Infamous America - ENCORE: OSAGE MURDERS Ep. 1 | “A Body In The Dirt”

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

In 1921, two murder victims were discovered on the same day in Osage County in northeastern Oklahoma. It was shocking news, but members of the Osage tribe already knew they were in danger. They were some of the richest people on Earth, thanks to the oil under their land, and they had been dying in mysterious ways for years. But when the two bodies were found on the same day, it launched a 5-year period known as the Reign of Terror. No one was safe, and no one could be trusted.   Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jerry Fowler trudged across a patch of land north of the town of Pahuska. Pahuska was the capital of the Osage Nation and the community center for the people who were thought to be the richest on earth. Their wealth came from oil and companies were pulling it out of the ground in Osage County in staggering amounts. 24 years earlier in 1897, the first well was drilled on Osage land. Now in 1921, there were nearly 6,000 wells in operation. That number would only climb over the next few years, and the Osage people received money for every well that was drilled. Nearly overnight, they went from being desperately poor to unimaginably wealthy.

But with money came greed and corruption and worse. Less than a mile north of downtown Pahuska, Jerry Fowler walked across the oil drilling operation of the Garlander, Arland Oil Company. It was 9 o'clock in the morning on May 28, 1921, and the heat was already heavy. A blazing sun warned everyone in the hills of northeast Oklahoma that summer was just a couple days away. Eventually, the heat would become oppressive, and it would thicken with humidity as the summer dragged on. Right now, the saving grace was that the evenings were still relatively cool, and rainstorms swept in and knocked back the heat for a little while. That had happened

last week to everyone's relief. But now the sun was back, and it beat down on Jerry as he approached an oil Derek. Derek's all over the land, whined and churned and thudded. Their drills shook the ground under Jerry's feet as he walked, and the volume of noise likely drowned out any other sound in the area. Jerry was in a wooded area on a hill when he spotted something in a tangled mass, of brush. It was about a hundred feet from the nearest oil, Derek, and he tried to inspect the thing that caught his eye. He was likely horrified and probably sick to his stomach. More people gathered around and examined Jerry's discovery. It was a badly decomposing human body. At the time, there was no telling how long it had been there. It was certainly long enough

that it was impossible to know the identity, but the cause of death was painfully clear. There were two bullet holes in the victim's forehead right between the eyes. The news of the grizzly discovery and the violent death would shock the community and then the nation. But it was not the only shocking news on May 28, 1921. The news that raced out of the community later in the day would set off a chain of events that would become known as the reign of terror. Jerry Fowler's discovery of a body in the dirt under some tangled brush was not an isolated incident. It was only the beginning. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling a tragic story of conspiracy, greed, and betrayal that became known as the Osage murders. This is episode one, a body in the dirt. One week before Jerry Fowler discovered a body at the Garland Oil Field, Molly Burkhart hosted a small party for some friends and family. Molly was a full-blood member of the Osage tribe. She owned a big house, but it was modest when compared with some on the reservation.

She and her servants readied the house for the gathering, and that activity was unique to the Osage. No other tribe was wealthy enough to have servants. No other tribe was wealthy, period. The other Native American tribes in the U.S. were confined to the most barren patches of ground in the country. They scratched out a living however they could, and they were painfully poor. But the Osage had oil under their land. and that made them wealthy enough to employ servants who were white or black or Hispanic. It was a role reversal that was nearly impossible for most Americans to comprehend.

That wealth had deadly consequences. The U.S. government set up a system that made the Osage easy prey for thieves and killers. By the time of Molly's party on May 21, 1921, many Osage were suspicious of the people around them. After that day, it grew exponentially worse. The saga of what was to come would destroy Molly's family, beginning with her older sister Anna. May 21st was the last time Molly saw her sister alive. The party was unpleasant, to say the least. Molly was married to a young white man from Texas named Ernest Burckhardt.

