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Oil and Blood: The Osage Murders from Cautionary Tales · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin, wealth, greed, desire, murder. These are just some of
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Speaker 1: the plagues that befell the Osage people after vast oil
0:25
Speaker 1: reserves were discovered beneath their land. Killers of the Flower
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Speaker 1: Moon tells a story of the disregard for human life
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Speaker 1: and betrayal and greed. Today on Revision's History, we're presenting
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Speaker 1: a special episode of Cautionary Tales. You'll hear the story
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Speaker 1: behind David Grant's book Killers of the Flower Moon, which
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Speaker 1: has been adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and
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Speaker 1: is now exclusively in theaters. Plus hear about the investigation
0:51
Speaker 1: that began almost ninety years later. Here's the episode. Listen
0:56
Speaker 1: to Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts.
1:00
Speaker 2: This cautionary Tale is based on David Gran's book Killers
1:04
Speaker 2: of the Flower Moon and produced in association with Apple
1:08
Speaker 2: Original Film. The film of the same title is now
1:11
Speaker 2: exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O Sage
1:29
Speaker 2: Nation stretched across the center of the North American continent,
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Speaker 2: from the Rocky Mountains through to what is now Missouri, Kansas,
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Speaker 2: and Oklahoma. President Thomas Jefferson viewed the O Sage people
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Speaker 2: with where we respect When in eighteen oh four, he
1:46
Speaker 2: met with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at
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Speaker 2: the White House. He remarked that they were the finest
1:52
Speaker 2: men we have ever seen. The wary respect did not last.
1:59
Speaker 2: By eighteen seventy, the O Sage people had been pushed
2:03
Speaker 2: into buying land that one observer described as broken, rocky,
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Speaker 2: and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death
2:15
Speaker 2: of the buffalo, and brutal attacks from settlers, only a
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Speaker 2: few thousand of them remained alive. The O Sage chief
2:24
Speaker 2: wati Ankhar, tried to look on the bright side. My
2:28
Speaker 2: people will be happy in this land. He said, there
2:32
Speaker 2: are many hills here. White man does not like country
2:37
Speaker 2: whether a hills, and he will not come. But the
2:41
Speaker 2: white man did come. O Sage children were forcibly enrolled
2:46
Speaker 2: in Catholic boarding schools, days travel away from their parents,
2:50
Speaker 2: and made to change their names and their clothes to
2:53
Speaker 2: the European style. The United States policy was that the
2:57
Speaker 2: Indian must conform to the white man's ways peacefully if
3:01
Speaker 2: they will, forcibly if they must. In nineteen oh six,
3:13
Speaker 2: the US government wanted to create a new state, Oklahoma
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Speaker 2: and hand it over to white settlers. They pressed the
3:22
Speaker 2: Osage nation to agree to a new deal concerning the
3:25
Speaker 2: rights to the land they had purchased. The Osage negotiators
3:29
Speaker 2: played a weak hand well. Under the deal that they agreed,
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Speaker 2: the entire tribe of two thousand, two hundred and twenty
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Speaker 2: nine souls collectively held the rights to whatever lay beneath
3:42
Speaker 2: their land. And what lay beneath, as the Osage negotiators
3:48
Speaker 2: suspected and the white Man had not guessed, was oil
3:53
Speaker 2: vast reserves of black gold. As the oil started to flow,
4:00
Speaker 2: so did the money. Every quarter, every member of the
4:04
Speaker 2: Osage tribe received a check to reflect the money being
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Speaker 2: paid by the oil men. At first, it was little
4:10
Speaker 2: more than pocket money. Soon each check each individual was
4:16
Speaker 2: the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in today's
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Speaker 2: money every quarter, and the checks kept growing. Newspapers couldn't
4:25
Speaker 2: get enough of stories about what they called the red millionaires.
4:30
Speaker 2: O Sage girls dressed in the latest Parisian fashions. O
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Speaker 2: Sage cookouts a circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open
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Speaker 2: campfire where the bronzed and blanketed owners are cooking meat
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Speaker 2: in the primitive style. O Sage elders arriving for a
4:46
Speaker 2: ceremonial dance in a private plane. Luck had finally smiled
4:52
Speaker 2: on the o Sage Nation, or had it. I'm Tim
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Speaker 2: Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Minnie Smith was
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Speaker 2: the first of the four sisters to die. She'd been young,
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Speaker 2: fit and healthy, and then she'd grown ill quite suddenly.
