493 - Jazz Hands All Around

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Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder.

That's Georgia Hardstar.

That's Karen Kilgareff.

And we're about to podcast for you.

Watch this.

This is like, we have to think of something to say after welcome every week.

And we're doing it.

Every week for 10 years.

Almost 10 fucking years.

10 years.

10 years.

10.

So here's what I came up with for Georgia for this week.

Okay.

I started this sentence.

How did I say it?

And we're going to podcast at you.

Oh, yo.

Oh, just now.

Right before we started, you said, I'm going to, right?

I'm going to get.

That's right.

You said, I'm going to get.

And then you said, I'm going to save it for the podcast.

And in my wildest dreams, I can't imagine i can't imagine top three i'm going to get another tattoo is that what it was another fish tattoo another a second fish second salmon tattoo but this one is five times the size of the first one i'm going to get ready to walk out of here yeah storm out the best storm out is when you warn people seven minutes in advance that you're going to angrily stand up and walk out and you're waiting until you're on you're being recorded yes exactly As many witnesses as possible.

What could the last one be?

I'm going to get more dogs.

Oh, I am.

Are you?

But I mean, that's not what it was.

Okay.

And it's going to be so disappointing.

Oh, no, what is it?

When you play games like this, you can't help but set yourself up to be like, I'm going to have to get a bunch of Kleenex because my nose has started randomly all of a sudden running.

What?

When I have no allergies.

That's not the way I live my life.

No.

All of a sudden, just it's menopause.

Do you know?

It's this single stream of just something coming out of your nose.

You're like, what the hell?

And then

dab, dab, dab.

Is that a thing too?

Yes.

Can you just blame everything on menopause now?

That would be fun.

I mean, I could kind of do already.

Your nose is going to start running.

It's the thing you used to talk about during the show where you're like, I have to have clinics because all of a sudden my nose will just run.

And I'm like, okay.

Okay.

And then, like, some point this weekend, I was just sitting outside, literally like sipping a Diet Coke, and it was like going

onto my lips.

I was not ready.

Well, welcome to the fucking tissue world.

Tissue club.

It sucks.

It's annoying.

Although my allergies are much better, I've been taking these drops.

You can get like allergy drops made.

They test you and then they like give you these drops.

Fascinating stuff for a true crime podcast.

Oh, what the people they want to hear about compounding pharmacies on this podcast.

Hey, welcome to it.

I always think in the beginning of these when we're talking stupid shit like this of the girl who's playing it for her sister or her mom being like, just wait, they get better.

It's not always like that.

Let me fast forward.

Let me fast forward.

Are you telling me that people aren't gripped by my story of I'm about to get dot dot dot?

And my guesses that mean nothing to nobody?

None of this means anything, Daniel.

That means anything to anyone, and that's what we're here for.

And that's the lesson of 10 years of podcasting.

Hey, hey.

I'm going to be in Ireland when this gets posted.

When this gets

Dublin.

Hell yeah.

And then we're going to Edinburgh, which I'm a little nervous about because the fringe fest is going on and it looks like every street performer is just up in your face the whole time.

Yes, but it's Ireland, so

they're more low-key.

The Irish up in your face.

They're Scottish.

Oh, that's right.

Oh, sorry.

I was thinking about when I went to the Galway.

You're talking French Fest.

I was thinking of the Galway Arts Festival.

Oh, okay.

Now that sounds great.

Your vacation is my vacation.

This world.

I'm going to the same

places.

Edinburgh is.

One of the greatest cities there is.

Yeah, I'm really excited.

Have you been before?

I went as a a broke 25-year-old with my friends who were doing a festival tour all over Europe.

And so I just like bummed along with them.

So I didn't have any money for anything.

We were there for like 24 hours.

So now I'm going back all fresh.

We're going to see Oasis on Vince's 50th birthday.

So excited.

This is, this is it.

Are you going to throw your beer cup full of pee?

Remember that moment?

No, they always, oh my God.

Fear.

That's the thing.

Thank God that doesn't happen in my favorite murder live shows.

Well, you don't.

I mean, not anything's possible.

Well, that's a great 50th birthday.

Yeah.

That'll be very fun.

But then there's all the witchy things that you can do in Edinburgh.

Yeah.

Like castle-y things and the witchy things.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm doing it.

A lot of tours.

And I mean, there's just the oldest of cultures.

I feel like I have to say that someone's going to be living at my house while we're gone so no one breaks in.

Okay.

Is that what Marty's on duty?

Yeah.

That's what 10 years of this podcast will do to you is you get so paranoid

that you have to, you know, do do that.

People should know, though.

I have pets, so clearly someone's going to be staying there.

Yeah.

Like, goes with me.

Mimi is going to be watching the house

and angrily watching the house.

She is.

She'll scratch her fucking eyes out.

Be careful of Mimi.

All right.

And anything else exciting going on?

I mean, that's a great, exciting trip to take.

No, I mean, we're just planning for our live shows.

It feels like it's coming up so fast.

It is coming up fast.

Go to myfavorate murder.com slash live to get tickets, please.

That's right.

And we do want to thank everybody for all of your excitement.

We announced and you showed up and you've bought tickets, and we were scared that maybe you wouldn't.

