was very ill. Despite
Speaker 2: the close attention she was receiving from William Hale's personal physicians.
Speaker 2: She hadn't died, not yet, but perhaps the killers weren't
Speaker 2: in a hurry since Molly's money was all controlled by
Speaker 2: her husband, Ernest, a man who was absolutely loyal to
Speaker 2: his uncle William Hale. Earnest, it seemed, might be complicit
Speaker 2: in the plot to murder every member of his wife's
Speaker 2: family and presumably his wife herself. Solving the mystery was
Speaker 2: one thing, Securing a conviction was quite another. In an
Speaker 2: Oklahoma court, everyone from the sheriff to the juries would
Speaker 2: be bought and paid for by William Hale. Even if
Speaker 2: Tom White could get the case tried in a federal court,
Speaker 2: would a white jury convict. As one o Sage elder commented,
Speaker 2: the question for them to decide is whether a white
Speaker 2: man killing an osage is murder or merely cruelty to animals.
Speaker 2: The trials were a sensation, I say trials, since there
Speaker 2: were several murders and several murderers working for Hale. One
Speaker 2: was declared a mistrial after it became clear that members
Speaker 2: of the jury had been bribed. Ernest made a full
Speaker 2: confession of his and his uncle's crimes, then withdrew it
Speaker 2: and agreed to testify for his uncle's defense, then repented
Speaker 2: and confessed again. It's hard to know why he changed
Speaker 2: his mind, but perhaps it was the sight of his wife, Molly,
Speaker 2: sitting silently in the courtroom day after day, solemnly watching
Speaker 2: as it became clear that the man she had loved
Speaker 2: had conspired to murder every member of her family, including her. Finally,
Speaker 2: a jury reached a verdict. The clerk read it out
Speaker 2: to the charge of first degree murder. William K. Hale
Speaker 2: had been found guilty, but the jury ruled out the
Speaker 2: death penalty that would normally be a foregone conclusion. Hale
Speaker 2: and others would serve long prison terms for their appalling crimes.
Speaker 2: Awson Wells once said that if you want a happy ending,
Speaker 2: it depends on where you stop the story. It's tempting
Speaker 2: to stop the story. On November seventeenth, nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 2: Tom White has gone out on a high, retiring from
Speaker 2: the Bureau to take a more settled job does the
Speaker 2: warden of Leavenworth Prison, and he's just learning the rope
Speaker 2: of the new job when some new inmates shackled, pale,
Speaker 2: and blinking in the sunlight, are walked up the prison
Speaker 2: driveway at the US Marshals. White recognizes the distinctive round.
Speaker 4: Face of William K.
Speaker 2: Hale, and Hale recognizes him too by Hello, Tom offers Hale. Hello, Bill,
Speaker 2: says Warden Tom White. He shakes William Hale's hand and
Speaker 2: watches as Hale is marched off to his cell. But
Speaker 2: I can't end the story there. When Tom White and
Speaker 2: the Bureau of Investigation and convicted Hale and his immediate conspirators,
Speaker 2: they declared victory and got out of town, but the
Speaker 2: killings didn't stop.
Speaker 4: Then you can.
Speaker 2: Still drown in the devil's excrement, even if the devil
Speaker 2: himself has gone to jail. Cautionary tales will return after
Speaker 2: the break. This cautionary tale relies on David Grand's magisterial
Speaker 2: book Killers of the Flower Moon. When I told David
Speaker 2: I was hoping to base an episode on it, he
Speaker 2: told me, take a look at the final section of
Speaker 2: the book. That's the part of the history that often
Speaker 2: gets left out. The final section begins in twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: almost ninety year years after our comic book hero Tom
Speaker 2: White Strode into town. Another investigator followed in his footsteps.
Speaker 2: He wasn't a former Texas Ranger, standing tall, packing heat
Speaker 2: and wearing a cowboy hat. He was a bespectacled writer
Speaker 2: from New York, David Gran himself. Gran had questions in
Speaker 2: his mind about the murders, and he wanted to see
Speaker 2: Osage County to meet some of the twenty first century
Speaker 2: O Sage people. The oil boom ended in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: The boomtowns of the area are depopulated.