5:38
Speaker 2: The doctors in Osage County were baffled by her death,
5:42
Speaker 2: but of course they had a diagnosis, a peculiar wasting illness.
5:48
Speaker 2: Maybe peculiar, it certainly was. Minnie left behind a husband,
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Speaker 2: a white man called Bill Smith. A few months after
5:59
Speaker 2: Minnie's death in nineteen eighteen, Bill married another of the sisters, Rita.
6:06
Speaker 2: Then there was Anna. She had also married a wife man,
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Speaker 2: but she had divorced him, and at the age of
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Speaker 2: thirty four, she had a habit of disappearing on wild
6:15
Speaker 2: nights of drinking and dancing. She had plenty of places
6:19
Speaker 2: to go as the oil flowed in Osage County. Once
6:23
Speaker 2: modest settlements became bustling towns full of oil workers, bootleggers,
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Speaker 2: and gangsters. One overnight oil rush town was named wiz Bang,
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Speaker 2: where people whizzed all day and banged all night. Anna
6:39
Speaker 2: enjoyed such places that they were risky. She always kept
6:43
Speaker 2: a small pistol in her purse. And then one night
6:48
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty one, she went out partying and didn't
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Speaker 2: come home. Not the first night, not the second, and
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Speaker 2: not the third. Which brings us to Sister number four, Molly,
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Speaker 2: the serious, responsible sister, the one who ended up taking
7:08
Speaker 2: care of all the other and their mother too. In
7:11
Speaker 2: her hunt for her missing sister, Molly could call on
7:14
Speaker 2: perhaps the most influential man in Osage County, her husband's uncle,
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Speaker 2: William Hale, the man they called the King of the
7:24
Speaker 2: Osage Hills. Hale had been a cowboy when he was young.
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Speaker 2: Now he was a bespectacled, three piece suit wearing pillar
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Speaker 2: of the community. Behind his owlish glasses, he remained a
7:38
Speaker 2: formidable character. He was not the kind of man to
7:41
Speaker 2: ask you to do something he told you, said Molly's
7:45
Speaker 2: husband Ernest. But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering,
7:51
Speaker 2: he was also a reverend and a deputy sheriff, and
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Speaker 2: widely regarded as the most public spirited man in Osage County.
8:00
Speaker 2: He had supported local schools and charities before the Osage
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Speaker 2: people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to
8:08
Speaker 2: remember how many sick people have received medical attention at
8:12
Speaker 2: his expense, nor how many hungry mouths have tasted of
8:16
Speaker 2: his bounty. William Hale himself once wrote, I never had
8:21
Speaker 2: better friends in my life than the o Sages. Uncle
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Speaker 2: William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If
8:30
Speaker 2: anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him.
8:45
Speaker 2: In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began
8:49
Speaker 2: to observe a pattern striking oil is not the guarantee
8:54
Speaker 2: of national prosperity that you might expect. Indeed, the reverse
8:59
Speaker 2: is often true. Think of Iraq and Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria.
9:04
Speaker 2: There are plenty of countries with vast reserves of oil,
9:08
Speaker 2: and few of them seem to have flourished as a result.
9:12
Speaker 2: Even the wealthy exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia often have
9:16
Speaker 2: a thin and brittle kind of wealth. It's a challenge
9:21
Speaker 2: to build foundations for enduring prosperity for something that will
9:25
Speaker 2: last longer than wiz bang when the oil money is gone.
9:30
Speaker 2: Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem, and
9:34
Speaker 2: they call it the resource curse, But I prefer a
9:38
Speaker 2: more lyrical description by a former minister of oil, Rich Venezuela,
9:43
Speaker 2: when he was asked to describe the effect of all
9:46
Speaker 2: that black gold on his country. It is the devil's excrement,
9:53
Speaker 2: he declared. We are drowning in the devil's excrement. The
10:01
Speaker 2: Oce age had never heard of the resource curse or
10:05
Speaker 2: the devil's excrement, though one of their elders, it seemed
10:09
Speaker 2: to anticipate the idea. Someday this oil will go, he said,
10:16
Speaker 2: and there will be no more fat checks every few
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Speaker 2: months from the Great White Father. There'll be no fine
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Speaker 2: motor cars and new clothes. Then I know my people
10:28
Speaker 2: will be happier. But were those fat checks involved in
10:35
Speaker 2: the peculiar death of one sister and the disappearance of another?
