On May 21, 1921, Anna Brown arrived half-drunk at the home of her sister Mollie Burkhart in Gray Horse, Oklahoma. After causing a scene in front of Mollie’s in-laws who had been invited to dinner, fighting with her invalid mother and with Mollie, Anna walked out the door and became a statistic.
Her badly decomposed body was found about a week later in the bottom of a ravine. The coroner had her body hauled to the top of the ravine where an inept autopsy was immediately performed. A bullet hole was found in the back of her skull. A coroner’s inquest, composed of white men present during the retrieval of the body and the autopsy, concluded that Anna had been murdered.
The case was handed over to the county sheriff’s office which conducted an equally inept investigation. By July, the coroner had closed his file with a notation that Anna had been murdered by “parties unknown”.
Around the time that the coroner closed his file on Anna, her invalid mother wasted away to death. Bill Smith, who was married to Rita, another of Mollie’s sisters, immediately suspected foul play. Bill told the authorities that he thought his mother-in-law had been poisoned.
Official incompetence bordering on indifference continued to stall the sheriff’s investigation. Frustrated by a lack of progress, Bill began conducting his own investigation, but potential witnesses suffered amnesia, often followed by a violent death. Before long, Bill and Rita began to fear for their lives.
On March 9, 1923, a bomb exploded in the basement of their home killing Rita instantly. Bill was dragged from the rubble and taken to a hospital where he died four days later. Mollie was the only member of her family still alive. Then she began to feel sick. By 1925, she was convinced she was being poisoned.
Who wanted to kill these women?
Mollie, Anna, Rita and their mother Lizzie were Osage Indians. They were also millionaires. In 1917, oil was discovered on Osage tribal lands and by the early 1920’s, the Osage had the stuff that dreams are made of. The annual income of the tribe in 1923 was $30 million, equivalent to more than $400 million today.
Enormous wealth attracts conmen and greedy sorts with poor impulse controls. Local white powerbrokers convinced the federal government that the Osage weren’t fit to manage their own wealth. It wasn’t difficult. The federal government already had a paternalistic policy under which Indians were the legal wards of the U.S. government.
As a result, white men were appointed as trustees to control Osage money and dole it out “as needed” to the individual tribal members. The potential for corruption was further enabled by innocuous laws under which a surviving spouse inherits.
Mollie and her sisters, like most Osage heiresses, were married to white men. They were also not the only Osage family suffering from overdoses of lead and poison. An estimated 60 Osage Indians were murdered between 1918 and 1931. As the body count climbed, the tribe appealed to the federal government for help.
In 1925, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) took over the investigation. The case was assigned to Tom White, a former Texas Ranger. He assembled a team that included the first American Indian FBI special agent. Team members went undercover posing as ranchers, oilmen, and cowhands.
It didn’t take them long to identify the murderers of Anna, Lizzie, Rita and Bill. Their investigation even revealed that the ringleader of the conspiracy to kill Anna served as a pallbearer at her funeral.
Piecing together the facts was one thing. Ensuring justice for Mollie and other Osage families was another matter. Today there are about 20,000 enrolled members of the Osage Tribe and most of them lost a family member during the murder spree caused by greed and official indifference.
To read the rest of the story, see Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann (2017). The book includes a mini-bio of the fascinating life of Tom White, a lawman for any era.
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