She was 35 and he was 28. They had two kids and Molly's mother lived with them. Molly's older sister Anna was recently divorced and had occasionally dated Ernie. Ernest's brother Brian. So Molly and Ernest welcomed Anna and Brian into their home, as well as another Burkhart brother and the Burckhart's aunt. It was a bad mix. The Burckhart's aunt continuously made disparaging remarks about the Osage and Native Americans in general, even though one of her nephews was married to a member of the tribe. And Anna definitely didn't help the situation. She spent her time and money having fun. She went to parties all over Osage County

and drank more than lots of men. When she showed up at the party, she was already drunk, and she offered a flask of bootleg whiskey to the others. This was May of 1921, a year and a half after prohibition went into effect. The sale and consumption of alcohol was illegal, but that did nothing to stop Americans' desire for beer and gin and whiskey. In fact, it only made it stronger and more dangerous. Illegal liquor was often made with a horrifying array of ingredients.

It was so raw and potent that it could cause serious damage in a very short period of time, which also made it the perfect delivery vehicle for poison, as many Osage would suspect in the coming months. But at the party, personalities clashed, and Anna began fighting with some of the other guests. By late afternoon, the situation was untenable, and it was time for the party to end. Ernest and Brian Burkhart had more relatives in town from Texas, and they had agreed to go to a show in a nearby town that night, so it was time for them to leave anyway.

Brian dropped Anna off at home sometime between 4.30 and 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and then he drove to the town of Fairfax to go to the show. Ernest and Brian went to the show that night with their aunt and uncle from Texas, and at that time, no one had any reason to worry. But the next day, Molly didn't hear anything from Anna. She didn't hear anything the next day either. On the third day after the party, Molly sent her husband Ernest to Anna's house. Yes, Anna was known as a partier, and yes, she was known to stay out all night drinking,

but this felt different. When Ernest arrived at Anna's house, the panic started to set in. News of Anna's disappearance spread like wildfire through Osage County, and it was not because of her disappearance alone. She was not the first member of the Osage tribe to disappear. There was still hope that she was just out on a spree, a party bender that lasted longer than normal, and she would turn up soon. But if she didn't, or if she turned up dead from causes that were not natural, she would not be the first Osage to suffer such a fate. By May of 1921, disappearances and

suspicious deaths had been happening for years, and Anna and Molly's family had already experienced one. There were four sisters in the family. Anna, Molly, Rita and Minnie. Minnie, the youngest, had died three years ago at the age of 27 from what was called wasting sickness. That was just a generic label for an illness that doctors didn't understand. They had no idea what caused the symptoms or how to treat them. The victim just grew sicker and sicker and seemed to waste away. And that same sickness was happening to Molly's mother right now. Molly's mother, Lizzie, had been suffering from strange symptoms for months. Molly and Ernest tried to care for Lizzie in their home, but she slowly grew worse.

And now Anna was missing, though the mystery of her disappearance wouldn't last much longer. Jerry Fowler and the other roughnecks at the Garland Oil Field tried to determine the identity of the person Jerry found in the brush. They couldn't identify the person by sight because the body was too badly decomposed. They tentatively searched the victim's clothes for a clue. They found a letter in a pocket. And now they knew the identity of the dead person. It was Charles Whitehorn.

Charles was one of the 2,229 registered members of the Osage tribe, and his wife had reported him missing two weeks ago. Charles vanished on May 14, 1921, one week before Anna disappeared. Local law enforcement had been searching for him ever since, and if he had been murdered shortly after he disappeared and his body had been laying outside in the elements, then that explained why he was impossible to identify by sight. At 2.30 that afternoon,

the Justice of the Peace began an inquest to try to solve some parts of the mystery. Charles had been shot twice in the forehead, which made it pretty clear that he was murdered. But there was no other evidence at the scene of the discovery, and there were no known witnesses at that time. It was going to be a tough case for the local sheriff to solve. And later that day, his prospects dropped further when his workload doubled.