10:41
Speaker 2: Uncle William Hale had quietly expressed his doubts about Bill Smith.
10:46
Speaker 2: He'd married Minnie, remember then she had died suddenly and mysteriously.
10:52
Speaker 2: Months later he married her sister Rita. Marrying one o
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Speaker 2: sage woman would set a man up for life. Marrying two.
11:02
Speaker 2: You had to wander about Bill's motives. But then it
11:06
Speaker 2: wasn't as if Bill had stood to gain financially from
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Speaker 2: Minnie's death. Under the system of head rights, it wouldn't
11:14
Speaker 2: be Bill who'd keep getting those fat checks. Instead, Minnie's
11:18
Speaker 2: head right passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's
11:24
Speaker 2: head wright if anything had happened to Anna. And after
11:28
Speaker 2: Anna had been missing for a week, there was news
11:32
Speaker 2: a rotting corpse had been discovered. The undertakers scattered salt
11:38
Speaker 2: and ice on it to reduce the swelling and the stink.
11:43
Speaker 2: By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the
11:47
Speaker 2: vultures were wheeling overhead. Was it Anna? The face of
11:53
Speaker 2: the corpse was unrecognizable, but Molly knew the traditional blanket
11:58
Speaker 2: and the clothes were Anna's. She had washed them freshly
12:02
Speaker 2: for her sister the last time she saw her alive
12:05
Speaker 2: a week ago, and there was anna distinctive gold filling.
12:11
Speaker 2: It was her for sure. Rita wept. Molly was resolute.
12:19
Speaker 2: She hired private detectives, and she had help from her
12:23
Speaker 2: husband's uncle, William Hale, who swore he'd get justice for Anna.
12:28
Speaker 2: He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They
12:32
Speaker 2: found a bullet hole in the woman's skull. Although even
12:36
Speaker 2: after chopping her brain into mints, they never could find
12:40
Speaker 2: the bullet. Curious, but as both the sheriff and the
12:47
Speaker 2: private investigators started to look into the mystery, it wasn't
12:51
Speaker 2: just Minnie's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve.
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Speaker 2: Another one of the sisters did not have long to live.
13:03
Speaker 2: Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must
13:11
Speaker 2: conform to the white man's ways. But not like this,
13:16
Speaker 2: decided the federal government. Not with luxury cars and private planes.
13:21
Speaker 2: Congressional committees took to pouring over reports of O Sage expenditure,
13:27
Speaker 2: like disapproving parents, scrutinizing the bank account of a teenager,
13:32
Speaker 2: and their devised a system just like the one you'd
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Speaker 2: impose on a child. If the US Department of the
13:39
Speaker 2: Interior decided that a member of a Native American tribe
13:44
Speaker 2: wasn't competent to manage their own affairs, their finances would
13:48
Speaker 2: be handed over to a guardian. The idea of competence
13:53
Speaker 2: was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was
13:58
Speaker 2: purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people
14:02
Speaker 2: would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian guardianship
14:10
Speaker 2: was supposedly intended to protect O sage people from themselves.
14:16
Speaker 2: In fact, and of course, and by design, it made
14:20
Speaker 2: them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item
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Speaker 2: of expenditure down to toothpaste and groceries. The guardians were
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Speaker 2: the ones writing the checks, and it was the easiest
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Speaker 2: thing in the world for a guardian to steal from
14:36
Speaker 2: their O sage ward. One's gam for example, was for
14:40
Speaker 2: a guardian to buy a car for a couple of
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Speaker 2: hundred dollars, then parted onto their ward for a thousand.
14:48
Speaker 2: Since O sage people were forbidden to have direct control
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Speaker 2: of their own money, they might not have known about
14:55
Speaker 2: the deception, but in any case they were powerless to
14:59
Speaker 2: do much about it. At least, some O sage people
15:07
Speaker 2: had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some
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Speaker 2: exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian.
15:17
Speaker 2: That meant she had as much control over her money
15:19
Speaker 2: as most women of the day, and just as you'd
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Speaker 2: expect from the nephew of the upstanding William Hale, Ernest
15:27
Speaker 2: took good care of Molly. She suffered from diabetes. He
15:32
Speaker 2: made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors,
15:36
Speaker 2: the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her
15:40
Speaker 2: the regular injections of insulin she needed to stay alive.