And you really did.

So thank you so much.

There are a couple tickets left.

So Pasadena, San Diego, Salt Lake City.

I think those cities still have a couple.

So go to myfavorite murder.com/slash live and get what is now available at the airing of this podcast.

I'm picking out so many dresses.

You guys are going to.

I'm picking out dresses that I looked at and I'm like, Karen's dad would say, what the hell is she wearing?

I don't know why.

Like, that's my goal.

is for your dad to, what in the hell is she wearing?

Jesus, that's from the 1960s.

Why would she wear that?

You're in Kathleen out of dress like that.

Yes, that's a great idea.

Yeah, I'm always dressing for the opposite, whereas like, I don't want to hear it.

Don't comment on my clothes.

I don't want to hear it.

But I have to say, I was doing some shopping this week, and it's so great to have an excuse like that.

Whereas, I have to go to the mall.

And I did try something on that I loved, and it didn't have pockets.

And I was like, this just doesn't even make sense anymore for women of today.

Yeah.

You better put pockets in your dresses.

I bought a pair of pajama shorts recently and they didn't have pockets.

Come on.

Like,

where am I going to put that little Apple remote?

I'm not going to be in bed the whole time.

I'm going to be walking around.

Walking around with the Apple remote in your pockets.

That's right.

So you go, where did I put that?

Shit.

It's gone forever.

Where did I put my headphones?

Yes.

So we're preparing to.

Are you prepared for this tour?

Prepared.

Please come and don't throw your pee.

Please don't pull an Oasis audience on us.

Oh, that was legendary.

Well, we'll go into highlights.

Let's do it.

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Goodbye.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

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All right, well, this is a solo episode because it's summer, it's vacation, the live shows are coming up.

So you

tell me a story.

That's right.

It's my chance to shine.

Now, there was a very famous movie very recently about these murders that I'm going to tell you about.

We begin today in Osage County, Oklahoma, home to the Osage Nation.

Holy shit.

This wasn't always the Osage Nation's home in the 1870s.

After having already been pushed out of their ancestral lands in what are now Missouri and Arkansas, the Osage are then forced to relocate from Kansas to eastern Oklahoma on land that white authorities have deemed worthless for farming.

But decades later, underneath that same worthless land, oil deposits are discovered.

So when the Osage realize that they're sitting on a gold mine, they meet with the federal government and shrewdly negotiate to maintain their reservation's mineral rights, flipping a very racist power dynamic on its head.

So in 1923 alone, those oil royalties brought in around $30 million for the Osage nation.

Whoa.

Do you want to guess what that would be in today's money?

$175.

$480 million.

Shit.

Yes.

And that's in one year.

The person who did the accounting, a fucking white man who did the accounting, I was like, just send them there.

Yes.

Fired.

Well,

because, yeah, exactly.

They're like, this is not our colonial plan where we're trying to oppress these people.

So how the Osage decide to handle it is they pull that money and then they divide it equally among the 2,229 people listed on the official Osage tribal roll.

Wow.

Everybody gets a cut.

Damn.

And there's more than enough to go around.

That is there.

Yes.

And so each person's share become known as their head rights.

And we'll refer to head rights kind of for the rest of the story.

So by the 1910s and into the 20s, the Osage were said to be the wealthiest people per capita in the entire world.

Oh my God, like that's amazing.

Yes.

But of course, with that money came an increase in tribal member deaths.

Between 1907 and 1923, it's estimated that members of the Osage nation died at about one and a half the national rate.

Okay.

And many of these deaths were suspicious.

But as grieving families fought for accountability and justice, they were often dismissed by the white authorities.

No shock there.

Writer Dennis McAuliffe Jr.

is an Osage tribal member who learned that his own grandmother's 1920s murder was covered up as well.

Holy shit.

And he writes, quote, deliberate poisonings were chalked up to drinking bad liquor.

Shootings got labeled as suicides.

Autopsies were often skipped, burials rushed, and death certificates falsified.

Wow.

So then in the early 20s in Osage County, driven by the persistence of the Osage people, one of the FBI's very first major homicide cases is going to be investigated.

And decades later, it will serve as the subject of David Grant's best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which was then adapted into Martin Scorsese's 2023 Oscar-winning film.

This is the story of the Osage oil murders.

Wow, this is an epic.

Right?

This is, yeah, good job.

Because when we're doing solos, we still want to give the people what they want.

I definitely, yeah, you want a little bit of a like a showstopper.

Right?

Right.

Jazz hands all around

of talking about what what is essentially

it typifies a true crime story

in the most government signed on, worst way, horrifying way possible.

Yeah, like, oh, people say that this is the government's not after you.

And it's like, well, here's a story where they literally are after you.

Entirely kind of like, say government, say,

you know, your town, whatever it is, where it's so much worse than you can even begin to imagine.

So we begin today with the Osage family that play play key figures in this FBI investigation and whose experiences serve as the backbone for the book Killers of the Flower Moon.

The patriarch of this household is Naka Ise Wai, who prefers his Osage name, but many people call him Jimmy.

Again, colonialism.

So he passes away before much of our story takes place, and his widow is named Lizzie Q,

and they have four daughters together that are born in the 1880s and early 1890s.

