The man known to history as William
King Hale was born on the 24th of December 1874 in Hunt County in Texas
in what was then the American West. His mother was Mary Elizabeth Gaines, she died
when William was three years old and the details of his father, Peyton Hale, are scant, indeed
very little is known about William Hale’s family background and early life at all. However, he
did have an older sister by the name of Martha, who went by the diminutive name Mattie and
who would later marry Walter Burkhartt. Her sons through that marriage, Ernest and Byron
– Also known as Bryan, particularly Ernest, would play a prominent role in Hale’s
later life. Evidently by the time he was a teenager Hale was already working as a
cowboy in Texas, a profession which despite the depiction of it as a life of crime and
gun-slinging in countless western films, was actually exactly what it was described as,
somebody who herded cows across the vast plains of the American Midwest. It was also in his youth
that he met and then later married Myrtle Fry. Hale grew up in the American West, a time and
place which has inspired many stories, but which is often misunderstood, used as it was as the
backdrop for numerous films and books. The ‘West’ was not a homogenous entity. There were many
different versions of it and Hale’s later life and the events which he has become famous for took
place in a specific version of the ‘West’. Broadly speaking, the West was the vast part of North
America within the continental United States, stretching from the River Mississippi westwards to
the Pacific Ocean. This was a stretch of territory which was relatively untouched by people of
European descent until the early nineteenth century, but owing to a series of events, most
notably the Louisiana Purchase of the Midwest from France by the government of President Thomas
Jefferson in 1803 and the US-Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, this huge mass of territory came under
the jurisdiction of the United States by the end of the 1840s. Then successive gold, silver and
oil rushes in places like California, Tombstone Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas brought hundreds of
thousands of people westwards in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s seeking riches and a better life. As
they did, they began to settle towns and villages all over the region. This westward expansion also
brought conflict with the Native Americans of the area, a process which we will explore in more
detail with regard to the Osage Indians presently. The part of the American West which Hale grew
up in and lived much of his life was the more traditional or stereotypical version of the
West, generally rural and isolated parts of the countryside where the trappings of
modern western society were only just being introduced in the second half of the
nineteenth century. There were more developed corners of the country in this respect. For
instance, towns like San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco out in California, which were
part of the frontier in the 1850s and 1860s, had become well-developed urban centres by
the 1890s, much like the towns and cities of the East Coast. Here the kind of lawless and
opportunistic activities which would characterise Hale’s later life in Oklahoma were simply not
possible by the turn of the twentieth century, but the more rural and less developed parts of
the West, in regions like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma were still semi-lawless and
had a limited form of governmental oversight or law and order. It was here that opportunistic
and ruthless individuals, like Hale would reveal himself to be in later life, could acquire massive
riches through underhand and brutal behaviour, often at the expense of the Native
Americans who were so often the victims of westward expansion. This was the backdrop
against which Hale’s story would play out. While the details of Hale’s early life are very
scant indeed, we get a much better idea of his life story from around 1900 onwards. This was the
period during which he first settled in Oklahoma, one of the last frontiers of the American West,
where society and government were still tenuous enough that the region would not be granted
statehood status until 1907, making it the 46th State in the union. As one modern account of
Hale’s arrival into Oklahoma put it, he seemed to have come out of nowhere, as an individual with a
past that no one knew anything about, and arriving with little more than the clothes he was wearing
and a copy of the Bible, the latter being an ironic possession given his subsequent behaviour
in Oklahoma over the next thirty years. Although still a young man when he arrived in the region,
Hale had many of the personal characteristics which would identify him throughout his life:
black hair, an ‘owlish’ face and a large pair of spectacles which framed a shrewd look that always
seemed to be on the lookout for an opportunity, no matter how unethical it might be. When he arrived
in Oklahoma he first found work as a cowboy, but he would soon graduate to more illustrious
and more financially lucrative activities. The region which Hale moved to at this time was
named after the Osage Indians, a Native American people who lived here in great numbers. Osage
is an English rendering of the original name the French gave to the Native American tribe called
the Ni-U-Kon-Ska, meaning ‘People of the Middle Waters’, which dominated parts of the Ohio River
Valley and the Mississippi River Valley when the French first began establishing trading stations
along the course of these riverine route-ways in the seventeenth century. The Osage dominated
much of what is now Ohio and surrounding regions by the eighteenth century, but their history
here went back over two millennia to when the Mound-building cultures of the American Midwest
and south had first begun to flourish in a vast region from Texas east to the Atlantic Ocean.