15:45
Speaker 2: But the private detectives that Molly hired weren't making much
15:49
Speaker 2: progress in figuring out who had shot Anna and why.
15:54
Speaker 2: They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive.
15:58
Speaker 2: Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing
16:02
Speaker 2: to gain from her death. Anna's money went to her mother, Lizzie.
16:07
Speaker 2: The evidence to charge anyone seemed thin anyway. The local
16:13
Speaker 2: sheriff and his deputies were busy, busy taking bribes, busy
16:17
Speaker 2: colluding with bootlegging gangs, and soon enough they were busy
16:21
Speaker 2: dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set
16:26
Speaker 2: in o Sage. People began to install electric lights outside
16:32
Speaker 2: their homes, pushing back the darkness in the hope of
16:36
Speaker 2: dissuading the creep of the assassins who would be next.
16:44
Speaker 2: At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage,
16:47
Speaker 2: William Hale, seemed to be a target. Unknown men set
16:52
Speaker 2: fire to his pastures, and the flames spread for mile
16:56
Speaker 2: upon mile. If the King of the Osage Hills could
17:00
Speaker 2: be attacked. Nobody was safe. Rita's husband, Bill Smith, developed
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Speaker 2: his own aspisions about what was going on. He hired
17:12
Speaker 2: his own private detectives. He told friends he was determined
17:16
Speaker 2: to get to the bottom of the killings and that
17:20
Speaker 2: he was getting warm, but perhaps his enemies were getting
17:24
Speaker 2: warm too. On several nights, Bill and his wife Rita
17:29
Speaker 2: were awoken by movement outside the house. It sounded like
17:34
Speaker 2: intruders scouting around getting the lay of the land. Rita
17:39
Speaker 2: and Bill were scared. Leaving many of their possessions behind,
17:44
Speaker 2: they abruptly moved to a neighborhood in the town of Fairfax.
17:49
Speaker 2: Most people there had a guard dog, but over the
17:53
Speaker 2: course of a few days, one by one the neighborhood
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Speaker 2: guard dogs began to sicken, lay down, and die. In
18:04
Speaker 2: the early hours of March tenth, nineteen twenty three, the
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Speaker 2: entire town was jolted awake. Close to the blast, windows shattered, timber, snatched,
18:19
Speaker 2: doors flew from their hinders. People were not flat further away.
18:24
Speaker 2: The town shook and shook and wouldn't stop. A rush
18:30
Speaker 2: of bewildered townsfolk headed towards the epicenter. It was Bill
18:35
Speaker 2: and Rita's new house. There was nothing left of it
18:41
Speaker 2: but rubble and choking black smoke. Apparently Bill Smith's investigation
18:48
Speaker 2: had got a little too warm. Molly was the only
18:55
Speaker 2: one of her sisters left, and despite regular injections to
19:00
Speaker 2: treat her diabetes, Molly herself was getting sicker and sicker.
19:14
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty five, a lawman strode into Osage County, Oklahoma.
19:21
Speaker 2: Tom White was a movie caricature of a Western hero.
19:25
Speaker 2: Six foot four, square jawed, incorruptible, and fearless. He wore
19:31
Speaker 2: a big cowboy hat even when in the office. The
19:35
Speaker 2: office itself was the Bureau of Investigation of Washington, DC,
19:41
Speaker 2: a new organization run by an ambitious young man, j
19:46
Speaker 2: Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted to make the reputation of his
19:49
Speaker 2: new bureau by solving a high profile case, a case
19:54
Speaker 2: that had gripped the nation, so he had sent Tom
19:58
Speaker 2: White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made
20:06
Speaker 2: no progress in solving any of the craft Tis, neither
20:11
Speaker 2: the deaths of Molly's family, nor around twenty other murders
20:15
Speaker 2: of the Osage and their allies. There were too many
20:20
Speaker 2: possible suspects, too many rumors and stories and no hard evidence.