The oldest daughter is Anna.

Then there's Molly, followed by Minnie and Rita.

And we spend most of our time in this story with Molly, who in Scorsese's movie is played by Lily Gladstone.

Yes, amazingly.

And she earned lots of awards for that portrayal.

And she became the first Native American woman ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Wow.

And she won the Golden Globe for the same category.

So

lots of firsts and groundbreaking kind of glass ceiling breaking took place during that,

which is amazing.

And also, just the fact that getting this story to the general public is the kind of history that we all need to learn.

So Molly's family experiences this huge transformation of Osage County firsthand.

They lived in the abject poverty after being pushed out of Kansas and forced by the government to assimilate into mainstream American culture, which meant that they had to either abandon or hide their Osage identities, customs, traditions, or else food and funds would be withheld.

Jesus.

Then when Molly's around 10 and her sisters being close and age to her are also close to that age, that's when the oil's discovered.

Suddenly, Osage families go from barely scraping by to moving into large homes that are often staffed with white domestic servants.

Yeah.

I mean, God, what a fucking moment.

What a moment.

This should be.

a TV show.

That should be a

downstairs cat style.

Absolutely.

Is it a comedy?

I think it could be.

I think the people who made reservation dogs

could easily give us a kind of a retro.

Let's capture this for the moment that it is.

Yeah.

All right.

There's your pitch.

Not for me to say, though.

Not for me to pitch.

But,

okay.

So there's nothing that a member of the Osage nation who is getting a cut of this oil money can't buy, including couture from Paris, expensive cars, and chauffeurs to drive them.

Oh my God.

Anything that basically you could dream of.

One New York newspaper reports that, quote, lo and behold, the Indian, instead of starving to death, enjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy.

Jesus.

Yeah.

End quote.

So this materializes as an influx of white settlers into Osage County.

In the 1910s and 20s, their numbers swell, and many of these transplants are bad news.

An FBI report will later note that, quote, the rich oiled fields produce not only an abundance of oil, but also grift, easy money, gambling, whiskey, and parasites bent on milking the Osage out of all he owned.

So that's pretty typical.

Yeah.

But these schemes used by white settlers are endless.

Some open businesses that sell goods or services to Osage customers at extremely inflated prices.

There's also a rash of robberies and con men in the area.

And then there are also these so-called guardians who are mandated by the federal government.

So, guardians are basically white people who monitor Osage men and women's bank accounts because the government has deemed them, quote, incompetent when it comes to handling their oil wealth.

Wow.

So, it's in the bank, and they still have to have someone keep an eye on it.

A white man.

Yeah, they force someone to

keep tabs.

It's not only overtly racist, these so-called guardians aren't trained accountants.

Many of them are just local white businessmen, but they oversee every aspect of their ward's spending, approving or denying whatever expenditures they see fit.

It's so infuriating.

So I bet they like can't just take all their money out and leave.

You know what I mean?

You're thinking, like, go move to New York City.

It's like, they don't have access to that money, even though it's theirs.

Yes.

I'm sure.

Their spending is controlled in a way that serves the

white infrastructure.

And unsurprisingly, many of these guardians abuse this power and steal directly from Osage accounts.

Another type of grifter are the white settlers, typically single men, who swoop into Osage County looking to marry into oil head rights.

By law, head rights can only be passed along through an inheritance or marriage.

They cannot be sold or given away.

So joining an Osage household is a direct way for white men to access the oil money as they often wind up serving as the guardian for their Osage wives.

So love, it's like everything is a scam.

Wow.

Everything.

So by the late 1910s, Molly and her sisters, Anna, Minnie, and Rita, are in their late 20s to early 30s.

Like every Osage person, they know that white people are here to swindle and con them.

So trust is not something that comes easily.

But at the same time, there's only around 2,000 people on the official tribal roll.

And so the number of young, eligible Osage men and women is a small pool.

Because of that, many of them do wind up marrying white settlers in the face of the very real possibility that their partners have ulterior motives.

God.

Nasty.

Just like the worst feeling.

Absolutely.

It's like, oh, I'm going to hold out and wait for the biggest sociopath who is the most convincing to basically be like, no, no, no, but I really love you.

This time it's real, even though.

Look around.

Oh my God, how terrifying.

Horrible.

So in 1917, when Molly's around 30 years old, she meets a World War I vet named Ernest Burckhardt.

He is in his mid-20s and he's new to town.

So at first, Molly's not so sure about Ernest.

He's a good-looking guy in the movie.

He's played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

He is.

And he's often described as simple and passive, which probably makes him feel safe to Molly.

Totally.

Right?

He's not a scheming and like smooth talker.

Yeah, yeah.

Also, given the power he would have over their household, it seems to be a green flag that Ernest doesn't seem particularly shrewd or ambitious.

It also doesn't hurt that Ernest is the nephew and sort of adoptive son of one of the most powerful men in Osage County, a man named William King Hale.

So Hale is in his 40s and he's a white cowboy from Texas who's got a rags to riches story that mirrors the Osage's own rise to wealth.

He started out leasing grazing land from the Osage tribe and slowly acquired more acres and more cattle and then a bank and then a general store.

