Infamous America - ENCORE: OSAGE MURDERS Ep. 4 | “New Evidence, New Suspects”

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Mercifully, the murders in the Osage Nation paused in 1924 and 1925. J. Edgar Hoover became the director of the Bureau of Investigation and assigned a new man to the case of the Osage murders. Special Agent Tom White succeeded where all others failed. He eliminated suspects; uncovered lies and corruption; and discovered new evidence. In the process, he believed he learned the identities of some of the killers.   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

Jay Edgar Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 because President Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923. Obviously, it's more complex than that, but that's when the dominoes started to fall. Harding died a little over a month after the latest rounds of murders and suspicious deaths in Osage County. He was only in office for three years, and he was one of the most unlikely candidates to have been there at all. He was a senator from Ohio, who was a long shot to win the Republican nomination for president in 1920.

Teddy Roosevelt was considered the overwhelming favorite to lead the Republican Party and probably reclaimed the White House in 1920, but he died suddenly in January 1919. There was no obvious successor, so the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1920 turned messy. The electors couldn't agree on who to nominate for president. After ten rounds of voting, they finally chose Harding. During his time in office, he was loved by both the American public and foreign leaders, but now he's widely viewed as one of the worst presidents in American history. And that was because of the scandals that came to light soon after he died.

In fairness, a couple of his cabinet members did do great things. But at the same time, a few more were brazenly corrupt, and their corruption was indirectly related to and would indirectly affect Osage County. Harding's Secretary of the Interior and his Attorney General were put on trial for separate cases of corruption, and the scandal that brought down the Secretary of the Interior was about oil. Two oil barons bribed the secretary to win a contract to drill oil in Wyoming. The ordeal is known as the Teapot Dome scandal, which was named after a district. distinctive rock formation in the area. Those two oil barons were Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair.

For people who have lived in or spent time in Los Angeles, the name Doheny should sound familiar. Doheny Avenue is a major street that's basically the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Edward Doheny helped create the modern city of Los Angeles. He drilled the first successful oil well in L.A. and eventually created a company that dominated oil drilling in Mexico and South America. By 1920, his company was the largest oil company in the U.S., ahead of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Harry Sinclair's Sinclair Consolidated Oil.

Harry Sinclair made his fortune in the Osage oil fields. While many of the other oil companies of the era have merged or changed names, you can still find Sinclair gas stations in America. to this day. Doheny was one of the richest men in the world, and he and Sinclair bribed the Interior Secretary to get the contract for the Wyoming Oil Project. Sinclair ended up winning, but it came with a price. Doheny and Sinclair were put on trial for bribery. They were eventually found not guilty, but interestingly, the Interior Secretary was found guilty of accepting their bribes. And at the same time that trial was happening, Harding's Attorney General was also on trial

for accepting bribes. He was Harding's campaign manager and is generally credited with making the backroom deals that got Harding nominated. As a reward, Harding gave him the position of Attorney General. After Harding's death, investigations reveal that the Attorney General was accepting bribes from lots of people, including bootleggers who paid him to keep them out of trouble, a fact that was dramatized in the HBO TV show, Boardwalk Empire. So, by 1924, the Attorney General was out of office, and so was the flamboyant detective whom he'd hired to run the Bureau of Investigation. And that was how J. Edgar Hoover became the acting director of the Bureau, all because, or kind of because, Warren G. Harding had a heart attack.

The former Attorney General and the former Bureau Director didn't spend much time and effort on the Osage murders, which the Osage were well aware of. The Osage sincerely hoped that the new director, this 29-year-old bureaucrat, would be different. If they hoped Jay Edgar Hoover would ride in like a knight in shining armor and save them, they would be disappointed. But he did just enough so that his agents would break the case wide open and put the Osage on the road toward at least a little justice. 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. It became known as the Osage murders. This is episode four, new evidence, new suspects. Back in the summer of 1923, in July, one month before the president died, the Osage were reeling from one of the deadliest months in the time period known as the reign of terror. Four people died that month, though only half were on the Osage side of the ledger. An Osage man named George Bighart died of suspected poisoning at the end of June, and his friend and lawyer, W.W. Vaughn, was murdered shortly thereafter.

Reportedly, both men had significant information about the conspiracy and killers in Osage County. But now, whatever that information was, it was gone. If there was a criminal mastermind behind many or most of the Osage murders, he or she was good at covering his or her tracks. And that seemed to be what happened with the other two deaths in June. Henry Grammer, a notorious bootleggar, died in a car crash. It was revealed later that his car had been tampered with, and the crash probably wasn't an accident.