Speaker 4: Now. Wiz Bang is long gone.
Speaker 2: The clues that it ever existed covered by grass. There's
Speaker 2: still a little oil and still a little money for
Speaker 2: the people with head rights, but not enough to change
Speaker 2: a life or to end it. Under the head right system,
Speaker 2: some of that money remains in a trust, and some
Speaker 2: things don't change. It isn't managed by the O Sage Nation,
Speaker 2: but by the US government, mismanaged the Osage say, and
Speaker 2: their legal struggle over the money continues. The O Sage
Speaker 2: Nation is twenty thousand strong, of whom four thousand still
Speaker 2: live in Osage County, in and around their capital, Poor Huskar.
Speaker 2: The O Sage have an elected government and ratified a
Speaker 2: new constitution in two thousand and six. In some ways
Speaker 2: the Osage chief's prophecy has come true. Someday this oil
Speaker 2: will go.
Speaker 4: And there will be.
Speaker 2: No more fact checks every few months from the Great
Speaker 2: White Father. Then I know my people will be happier.
Speaker 2: The terror of the nineteen twenties is a low bar
Speaker 2: for happiness. One O Sage historian, Lewis F. Burns wrote,
Speaker 2: to believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal
Speaker 2: is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible
Speaker 2: to salvage has been saved, and is dearer to our
Speaker 2: hearts because it survived.
Speaker 4: But much of what the O.
Speaker 2: Sage nation had now exists only in memory. David Grant
Speaker 2: visited the region several times to meet people and hear
Speaker 2: their stories. He attended a ceremonial dance, watching the drummers
Speaker 2: and the singers, the dancers in headdresses stepping together counterclockwise.
Speaker 2: Intensity building at the dance, a woman came up to
Speaker 2: David gran and introduced herself. She was in her fifties
Speaker 2: wearing a blue dress with long black hair in a ponytail.
Speaker 2: She seemed familiar somehow, Hi, she said, I'm Margie Burkhart.
Speaker 2: She was the granddaughter of Ernest and Molly Burkhart, Mollie
Speaker 2: who'd watched her sisters and mother die one by one,
Speaker 2: Ernest who'd conspired in their murder. Margie talked about her father,
Speaker 2: Cowboy Burkhart, how much he had doted on his mother, Molly,
Speaker 2: and how haunted he had been by the crimes of
Speaker 2: his father. She drove David Graham to the site of
Speaker 2: the bombed house, and as they sat outside in the car,
Speaker 2: she told him that little Cowboy and his sister had
Speaker 2: been due to visit their aunt Rita the night her
Speaker 2: house blew up, but Cowboy had earache, so it didn't go.
Speaker 2: Ernest would have known very well what would happen to
Speaker 2: the house that night, as Margie explained to gran my
Speaker 2: dad had to live knowing that his father had tried
Speaker 2: to kill him. The more often David Graham visited Osage
Speaker 2: County and the more stories he heard, the more he
Speaker 2: came to realize that reality didn't quite squeeze into the
Speaker 2: neat story of William Hale's murderous plot and Tom White's
Speaker 2: brilliant investigation. Hale was guilty of organizing the murder of
Speaker 2: Molly Burkhardt's family to be sure, and the Oceage haven't forgotten.
Speaker 2: In the Oceage Nation Museum in poor Huskar, there's an
Speaker 2: expansive group photograph from nineteen twenty four depicting many members
Speaker 2: of the tribe alongside the most influential and admired White locals.
