Murder: True Crime Stories - The Osage Murders: The Crime That Made the FBI

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were among the wealthiest people on the planet, thanks to massive oil reserves beneath their land. Then they started dying: poisoned, shot, and blown up in their own homes. Local law enforcement wouldn't help, and some of them were in on it. There was no FBI to call. Not the way we know it. This is the story of the conspiracy that targeted the Osage for their oil money, and the investigation that transformed a small federal agency into the most powerful law enforcement organization in the country. This is episode 2 of The Crimes That Built America, a special four-part series on Murder: True Crime Stories hosted by Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Monday, with all four available now, ad-free, on Crime House Plus. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @murdertruecrimestories

Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy. Happy America 250. If you want to binge all four parts of our limited series about the crimes that built America ad-free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. With Crimehouse Plus, you'll get all four episodes right now instead of waiting. You'll also get every episode of murder true crime stories and the rest of the Crime House shows ad-free and released early. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com. listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. This is Crime House. You probably take it for granted that if something terrible happens to you in America, there's somewhere to call a local police department, state troopers, the FBI,

someone whose job it is to help. But it wasn't always that way. Before the FBI existed, Before there were federal investigators, the only law in most American towns was the local sheriff. And if he couldn't or wouldn't help, you were on your own. That was the reality for the Osage people in the oil fields of Northern Oklahoma in the 1920s. They were some of the richest people on earth, and they were being murdered, one by one, in their cars and their beds in their own homes. Every time they asked for help, the answer was the same. There was nobody to call. This is the story of how that changed and of all the lives that were lost along the way.

People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Today, we're continuing our series on the Crimes that built America in honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

Over the course of four Mondays on the murder true crime stories feed, we're covering the cases that built the American criminal justice system as we know it, or tragedies that led to greater protections for everyone. Miranda writes, the FBI, criminal profiling, the system that protects and advocates for missing children. Each one exists because of a specific crime, a specific family, and a specific moment when the country decided enough was enough. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community.

Please rate, review, and follow the show. If you're a Crime House Plus subscriber, all four episodes are available right now, completely add-free. If you haven't joined yet, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. you'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. For our second episode of The Crimes That Built America, I'll be covering the Osage murders of the 1920s. This was a coordinated campaign to kill some of the wealthiest people in America for their oil money, and it turned an obscure little federal agency into the juggernaut we now call the FBI. eye. All that and more coming up. The Osage nation didn't choose to live in Oklahoma. They were pushed

there. Throughout the 1800s, the U.S. government moved the Osage off their traditional lands again and again. Between 1808 and 1825, the Osage ceded nearly 100 million acres of their traditional homelands through a series of treaties and were resettled on. onto a reservation in what is now southern Kansas. Decades later, in 1871, they were pushed off that land too. Before they could be moved again, the Osage took matters into their own hands. They pooled what money they had and they bought land. A stretch of rocky prairie in northern Oklahoma purchased from the Cherokee Nation.

It didn't look like much, but it was a smart move. move and a lucky one because under all that rocky prairie was something the Osage didn't know was there. Oil. The first small deposits were found on Osage's land in the 1890s, but the tribe had the foresight to do something nobody had really done before. Before they let anyone drill, they negotiated. In 1906, the Osage signed a formal agreement with the federal. government to divide up their reservation into individual plots called allotments owned by individual

tribe members instead of the tribe as a whole. But there was one detail they refused to budge on. They insisted that the mineral rights, the right to drill for oil, would stay in a collective trust owned by the tribe as a whole. It's a system every American landowner now lives under. Surface rights and mineral rights are two separate things you can own. The distinction was written into U.S. law for the first time because of the Osage Nation's lawyer at the negotiating table. Every member of the tribe got an equal share of those mineral rights called a head right, about 2,200 people with a head right each. And over the next 15 years, those head rights made them rich. But there was one detail about head rights written into the original 1906 law that almost nobody paid attention to at the time.