And ultimately, he became one of the county's wealthiest ranchers.

It's unclear though if he came by all of that money honestly, every time and every deal.

Dennis McAuliffe Jr.

reports that, quote, a portion of his fortune allegedly came from insuring his pasture for a dollar an acre and having his cowboys torch 30,000 acres in one night.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

But in the area, in the county, Hale has a great reputation.

He's seen as easygoing and generous, the kind of guy who donates to schools, gives money to build hospitals, and positions himself as the, quote, best friend of the Osage.

So like a lot of scheming going on in

a lot of high level yeah it's kind of that thing where people get scammed and then they're so embarrassed.

They're like, how could I fall for it?

And it's like, because the person who is scamming you has dedicated their life to scamming.

Totally.

That's what they do.

Right.

So you're just surrendering, like you're having this like, oh my God, we won the lottery, except for it turns everyone into an enemy.

Right.

So Molly and her family know William Hale very well.

So when Ernest begins to pursue Molly, there's some just kind of pre-established trust.

She figures that Ernest must like her for her and not her money because he doesn't need the money.

William Hale will always take care of him, presumably.

So Molly eventually marries Ernest, and they do seem like a loving couple.

She has diabetes, which can be fatal at that time.

So she depends on Ernest to care for her.

And even though Molly speaks English fluently, Ernest learns to speak the Osage language so that the two can communicate in her native language.

Okay.

An act of love.

Yeah.

Some might say.

One would think.

One would like to assume.

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About a year later in 1918, Minnie, who's Molly's second youngest sister, suddenly dies.

She was only in her late 20s.

She'd always been very healthy.

The doctors, the white doctors, chalk it up to, quote, a wasting illness, and that's that.

They never look further into it.

Wasting illness.

Just a few months later, Minnie's widower, who's a white man named Bill Smith, marries the younger sister, Rita, who's the youngest daughter in Molly's family.

It sounds weird, but it's actually an antiquated custom that many cultures around the world practice, which is kind of like if someone dies, you marry back into the family for another sibling.

So Minnie's head rights are now split between their mother, Lizzie, and Minnie's widower, Bill.

And now Bill also has claim to Rita's head rights.

Three years later, it's 1921.

Molly and Ernest now have two small children, and Molly's mother, Lizzie, has moved into their house.

But Molly's oldest sister, Anna, is struggling.

She's recently divorced a white settler named Oda Brown, and her sisters have noticed that she's been drinking a lot lately.

And then in May of that year, Anna goes to visit Molly and Ernest, and she gets a ride home from Ernest's brother, Brian, who she's actually gone on a few dates with.

After that, Anna vanishes.

Her family members don't hear from her for several days, which is extremely out of character for her.

A week later, squirrel hunters find the body of 36-year-old Anna dumped in an Osage County ravine.

She's been shot twice in the head.

And even though there are no exit wounds, the white doctors who perform her autopsy can't seem to find the bullets in her skull.

God, like her last moments realizing that it was all a scam.

They've been betrayed.

Her sister's husband,

who's about to go back to her, is fucking...

It's her sister's husband's brother.

is one away.

But still, you're totally right where it's like, all of a sudden, it all is a plot.

Like this is the confirmation, as you can't tell anybody.

Yeah.

Horrifying.

So those bullets could be critical evidence, but of course they just simply quote unquote can't find them.

On the same day that Anna's body is found, a second body is found under some brush near the town of Pahuska, which is also in Osage County.

The victim here is male, but like Anna, he is Osage.

He's wealthy.

He's in his 30s.

And he's been shot twice in the head.

There's a letter addressed to a Charles Whitehorn in his pocket, and that's how authorities identify him.

So these two murders send shockwaves through the Osage nation.

And the expectation, of course, is that both deaths will be properly investigated and the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

But despite a few people being brought in for questioning, including Anna's ex-husband and Ernest's brother, Brian, the man who drove Anna home the night she went missing, no one is charged in either case.

And police don't even determine whether or not the murders are connected.

Two bullets each.

Yep.

And maybe they're not connected.

Same day.

Exactly.

M.O.

Same day.

Yeah.

In July of 1921, about two months after those bodies are found, the inquiry into Anna's death is officially closed with the determination that she was murdered, quote, at the hands of parties unknown.

Jesus.

That's just as far as it's going to go.

Close the case.

Cold case closed.

This is the same verdict reached in the Charles Whitehorn investigation.

So with the white authorities failing to take real action, the victims' loved ones are forced to investigate themselves.

So, that is the advantage of this oil boon is that now instead of being put in this place of like having to beg people, they can hire private investigators.

So, that's what they do.

Both families hire private investigators, and they soon uncover a bombshell.

It turns out that Anna was pregnant at the time of her murder.

Oh, shit.

No one knows who the father might be.

So, now the families post rewards for any information that could help solve the cases, cases with Molly's family offering $2,000, which is $35,000 in today's money.

Yeah.

They also enlist William Hale's help, who talks to his buddies down at the police station and at the DA's office.

That's the head guy, head guy around town.

Yeah.

So he is like, I'm going to help.

He just is like, I'm friendly.

I'm friends to the OCH people.