Speaker 2: A section of the picture has been cut away, the
Speaker 2: section depicting William Hale. The museum director, Catherine Redcorn explained
Speaker 2: to David gran that it was too painful to show
Speaker 2: the devil was standing right there. But there's no evidence
Speaker 2: connecting Hale with the murder of Barney McBride, an oil
Speaker 2: man who'd set off for Washington, d c. Determined to
Speaker 2: appeal to the federal authorities for help in solving the
Speaker 2: Osage murders. His naked body was found the next morning,
Speaker 2: a sack tied over his head, his skull smashed in
Speaker 2: had been stabbed two dozen times. Nor was Hale apparently
Speaker 2: connected with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn, who disappeared around
Speaker 2: the same time as Anna. He was found under a bush,
Speaker 2: A bloated, fly blown corpse, identified only by a letter
Speaker 2: in his pocket. Between his eyes gaped two bullet holes.
Speaker 2: His widow, Hattie, then seemed sure to die of a
Speaker 2: mysterious illness until her sisters moved her away from the area,
Speaker 2: where she staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't
Speaker 2: seem to be behind the death of George Bigheart, who
Speaker 2: died in an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three
Speaker 2: after being poisoned.
Speaker 3: Or W. W.
Speaker 2: Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to his deathbed to
Speaker 2: hear his testimony and collect some vital incriminating documents, then
Speaker 2: phoned the Osage County sheriff to tell him that he
Speaker 2: knew who killed big Heart, and a lot more than that.
Speaker 2: Vaughan boarded a train home but.
Speaker 3: Never made it.
Speaker 2: His body was found by the tracks north of Oklahoma City,
Speaker 2: neck broken, incriminating documents gone. In his conversations with O
Speaker 2: Sage people, Gran kept hearing similar stories O Sage grandparents
Speaker 2: who died young in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
Speaker 2: With the family convinced of foul play and the authorities
Speaker 2: showing no interest. Digging into the archives, he sometimes found clues.
Speaker 2: In Killers of the Flower Moon, Gran's detective work reveals
Speaker 2: the identity of the influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan,
Speaker 2: But some of them murders will never be solved. Too
Speaker 2: much evidence was deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then
Speaker 2: there are other heartbreaking cases of White Guardians with three,
Speaker 2: four or more O Sage wards who all died young
Speaker 2: for no apparent reason, deaths that at the time were
Speaker 2: never even recognized as murder at all. The resource curse
Speaker 2: is seen as a subtle economic problem. There's a lively
Speaker 2: academic debate on why some nations seem to suffer more
Speaker 2: than others and what policies they should adopt, But the
Speaker 2: basic truth of the resource curse isn't subtle at all.
Speaker 2: It's that money brings trouble, civil wars, nasty geopolitics, brutal dictatorships,
Speaker 2: or if you're the last remaining two thousand, two hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty nine members of the O Sage nation suddenly
Speaker 2: rich and hemmed on all sides by a society with
Speaker 2: no respect for you at all, it brings murder. The
Speaker 2: Ocea Age was surrounded by murderers. Those murderers weren't all
Speaker 2: orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't need to be They
Speaker 2: had their own reference and their own motives, and they
Speaker 2: were protected by a white society that didn't much care
Speaker 2: about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a conspiracy is so big
Speaker 2: you simply can't call.
Speaker 3: It a conspiracy.
Speaker 2: This cautionary tale is based, with permission, on David Grand's
Speaker 2: book Killers of the Flower Moon. The film of the
Speaker 2: same title is now in theaters, directed by Martin Scorsese
Speaker 2: and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, and Lillie Gladstone.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced in association with Apple Original Films.
Speaker 2: Next week, I'll be back discussing this story with Jim
Speaker 2: Roan Gray, a former principal chief of the Osage Nation.
Speaker 2: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
Speaker 2: It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
Speaker 2: The sound design and original music is the work of
Speaker 2: Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
Speaker 2: voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gushridge, Stella Harford, Jamma Saunders,
Speaker 2: and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible
Speaker 2: without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
Speaker 2: Diteal Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Speaker 2: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
Speaker 2: at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
Speaker 2: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
Speaker 2: tell your friends and if you want to hear the
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Speaker 2: show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
Speaker 2: slash yes