You could inherit them. When an Osage person died, their head right passed to their legal heirs, and those heirs didn't have to be Osage. A non-native spouse, a non-native business partner named in a will, anyone in line under standard inheritance law, any of them could end up holding an Osage headright forever. That single detail is what would later turn Osage County into the deadliest place in America. By the early 1920s, oil prices had gone through the roof. Automobiles were everywhere, and Osage County was producing millions of barrels a year. By 1923, the tribe was earning more than $30 million,

annually from oil. About half a billion in today's money, split among 2,200 people. At its peak, each individual headright brought in around $13,000 a year, well over $200,000 in today's money. And most Osage families held more than one. A husband, a wife, and a few children might have five under a single roof. Osage families, built mansions, bought new, cars every year and sent their kids to private schools back east. One family even bred a thoroughbred racehorse that went on to win the 1924 Kentucky Derby. They named the horse black gold after the oil. Newspapers across America started covering all of it, calling the Osage, quote, the richest people per capita in the world. Tabloids ran stories about their diamond jewelry,

white chauffeurs and gold-plated bathtubs. Some of it was true. A lot of it was exaggerated. But people read those stories, and some of them decided they wanted in. They came from everywhere. Cattlemen from Texas, lawyers from Kansas City, drifters and grifters with no fixed address.

They moved to Osage County looking for a way to get riddlemen. rich, and many of them found one thanks to the federal government. In 1921, Congress passed a law that changed everything for the Osage Nation. Under what was called the guardianship program, Osage adults who were full-blooded, meaning they had no white ancestry, were automatically declared incompetent to manage their own money. A court would appoint a non-native guardian who would receive the Osage person's headright payments and decide how much, if any, to release to their so-called ward. Osage adults, including educated professionals, business owners, parents who had raised families,

now had to ask permission from a stranger to buy a pair of shoes. Oh, of course, the guardians took a fee, a generous one, and in many cases, when the ward died, the guardian was first in line to inherit. Lawyers from across Oklahoma flooded into the county to compete for those appointments. In one small town called Pahuska, with a population of just a few thousand, there were 400 professional guardians and lawyers working the system. That's the world Molly Kyle grew up in. Molly was born in 1886 on Osage land in Oklahoma.

Her Osage name was Wakanta Heumpa. She was the second of four sisters, Anna, Molly, Rita, and Minnie. Their parents were traditional and raised the girls in the Osage spiritual practices, speaking their language at home. but like many Osage children of her generation, Molly was sent to a Catholic boarding school where she was expected to learn English and become more in the language of the day, American.

Molly embraced it in her own way. She kept her language, but she also became a devout Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday on the reservation. She was a quiet, careful woman, educated, practical, the kind of person who thought twice before doing anything. And in many ways, she was the opposite of her sisters. Minnie was the youngest, gentle and married young.

Anna, the eldest, was the wild one. Outgoing, loud at parties, the kind of person closed down dance halls. Rita was the steady one. The four of them had grown up close, and in a county full of strangers, they were each other's anchor. All four sisters would end up marrying white men, which in 1920s Osage County wasn't unusual. Intermarriage between Osage women and white settlers had become common by the 1910s. The oil money was part of it.

Men poured into Osage County from Texas, Kansas, and Missouri, hoping to marry into wealth the way other men headed to gold rushes. But there were quieter reasons, too. Disease had hit the Osage hard over the previous century. The boarding schools had cut off a generation of Osage children from their traditions, and the guardianship system added one more pressure. An Osage woman with a white husband could sometimes manage her own money. An Osage woman married to another Osage often could not.

In her 20s, Molly had a traditional Osage marriage, to a man named Henry Rohn, but the relationship didn't last. Henry had struggled with alcohol since his time at a brutal boarding school in Pennsylvania, and Molly eventually left him. By her 30s, she'd remarried, this time to a white man named Ernest Burckhardt. Ernest had grown up on a cotton farm in Texas. He was six years younger than Molly and had come to a young. Osage County around 1912 when he was 19 to work for his uncle in town. He did that for a while,

but eventually he started driving a taxi, which was how he met Molly. She was one of his regular customers. Ernest was described as an easy-going man, quiet, and the kind of person who listened more than he talked. After he and Molly started seeing each other, he learned a few words of her language, so she wouldn't have to speak English at home. His uncle, the man Ernest had moved to Oklahoma to work for, was named William King Hale. And by 1917, Hale was known around Osage County as one of the nicer white settlers in the area. He donated to the Osage schools, bought new suits for his Osage friends, and paid for caskets when somebody in the tribe died. He'd been calling himself the king of the Osage Hills for years, and most people in town

used the nickname without irony. From what everyone could see, he was a friend to the Osage. Molly liked him, so did most of her family. She and Ernest married in 1917. Molly was 30, and Ernest was 24. Molly and Ernest had three children quickly, a daughter named Elizabeth in 1918, a son they called cowboy in 1920, and another daughter named Anna after Molly's sister in 1920. In those years, Molly had every reason to think she'd built a happy home. Ernest was patient with the children and gentle with her. To anyone watching, he was a devoted husband and father, and Molly's family had been lucky in other ways, too. By the early 1920s, Molly had her own head right. Her three sisters had theirs and her mother Lizzie had hers. The family was wealthy.