20:26
Speaker 2: Witnesses had a tendency to die in strange circumstances, the
20:31
Speaker 2: car crash, bad whiskey falling down the stairs. When the
20:37
Speaker 2: cowboy hatted Tom White agreed to go to Osage County,
20:41
Speaker 2: he knew that investigations had been stalled for years, that
20:45
Speaker 2: the local officials were corrupt, and that some previous investigators
20:50
Speaker 2: had been murdered themselves. If he took the job, he'd
20:54
Speaker 2: have a target on his back. It wasn't going to
20:59
Speaker 2: stop him. Tom White summoned a posse of undercover agents
21:04
Speaker 2: to join him in Oklahoma City. The only member of
21:08
Speaker 2: a Native American tribe who worked for the Bureau, John Wren,
21:12
Speaker 2: who was part ute several experienced gunslingers who could easily
21:16
Speaker 2: pose as cowboys or rustlers, a former insurance salesman whose
21:22
Speaker 2: cover story was that he was an insurance salesman. More
21:29
Speaker 2: than twenty o Sage people had been murdered, along with
21:32
Speaker 2: several other locals. White decided to focus on a few,
21:38
Speaker 2: including the sisters, Anna who was shot, Rita whose house exploded.
21:47
Speaker 2: In his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Gran
21:52
Speaker 2: describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness
21:57
Speaker 2: of mirrors, evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctor has
22:03
Speaker 2: managed to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking
22:08
Speaker 2: leads turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially
22:12
Speaker 2: said Anna had been killed by a jealous wife after
22:16
Speaker 2: fooling around with the husband, but later admitted that a
22:20
Speaker 2: strange White man had come to her house and forced
22:24
Speaker 2: her to sign a fake statement. And Tom White realized
22:28
Speaker 2: something else. Some unknown person in his team was a
22:34
Speaker 2: double agent, leaking the bureau's internal reports, feeding back everything
22:40
Speaker 2: to the men they were pursuing. Who were those men?
22:46
Speaker 2: After spending the summer of nineteen twenty five trying to
22:49
Speaker 2: navigate the wilderness of mirrors, Tom White started to piece
22:54
Speaker 2: together a theory. One of the murdered o Sage men
22:58
Speaker 2: had a life insurance policy for twenty five thousand dollars,
23:03
Speaker 2: a huge sum, but rather than naming his wife as
23:08
Speaker 2: a beneficiary, he had named his wealthy friend, William Hale,
23:15
Speaker 2: the King of the Osage Hills. That seemed strange, although
23:21
Speaker 2: Hale explained to White that the poor man had discovered
23:25
Speaker 2: his wife was having an affair and Hale had comforted
23:28
Speaker 2: him in his distress. That would explain everything. Then, a
23:34
Speaker 2: woman who lived near Hale's farm told investigators that when
23:39
Speaker 2: Hale's land had been set ablaze, it was by Hale's
23:43
Speaker 2: workers on Hale's orders. He had collected thirty thousand dollars
23:49
Speaker 2: in insurance money. Hale controlled everything around here, she told
23:54
Speaker 2: the agents. White looked more and more closely at Hale's affairs.
24:01
Speaker 2: Those head rights, the unbelievably lucrative rights to the money
24:06
Speaker 2: from o Sage County's oil fields, couldn't be bought or sold.
24:11
Speaker 2: They could only be inherited. Minnie's and Anna's head rights
24:16
Speaker 2: had gone to their mother, Lizzie. Then Lizzie herself had
24:21
Speaker 2: died from a mysterious illness, all of her accumulated head
24:26
Speaker 2: rights went to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow
24:31
Speaker 2: burning family tragedy started to develop a remorseless logic in
24:36
Speaker 2: Tom White's mind, even the use of a bomb to
24:40
Speaker 2: murder Rita and her husband Bill, because their will specified
24:45
Speaker 2: that if they died simultaneously, everything would pass to Molly.
24:51
Speaker 2: Molly herself was very ill, despite the close attention she
24:57
Speaker 2: was receiving from William Hale's personal physicians. She hadn't died,
25:04
Speaker 2: not yet, but perhaps the killers weren't in a hurry,
25:08
Speaker 2: since Molly's money was all controlled by her husband, Ernest,
25:14
Speaker 2: a man who was absolutely loyal to his uncle William Hale. Earnest,
25:21
Speaker 2: it seemed, might be complicit in the plot to murder
25:26
Speaker 2: every member of his wife's family and presumably his wife herself.