But, like all their brethren further to the east, the Osage came under increasing pressure from the
United States from the late eighteenth century onwards. As this occurred, there were growing
drives to transplant the Natives of regions like Ohio, Alabama and Tennessee, into which
the US wished to expand further westwards, to land which was deemed to be unoccupied. The most
infamous example of this was the ‘Trail of Tears’ when 60,000 people from several Native groups
were forced west of the Mississippi from places like Tennessee and Alabama in the 1830s by the
government, leading to the deaths of thousands. The Osage soon fell prey to such a scheme
themselves. Indeed, they were involved to some extent in the removals of the 1820s and
1830s, while they were also devastated by a smallpox pandemic which ravaged native populations
all across North America in 1837 and 1838. Many of them ended up in places like Kansas, but others
tried to remain on their ancestral lands in Ohio and fight the US government as part of the Indian
Wars of the mid-nineteenth century which focused primarily on the Sioux and Lakota Indians
further to the north-west in what are now the Dakotas and Montana. Some Osage were hired
by the US government at this time as scouts to help the Americans map out and explore the area,
but others continued to resist. By the 1870s, though, it was becoming clear to the Native
Americans across the continent that they were fighting a lost cause. Many were corralled into
reservations, but some managed to strike deals with the government in Washington for their lands.
The Osage were one of the better arbiters in this respect and managed to acquire enough financing
that they were in a position to buy their own reservation lands, thus ensuring a degree of
self-determination in their own affairs. This was located in the north-central region of what
was then known as the Oklahoma Territory. It consisted of a one and a half million acre plot
of land and is coterminous with Osage County in the state of Oklahoma today. It was to this
region that Hale gravitated some years later. The events which followed would not have
occurred had Oklahoma not turned out to be such an oil-rich region. Today other parts of the
United States are synonymous with oil. California, for instance, had its oil boom from the 1870s
onwards, which produced much of the wealth which later went into building up Hollywood, while
Texas is regarded as the heart of American oil country. But in reality, back in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oklahoma was the thriving heart of the oil
industry in the United States. There was more oil, by far, being produced here, per square mile
than any other region in the country. And the Osage soon discovered that they were sitting on
quite a lot of it. In 1894 the first discovery of large oil deposits were made under the
lands owned by the Osage. While the Osage were not in a position to begin exploiting the
reserves themselves, they were soon in contact with oilmen who had experience in laying
down oil wells and extracting the energy in large quantities. Some of this was through the
intercession of Henry Foster and Edwin B. Foster, two oilmen operating out of Kansas. These
were looking to turn a profit themselves, but as the Osage owned the vast land on which the
oil was sitting it was clear that the Natives were soon to become wealthy if they struck a good deal
with those who would take it out of the ground. In the mid-1890s an agreement was worked out
between the Fosters, the Osage and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The latter was a government body
and, despite the often brutal treatment of various Native American groups by the US government in
the century between US independence and the end of the Sioux Wars, by the late nineteenth century
Washington often did act in ways which aimed to treat groups such as the Osage with a modicum of
respect and, in the events which would follow, it was the government which eventually acted
in defence of the Osage. In the mid-1890s the Bureau of Indian Affairs eventually agreed that
the Fosters could begin prospecting for oil and extracting it from Osage territory, but they were
to pay the Osage 10% of all profits therefrom. In order to understand how the Osage became so
wealthy, and why individuals like Hale became involved in trying to steal their wealth, one
needs to have an overall view of exactly how much oil was being extracted from beneath the earth in
Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, and how much the Osage were making from this. Between the
1850s and the 1920s Oklahoma was rivalled only by California in terms of the volume of oil that it
produced and for large stretches of time during this era it was the largest producer of any region
in the United States. Production began to peak in the decades following the discovery of oil on
the Osage territory. It peaked in the 1920s, when Hale’s story also took centre-stage, with
production of approximately 700,000 barrels of oil per day in Oklahoma. And the United States
had emerged as the world’s foremost economic power by then, meaning that the demand for oil
was enormous and the profits correspondingly huge. Often the Osage collected in excess of ten million
dollars a year as part of their 10% royalties and in the early 1920s this peaked towards thirty
million dollars, a sum equivalent to hundreds of millions in today’s money.