They had cars, a nice house in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and each other. But those happy years didn't last. In 1918, Molly's younger sister Minnie got sick. She was 27 years old and had been healthy her whole life, but over the course of a few months, she'd just waste. stayed away. Doctors at the time called it a wasting illness, blaming tuberculosis or some unnamed disease the Osage seemed to keep getting. Minnie died that year. She left behind a husband, a white man named Bill Smith. For a long time, nobody in Molly's family thought of her death as anything other than a tragedy. The Osage had lost many people to disease, smallpox, Influenza, things nobody could control.

There was no reason to think this was different. That changed three years later with Anna. In May 1921, Molly's older sister, 36-year-old Anna, came to the family house for the evening. She'd been dealing with a divorce and going out a lot to dance-alls, speakeasies, parties. That night, she was drinking, and by the end of the evening, she was drunk enough that nobody wanted her driving home,

so Ernest's brother, Byron, offered to drive her. Byron came back. Anna didn't. For three days, the family didn't worry too much. Anna had disappeared on Benders before, but by the fourth day, Molly was making calls. By the fifth, she was talking to the police. On May 27, 1921, two hunters walking through her,

ravine near Fairfax found Anna Brown's body. She'd been shot once in the back of the head. When Byron was questioned, he said he dropped Anna safely at home and didn't know what happened next. There was nobody to contradict him. The coroner did his work. The sheriff did his. Molly offered a $2,000 reward, about $35,000 in today's money. Nobody came forward. William had to be Hale offered a reward of his own on top of Molly's. He visited the family. He told Molly how sorry he was for her loss. But Molly didn't get a grieve her sister for long. Within weeks of Anna's funeral, Molly's mother, Lizzie began to fall ill. Lizzie was the matriarch of the family. She'd raised her four daughters in their own language, gone to mass with them every Sunday,

and watched over them for 50 years. Now, she was wasting away. She had the same fatigue many had complained about three years earlier, the same slow weight loss, and the same doctors saying the same words. It must be a wasting illness, something running in the family. In July, 1921, just two months after Anna's body was found in the ravine,

Lizzie died. Molly was 34. Of her three sisters, only Rita was still alive. Both her parents were gone. While Molly was burying her family, the headwrites were moving. Anna's headwright had passed to her mother, Lizzie. With Lizzie gone, her share would now pass to the surviving daughters. And every day Molly and Rita stayed alive. They were worth more than the day before. By 1922, Molly Barkhart's family had been cut nearly in half. Minnie was gone, Anna was gone, and her mother was gone. Only her sister Rita and Molly herself were still alive. And Molly wasn't the only one losing people.

All across Osage County, the death toll was rising. A man named Charles Whitehorn was shot. was shot. A man named William Stepson, a 29-year-old rodeo champion in excellent health, went to sleep one night and never woke up. Two of Molly's distant relatives died under circumstances no one could explain. One woman fell off a cliff, another was found beaten to death in her own home. The Osage had a name for what was happening. They called it the reign of terror, and what made it even worse was that no one seemed willing to look into it.

The local sheriffs were in the pockets of the same wealthy white men the Osage suspected of the killings. Local prosecutors were often the same lawyers profiting from the guardianship system. Coroner's ruled deaths as accidents, alcoholism or wasting illness. Witnesses who stepped forward were intimidated, paid off, or in a few cases, killed. And anyone who tried to bring in outside help paid for it. In the summer of 1923, an attorney named W.W. Vaughn, who'd been quietly collecting evidence

that he planned to take to Washington, D.C., boarded a train out of Oklahoma. He was found dead beside the tracks the next morning, thrown from a moving train, with whatever evidence he'd been carrying, gone. But even if Vaughn had made it to D.C. with his evidence in hand, it wouldn't have mattered. Because in 1923, the federal government had no real way to help. It's hard to imagine now,