25:39
Speaker 2: Solving the mystery was one thing, Securing a conviction was
25:44
Speaker 2: quite another. In an Oklahoma court, everyone from the sheriff
25:50
Speaker 2: to the juries would be bought and paid for by
25:53
Speaker 2: William Hale. Even if Tom White could get the case
25:57
Speaker 2: tried in a federal court, would a white jury convict
26:03
Speaker 2: as one O sage elder commented, The question for them
26:07
Speaker 2: to decide is whether a white man killing an O
26:10
Speaker 2: sage is murder or merely cruelty to animals. The trials
26:22
Speaker 2: were a sensation, I say trials, since there were several
26:27
Speaker 2: murders and several murderers working for Hale. One was declared
26:32
Speaker 2: a mistrial after it became clear that members of the
26:35
Speaker 2: jury had been bribed. Ernest made a full confession of
26:40
Speaker 2: his and his uncle's crimes, then withdrew it and agreed
26:45
Speaker 2: to testify for his uncle's defense, then repented and confessed again.
26:52
Speaker 2: It's hard to know why he changed his mind, but
26:56
Speaker 2: perhaps it was the sight of his wife, Molly, sitting
27:00
Speaker 2: silently in the courtroom day after day, solemnly watching as
27:07
Speaker 2: it became clear that the man she had loved had
27:10
Speaker 2: conspired to murder every member of her family, including her. Finally,
27:18
Speaker 2: a jury reached a verdict. The clerk read it out
27:25
Speaker 2: to the charge of first degree murder. William K. Hale
27:30
Speaker 2: had been found guilty, but the jury ruled out the
27:37
Speaker 2: death penalty that would normally be of foregone conclusion. Hale
27:41
Speaker 2: and others would serve long prison terms for their appalling crimes.
27:54
Speaker 2: Orson Wells once said that if you want a happy ending,
27:58
Speaker 2: it depends on where you stop the story. It's tempting
28:02
Speaker 2: to stop the story. On November seventeenth, nineteen twenty six,
28:09
Speaker 2: Tom White has gone out on a high, retiring from
28:13
Speaker 2: the Bureau to take a more settled job does the
28:16
Speaker 2: wardens and Leavenworth Prison, and he's just learning the rope
28:20
Speaker 2: of the new job when some new inmates, shackled, pale
28:26
Speaker 2: and blinking in the sunlight, are warped up the prison
28:30
Speaker 2: driveway are the US Marshals. White recognizes the distinctive round
28:37
Speaker 2: face of William K. Hale, and Hale recognizes him too
28:44
Speaker 2: by Hello, Tom offers Hale, Hello, Bill says Warden Tom White.
28:52
Speaker 2: He shakes William Hale's hand and watches as Hale is
28:57
Speaker 2: marched off to his cell. But I can't end the
29:04
Speaker 2: story there. When Tom White and the Bureau of Investigation
29:09
Speaker 2: convicted Hale and his immediate conspirators, they declared victory and
29:14
Speaker 2: got out of town. But the killings didn't stop. Then
29:20
Speaker 2: you can still drown in the devil's excrement, even if
29:24
Speaker 2: the devil himself has gone to jail. Cautionary tales will
29:31
Speaker 2: return after the break. This cautionary tale relies on David
29:45
Speaker 2: Grand's magisterial book Killers of the Flower Moon. When I
29:51
Speaker 2: told David I was hoping to base an episode on it,
29:54
Speaker 2: he told me take a look at the final section
29:57
Speaker 2: of the book. That's the part of the history that
30:01
Speaker 2: often gets left out. The final section begins in twenty twelve,
30:07
Speaker 2: almost ninety year years after our comic book hero Tom
30:11
Speaker 2: White strode into town. Another investigator followed in his footsteps.
30:17
Speaker 2: He wasn't a former Texas Ranger, standing tall, packing heat
30:22
Speaker 2: and wearing a cowboy hat. He was a bespectacled writer
30:26
Speaker 2: from New York, David Gran himself. Gran had questions in
30:32
Speaker 2: his mind about the murders, and he wanted to see
30:35
Speaker 2: Osage County to meet some of the twenty first century
30:39
Speaker 2: O Sage people. The oil boom ended in the nineteen thirties.
30:45
Speaker 2: The boomtowns of the area are depopulated now. Wizbang is
30:49
Speaker 2: long gone, the clues that it ever existed covered by grass.
