"Killers of The Flower Moon" Author David Grann Discusses His Research And The Shocking Discoveries

it was perhaps the most sinister murder conspiracy in American history perpetrated against a nation of original Americans the real death was not the official death toll the bureau gave up about 27 that it was in the scores if not hundreds David grands runaway bestseller killers of the flower moon tells the forgotten story of America's Osage Indians whose astounding plight in the 1920s was not born of poverty but of riches because underneath their reservation was an ocean of oil they were considered the wealthiest people per capita than in the world so we said at the time where as one America might own a car ego Saijo and eleven of them their wealth made the osage attractive targets for cold-blooded con men who sometimes even married their victims took their money and then their lives these murder schemes were essentially inheritance schemes and it's one of the things that maybes crime so deeply sinister grands taught and shocking book is now becoming a major motion picture with an all-star cast and director my hope is with a movie you know book reaches so many people what a movie can reach even more that this story will become part of our national narrative will become part of our consciousness and part of our conscience which is where it belongs how gran found the story how the murders created the FBI and how racism and greed led to one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history as we meet the reporter who uncovered it all [Music] David Brent welcome to st. Louis thank you it's great to be here you know the book is fascinating the amount of research that must have gone into it is sort of mind-boggling really was about five years yeah took it took five years I didn't realize when I began how long it would take but it was quite a journey and part of it was archival trying to find records to bring this story to life and then the other part of the research was tracking down descendents of both the murderers and the victims who would suffer from this criminal conspiracy and getting their oral histories from what documents they had it's not just putting together a jigsaw puzzle you have to go out and find the pieces to put into the puzzle a hundred percent and I'm a big believer that you know you kind of have to do that work and you know I would spend weeks at various archives and for days and days you know you you kind of find nothing and then one day almost through serendipity you open a folder and there is the secret grand jury testimony from one of the trials that had never been made public and was it even properly filed and it suddenly cracks open this world then you hear the voices of the people you're writing about well and really speaking of serendipity it's a little bit how this started you had some knowledge of it when you went down to Oklahoma to kind of poke around a little bit but it really started with a photograph and not even so much the photograph of what wasn't in the photograph anymore yeah it did I mean I was fairly ignorant of these crimes and what had transpired and I made this trip out the Osage Territory in Osage Nation and the first thing I did was I went to the Osage Nation Museum to see if I could learn more and when I was there I saw this great photograph was taken in 1924 it shows members of those aged nation along with white settlers looks very innocent from afar when I noticed that a portion of that photograph was missing and I asked the the museum director Katherine wreckless who you know what why is that part of the photograph not there and she said it had contained a figure so frightening she had decided to remove it and she pointed to that missing panel she said the devil was standing right there and she then went down into the basement and she brought up an image of the missing panel which they had and it showed one of the killers of the osage and for me that you know it's rare that books where stories have kind of origin stories that are so clear but for me this really was the origins of the project because I kept looking at that photograph and thinking you know the Osage had removed it because they couldn't forget what had happened and people like me had never been taught this we had never learned it we knew nothing about it and I just thought how can that be and so that really began this kind of quest began it was about a five-year quest to try to figure out who that missing figure was the history that figure embody and it led me to what I would come to realize was one of the most sinister crimes in American history pure evil pure evil and the guy we're speaking of mr. Hale when you look at it looks like an accountant or something yeah and and and that's one of the things that's so unsettling about these crimes is that you know these were prominent figures William Hale was a deputy sheriff he was a cattle baron he was somebody who advocated for what he called god-fearing Souls and yet here he was engineering several of these murders but as the project went along the story also changed because originally I had thought of this story about the singular evil figure which was Hale and he really is you know fairly sociopathic creature and yet over time I because I spoke to more Osage as I found more documents as I collected more oral histories I began to realize that this was not actually a story about a singular evil fear it was really about a culture of killing about many people who were involved and you had bankers and law men and sheriffs and prosecutors who were complicit you had doctors who were administering poisons you had reporters who did not disclose the truth you and many others who remain complicit in their silence and so what's most unsettling for me at least what was most unsettling is we like to think that when people commit these crimes there is this kind of singular evil figure who is somehow apart from us and different from us and when you remove