To get a sense of exactly how wealthy this made individual members of the Osage community, we
need to look at exactly how many people this was divided between. There were hundreds of families
living on the Osage lands in Oklahoma, meaning that there were several thousand who were entitled
to part of the payment for the oil revenue which was generated every year. Some of these were
children, so the pool was reduced accordingly, but given that the sum which was received
annually in the early 1920s was equivalent to half a billion dollar’s today, the sum of
money which the average Osage could expect to receive was substantial indeed by the standards
of the time. This was called a ‘head right’, the right of each Osage to a share in the oil
wealth. Add to this the fact that the region also began to develop economically as oil prospectors
moved in and attendant services developed on lands which were also owned by the Osage, and the result
was that this community was quickly moving from extreme poverty to wealth in the early twentieth
century. By the 1910s the region was developing in such a way that the Osage were living in
large houses with servants and automobiles, still a rarity in that part of Oklahoma, to
convey them into town and around the area. This was a version of early twentieth-century
America where society was turned on its head. It was the Native Americans who were wealthy
here and the average American of European extraction that was cleaning their homes and
buying in luxury commodities to the region for them. It has been estimated that collectively
the Osage constituted the wealthiest group of people in the world at one time by the end
of the 1910s and the start of the 1920s. There was, though, a complicating factor in
all of this, one which is highly relevant for Hale’s story. While the federal government had
ensured back in the mid-1890s that the Osage were rewarded for any oil that was extracted from
beneath their lands, they had also done so with the characteristic type of racial attitudes of
the time which believed that the Natives were incapable of looking after their own affairs.
Accordingly, a system of guardianship was set up in 1897 whereby any Osage who were deemed to
be unable to look after their newfound wealth would have guardians appointed to monitor what
they did with their money and to decide whether they were spending it appropriately. This system
was rife for abuse and years later there were more lawyers present per capita in the Osage
territory than in any other part of America, as individuals tried to exploit the Osage and
control their wealth. What was more, the guardian system often functioned in such a way that if an
individual member of the Osage community died, their oil payments or ‘head rights’ could
continue to flow to their former guardian, particularly so if there were children involved
when the person died or some other complicating factor of this nature. All of this would
end in tragedy for the Osage in the 1920s. Back in the 1900s Hale began to prosper when he
arrived to Osage territory. He started off as a cowboy on a ranch, driving cattle between Oklahoma
and his native Texas and onwards again to Kansas, often with the livestock being sent north towards
Chicago and other major towns and cities for supply to the wealthier East Coast markets where
Gilded Age upper middle class families had a taste for beef. While the cowboys of the era have
been immortalised in western films and novels, it was not glamorous work. It was long, arduous,
uncomfortable and badly paid, and Hale soon began to aspire to something else. To do so, he first
began saving his meagre wages and after a time had put together enough to be able to start buying
his own herd. Over time he used this to grow his wealth within Osage territory, but even this
promising beginning in Oklahoma met with disaster. After a series of business and economic setbacks,
Hale ended up bankrupt in the mid-1900s. Yet even this new setback only made him more determined,
though unfortunately for his Native American neighbours, he became ever more ruthless too. In
the course of the second half of the 1900s he used every means possible to begin building himself
back up as a cattleman, becoming an expert in the business, but also cutting corners through
insurance fraud and other illegal methods. It worked, and by the end of the 1900s Hale had
become a prosperous figure in Osage territory. The 1910s saw him emerge as arguably the most
powerful man in Osage territory. As he ruthlessly cornered every business opportunity, he amassed
an estate of some 45,000 acres of land, buying up the farms from competitors, leasing lands from the
Osage and cultivating relationships with the most powerful politicians in Oklahoma. His appearance
changed too. Gone was the rustic cowboy that had arrived in Oklahoma, and in its place Hale emerged
as a genteel business figure who dressed in a suit with a bow-tie and a felt hat. He was also named
as a reserve deputy sheriff in Fairfax County and in this capacity had charge over a substantial
element of law enforcement in the Osage territory, walking around the region with a pistol strapped
to his side. By that time he already had a controlling stake in the Fairfax Bank and so was
a powerful local moneylender. Years later it was speculated that Hale was a millionaire by the
end of the 1910s and was widely referred to as ‘the King of the Osage’, such was his economic
and political power in the region, but it was seemingly never enough for Hale. Moreover, his
methods hinted at his future crimes. Much of his wealth was accumulated in the 1900s and 1910s
by exploitative dealings with the Osage, engaging in land leases and trade deals with the Native
Americans which were to his advantage and directly exploiting the Osages’ lack of familiarity with
certain areas of land law and economic policy. Yet even so, Hale would soon decide he could go
further still to benefit himself at their expense. While Hale was enriching himself in Oklahoma
through dubious business activities in the 1910s, trouble was brewing for the Osage.
The guardian system and the associated head rights had presented an opportunity for
ruthless individuals in the Osage territory, and, as the amount of money being generated by the
oil wells of the territory increased year by year, many saw an opportunity. This was especially the
case as countries like the United States moved away from a reliance on coal as the primary fossil
fuel driving their economies to a greater reliance on oil and petroleum. Moreover, the full extent of
the oil reserves on the Osage territory was only established in 1917 when new wells were drilled.