30:55
Speaker 2: There's still a little oil and steal a little money
30:58
Speaker 2: for the people with head rights, but not enough to
31:01
Speaker 2: change a life or to end it. Under the head
31:09
Speaker 2: right system, some of that money remains in a trust,
31:14
Speaker 2: and some things don't change. It isn't managed by the
31:17
Speaker 2: O Sage Nation, but by the US government, mismanaged, the
31:22
Speaker 2: Osage say, and their legal struggle over the money continues.
31:29
Speaker 2: The O Sage Nation is twenty thousand strong, of whom
31:33
Speaker 2: four thousand still live in Osage County, in and around
31:38
Speaker 2: their capital, Poor Huskar. The Osage have an elected government
31:43
Speaker 2: and ratified a new constitution in two thousand and six.
31:48
Speaker 2: In some ways, the Sage Chief's prophecy has come true.
31:54
Speaker 2: Someday this oil will go and there will be no
31:59
Speaker 2: more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father.
32:04
Speaker 2: Then I know my people will be happier. The terror
32:09
Speaker 2: of the nineteen twenties is a low bar for happiness.
32:14
Speaker 2: One O Sage historian Lewis F. Burns wrote, to believe
32:20
Speaker 2: that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a
32:25
Speaker 2: delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage
32:31
Speaker 2: has been saved, and is dearer to our hearts because
32:36
Speaker 2: it survived. But much of what the O Sage nation
32:40
Speaker 2: had now exists only in memory. David Grant visited the
32:54
Speaker 2: region several times to meet people and hear their stories.
32:59
Speaker 2: He attended a ceremonial dance, watching the drummers and the singers,
33:04
Speaker 2: the dancers in headdresses stepping together counterclockwise, intensity building. At
33:12
Speaker 2: the dance, a woman came up to David gran and
33:15
Speaker 2: introduced herself. She was in her fifties wearing a blue
33:20
Speaker 2: dress with long black hair in a ponytail. She seemed
33:25
Speaker 2: familiar somehow, Hi, she said, I'm Margie Burkhart. She was
33:32
Speaker 2: the granddaughter of Ernest and Molly Burkhart. Mollie who'd watched
33:38
Speaker 2: her sisters and mother die one by one, Ernest, who'd
33:44
Speaker 2: conspired in their murder. Margie talked about her father, Cowboy Burkhart,
33:52
Speaker 2: how much he had doted on his mother, Molly, and
33:55
Speaker 2: how haunted he had been by the crimes of his father.
34:00
Speaker 2: She drove David Graham to the site of the bombed house,
34:04
Speaker 2: and as they sat outside in the car, she told
34:07
Speaker 2: him that little Cowboy and his sister had been due
34:10
Speaker 2: to visit their aunt Rita the night her house blew up,
34:15
Speaker 2: but Cowboy had earache, so it didn't go. Ernest would
34:22
Speaker 2: have known very well what would happen to the house
34:25
Speaker 2: that night, as Margie explained to gran my dad had
34:29
Speaker 2: to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him.
34:39
Speaker 2: The more often David Graham visited Osage County and the
34:43
Speaker 2: more stories he heard, the more he came to realize
34:47
Speaker 2: that reality didn't quite squeeze into the neat story of
34:51
Speaker 2: William Hale's murderous plot and Tom White's brilliant investigation. Hale
34:57
Speaker 2: was guilty of organizing the murder of Molly Burkhardt's family,
35:01
Speaker 2: to be sure, and the Oceage haven't forgotten in the
35:07
Speaker 2: Oceage Nation Museum poor Huskar. There's an expansive group photograph
35:13
Speaker 2: from nineteen twenty four depicting many members of the tribe
35:17
Speaker 2: alongside the most influential and admired White locals. A section
35:22
Speaker 2: of the picture has been cut away, the section depicting
35:27
Speaker 2: William Hale. The museum director, Catherine Redcorn explained to David
35:32
Speaker 2: gran that it was too painful to show the devil
35:37
Speaker 2: was standing right there. But there's no evidence connecting Hale
35:44
Speaker 2: with the murder of Barney McBride, an oil man who'd
35:48
Speaker 2: set off for Washington, d c determined to appeal to
35:51
Speaker 2: the federal authorities for help in solving the Osage murders.