He's also basically saying, I'm going to pull some strings, being the uncle, the kind of or Zat's uncle of Ernest.

Around the same time, Molly's mother, Lizzie, gets very sick and dies.

Lizzie did have some underlying medical issues, and some people wonder if the grief of losing two daughters within just a couple of years was just too much for her to handle.

But Molly, Rita, and Rita's husband, Bill, share a nagging suspicion that there is more to that story.

But no doctors are interested in investigating Lizzie's cause of death any further.

So meanwhile, Lizzie owns several valuable head rights.

She has her own, she has her late husband's, and then she has the partial ones she inherited back from both Minnie and Anna.

So now following her death, these head rights will be divided between two households, Molly and Ernest's and Rita and Bill's.

This is a lot of money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Molly and Rita have now lost two sisters and their mother, all in close succession, and they are deeply in grief.

But Rita's husband, Bill, is becoming very vocal about his belief that their family is systematically being murdered.

Oh my God, how scary.

Yeah.

He even takes it upon himself to investigate the murders alongside the private investigators they've hired.

But he always stops short of accusing anyone by name because he's not an idiot.

They are surrounded.

Right.

Meanwhile, across the county, more members of the Osage nation are dying under strange circumstances.

In 1922, a 29-year-old champion steer rooper named William Stepson picks up the phone at his home in the Osage County town of Fairfax, where he lives with his wife and two children, and he receives some some sort of message that then prompts him to leave the house immediately.

When he comes back later that night, he is very, very sick.

He dies within hours of making it back home.

So someone called and we're like, you got to get over here, and then something nefarious happened.

Yeah.

Okay.

And he makes it back home just basically to die at home.

Many at Osage immediately suspect William was poisoned that night, but beyond hiring private investigators and posting rewards, there are very few avenues to meaningfully investigate as local police just refuse to acknowledge the possibility that it was a murder.

A few months later, an Osage man in his 30s named Joe Bates starts, quote, frothing at the mouth after drinking whiskey he'd purchased from a stranger.

He collapses and dies not long after, leaving behind a wife and six kids.

The Osage Nation suspects yet another poisoning, but again, local officials decide not to investigate.

So now the Osage Nation have completely lost faith in the local white run institutions, and they basically feel forced to take matters into their own hands.

So about a month after Joe Bates's murder, tribal leaders enlist a white 55-year-old oil man named Barney McBride, whom the Osage trust and consider to be an ally, to head up to Washington, D.C.

and lobby the federal government to send investigators to Osage County.

But shortly after arriving in D.C., Barney is ambushed, stabbed to death, and dumped in an alleyway.

Holy sh.

Okay, now you're like, are we being, we're not being paranoid?

No one's being paranoid.

They weren't being paranoid the first time, and now it's just like confirmation after confirmation.

How terrifying.

And the suspicious deaths continue.

In January of 1923, the body of 40-year-old Henry Rowan, who is Molly and Rita's cousin, is found north of Fairfax in his car, slumped over the steering wheel, having been shot in the back of the head.

This is another clear homicide, and the police do not meaningfully investigate it.

Months later, in June of 1923, an Osage man in his 40s named George Bighart becomes very sick.

He suspects he's been poisoned, and from his deathbed, he asks to see a 54-year-old white lawyer named W.W.

Vaughan, who, like Barney McBride, is widely seen as a true Osage ally.

And he shares with him what he claims is key information about the murders, along with a stack of incriminating documents.

Okay.

After George dies, W.W.

Vaughn calls his wife, who has just given birth to their 10th child

to tell her where he stashed some money in case anything happens to him.

Because he knows.

He then contacts the sheriff.

He's saying he's on the way with evidence.

Once he leaves that hospital, he vanishes.

Yeah.

That's got to be scary.

That's got to be the scariest to be that guy.

Yeah.

But he did it anyway.

He sure did.

You know what I mean?

Like he fucking did it anyway.

He truly was acting on the Osage's behalf, clearly.

Yeah.

A few days later, W.W.

Vaughn's dead body is found near some railroad tracks, having clearly been thrown from a moving train.

Jesus.

Neither his nor George Bighart's killers are ever found, nor are the documents that George gave Vaughn at the hospital.

Just gone.

Now it's spring of 1923, and the violence and lack of accountability are so extreme that many Osage believe that white officials, the cops, doctors, politicians, all of them, aren't just covering up their white friends' murders.

They're actively participating in what is like a conspiracy to ostensibly steal their victims' fortunes.

There's a sense that any Osage person might be next.

Wow.

This fear is so intense that Rita and Bill move from the countryside into a more populated Fairfax neighborhood, hoping that being around other people will help keep them safe.

Like a systematic execution of this whole

family.

Community and family, yeah.

Molly and Ernest, who have just welcomed the third daughter named Anna, named after her aunt, they live just down the street.

So one night in March of 1923, Molly and Ernest wake up to the sound of a massive bang.

Molly jumps out of bed, runs to the window, and sees a huge orange fireball rising above her sister's house.

Rita and Bill's home has just been bombed.

The property is reduced to rubble.

Oh, my God.

Rita and the family's teenage maid, a woman named Nettie Brookshire, die instantly.