One of Henry's top henchman, Asa Kirby, died just two weeks later. He tried to rob a jewelry store and was shot by the owner. On the surface, that didn't seem overly unusual. But as investigators would learn later, there was a whole other way to look at it. For now, those investigators just needed to get onto the case. There were two more murders before the violence finally slowed down. In early February 1923, an oath. sage man named Henry Rhone had been found dead in his car outside the town of Fairfax.

He had been shot in the head. Sometime before his death, Henry allegedly passed some information about the Osage murders to his friend Henry Bennett. Henry Bennett took the information to Oklahoma City to try to pass it to higher authorities than the lawmen in Osage County. Bennett was shot and killed in Oklahoma City, just two blocks from the Capitol. The other man who died was Hugh Gibson, an Osage rancher. He had also been trying to help investigators

before he conveniently fell down a flight of stairs and died in an alley. He was reportedly drugged. Whatever caused the fall, it was unlikely that it was just a clumsy accident. Then, mercifully for everyone in the Osage Nation, the murders paused. As the days and weeks ticked by with no new reports of dead body, the people likely started to wonder if this was just another calm before the storm or if the rain of terror had really stopped. It was too soon to know either way,

but the rest of 1923 passed without incident. And so did 1924, though the same couldn't be said for the federal government. The scandals of the Harding administration started to come to light one after another. The Teapot Dome scandal involving the Secretary of the Interior, the Justice Department scandal involving the Attorney General and the Veterans Bureau scandal involving the director of the Veterans Bureau who defrauded the government while supposedly trying to build new hospitals for America's veterans of World War I.

In May of 1924, with a new president and a new attorney general in place, the director of the Bureau of Investigation, William Burns, was forced to resign. J. Edgar Hoover received a promotion from deputy director to acting director. He hoped with every fiber of his being that he would be named full-time director. And he had been on a steady upward climb since he joined the Justice Department in 1917,

right after law school. He started as a clerk, then quickly became the head of the Alien Enemy Bureau. That was at the height of World War I, and his job was to investigate suspicious Germans. Two years later, he joined the Bureau, of investigation and ran the General Intelligence Division. It was more commonly known as the radical division, and Hoover's job was to investigate anyone who could be considered radical

and potentially dangerous to the U.S. government. It was the height of America's first red scare, so anyone who was even remotely connected to communism, whether in rumor or fact, was investigated, arrested, and sometimes deported. Two years later, in 1921, as the situation in Osage County exploded, Hoover rose to deputy director of the Bureau. Three years after that, he got his chance at his dream job. He was 29 years old, and he was the acting director of the Bureau of Investigation.

And just like his predecessor, William Burns, he wanted nothing to do with the case of the Osage murders. J. Edgar Hoover had two priorities above everything else. Number one, to make himself look good. Number two, to make his beloved bureau look good. Those priorities never changed over the 50 years that he ran the bureau that would soon be called the FBI. Now, here in the summer of 1924,

newly promoted acting director Hoover desperately wanted to impress his bosses, the Attorney General and the President of the United States. As such, he didn't want the first big murder investigation under his watch to be a loser, and that was how he viewed the case of the Osage murders. He badly wanted to dump it back on the state of Oklahoma and tell them to figure it out. But he had a problem. It was the worst case scenario for Hoover's two priorities,

a possible scandal. A scandal could tarnish his reputation and the Bureau's reputation, and at this critical moment, when he was in a tryout period to become the permanent director, it could cost him his dream job. The potential scandal involved a local Oklahoma gangster named Blackie Thompson, who would play a larger role in the Osage murder case over the next two years.

Ironically, it was the failed attempt to work with Blackie Thompson that forced Hoover to take the step that eventually solved the case. Federal agents convinced the governor of Oklahoma to release Blackie Thompson from prison. He was serving time for bank robbery, but the agents believed he could be a valuable under-examination. cover operative. They wanted him to go back into Osage County and reunite with his old criminal cronies. Blackie could gain access to groups that agents couldn't hope to infiltrate. Hopefully, he could learn something about the Osage murders and report back to the Bureau.

