Summary of Killers of the Flower Moon By David Grann: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of Killers of the Flower Moon By David Grann: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

 

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David Grann's book The Wager is a true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case and Tom White put together an undercover team to uncover the conspiracy. Grann's latest book, The Wager, is also a #1 New York Times bestseller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: May 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223074182

Willie M. Joseph

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CHRONICLE ONE

THE VANISHING

The Osage Indians of Oklahoma refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon. On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart, a resident of the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, began to fear that something had happened to one of her three sisters, Anna Brown. Anna had disappeared three days earlier, and Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier. Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant they were among the registered members of the tribe and possessed a fortune. To obtain the oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties.

The early twentieth century saw the Osage tribe become the wealthiest people per capita in the world, with quarterly checks for only a few dollars. This prosperity belied the images of American Indians that could be traced back to the brutal first contact with whites. Reporters seized upon any signs of the traditional Osage way of life, which seemed to stir in the public’s mind visions of wild Indians. Gray Horse was one of the reservation’s older settlements, and the streets clamored with cowboys, fortune seekers, bootleggers, soothsayers, medicine men, outlaws, U.S. marshals, New York financiers, and oil magnates. Mollie and Ernest Burkhart were two of the last people to see Anna before she vanished.

Mollie had built a beautiful, rambling wooden house in Gray Horse near her family's old lodge and owned several cars and a staff of servants. Ernest was a twenty-eight-year-old white man who had been enchanted by tales of the Osage Hills and had gone to live with his uncle, William K. Hale, in Fairfax. Hale was a domineering cattleman who became Ernest's surrogate father. Ernest and Mollie met while Ernest was a livery driver. Ernest had a tendency to drink moonshine and play Indian stud poker with men of ill repute, but Mollie fell in love with him.

They exchanged rings, vowing to love each other till eternity. By 1921, they had a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son, James. Mollie also tended to her aging mother, Lizzie, who had fallen ill and stayed in bed. On May 21, Mollie asked Ernest to ring Anna to help tend to Lizzie for a change. Anna, the oldest child in the family, held a special status in Mollie's eyes.

When she arrived at Mollie's house, she was drunk and made a scene by offering guests a swig of bootleg whiskey. Anna had recently divorced her husband and spent more time in the reservation's tumultuous boomtowns, where people whizzed all day and banged all night. At Mollie's house, Anna began to flirt with Ernest's younger brother, Bryan, whom she had sometimes dated. Mollie, Ernest's sister, is in a relationship with a man who is more brooding than Ernest and has inscrutable yellow-flecked eyes and thinning hair. At a luncheon, Anna threatens to kill him if he fools around with another woman.

Mollie and Ernest take a trip to Fairfax to meet Hale and see Bringing Up Father, a touring musical about a poor Irish immigrant who wins a million-dollar sweepstakes and struggles to assimilate into high society. After the third night, Mollie dispatches Ernest to check on Anna's house and finds it locked. Ernest stands alone in the heat, blurring the prairies and making the tall grass creak underfoot. Anna, an Osage woman, disappeared from her home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a week after her husband, Charles Whitehorn, left for Pawhuska. Mollie, an Osage woman, was reassured by Ernest that Anna would be back soon.

A week later, an oil worker noticed a rotting corpse near the base of a derrick, with two bullet holes between the eyes. Someone pulled out a letter addressed to Charles Whitehorn, which revealed that he had been shot, execution-style. A man and his teenage son were squirrel hunting by Three Mile Creek, near Fairfax, when the boy spotted a squirrel and pulled the trigger. He chased it down a steep wooded slope and found the body of an American Indian woman. The men and the boy hurried out of the ravine and raced on their horse-drawn wagon to the Big Hill Trading Company, where Scott Mathis alerted his undertaker to the creek.

The body of Anna Brown was found in a ravine and covered with salt and ice. Mollie led a procession to the creek with Ernest, Bryan, Rita, Bill Smith, Kelsie Morrison, and Kelsie's Osage wife. Mollie recognized her Indian blanket and clothes, and Bill pried open her mouth to reveal Anna's gold fillings. Mollie mouthed the word yes and retreated from the creek with Ernest, leaving behind the first hint of the darkness that threatened to destroy both her family and her tribe.

AN ACT OF GOD OR MAN?

Inquests were a remnant of a time when ordinary citizens assumed the burden of investigating crimes and maintaining order. The justice of the peace selected jurors from among the white men at the ravine to determine whether Anna had died by an act of God or man, and if it had been a felony, they were tasked with trying to identify the principals and accessories to the crime. Two doctors, James and David Shoun, performed an autopsy and examined the clothes Anna wore, searching for unusual tears or stains. The Shouns attempted to determine the time of death of Anna, a woman who had been dead for several days. However, pathologists realized that too many variables affect the rate of decomposition, so a rough estimate was made and the Shouns determined that Anna had been deceased between five and seven days.

A round hole in the back of her skull revealed a.32-caliber bullet, which they thought had caused the wound. Frontier lawmen were primarily gunfighters and trackers, expected to