A few miles away from the small town of Greyhorse, where Anna and Molly lived, a father and son were out hunting squirrels. The boy spotted a squirrel and fired his rifle. He hit his target, but the squirrel toppled off the edge of a short cliff and down into a ravine. The boy hurried down the side of the hill and searched for the squirrel. He spotted it and picked it up, and then, and screamed for his father. When the man rushed to his son, he saw the other thing the boy had found, a decomposing human body. It was lying near the edge of the creek that ran through the ravine. Based on the features and the clothes, she appeared to be an Osage woman.

The father and son ran back to their horse-drawn wagon and raced into the town of Fairfax. They spread word of their discovery, and several men, including the undertaker, hurried back out the scene. Everyone knew of Anna Brown's disappearance, but the body in the ravine was too decomposed to know if it was Anna. Still, the chances were high, so one of the men at the scene went back to town and contacted Molly. Molly rallied her family and led them to the location. Her husband Ernest was with her. His brother Brian came along, the last known person to see Anna alive. Molly's sister Rita and her husband Bill made the trip. When they arrived, she was arrived, news of the discovery had clearly spread beyond the family.

Morbid curiosity seekers showed up, like notorious bootlegger Kelsey Morrison and his wife, as well as local lawmen and doctors. It took time and effort because of the state of the body, but Molly, Rita, and Bill were finally able to identify her as Anna. With the benefit of 100 years of hindsight, we know two things that no one knew that day in May, 1921. and as killer was in that crowd, and two more people at the scene were going to die.

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To hazard a guess, there were probably two eras in American history that saw the most change in all things related to law enforcement. The two decades of the 1920s and 1930s, and the two decades of the 1990s and early 2000s. There's always change in evolution, but if you were forced to single out two time periods, those would probably be the ones. In the 90s and 2000s, major advances like DNA testing, computers, and the internet were genuine game changers.

Back in the 20s and 30s, it was much more scattered and haphazard, depending on where you lived. Cities had more resources and more advanced techniques and procedures. That's always been the case. Places like Osage County were much closer to the Old West era than the modern era. But the 20s and 30s saw major changes in everything. In transportation, automobiles instead of horses. In forensics and investigation, cataloging criminals by taking their photographs, measuring height and weight, and stamping their fingerprints.

In communication, when radios eventually allowed lawmen to chase outlaws faster and more efficiently, in the laws themselves, when Congress passed laws that allowed officers to pursue criminals into other counties and states. And of course, with the creation of the first national police agency called the Bureau of Investigation, which would later be known as the FBI. There were definitely advances in medical technology as well, but those were probably the slowest, especially in Osage County. The autopsy that was performed on Anna Brown that afternoon, May 20, 28th, 1921 would have horrified modern medical and law enforcement professionals.

There were two doctors who did much of the medical care in Osage County. They were brothers, James and David Shone. They supervised the scene as several men hauled Anna's body out of the ravine and later on a bed of ice in the back of a wagon. Then they transferred her to a wooden plank that acted as a makeshift operating table. There, outside in the heat and humidity with flies buzzing, the doctors and the lawmen examined the body. The doctors thought she had been dead between five and seven days, which meant she had probably died the night of Molly's party. When they looked at the back of her head, they found a bullet hole. The doctors and the lawmen quickly agreed that it was made by a small caliber bullet, probably a 32 or a 38. And now they

took the next step of opening her head and probing through her brain to find the bullet. There was no exit wound, so the bullet, the most critical piece of evidence, had to be in there somewhere. But they couldn't find it, or so they said. And while the doctors worked, the lawmen scoured the scene for clues. They found a bottle near the creek with clear liquid in it that smelled like moonshine whiskey. It looked like Anna might have been sitting near the creek drinking whiskey when she was shot. The marshal of the town of Fairfax spotted two different sets of tire tracks that led from the road to the ravine. That could have been multiple people involved in the murder.