but for most of America's first century and a half, the federal government had almost no investigators of its own. There was no FBI, no real federal police. If a crime happened in your town, the local sheriff handled it. If you didn't trust the local sheriff, your only option was to go to D.C. and ask Congress or a cabinet department to send someone. And even then, there wasn't really anyone to send. That started to change in 1908 when Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, a grand nephew of Napoleon, of all people,

created a small force of 34 special agents to conduct investigations for the Department of Justice. A year later, that office got a name, the Bureau of Investigation. But the Bureau in the early 1920s wasn't anything like the FBI we know today. It was small and understaffed, mostly handling bank fraud, draft dodging, and violations of a law called the Man Act. It didn't typically investigate murders. It didn't really do undercover work, and on Native American reservations, its jurisdiction was even narrower. Since the 1880s, reservations had been their own legal category. Under the Major Crimes Act, federal courts could try murders on tribal land, but only if both the killer and victim were native.

But after the Osage land had been allotted, much of what had been the reservation, was now privately owned plots that fell under Oklahoma's state law. Almost all the killings were happening on those plots, but federal agents could only act on restricted federal trust land and own. only in specific circumstances. That was the door the Osage had to knock on, and they were going to have to knock on it themselves. A few people tried to help them push it open. One was Bill Smith. Bill was Rita's husband, Molly's brother-in-law.

Before he married Rita, he'd been married to Molly's other sister, Minnie. Marrying your dead wife's sister wasn't unheard of in 1920's America, but it raised eyebrows, and it raised them again after Rita's mother and older sister died. To some people in town, Bill looked like a man working his way through the headwrites, one funeral at a time. But Bill didn't act like a killer. He acted like a man who was worried he was going to be next. And unlike most of the white men who'd married into Osage families,

Bill didn't keep his suspicions quiet. He hired a private detective out of Tulsa, paid him out of his own pocket, and started telling anyone who'd listen what he thought. According to Bill, the deaths weren't random. They were planned, and the man at the center of it all was the king of the Osage Hills himself.

Bill didn't see hail as it kindly benefited. factor. He saw a monster. He thought Hale was working his way through the Osage head rights of the whole county, one funeral at a time, and he knew that saying so out loud put him next on the list. Because if Hale's plan was to consolidate the family's head rights into a single inheritance, Bill was the only person who still stood in the way. The problem was The king of the Osage Hills wasn't just a generous local rancher. He was the most connected man in the county. He served as a deputy sheriff.

He counted federal officials, state senators, and judges as personal friends. But he also had a reputation for having a temper. So when Bill Smith said William Hale was a murderer, people listened. quietly behind closed doors, and then they walked away, because anybody who openly crossed hail tended to have a bad year. Bill wasn't the only person trying to get help from outside, though. In the summer of 1922, the Osage Tribal Council sent a man named Barney McBride to Washington, D.C. McBride was a 55-year-old retired oil man, and he was white.

That was important. The Osage knew a white man in a suit walking into a federal office would be taken more seriously than they would. McBride arrived in D.C. on August 9th, 1922. When he checked into his hotel, a telegram was waiting for him. It contained two words.

Be careful. That night, McBride went out to a club. The next morning, his body was found, about 10 miles north of his hotel in a wooded area in Bethesda, Maryland. He'd been beaten, stripped to his shoes and socks, and stabbed more than 20 times. The Washington Post called it one of the most brutal murders the district had ever seen. The headline read, Conspiracy believed to kill rich Indians. That headline did something.

thing. Reporters across the country picked the story up, and for the first time, Americans outside Oklahoma started paying attention to what was happening to the Osage. But the headlines didn't lead to a federal investigation. Not yet. And as the months rolled on, the killings continued. And by early 1923, Molly herself was getting sick. She'd had diabetes for years and knew what it felt like. But this was different. The symptoms were the same ones many and her mother had reported before they died. Molly's doctors were two brothers, both with practices in Fairfax. She didn't know it yet, but both of them were on William Hale's payroll. They gave Molly regular insulin injections at home with earnest helping administer them.

He was a careful, gentle nurse who fed her, took care of the children when she was too tired, and learned her language so she could speak it with him. Molly had no reason to suspect her own husband, and she didn't. But Bill Smith did. He'd spent nearly two years building a case against what he saw as a single operation. Hale at the top and his nephews moving in on Osage families for, the inside and by early 1923 Bill finally decided to use what he'd gathered. Hale owed him money, a $6,000 personal loan that he'd never repaid. Bill went to him privately and made an offer.