that evil everything returns to normal what if ordinary people committed these evil and what lurked inside them and the only explanation after all the years that at least got to that is that the osage were killed for their money so greed was the primary motivating factor or a motivating factor but that was fueled with this prejudice in which the Osage were not seen as these fully embodied humans would you know dignity and with the same souls and those two forces that greed and that prejudice came together to create this culture of killing it was a runaway bestseller I guess still is so for the five people who haven't read it yeah let's lay out the story a little bit so we're talking about the Osage Indians yeah at this time they were mostly in Oklahoma they had sort of gotten pushed down there yep because it was terrible land and the people who pushed them down there had a surprise under the land yeah it turned out that this land where they had you know this this kind of pile of rocks it's one of those days chief called it back then turned out to be sitting upon some of the largest deposits of oil and in the United States and there were only about 2,000 or so Osage on the tribal roll at that point because of forced migration disease massacres I mean the Osage had been forced to see more than 100 million acres of their territory they once had a presence here in Missouri they stretched all the way to the edge of the Rockies Thomas Jefferson have referred to them as this great nation then of course as it happened to so many Native Americans you know through this drive to take over their lands and Massacre so numbers had dwindled but they ended up ultimately in 1870s on this area was then Indian Territory would later become Oklahoma and it turned out it was sitting upon all this oil and so those two thousand are so Osage received for example in the near 1923 the equivalent of what would be today about four hundred million dollars they were considered the wealthiest people per capita than in the world and reporters often with a great deal of prejudice and sensationalism would head out the Osage Territory and kind of regular readers with these stories about the quote/unquote plutocratic Osage and the quote/unquote red millionaires were their terra cotta mansions and their cars we said at the time where as one America might own a car each Osage owned eleven of them where they truly that profligate or was at all just I hate to use the term fake news but there was a great deal of I mean the Osage were like any other human beings he had some who were prolific yet you had some who saved their money at some who invested you know the specter of human nature it was no different for the Osage as it was for I think any any humankind but what was different about the Osage was there was this great deal of prejudice both in the coverage and then also in terms of what politicians ultimately decide to do so they portrayed them as these children who somehow couldn't again it was part of this prejudice in which somehow the Osage you know couldn't handle their money and and it went so far that members of the US Congress passed this legislation requiring that many Osage have these white Guardians these businessmen these bankers these these politicians to manage the fortunes and this system was not abstractly racist it was literally racist it was based on the quantum of Osage blood so if you were a full-blooded Osage you were Dean quote/unquote incompetent and you were given one of these guardians and not only was it a racist system it also led to one of the largest state and federally sanctioned criminal enterprises as many of these guardians went on the swindle you know tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from the Osage well and it's not only is it outrageous but I don't even see how it was legal yeah well after Congress passed a big cumbersome pass it and and and I you know I really recommend you know for me it was eye-opening to go back and and dig up the debates that these members of Congress would have and you really get a sense we're not talking that long ago you're talking about the 1920s you really get a level and the breath prejudice that existed at that time so these guardians it sounds like we're really at the heart of this remarkable conspiracy which you found again and sort of by accident serendipity looking at the lists of some of the people they represented and noticed how many were dead yes yeah so I went one of the main archives I visited was in Fort Worth which is a branch of the National Archives it's this enormous warehouse looks like something out of the los Raiders of the Lost Ark where they you know stick the last come in at the end it's just huge it could fit airplanes in it like the furniture area you know yeah yeah yes and I had pulled records on the guardians and I was hoping simply to determine whether a certain OSI agent had a certain guardian and so I pulled all these records that was going through the boxes and in those boxes was this ledger it was a little book had like a fabric cover that identified guardians and who were the osage's whose fortunes they had managed and it was only for a few years and when I opened up the book I noticed that one of the Guardians had had five osage's whose fortune they had managed and the only other thing in this book besides the Guardian and the oh Sh whose fortunes they controlled the only other writing in the book was if one of those sages had died somebody some anonymous bureaucrat had written the word next to the name he just said the word edie and so he noticed under one of these guardians who had had five Osage a was next to one of the names that were dead and then I looked the next dam and I saw the word dead and I looked at the next name and I saw the word dead and then I looked at the fourth name and I said dad I looked at the fifth ml5 Edie and I thought that's crazy that defies any natural death rate this is just a few years Osage were wealthy