And then the investigation suffered some of the problems of the era, or as people started to believe later, from corruption. The Osage County Sheriff was close with people who would later be viewed as highly suspicious. But even if he were on the level, the sheriffs and marshals at the scene were mostly old-school frontier lawmen. They were not scientifically trained modern officers. They collected no evidence at the scene, no fingerprints, no casts of the tire tracks to try to match them to vehicles in the area, no samples of clothing or blood, and no photos of the body or the crime scene.

Without the bullet, all they could do was start canvassing for witnesses and asking questions about Anna's movements after she left Molly's party exactly one week ago. Molly and her husband Ernest said they had last seen Anna when she left with Ernest's brother Brian. Brian said he dropped Anna off at her home and then reunited with Ernest to go to a show in Fairfax that night. All of that was easily verified. So with no other leads, the suspicion fell on Anna's ex-husband, Oda Brown. In addition to being a logical suspect because of his previous relationship with Anna, Oda Brown rose to the top of the list because lawmen received a word that a man who had been arrested in Kansas was claiming Oda paid him $8,000 to kill Anna. Lawman arrested Oda and questioned him, but he had an alibi for the time frame

that Anna was probably killed, and there was no evidence to support the claim of the man in Kansas. Oda was released, but it was not the last time the law would come calling about the murder of his ex-wife. Even with that, there was another thing that might have worked in Oda's favor. The examination of Charles Whitehorn, whose body had been found earlier in the day, revealed that he was also killed with small caliber bullets, probably from a 32 caliber pistol. Without the bullet from Anna's body, it was impossible to know if the same gun had been used to kill both people. But if it had, and if it was the same killer, then it was hard to understand why Oda Brown would have been that killer. There was no connection between Oda and Charles, so the lawmen

were, once again, at a loss. In July of 1921, a little over a month after the discovery of the bodies, the cases of Charles Whitehorn and Anna Brown were considered closed. There were no new leads, so the lawmen shoved the files into drawers, and everyone moved on. Molly organized Anna's funeral, and businessmen in Osage County took the opportunity to charge outrageous prices for their goods and services. It was starting to become common to charge a member of the Osage tribe, $6,000 or more for the total cost of burying a loved one. That's the equivalent of $80,000 today. For some perspective, the total cost of a funeral varies from state to state in the U.S., but the range is between $18,000 and $25,000. The Osage were paying more than triple the

price that most people paid around the country, and there was an easy explanation for the price gouge. It was generally called the guardian system. The U.S. government viewed the Osage as children who weren't mentally capable of spending their own money. So, the government mandated a program where white men acted as guardians for many of the Osage. The guardians had full control over the money for their Osage wards. The Osage were probably the wealthiest people on earth, but many of them couldn't buy a pack of gum without asking for money from a guardian. and that program led to theft in multiple ways. Some guardians simply stole money straight from their Osage wards.

They took it out of bank accounts like regular thieves. One Osage leader estimated that somewhere around $8 million was stolen outright from the Osage during the Guardian program. That's more than $130 million today. And that didn't include the price gouging. Guardians were mostly businessmen, lawyers, ranchers, and politicians. In one case, a guardian who was a car dealer bought a car from his own dealership for $250, and then added $1,000 to the price before he sold it to his Osage ward.

But as bad as the system was, it was arguably better than the alternative. Most tribes had no money at all after being forced onto reservations, and that was one of a couple things that made the Osage unique. They were forced to move to a reservation in Oklahoma, but not at gunpoint. by the U.S. cavalry like most other tribes. Their traditional homeland was the current state of Kansas, but as Americans moved westward, they took Osage lands. The Osage were forced to move, yes,

but they actually negotiated with the U.S. government and bought their new lands in northeast Oklahoma. The Osage were shrewd business people. They intentionally bought land that they didn't think homesteaders would want, which meant their land wouldn't be gradually reduced by the government, like it had with so many other tribes. The Osage had watched the Cherokee lose much of their land during the 1893 land rush,

so the Osage sent negotiators to Washington to make a deal. That deal inadvertently set up the wealth and the tragedies of the 1920s. In order to avoid losing their land to settlers, the Osage made a deal in 1906. They could keep all their land, but they had to divide it up between all the members of the tribe.