Pay what you owe and the evidence stays in my desk drawer. That was one of the only mistakes Bill Smith ever made. On the night of March 9th, 1923, Molly was supposed to spend the night at Rita and Bill's house in Fairfax. She brought her two-year-old son, Cowboy, with her. But Cowboy had an ear infection and was running a fever, so at the last minute, Molly decided to take him home. She kissed her sister goodnight and walked out.

Around three in the morning, a five-gallon container of nitroglycerin detonated beneath the Smith's home. The blast jolted Molly and Ernest awake from across town. Ernest, lying next to his wife in the dark, knew exactly what he was hearing. He'd known the plan for months. The explosion killed Rita instantly. It also killed the family's teenage housekeeper. a young woman named Nettie Brookshire. Bill was dragged from the wreckage, barely alive, and died of his injuries two days later in a hospital. But before he died, Bill named his killer.

He told the authorities he had only three enemies in the world, William King Hale, and Hale's nephews, Ernest and Byron Burckhardt. After the bombing, the Osage Tribal Council had had enough. They sent a delegation to Washington, D.C. to ask the Department of the Interior, which oversaw Native Affairs for federal investigators. The Osage offered to help pay for the investigation themselves. Eventually, the government agreed. The Bureau of Investigation was assigned to the case, but to take it on at all,

the Bureau needed a crime that fell under federal jurisdiction. Most of the Osage murders technically didn't, but there was one case that fit the bill. Barely a month before the bombing, Molly's first husband, Henry Rhone, had been murdered. Henry was the man Molly had left years earlier because of his drinking, and by 1922, his drinking had made him useful to William King Hale for one reason. Hale had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy on Henry's life. Now that's about half a million dollars in today's money. Hale claimed it was insurance on a loan he'd made to Henry.

Whether Henry or his guardian ever agreed to it, nobody could ever say. In late January, 1923, Hale paid a bootleger named John Ramsey to take Henry out drinking. Once Henry was too drunk to defend himself, Ramsey shot him in the back of the head and abandoned the car at the bottom of a creek bed. Hunters found Henry's body on February 6th. Hill grieved publicly, served as a pallbearer at the funeral, and filed the claim on the insurance policy. Of all the Osage murders, Rones was one of the only ones the Bureau could take. He'd been killed on federal trust land, which made it a federal crime. That was their way in.

And the Bureau sent agents to Osage County in April 1923, and they didn't do very well at first. Nobody wanted to talk to them. Hale had threatened or paid off most of the locals, and the Osage didn't trust strangers. Witnesses kept changing their stories or vanishing. The agents themselves. made bad calls. In the hopes of getting an informant inside the local criminal underworld, the Bureau released a notorious outlaw named Blackie Thompson from prison. Instead of helping, Blackie immediately robbed a bank and killed a police officer. It was a disaster. By late 1924,

the case had been open for over a year and nobody had been charged with anything. On top of that, the Bureau was dealing with bad press over a separate scandal involving stolen oil leases at a place called teapot dome. Just when it looked like the Bureau was going to be humiliated for the second time in a row, they got a new director, and he changed everything. John Edgar Hoover had been with the Department of Justice since 1917 and became an assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation, in 1921. In May of 1924, at 29 years old, he was appointed acting director of the agency. By December that year, the appointment was permanent. Hoover was young, ambitious, and had specific ideas about what kind of federal agency he wanted to run. And he saw the Osage case as either his big break or the disaster that would end his career before it really began. So Hoover

decided to scrap the investigation and start over. And he had exactly one person in mind to lead it. His name was Tom White. He was 44 years old, 6'4 foot 4 and wore a Stetson hat. On dangerous assignments, he carried a six-shooter he'd had since his days as a Texas Ranger. Before joining the bureau, he'd been a railroad detective, a frontier lawman, and a sheriff's son who'd grown up in a household that literally lived next door to the jail. Despite all that, Tom White was not a cowboy. He was a methodical investigator who'd never killed anyone in the line of duty, which was rare for a frontier lawman in those days. He believed in evidence and patience, and by 1924 he'd built one of the strongest reputable. in the Bureau running field offices in Houston and Atlanta.

In the summer of 1925, Hoover gave him the Oklahoma City field office and the Osage case. Hoover didn't like undercover work. He worried about agents getting too close to criminals and embarrassing the Bureau. But White decided the only way to crack Osage County was to send agents into town in disguise for the long haul. Not days, months, living in the community, building relationships, and earning trust. He picked four agents for it. One posed as a cattle buyer working the stockyards in barns and listening to ranchers gossip about everything from cattle prices to which families were burying their debt. Another posed as an insurance salesman.