they had health care they were not hungry and so I began to look at other names and I noticed them under one name there was about there was one Guardian I had about a dozen osage's whose fortune they had managed and about 50% were listed as dead now again some of these may have been from natural causes but it defied any natural death rate and so then I began to try to investigate and look into some of those names that were listed and in several the cases I could find testimony of money that had been stolen or a complaint about a poisoning or of a suspicious death or some bit of testimony and by the end I came to realize that this little seemingly anti septic ledger really contained the hints of a systematic murder campaign and to me also the person and the bureaucrat who had written the word dead next to each name it really struck me as this kind of banality of evil this kind of bureaucratic evil and it got to the also the breath of complicity because that person had to have known as well I mean why are all these people having their names listed as dead so why were these guardians those that participated in this conspiracy and others who weren't guardians killing them because they couldn't get the money because through some sort of inheritance because it was ahead right they could only be passed through the families is that correct so so when when the Osage when before they became a state Oklahoma became a state the US government forced upon me O sage does kind of culmination of this very brutal assimilation campaign which was a lot in it and what they wanted to do was to divvy up the land and each Osage would have a portion and then they open up the rest of the lands and this was a way not incidentally to make it much easier to procure Native American lands and this had happened to many other First Nations but when the low sage were negotiating they had more leverage one they had a deed to their land they had actually purchased it they saw they had this deed they were the last nation and what was then Indian territory to be allotted they were led by one of their greatest Chiefs at the time this guy spoke like seven languages French Sioux eonline and they inserted into their treaty provision into their treaty over allotment what seemed at the time of very curious provision it said we shall maintain all the subsurface mineral rights to our land and at that time nobody knew that those age were sitting on a fortune well but they knew there was a trickle and they very shrewdly managed to hold on to this last realm of their territory around they could not even see and each one of those Osage were on the tribal roll were given a head right which was essentially a share in this mineral trust and a head right could not be bought or sold it could only be passed down through inheritance and so these murder schemes were essentially inheritance schemes and it's one of the things that maybes crime so deeply sinister they involved these intimate levels of betrayal they involve people marrying into families usually white men but sometimes white women as well marrying into families having sometimes children with an Osage while systematically plotting to murder them sometimes their children as well so they could then inherit those head rights there is dispute as to how many people actually died the official numbers watch something like 24 yeah I think the official total for the FBI listed was usually about twenty seven but you suspect it's much much higher much higher and and when you begin to look for example at books like that ledger you begin to realize that there was this kind of much deeper and darker conspiracy that the FBI and its investigation never fully exposed and that this really was about a culture of killing and there were many people complicit when you speak to Osage when you look at the archival record records a conservative estimate would be in the scores if not hundreds of people Osage who were killed the FBI is sort of the parallel story going on here this really gave birth to the FBI or at least nurtured it I mean that the FBI wasn't called the FBI then zero of investigation right right and and j edgar hoover rose to prominence having all the people you would think would not be interested in helping these poor indians out in oklahoma would be j edgar hoover yes so so the bureau at that time was a pretty ragtag operation they had only a smattering of offices across the country they suffer from many of the same problems that plague law enforcement at that time which was poor professionalization great deal of corruption poor training and FBI which was then known as a bureau investigation something from these two and the FBI had very limited jurisdiction over crimes at that time in the United States but one of the jurisdictions they have was over American Indian reservations and so that is why this case fell to the FBI and why it became one of their first major homicide cases and it fell to Hoover the Bureau had actually been working on the case starting in 1923 and for two years I worked on the case and they completely bungled it they failed to make any arrests they got this informant this guy named Blackie Thompson who was this kind of legendary outlaw at the time they got him out of jail thinking okay we can use him as an informant to help us and instead he slipped away and he robbed the bank and he killed the police officer just before that Hoover wanted to dump the case because he didn't think they could solve it and he just was afraid of the headaches but he was suddenly afraid that the scandal might destroy his dreams of building this bureaucratic empire he was only 29 at the time he was new to the job and he was afraid that the scam might end it so that is why he took over the case and he eventually turned it over to frontier lawman an old FBI agent a guy named Tom white who takes over the case or leads the investigation yeah white as this character who was fiction people would say you were sort of