Bill lives through the explosion.

He hangs on for several days and then succumbs to his injuries.

Holy shit.

His doctors inject him with so much morphine that he isn't able to say much before he dies.

Aside from this quote,

they got Rita and now it looks like they've got me.

Damn.

End quote.

So aside from Ernest and their children, Molly is now the only member of her immediate family that's left alive.

Oh my God.

This means all of their assets and head rights, her father's, her mother's, and her three sisters, are transferred to her in earnest.

Oh shit.

Yeah.

So now, meanwhile, up in Washington, D.C., a 29-year-old J.

Edgar Hoover, who Leonardo DiCaprio has also played in a film,

has just been made the acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, which is the early incarnation of the FBI.

And even though homicides aren't really the Bureau's purview at the time, they're more known for tackling white-collar crimes.

They've technically been working on the Osage case for a couple of years, even though it is a complete mess.

So, in 1925, Hoover sends a respected lawman named Thomas B.

White to take over the Oklahoma Field Office and to shake up this investigation.

Agent White is a six-foot-tall Texan in his 40s with a no-nonsense, incorruptible reputation.

He has a sterling background as a Texas Ranger and as a special agent for railroad companies.

We've actually talked about this man before in episode 410, which was entitled The Bossy One, because he will eventually become a prison warden that gets taken hostage during the Leavenworth prison break of 1931.

That's right.

I remember that.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that same guy.

So Agent White, this is his younger years.

He assembles a team of agents, including undercover operatives, to go into Osage County.

But right away, they hit a wall of silence because people are very afraid to share what they do know or even what they suspect.

Yeah, everyone could be the enemy.

Yes.

Because if you aren't acting with the enemy, then you'll just get killed too.

Totally.

So as Agent White interviews people and digs around in the case files, he's finding signs of a clear conspiracy, which corroborate what the Osage have been suspecting all along.

Important pieces of evidence go missing.

Autopsies are hastily prepared.

Witness statements are never followed up on.

Alibis go unchecked.

And one of the people that Agent White really wants to speak to about this is Molly Burkhart.

But when he first meets her, he is stunned by how sick she is.

Ernest explains that Molly suffers from diabetes and that she's recently started taking insulin, which is hard to come by and considered experimental at the time.

But instead of improving, Molly seems to be getting worse because of this insulin.

Agent White suspects that Molly is being poisoned by someone.

He can't do much with this suspicion until he pulls some evidence together.

But fortunately, a tip comes in.

An incarcerated incarcerated man named Burt Lawson spills that back in 1923, he was hired to blow up Bill and Rita Smith's home using nitroglycerin.

He was paid $5,000 to do this, which is $90,000 in today's money.

And the man who hired him, none other than self-professed best friend of the Osage himself, William Hale.

And his nephew, Ernest Burckhardt, Molly's doting husband, served as his intermediary.

Damn.

Agent White then learns that William Hale was the beneficiary of victim Henry Rowan's $25,000 life insurance policy, which is worth nearly $450,000 today,

despite Henry leaving behind a wife and children.

So for some reason, he's got a life insurance policy that names this dude and not his immediate family.

Not long before Henry's murder, Hale shopped around to different insurers before finding one that was willing to sign off on such a suspicious policy.

An insurer will eventually claim he'd actually asked Hale if he was planning on killing Henry for the payout.

And Hale reportedly said back, quote, oh God, I am.

Hell yes.

Okay, and then just sign here, sir.

Like, what the fuck?

Just sign here so I can go on my white way and never say a fucking word about it.

Oh, my God.

On my white way.

It's the new Follow the Ellibrick Road.

Please no.

Every time we tell a story about the white way, it's not great.

Gotta say.

Agent White theorizes that the motive here is obvious and straightforward.

William Hale profited from Henry Rowan's death and stood to gain even more with the help of his compliant nephew, Ernest.

Molly's mother and sister's estates and oil head rights funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars straight into Ernest's control and by proxy, William Hale's.

These estates are worth millions and millions in today's money.

As the investigation closes in, people who Agent White believes are tied up in this conspiracy wind up dead.

Many of these are white men suspected of working with Hale who were then silenced before they could talk, turn on him, or testify.

Yeah.

The three Ds.

I threw the second T in because I wanted it to be three.

Agent White himself becomes a target.

One of his relatives will later tell David Grant that, quote, once when he went to open his window, he found sticks of dynamite behind the curtain.

Oh no.

And quote, just by chance.

It's like a fucking cartoon, one-toons cartoon.

So White starts sleeping with a gun, and he keeps his head on a swivel anytime he's out in public, knowing that William Hale wants him dead and actually has enough power to make that happen in Osage County.

For sure.

Then Agent White starts meeting with Ernest Burkhart, who little by little starts talking.

It all gets very complicated, but essentially, Ernest shares just enough to implicate one of William Hale's goons, who then in in turn says just enough information about Hale and Ernest to implicate them.

As the men slowly reveal more and more information, a tangled web of white settlers is exposed and taken into custody for the murders of Anna, Rita, Bill, the Smithsmaid Nettie Berkshire, and Henry Rohn.

Wow.