Each person receives 657 acres, and the following year, in 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, the Osage could sell that land to whomever they wanted. But the ability to sell their land, rather than have it taken by the government, wasn't the big thing. In that deal in 1906,

the Osage negotiators slipped in a provision that the U.S. government overlooked at the time. The Osage retained all the mineral rights to their land. So if anything of value was found in their rocky rolling hills of northeast Oklahoma, gold, silver, copper, or oil, they had full rights to it. And the Osage already knew there was oil on their land. They'd known for at least 10 years. The first oil well was drilled back in 1897. And the modern day oil boom was just beginning. The Osage could lease their land to oil companies, and as the need for oil around the world skyrocketed in the first 20 years of the

1900s, the Osage became multi-millionaires. And thanks to the Guardian system that was imposed on them, they lost millions to thieves. And then they started losing their lives. The mineral rights of the Osage could not be sold. They could only be inherited. But in the 1920s, the rights could be inherited by people from outside the tribe. An Osage woman, for instance, could leave her rights to her husband. If she died, he could become a multimillionaire overnight. Molly's husband, Ernest Burkart, was a white Texas cowboy who was seven years younger than she was. During one of the murder investigations, an agent asked him what he did for work. He said he didn't work. He'd married an Osage. And as soon as there were vast fortunes to be made, either by

drilling for oil or stealing from the Osage in a variety of ways, the Osage started dying. Molly's younger sister Minnie died in 1918. She was a perfectly healthy 27-year-old who then died of a mysterious illness. Charles Whitehorn and Anna Brown were murdered in May of 1921, and they were just the beginning of what was to come. The next potential victim was Molly's own mother. Molly's mother, Lizzie, had been battling the illness that was called wasting sickness, the same mysterious calamity that had killed her daughter Minnie. Molly pleaded with local doctors for help. They examined Lizzie, but they couldn't do anything for her. Molly went back to the old ways and implored the tribe's medicine men to help her mother. They tried ancient remedies

and rituals, but nothing worked. On July 17th, 1921, Lizzie passed away. She was 76 years old, and no one could explain her death. Like her youngest daughter Minnie, she had simply wasted away. At the time of Lizzie's death, she owned four head rights. A head right was a common term for the mineral rights that belonged to each member of the tribe. Each person owned one equal head right. When Lizzie died, she owned four head rights, her own, and three she had inherited. One from her husband, who had died several years earlier, one from her daughter Minnie, and one from her daughter Anna.

Those four headwrites, a fortune, passed to her two remaining family members, her daughters, Molly and Rita. For all intents and purposes, Molly and Rita now had targets on their backs. They couldn't prove that their mother had been killed by something sinister like poison, but the idea started to gain steam. The doctors couldn't find a cause of death, and Rita's husband, Bill, began to openly say that Lizzie's death was suspicious. He was one of the first to raise the prospect of poison, and he believed all three recent deaths were connected, Charles Whitehorn, Anna, and Lizzie. In August 1921, he started pushing hard for law enforcement to open new investigations.

He hit lots of roadblocks, but he seemed passionate about taking action. As Bill pushed for more investigation, the list of suspects grew. Everyone had to be considered, and that was because it was about to get really, bad in Osage County. The next two years would showcase why people started calling the Osage murders the reign of terror. Next time on Infamous America, a detective agency comes to Osage County and sends undercover operatives to investigate the murders. But while they work, the number of victims rises dramatically. It becomes clear that someone will stop at nothing to protect the

secrets behind the Osage murders. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our black Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer.

find us at our website blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're blackbarrel media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.