That turned out to be the perfect cover. he went door-to-door selling real legitimate policies, and it turned out, every Osage family he visited had been thinking about who might kill them for months. They told him things they wouldn't have told the police, which relatives had gotten sick out of nowhere, which neighbors had been threatened, which men in town to stay away from. A third posed as an oil prospector, picking up rumors from oilmen and roughnecks. The fourth agent, a man named John Wren, was both the most dangerous and the most effective.

He posed as a native medicine man. Wren was the Bureau's only Native American agent. He carried a bag of remedies, which was mostly sweetened water, and he sat in Osage homes, attended ceremonies, and listened. He became trusted enough that the Osage themselves came to him with their suspicions. In the Bureau's internal account of the case, the medicine man is described as the breakthrough, the agent who got inside. The four met regularly in secret at remote locations outside town.

They had to be careful that nobody knew they were federal agents at all, and slowly but surely they got all the information. they needed. The names at the center of the conspiracy were exactly the ones Bill Smith had named on his deathbed. William King Hale and Ernest and Byron Burckhardt. The agents added one more, the bootleggar John Ramsey. The break came in the fall of 1925.

A Catholic priest contacted the bureau and told them Molly Burkhart hadn't been to Mass in months. Ernest wasn't letting her, but Molly had managed to get a message out to the priest. She believed she was being poisoned. Agents got to her in time. They moved her to a hospital away from the doctors who'd been treating her and put her on real insulin. Within days, her symptoms began to fade. It turned out, the insulin she'd been receiving from hails to doctors had been laced with poison the entire time. With Molly Safe, the agent started turning witnesses. The bootlegger John Ramsey eventually admitted he had pulled the trigger on Henry Rohn himself on Hale's orders.

A petty criminal named Kelsey Morrison confessed to pulling the trigger on Anna Brown. He also named Byron Burkhart as the man who'd driven her out to the ravine, where she was found dead. In January, in 1926, Tom White's agents made the arrests. William King Hale was 51 years old, Ernest Burckhart was 33, and John Ramsey was about 50. 26-year-old Byron Burkhart was arrested with them, charged at the state level for Anna Brown's murder. They were taken into custody with several accomplices in coordinated operations. federal authorities wanted to let the Osage know that after five years something was finally being done.

But while it looked like justice was being served, the most painful part of the case is what happened afterward. By all accounts, Ernest Burkhart had loved his wife. He'd been a tender, attentive husband to Molly for nine years, helping raise their three children and nursing her through diabetes. and the entire time he'd been part of a conspiracy to kill her family and eventually to kill her. When investigators offered him a deal, testify against your uncle and you live, Ernest took it. In open court, he laid the whole conspiracy out. He admitted the marriage had been engineered by Hale from the start. He admitted he had known about every murder.

he admitted he had been handing his wife her poisoned insulin. Whether Ernest was a willing accomplice or a terrified one is something historians have argued about ever since. People who knew Hale described him as scary, a man whose temper kept much of Osage County in line. Later in his life, Ernest himself told his family he had always been afraid of his uncle that he wouldn't have done any of it on his life. his own. Some of the Osage who knew him said they believed he genuinely loved Molly even as he helped poison her. Molly never spoke publicly about any of it. She sat through some of the proceedings watching her husband answer questions about how he had agreed to her death. She filed for divorce

shortly after. The trials that followed dragged on for almost four years and the first hurdle was a legal one, Hale's defense argued that since most of the murders had taken place on land that was technically Oklahoma's jurisdiction, the federal government had no right to try him. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In late May, 1926, the court ruled unanimously that the Roan killing had taken place on restricted native land, making it a federal crime. Without that ruling, Hale probably would have walked. The first federal trial began in July, 1926 in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Five weeks of testimony, five days of deliberation, and on August 25th, a hung jury. Tom White's agents soon found out why. Several jurors had been bribed. One of Hale's own lawyers,

William Schiff, was later convicted of trying to derail the case by getting to get a key witness drunk, so she'd change her story. But jury tampering wasn't Hale's only insurance policy. Two of the men who could have buried Hale on the stand never made it to court. He made sure of it. Henry Grammer was a bootleager and rancher who'd introduced Hale to John Ramsey, and Ernest Burckhardt later identified him as the man who had recruited the bomb maker. In June 1923 weeks after the bombing, Grammer died in a car wreck near his own ranch. Asa Kirby, the man Ernest said, had planted the explosives under the Smith's house, was shot dead nine days later after breaking into a store.