With this, it became clear that great wealth would continue to flow to the Osage for many, many
years to come. If an individual could establish themselves as a guardian to an Osage individual
or family, then if something happened to the Osage in question the guardian might hope to benefit
financially. Similarly, if a member of the Osage tribe died, their lands might become available
and, if a white man could muscle in, he could hope to benefit financially from the oil wealth of the
region. This was especially the case as the head rights functioned in the 1910s and early 1920s in
such a manner that a non-Osage could inherit them from an Osage that died. This loophole would be
closed in time, but it presented an opportunity for Hale and others before the federal government
moved to prevent exploitation of the law. What has come to be termed the Osage Reign
of Terror only began to gain attention and notoriety from 1922 onwards, but it is now
accepted that the first murders might have been committed as early as 1918. It was at this
time that an Osage woman by the name of Minnie Brown died at just 27 years of age from what at
the time was described as a peculiar disease, the specifics of which could not be determined
by her doctors. It is now generally understood that Minnie had been poisoned and that her death
constituted the first killing in the Reign of Terror. Over the next decade, dozens more Osage
would fall victim to surreptitious activities and murders by their neighbours, most of them being
white settlers in Osage territory who were trying to claim the head rights of their victims.
Over the ten-year period at least 60 Osage were killed and the murders terrorised the wider
Osage community. As we will see, it would take a federal investigation of events in Osage country,
and a legal altering of the manner in which the head rights were transferred to guardians in
1925, before the killings would come to an end. In the events which followed, Hale would become
closely aligned with his nephews, Ernest and Bryan Burkhartt, sons of his sister Martha, though
the relationship was hardly equal and Ernest, the more significant of the two brothers in the
events which ensued, would later state of his uncle that, “He was not the kind of a man to ask
you to do something – he told you.” Nevertheless, Ernest developed a close relationship with
Hale and viewed him as a surrogate father. He first arrived in Osage country in 1912 as a
green-behind-the-ears 19 year old who had left Texas to settle in what was viewed as one of the
last vestiges of the American West in Oklahoma. There he began working for his uncle in various
capacities as part of his ever-growing business and legal empire in the Osage territory. Some
of this was simple driving and delivery work and it was in this capacity that Ernest would meet
Mollie, the sister of Millie whose unusual demise in 1918 is viewed as the possible beginning
of the Reign of Terror, and whose family had acquired great wealth owing to the head rights
and oil revenue that poured in during the 1910s and into the 1920s. Their relationship would form
the basis for much of the events which followed. When Mollie met Ernest in the mid-1910s it was
still common for the Osage to enter into arranged marriages with a fellow Osage. However, as the
tribe became richer and the social structures of Osage territory had changed, so too had
this custom. Several of Mollie’s siblings and relatives had consequently married whites
and she was not averse to doing the same. She soon fell for Ernest. He was a somewhat coarse
individual, prone to heavy drinking and gambling, though these were not exactly uncommon habits in
the place and time in question, but there also seemed to be a more affectionate side to him.
For instance, while she spoke some English, he nevertheless began studying the Osage dialect
after they met so that he could converse with her in her native language. He also brushed
aside the mockery which was directed at him by his friends for forming a relationship with a
Native American woman, while when she was sick, which was regularly owing to suffering from
diabetes at a time when the condition was not as treatable as it is today, he cared for her. All of
this seemed to win her over. In 1917 they married and in the years that followed they started a
family, with a daughter Elizabeth arriving first, followed by a son named James. Their relationship
is an enigma and to this day it remains unclear whether Ernest genuinely cared for Mollie
at first or whether the entire union was an elaborate deception which he concocted under the
guidance of his uncle over a period of many years. It was with Mollie’s sister Anna that the Osage
murders began to intensify in the 1920s. Anna had developed a somewhat problematic personality by
this time, specifically concerning her tendency to drink excessively. On the 21st of May 1921 she
attended a luncheon which Mollie had organised for her extended family and friends, but when Anna
showed up she was already drunk. In the hours that followed she drank from a flask, flirted
with Ernest’s brother Bryan and subsequently started fights with almost everyone in attendance.
Eventually she managed to sober up after several hours and Mollie sent her home with Bryan. It was
the last time the sisters saw each other. Six days later some squirrel hunters found her body in a
desperate state of decomposition in some boggy water near the road between Fairfax and Pawhuska.