The governor reluctantly agreed, and Blackie Thompson walked out of prison. Federal agents supervised him as he returned to Osage County, but they quickly lost him. He was free to do whatever he wanted, which turned out to be robbing a bank and killing a police officer. He was eventually captured and sent back to prison, but the whole affair was a black mark on Hoover and the Bureau. Hoover was scared that the scandal would become public, and he thought the only way to avoid the fallout was for his agents to solve the case of the Osage murders. So he summoned Special Agent Tom White to Washington, D.C. for an emergency meeting. White was the quintessential old-time frontier lawman. He was 44 years old and a former railroad detective and Texas Ranger.

He began his career by tracking outlaws on horseback, carrying a six-shooter in his holster and a Winchester rifle on his saddle. Now he wore suits and rode the train. He had been with the Bureau for seven years, and he had recently cleaned up the federal prison in Atlanta. It was rife with corruption and notorious, for its horrible conditions and practices. In the summer of 1925, Hoover recognized that he needed an old-time lawman like Tom White

to handle the investigation in Osage County. The 1920s were a crossover period between the old and the new. Hoover wanted to transform the Bureau into his ideal agency, but it would take time. He wanted his agents to be young men with law degrees. They would be clean-shaven, have short haircuts, and wear suits. They would not carry guns. They would investigate, but they would not make arrests.

When it came time to capture a suspect, they would work with local lawmen to make the arrest. Hoover had some of those ideal agents on the payroll, but he also still had the cowboy lawmen holdovers from the previous generation. Bureau agents had failed for two years to make any real progress on the Osage murders, so now it was time to try a new tactic.

In July of 1925, Special Agent Tom White traveled to Washington to learn about his new mission straight from Hoover himself. Hoover told Tom to take over the field office in Oklahoma City and get up to speed on the events of the past four years in Osage County. Then, Tom needed to succeed where the others failed. He needed to solve the damn case. Tom White started immediately. He was in his new office in Oklahoma City. by the end of July, and his first step was to assemble a new team. The Corps would be five men, all old-school lawmen like himself. One was a former Texas Ranger. One was a former New Mexico County Sheriff. One was a gifted investigator who was half Native American, which would be valuable to the team. One man was retained from the previous staff, and he would become Tom's right-hand

man. And the last of the core group was a deep cover operative who posed as an insurance salesman in Osage County. His cover was actually real. He opened a real insurance agency and sold real policies, which allowed him to gain the confidence of locals without raising suspicion. Tom White needed all his help and more, because there was a mountain of information to sift through. And that was the second step. They had to re-examine all the old old notes and files about all of the Osage murders and suspicious deaths. They immediately found problems that were either examples of bad police work or deliberate acts of sabotage. To get a better understanding, they had to go into Osage County.

The former Texas Ranger and the former county sheriff posed as ranchers to get close to the King of the Osage Hills, William Hale. Hale might have been viewed by many as a saintly benefactor of the Osage, but he was too connected to too many victims to be ignored. The deep cover insurance salesman opened his office in downtown Fairfax, just a few blocks from the former home of Bill and Rita Smith, which had been destroyed by a bomb two years earlier. The half Native American agent went undercover as a medicine man who claimed he was looking for lost relatives, and Tom White and his right-hand man went into Osage County as themselves, federal agents who were here to find out what the hell was going on in the northeast corner of Oklahoma.

White met with the Justice of the Peace in Fairfax, the man who had supervised several coroner's inquiries immediately after the bodies were discovered. The Justice of the Peace made a surprising and frustrating announcement. There was virtually nothing left from Anna Brown's inquest. The justice claimed that someone broke into his office and stole all of his notes and records. Apparently the only piece of evidence that was left from the investigation was Anna's skull. White went to the undertaker's office and examined it. It clearly showed a small bullet hole that was the entry wound and no exit wound. That made it highly suspicious that the doctors, the Shone brothers, claimed they couldn't find the bullet.

White met with them and they stuck to their story. They insisted they searched not once but twice and still. couldn't find it. With no hard evidence at White's disposal, he took the only next step that was available. He and his right-hand man began re-interviewing potential suspects. The first stop was to go back to Anna Brown's ex-husband, Oda Brown. This was Oda's third interview, and he told the same story he told the two previous times, because it was the truth. He was with his girlfriend during the time when Anna was probably murdered. The agents didn't know exactly when that was, but in all likelihood it was the night of May 21st, 1921, a little over four years ago.