And the only reason Minnie and Lizzie's deaths are not part of this FBI investigation is because their cause of death remained unclear.

Wow.

Meanwhile, Molly has now become so sick that she's actually nearing death.

So she's rushed to a hospital.

And while she's there, her condition quickly improves.

And that's how it's determined that her insulin injections were being laced with poison.

Those shots were being administered by the same white doctors known as the Shown brothers who had, quote, treated her mother Lizzie before her death, injected Bill Smith with so much morphine following the blast that he couldn't speak, and determined her sister Minnie had died of a, quote, wasting illness.

And suspiciously, the ones who couldn't find the fatal bullets in Anna's head during her autopsy.

So here's your conspiracy made real.

Yeah.

Horrifying.

And of course, these doctors just happen to have a very chummy relationship with William Hale.

So in 1926, the first trial in this case kicks off, but there will be many in the coming years as prosecutors unravel this conspiracy and work to convict William Hale, Ernest Burckhardt, and their accomplices.

The Tulsa Tribune describes the packed courtroom as filled with, quote, well-groomed businessmen and society women, as well as cowboys in broad-brimmed hats and Osage chiefs in bearded garb.

It's pretty surprising that they even were brought to trial.

I mean, I would suspect that they would just never get caught and never brought to justice, but it's pretty incredible.

They get brought to justice, and then in this way, we're like, people get to show up.

I mean, it's why they cut people off from money because money is power.

Money is that voice that you get to hire in a lawyer that makes that real.

So Molly herself is there, and with Hale and Ernest both pleading not guilty, she seems to be standing by her husband, presumably because she can't fathom what he's being accused of, a conspiracy to this level.

And because of her support of her husband, Molly is shut out by much of the Osage community.

At the same time, she's shunned by the white people who blame her for William Hale's downfall.

Molly is also enduring the horrific testimony about her beloved family members and their deaths.

For example, in a particularly shocking twist, prosecutors reveal in court that her sister Anna had confided in close friends the identity of her unborn child's father.

Oh, shit.

She believed it was William Hale's baby.

No.

This is a married man, so if he did get Anna pregnant, presumably be because they had an affair, this suggests another possible motive for her murder.

Tragically, Molly and Ernest's youngest daughter, Anna, then dies of whooping cough around this time, and that seems to fundamentally shift something in Ernest Burckhardt.

He decides to rescind his not guilty plea and come clean.

And he names Hale as the mastermind of this entire conspiracy while duly admitting to facilitating the bombing at the Smith House and the shooting death of Henry Rowan.

Ernest wasn't the guy who lit the fuse or pulled the trigger in either of those murders, but he found men willing to do it and he made sure the jobs got done.

And while Ernest's exact knowledge on the plan to kill Anna isn't clear, we do know that his brother Brian was directly implicated.

A man named Kelsey Morrison eventually confesses, claiming that William Hale hired him to kill Anna.

Kelsey testifies that Brian was right beside him as he pulled the trigger that night, and he'd even driven Anna to the ravine in Ernest's car.

When Brian is eventually charged in connection with Anna's murder, his trial ends in a hung jury and he's acquitted.

No.

The one thing Ernest does always maintain is that he had no idea that they were poisoning Molly's insulin.

And no one knows if that's true or not.

Like you got to suspect, right?

Well, yes.

I mean, like, if other people are dying of poison, you should have suspected it before you.

Like, I mean, if you were clear on that, that would have been something you would have been all over.

Yeah.

Regardless, Ernest admitting to everything shifts something in Molly, of course.

She can no longer cling to the hope that he is somehow innocent.

She files for a divorce and refuses to ever look at him again.

Wow.

I mean,

no, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good for her.

The betrayal of someone you thought.

was it's so heartbreaking

and that you had a family with and it's like bill was, her sister's husband, Bill, was the real deal.

Yeah.

It's like, also, did he love the kids?

Who the fuck?

Right.

You'll never know for sure.

Right.

Who were you?

Yeah.

This whole time.

Could there be love if you're also then killing my mother, killing my sister?

Like, that's not how love works.

No.

No.

Is your love good enough?

Oh, my God.

David Graham writes that, quote, whenever her husband's name was mentioned, she recoiled in horror.

In the end, some semblance of justice is served, served, which many Osage were not expecting.

Both Ernest Burckhardt and William Hale are sentenced to life in prison.

Great.

Of course, Hale serves just 21 years before being paroled in 1947, although he is barred from ever going back to Oklahoma.

He dies quietly in an Arizona nursing home in 1962 at the age of 87.

What's weird is when Hale is goes to jail for this stint, he's sent to Leavenworth, and that's where Thomas White will soon become the warden.

Wow.

Agent White.

So they overlap

at that jail.

Ernest Burkhart also gets parole, but it happens a bit earlier in 1937.

He's arrested not long after that for robbing a house.

Somehow he still receives a full pardon from the then Oklahoma governor in 1965.

Ostensibly.

A pardon.

A pardon.

Okay.

Ostensibly because his confession helped put Hale and the others away.

But the pardon does allow him to go back to Oklahoma.

Ernest winds up moving into a trailer in Osage County that he shares with his brother Brian, and he dies there in 1986 at the age of 94

as a pariah.