35:56
Speaker 2: His naked body was found the next morning, a sack
36:00
Speaker 2: tied over his head, his skull smashed in had been
36:04
Speaker 2: stabbed two dozen times. Nor was Hale apparently connected with
36:11
Speaker 2: the murder of Charlie Whitehorn, who disappeared around the same
36:15
Speaker 2: time as Anna. He was found under a bush, a bloated,
36:20
Speaker 2: fly blown corpse, identified only by a letter in his pocket.
36:26
Speaker 2: Between his eyes gaped two bullet holes. His widow, Hattie,
36:32
Speaker 2: then seemed sure to die of a mysterious illness until
36:36
Speaker 2: her sisters moved her away from the area, where she
36:39
Speaker 2: staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't seem to
36:47
Speaker 2: be behind the death of George Bigheart, who died in
36:50
Speaker 2: an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three after being poisoned,
36:58
Speaker 2: or W. W. Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to
37:02
Speaker 2: his deathbed to hear his testimony and collect some vital
37:05
Speaker 2: incriminating documents. Vaughn then phoned the Osage County sheriff to
37:12
Speaker 2: tell him that he knew who killed big Heart, and
37:16
Speaker 2: a lot more than that. Vaughan boarded a train home
37:20
Speaker 2: but never made it. His body was found by the
37:24
Speaker 2: tracks north of Oklahoma City, neck broken, incriminating documents god
37:34
Speaker 2: In his conversations with O Sage people, Gran kept hearing
37:39
Speaker 2: similar stories O Sage grandparents who died young in the
37:43
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties, With the family convinced of
37:48
Speaker 2: foul play and the authorities showing no interest. Digging into
37:53
Speaker 2: the archives, he sometimes found clues. In Killers of the
37:58
Speaker 2: Flower Moon, Gran's detective work reveals the identity of the
38:03
Speaker 2: influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan, but some of
38:08
Speaker 2: them ers will never be solved. Too much evidence was
38:13
Speaker 2: deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then there are other
38:18
Speaker 2: heartbreaking cases of white guardians with three, four or more
38:24
Speaker 2: O Sage wards who all died young for no apparent reason,
38:31
Speaker 2: deaths that at the time were never even recognized as
38:34
Speaker 2: murder at all. The resource curse is seen as a
38:43
Speaker 2: subtle economic problem. There's a lively academic debate on why
38:49
Speaker 2: some nations seem to suffer more than others and what
38:52
Speaker 2: policies they should adopt, But the basic truth of the
38:57
Speaker 2: resource curse isn't subtle at all. It's that money brings trouble,
39:05
Speaker 2: civil wars, nasty geopolitics, brutal dictatorships. Or if you're the
39:12
Speaker 2: last remaining two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine members
39:17
Speaker 2: of the O Sage nation suddenly rich and hemmed on
39:21
Speaker 2: all sides by a society with no respect for you
39:25
Speaker 2: at all, it brings murder. The Oceage was surrounded by murderers.
39:33
Speaker 2: Those murderers weren't all orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't
39:37
Speaker 2: need to be. They had their own reference and their
39:41
Speaker 2: own motives, and they were protected by a white society
39:47
Speaker 2: that didn't much care about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a
39:54
Speaker 2: conspiracy is so big you simply can't call it a conspiracy.
40:33
Speaker 2: This cautionary tale is based, with permission, on David Grand's
40:36
Speaker 2: book Killers of the Flower Moon. The film of the
40:41
Speaker 2: same title is now in theaters, directed by Martin SCORSESEI
40:44
Speaker 2: and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, and Lilli Gladstone.
40:50
Speaker 2: This episode was produced in association with Apple Original Films.
40:56
Speaker 2: Next week, I'll be back discussing this story with Jim
40:59
Speaker 2: Roan Gray, a former principal chief of the Osage Nation.
41:10
Speaker 2: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
41:14
Speaker 2: It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
41:18
Speaker 2: The sound design and original music is the work of
41:20
Speaker 2: Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
41:25
Speaker 2: voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jammas Saunders,
41:30
Speaker 2: and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible
41:34
Speaker 2: without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
41:38
Speaker 2: Dital Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
41:44
Speaker 2: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
41:49
Speaker 2: at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
41:53
Speaker 2: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
41:58
Speaker 2: tell your friends and if you want to hear the
42:00
Speaker 2: show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
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Speaker 2: show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
42:08
Speaker 2: slash yes