telegraphic there maybe it's true so it really did kind of give birth to the FBI right well it was really one of their first major homicide cases and what it did was it helped build the manor both of its power as a federal agency where it would have broader jurisdiction but also the beginning of kind of the professionalization of investigations and this was a real stepping stone toward that they used fingerprinting they used handwriting analysis they used undercover operatives to try to crack the case and so it became a kind of case study or model in the development of the bureau well and they needed all of that technology at least technology of the time because these murders were kind of all over the map some were shootings and were poisonings it was a it wasn't just one kind of you know basic conspiracy was it was crazy yeah it was crazy and you know and I write a lot about this remarkable woman in Molly Burkhardt this Osage woman was born in a wigwam in the 1880s practicing Osage traditions speaking Osage because of the oil money within a few decades she's living in this kind of large terracotta house she's married a white set there and she really is somebody who straddles not only two centuries but two civilizations and her family is being systematically targeted and it shows that the various methods used I mean her older sister Anna brown is four shot in the back of the head within a few within two months her mother has died of suspected poisoning and then she had a younger sister who's so terrified of these killing she had moved to live closer to Molly and one night Molly here is this loud explosion she goes to the window she looks out the window and in the distance she see this orange ball rising in the sky and somebody had blown up her younger sister's house so just in that one family you have a shooting a bombing and a poisoning and not only were the Osage being systematically targeted but even those who who were not corrupt to do it tried to catch the killers were often killed he had one man thrown off a speeding train you had a man and went to Washington DC to try to get federal authorities to look into these killings Stepney went into a boarding house he received a telegram from an associate in Oklahoma that said be careful he left the boarding house that night he was abducted and his body was found in a culvert the next day and he had been stabbed more than 20 times and beaten to death again for the five people who haven't read the book I don't want to spoil the ending so we won't go into if justice was meted out although I think you can probably guess for the most part that the story kind of goes in that direction but it's your belief I think from the research that you came up with it makes up the third section of the book yeah there's a lot more out there that could be uncovered yes and one of the things in speaking to so many Osage getting their oral histories and getting documents is you begin to realize that there are a lot of other suspicious deaths that were never properly investigated and that the case was effectively closed prematurely and one of the great challenges is and you know I'd always thought in reporting and telling stories like this you can't bring justice but you can at least provide a proper accounting which is to say you can identify the perpetrators and record the voices of the victims but in many cases that's no longer possible suspects are to seize the witnesses are deceased and this was a conspiracy in which people you know were consciously covering up evidence you know he had morticians covering a bullet wounds doctors covering up the crimes you had long and covering it up and so in many of these cases you can't provide that proper accounting and for me that was one of the most haunting parts is that in many cases the murderer I had not only erased the lives of the victims but they had also erased their history a many of sage this day live wood gnawing doubts not knowing precisely who was responsible for the death and the family and the absconded with their money reading the book I think anybody reading the book would say this would make a really good movie including I guess Martin Scorsese yay yeah so in Warren Scorsese is there in pre-production now and they're getting ready to shoot and in in Osage County which is terrific and have Osage participate and you know we talked about that photograph a little bit and for me you know the the Hope when writing the book was hopefully to address my own ignorance but also to hopefully fill in some of the ignorance of people outside Osage Nation though sage obviously know their history deeply and my hope is the movie you know book reaches so many people what a movie can reach even more that this story will become part of our national narrative will become part of our consciousness and part of our conscience which is where it belongs our saints Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio Oscar the good thing is it it's a very sensitive story it's got a lot of moral complexity but it's in the hands of people who are serious and sensitive I hope and really care about getting it right which is important what you hope to take away is for people who either read the book or see the movie it's it's too late to bring justice we're talking and you can't bring justice you can't bring people back to life but my hope is that we can at least restore some of our history so we new can know more about our past and in knowing more about our pasts also think about the kind of people we want to be and the kind of nation we want to be in the future and I hope that'll be the takeaway as as people move forward maybe something good can come of it one hopes David Grant thanks very much for this appreciate it [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Storytellers' Studio

Views: 537,538

Keywords: Grann, Scorsese, Di Nero, DiCaprio, Osage, Killers of the Flower Moon

Id: I6D6sJxECxQ

Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019