Anna had been at a party at her sister Molly's house during the day. Then Molly's brother-in-law, Brian Burkhart, dropped Anna off at her home late that afternoon. Brian then met his brother, Molly's husband, in Fairfax to see a show with some other family members. Anna was shot and killed near a ravine outside Fairfax sometime later that night. Her movements between being dropped off at home and arriving at the ravine were still a mystery, but they wouldn't be for long. The agent's next step was to re-examine another pair of suspects, Rose and Joe Allen. A couple years ago, a young Native American woman told the authorities that she had heard that

Rose and Joe killed Anna Brown. According to the story, Rose was mad at Anna because she thought Anna was trying to steal Joe away. Tom's right-hand man had interrogated Rose and Joe at the time, and they had both told the same story. They were at a shady motel 17 miles away from the area where Anna was killed. The motel owner verified the story, but the agent remained suspicious. Now Special Agent Tom White wanted to re-examine the whole Rose and Joe angle. but he didn't want to go with them directly. He wanted to take a more subtle approach,

so his team enlisted the help of a small-time crook named Kelsey Morrison. Kelsey Morrison was a bootlegger and drug dealer in Osage County, but he recently fled the county after he assaulted a prohibition officer. Agents tracked him to Dallas, Texas, and arrested him. The agents offered him a deal. He could work for them as an undercover informant in Osage County, and in return they would quash his arrest warrant, or he could go to prison for assaulting a federal agent.

Morrison took the deal and returned to Osage County. The agents pointed him toward Rose and Joe Allen, and he engaged them in conversation. They steadfastly denied that they were involved in Anna's murder. Morrison reported his findings to White's team, and White decided it was time to go to the source of the story about Rose and Joe. The agents visited the young woman who made the statement against the couple, and it didn't take long for her to crack under the pressure. She admitted that her original story was a lie. She now said that a white man whom she didn't know showed up on her doorstep and forced her to sign a statement that accused Rose and Joe.

Agents couldn't pursue the lead much further, but it was a small sign of a conspiracy and a cover-up that seemed to grow by the day. and now the agents moved on to their next target, Brian Burkhart. The agents started by visiting Brian's aunt and uncle in North Texas. On the night Anna was killed, Brian dropped her off at home and then reunited with his brother Ernest. Brian and Ernest met their aunt and uncle who were visiting from Texas, and they all went to a show in Fairfax. The aunt and uncle said they hung out with Brian for the rest of the night. Their statements lined up perfectly with Brian's statements, and it seemed like Brian was no longer a suspect. The agents moved on to other leads.

They followed up on witness statements from people in the tiny town of Ralston, which was right down the road from Fairfax. The original report said that a group of elderly men and women saw Anna on the night of her death, well after Brian dropped her off at home. Special Agent Tom White and his team tracked down a farmer and his wife who had been in that group. The couple confirmed that they saw Anna in a car in Ralston later that night, and then they added the piece of information that would have had every modern TV newsperson shouting the word bombshell during their broadcasts. They said Anna was in the car with Brian Burkhart.

Agents used the momentum of the new discovery to dig deeper. They fanned out and talked to more people in Ralston and Fairfax. They learned that Brian and Anna were at a speakeasy, an illegal bar, in Ralston, and left it around 10 p.m. They went to another speakeasy in the area, and they were seen with Brian's uncle. It was now clear that the aunt and uncle in North Texas were lying to cover for Brian. Later that night, witnesses said they saw Brian and Anna with a third man, but the man's identity was a mystery. At around 3 a.m., a woman in Fairfax said she heard Brian shout at Anna, and then at sunrise, Brian's neighbor said he saw Brian return home. He also said Brian paid him

to stay quiet about witnessing Brian's early morning arrival. All of that was powerful new information, and it seemed to prove that Brian was lying in his statement on the day Anna's body was discovered. He did drop Anna off at home after Molly's party, and he did go to a show with his family, but then he met back up with Anna, and they went out drinking later that night. The problem was none of the witnesses were there at the time of Anna's murder. If Brian Burkart killed Anna, or if he worked with the mysterious third man to do it, there was no hard evidence to support the theory and no witnesses to confirm it. But then the agents received more circumstantial information that ended up opening their eyes to a shocking new possibility.