Wow.

So it's not like he doesn't go back to life as he knew it in any way.

Sad fucking loners who live out in a trailer together.

And also belong.

Yeah, whether he's a tool of his evil uncle or a part of the plan,

this idea that you think you could go anywhere where people would be like, hey, you served your time for a betrayal to that level

of your own wife.

Yeah.

And children.

Of course, children.

As for Molly Burkhart, she maintains a low profile for the rest of her life.

We know she eventually remarries and that she dies young at the age of 50 in 1937 of an unspecified illness.

Molly's death is not considered suspicious, except for maybe by me and you.

Maybe coincidental that she dies the same year Ernest is paroled.

Yeah, I thought that.

So Molly's two children and Ernest's two children inherit her estate.

But at this point, by the time they inherit it, it's dwindled because of the Great Depression.

So it's nothing like it was before.

But this isn't the end of the story.

Despite Agent Thomas White's commendable work in Oklahoma, this case does not conclude with the FBI swooping in and catching the bad guys, even though J.

Edgar Hoover, ever the egotistical, power-hungry guy, was very eager to frame it that way.

Hoover, like his agents and just about everyone in the Osage Nation, knew very well that there was a much larger, more insidious conspiracy going on here.

And he chose to ignore it, but not before he billed the Osage Nation $20,000, the equivalent of $370,000 in today's money.

For what?

For the work his agents did on the William Hale case.

Sorry.

This is not like a fucking cleaning service that came and cleaned.

You don't got to charge

FBI bills.

Taxes, bro.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

And that is something that was not captured in the movie, but it's a point David Grant drives home in the book, Killers of the Flower Moon.

Basically, William Hale was not some homicidal mob boss behind every unsolved Osage County murder like J.

Edgar Hoover wanted him to seem.

Instead, he was one bagged actor of many who were all operating within a culture of complicity and violence geared geared at making white settlers richer at the expense of Osage nation members and also at the expense of their neighbors, their friends, and even their family members,

which is essentially colonialism.

As David Grant has put it, quote, this is not a story about who did it.

It's a story about who didn't do it.

Damn.

Oh, that just gave me a weird shit.

Yeah.

For example, Charles Whitehorn, the man whose body was found the same day as Anna's body, is widely assumed to have been murdered by a white man in collusion with Whitehorn's white widow, Hattie, presumably for his head right.

Damn.

Hattie once even told investigators, quote, if I tell you what happened, you will send me to the electric chair.

Shit.

The other suspicious deaths, the ones of William Stepson, Joe Bates, George Bighart, Barney McBride, and W.W.

Vaughan, are never solved, but they are not thought to be directly tied to the William Hale conspiracy, which means they're just from their own either conspiracy of a different group or anyone else that these people were like exposed to with no protection from.

Yeah, who had the same goal in mind.

So in the mid-1920s, laws are finally passed that make it more difficult to transfer head rights to non-Osage people, even through marriage.

But for many, this happens way too late.

We will almost certainly never have a conclusive death toll for this period of time in Osage County.

The most modest estimates put that number in the dozens, but a historian named Lewis Burns has said, quote, I don't know of a single Osage family that didn't lose at least one family member because of head rights.

Wow, yeah.

End quote.

Today, the Osage nation has a population of around 10,000 people.

Many of them live outside of Oklahoma.

And of course, the oil boom days are over, as are the big checks that came with it.

But the ripple effects of this dark chapter are still widely felt among the Osage people.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Gran interviews the great-grandson of Henry Rowan, who says that the murders are, quote, still in the back of our minds.

You just have it in the back of your head that you don't trust anybody.

End quote.

And that is the story of the Osage oil murders.

Wow.

I'm so glad the book was written about it because you'd never heard of it before.

Yes.

And it's a huge historical story.

And it's the kind of thing I think that when white people hear about that, it's like, oh, yeah, bad things happen.

We know that bad things happen, but it's like, no, we should actually talk about specific moment how it happens.

Yeah, so it doesn't happen anymore.

Then the responsibility of people who are going to go in there and say, we are the police.

We are the sheriff.

We are the people who hold people accountable.

And how do you make it so that everyone's a bad actor?

Yeah.

On that side of the fence.

There's no hope.

Wow.

Got to change.

Good job.

Thank you.

That was an epic story.

It was a big one.

Marin McLachin, one of the great researchers of our time.

All right.

Well, great job.

Thank you so much.

That's a solo episode.

That's how it's done.

Feels like a tripler.

We hope your sister enjoyed this.

We hope your mother takes you up on this and comes back.

All right, right.

We hope your road trip's going well.

We promise we won't swear as much next time.

That's right.

And stay sexy.

And don't get murdered.

Goodbye.

Elvis, do you want a cookie?

This has been an Exactly Right production.

Our senior producers are Alejandra Keck and Molly Smith.

Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.

This episode was mixed by Liana Squolachi.

Our researchers are Maren McLashin and Allie Elkin.

Email your hometowns to myfavorite murder at gmail.com.

Follow the show on Instagram at MyFavorite Murder.

Listen to MyFavorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now you can watch us on Exactly Right's YouTube page.

While you're there, please like and subscribe.

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