The shopkeeper had been waiting with a shotgun. He'd been tipped off in advance about the robbery by William K. Hale himself. When all that came to light, a second trial was ordered and moved to Oklahoma City. During the proceedings, Hale tried to come up with an alibi. He claimed that on the night of the bombing, he'd been hundreds of miles away at a livestock show in Fort Worth. The bureau agents took the alibi apart, witness by witness. By January 1929, almost six years after Bill and Rita Smith died, the convictions finally held.

Hale, Ernest, and John Ramsey were all sentenced to life in prison. It looked like Molly had finally gotten justice. With Ernest gone, she went back to church and married a man named John Cobb in 1928. She sued the government to terminate her guardianship, and in 1931, she finally won. For the first time in her adult life, Molly Burkhart had legal control of her own money. She died in 1937 at 50 years old from complications related to her diabetes. For a woman who had been on someone's kill list for most of her adult life,

she probably didn't even expect to make it that far. So, was justice served? Not really. William Hale was paroled in 1947. Ernest Burkhart was eventually paroled. Byron Burkhart was tried twice for Anna Brown's murder. Both ended in hung juries, and he was never convicted. Meanwhile, John Ramsey was also paroled,

and Kelsey Morrison's life sentence was overturned on appeal. Most of the Osage murders, dozens of cases the Bureau never had the time, resources or political will to investigate, were never solved. For his book, Killers of the Flower Moon, journalist David Grand spent years digging through Osage County records. He argues the official death toll of around two dozen is almost certainly a fraction of the real number. He found Osage families who'd lost two, three, four people to unexplain deaths.

He found coroners who never ordered autopsies and doctors who signed death certificates without seeing. the body. He found deaths nobody bothered to investigate because the victim was Osage. Jeffrey Standing Bear, the current principal chief of the Osage Nation, estimates that at least 5% of the tribe was murdered during the reign of terror. Out of a population of 2200, that's well over 100 people. The whole conspiracy had run on a single legal loom. poll. Non-O-Sage citizens could inherit Osage head rights. In 1925, while Tom White's agents were still working undercover, Congress finally closed it. But the law came too late for the people already dead. And to this day, about a quarter of Osage head rights are still held by non-Osage

families. Decades later, the Osage Nation sued the federal government over its mismanagement of the Mineral Rights Trust. The case was settled in 2011 for $380 million. The tribe used some of that settlement to begin buying back land they'd once owned, including a major purchase from the media businessman Ted Turner in 2016. Today, they used that land for farming and cattle ranching. It's the first time in two centuries that the Osage Nation has been able to defeat itself without trading with the United States. That's the legacy on the Osage side.

For the federal agency that took the case in 1923, and for the man who would eventually run it for nearly half a century, the Osage murders left a different kind of mark. Before 1923, the Bureau had been a small federal agency that handled paperwork crimes. By the time Hale was convicted in 1929, it had something it never had before. A model. Long-term undercover operations. A complex, multi-suspect murder conspiracy that was solved in a hostile environment.

National press, courtesy of Tom White and J. Edgar Hoover's PR instincts, and proof for the first time, that the federal government could be the answer when local law enforcement, couldn't or wouldn't act. Six years later, in 1935, the Bureau of Investigation officially became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI we know today. J. Edgar Hoover would run that agency for the next 48 years. He'd build it into the most famous law enforcement organization in the world, put his name on the building, and take credit for almost every year.

everything it did. What he wouldn't do much was talk about Tom White. After White retired, Hoover refused to give him access to the old Osage case files for a memoir he was trying to write. White had broken the case that made the Bureau's reputation and built the playbook for federal undercover work that the FBI still uses today. He died in 1971 in a small apartment. in El Paso, Texas, largely forgotten by the agency he had helped build. But the way he built that case became the way the FBI does business. And it all came from one place. A small town in northern Oklahoma where one family and one nation kept asking America to help them.

For a long time, the answer. was no. The FBI was built when it finally became yes. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next Monday for part three of our series on the crimes that built America. It's the story of an interrogation in Phoenix, Arizona, that rewrote the rulebook for every arrest in America. And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios.

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