A private detective contacted them through a middleman. The detective had been hired by the King of the Osage Hills, William Hale, to investigate Anna's murder back in 1921. The private detective offered to talk if he could get paid. Instead, the agents tracked him down and forced him to talk. He revealed that he was hired by William Hale to manufacture an alibi for Brian Burkart and to protect him from investigation. The private investigator further stated that he had met with Hale and Brian on numerous occasions, and sometimes Brian's brother Ernest was at the meetings. Suddenly, the most influential man in Osage County and his two nephews were the prime suspects in the Osage murders.

Special agent Tom White and his team now had a new focus for their investigation, William Hale and his nephews Ernest and Brian Burkhart. In just one month on the job, White and his team had accomplished more than all the other investigators in the previous four years combined. And like the investigation into Rose and Joe Allen, the agents didn't go straight at their primary suspects. They moved around the edges and worked their way closer to the center. They were investigating multiple murders at the same time, and now it seemed likely that the cases were all tied together.

The team couldn't investigate every murder and suspicious death, as much as they might have liked to. They simply didn't have the resources. So they focused on three crimes specifically, the murder of Anna Brown, the murder of Henry Rohn, and the bombing of Bill and Rita Smith. The agents had learned critical information about Anna's murder, and now, Now they switched to the cases of Henry Rohn and Bill and Rita, but now with specific suspects in mind. Tom White and his team interviewed James and David Shone, the local doctors who had worked on many of the murder cases.

They were the doctors who had somehow failed to find the bullet that killed Anna Brown. They had done a cursory examination of Henry Rohn, and James had sold his house in Fairfax to Bill and Rita less than two weeks before it exploded. Now, White and his team forced the brothers to admit the truth about the reason why they visited Bill in the hospital right before he died. They weren't there to help catch the bomber. They were there to convince Bill to give James Shone control of Rita's money, and they succeeded. Bill signed some papers that made James the executor of Rita's estate. Unfortunately, Tom White and his team couldn't prove that the Shone brothers committed any crimes.

but their actions were insanely suspicious. If the brothers were helping cover up certain aspects of the murders and had now directly benefited from one of them, there was a decent chance that they were being paid by or scared by William Hale. The more the agents looked into Hale, the more they found a darker side to the honorable man in the nice suit, spectacles, and felt hat. Hale could be a ruthless businessman

who made plenty of enemies on his way to the top. He used his money to buy anyone who could be bought. Sheriffs, judges, politicians, lawyers, doctors. If someone couldn't be bought, he used fear to make them loyal. It was likely one of his associates who visited the young Native American woman and made her sign the statement that accused Rose and Joe Allen of Anna's murder. That statement helped keep suspicion off of Brian Burkart for more than four years. It was hard for Tom White's team to know the extent of some kind of master plan or how it might have evolved over the past four years.

But when agents were able to understand the waterfall of money in Molly Burckhardt's family, a possible plan came to light. Anna's will left all her money to her mother, Lizzie. When Lizzie died two months after Anna, she left all her money to her two remaining daughters, Molly and Rita. Molly was married to Hale's nephew, Ernest Burkhart. So if Rita and her husband Bill died at the same time, Rita's money would pass to Molly. And just like that, Molly Burckhardt would have the accumulated wealth of all of her family members.

No one for a second suspected that Molly was part of the conspiracy, but it looked like people around her were going to great trouble to make sure she inherited all the money. The only thing that hadn't gone according to plan was that Bill Smith survived the bombing. He inherited Rita's money. But then the Shone brothers swooped in while he was dying in agony and doped up on morphine and convinced him to give James Shone control of the money. So it seemed like the spontaneous adjustment kept the master plan on track.

And now, Molly Burkart was the sole survivor of her family. and presumably her will left her fortune to her husband Ernest, William Hale's nephew. Molly was scared for her life and with good reason. She had isolated herself from the outside world to try to stay safe. Well, she had mostly isolated herself. Unfortunately, Molly suffered from diabetes, and there was a new product on the market that was being touted as the wonder drug for diabetes. It was called insulin, and it was administered through,

injections. So, two of the few people whom Molly allowed into her home were doctors James and David shown. They gave her injections of what they said was insulin, but instead of improving Molly's condition, she slowly and steadily grew worse. Next time on Infamous America, the investigation accelerates as the agents learn new information about Henry Roan's murder in the bombing of Bill and Rita Smith. They make arrests and hear a startling of confession and prepared to put three men on trial for their roles in the Osage murders. There are more twists and turns than ever before. Next week on Infamous America. Members of our 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. began 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 Black Barrel 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.