Mollie was called upon to try to identify the bloated corpse, but could only do so through
the gold fillings in her teeth. Though it would not be determined until much, much later, one of
those who had been included in the search team, Kelsie Morrison, a well-known local bootlegger
and dope smuggler, had killed her on the night of the 21st or early hours of the 22nd after she
left Mollie’s. He had done so on the orders of none other than William Hale, probably with the
complicity of Bryan Burkhartt, who had taken her home from Mollie’s party that evening. An autopsy
revealed a gunshot wound to the back of her head. It would subsequently be revealed in years
to come that Morrison had owed $600 to Hale, a very substantial sum of money in the early
1920s, and he had carried out the murder in order to have the debt cancelled. Yet the motives
were not initially clear, as Anna’s head rights on the oil money were transferred to her immediate
Osage family members. Yet with each member of Mollie’s family that would subsequently die, the
possibility of Anna and her family members’ head rights all transferring to Ernest Burkhartt,
Hale’s nephew and protégé, became ever greater. The murders mounted from there. On the
same day that Anna’s body was discovered, that of another Osage by the name of Charles
Whitehorn was stumbled upon by an oilman not far away with two bullet wounds between his
eyes. He had been murdered execution style. Whitehorn had disappeared a week before Anna
and had been missing for two weeks when he was discovered. What alerted local police to a
possible connection between the two murders was that the same bullet types were found to have
been used in both instances. Perhaps the same person had killed both Anna and Charles,
but at the time no one was identified as the possible suspect by the authorities.
Mollie argued strongly with the local police for them to investigate her sister’s
disappearance and murder more concretely, but such was the attitude at the time to the
Native Americans that they effectively refused to do so. A similar lethargy characterised the
response months later in 1922 to the death of Anna Sanford, a woman who had recently
married a white man by the name of Tom McCoy. Anna was not found murdered in cold
blood like Anna Brown or Charles Whitehorn, but her death was suspicious and is believed
to have been an instance of poisoning. What is especially revealing about Hale’s involvement in
this particular homicide is that Tom McCoy, Anna’s widower, quickly married Hale’s niece after he
inherited his deceased Osage wife’s head rights. The next major victim to which Hale can be
connected was George Bigheart. George was a relative of one of the most prominent of all the
Osage families. James Bigheart, for instance, had been a chief of the Osage in the 1890s
and 1900s, a man who spoke seven languages, including French and Latin, and who wore a
suit and tie, realising that the best way to beat the government and white man in their land
grabs as the American frontier was closing in, was to match them at their own game. George was
James’ nephew. In 1923, at 46 years of age, he was mysteriously taken ill in Osage territory and
was sent to Oklahoma City to a hospital there. It now seems relatively clear that Bigheart was given
some poisoned whiskey to drink and this killed him in the hospital shortly after he arrived there.
But this was not before he disclosed some secret information regarding his own circumstances and
the deaths which were occurring amongst the Osage to a white attorney by the name of W. W. Vaughan,
while George was on his deathbed. Incredibly, Vaughan then phoned the Osage county sheriff
and said he needed to meet with him urgently concerning the murders, but the last time he
would be seen was when he boarded an overnight train to go and meet the sheriff. When the train
arrived to Osage territory, Vaughan wasn’t on it and he was never seen again. Bigheart died
shortly afterwards in hospital and whatever information he had revealed about William Hale
and Ernest Burkheartt, who had been present at the hospital in Oklahoma City when Vaughan visited
George there, was never disclosed to the police. If any casual observer had been able to identify
a connection between the people who were being killed and William Hale, the most prominent
businessman in Osage territory, then they would have had their suspicions corroborated by the next
death. In February 1923, a forty year old Osage by the name of Henry Roan showed up dead, having
been found shot to death in his car. Roan’s name itself was symptomatic of the manner in which the
Osage had suffered systematic persecution over the decades. His tribal name was Roan Horse, but at
school in Oklahoma he had been forced to cut off the braids he wore his hair in and to change his
name to the more anglicised Henry Roan. Although he had two children who would inherit his head
rights and the income from the oil money that was due to his family, Hale had an insurance claim on
Roan’s life. Roan had listed Hale, who he referred to as his ‘best friend’, as the recipient of a
$25,000 insurance policy, a very hefty sum of money by the standards of the early-to-mid-1920s.
Hale had also been seen in town with Roan shortly before the Osage man disappeared, only reappearing
when he was found dead in his automobile. Thus, although Hale acted as a pallbearer at Roan’s
funeral after he was discovered, he had benefited greatly from Henry’s death. Roan’s case would
eventually come back to haunt Hale though. The next major killing targeted Rita Smith, Mollie
Brown’s sister. She had accompanied Mollie back in the summer of 1921 when they had gone to identify
their sister Anna’s body after it had been found in the countryside. She was married to William
‘Bill’ Smith, the man whose idea it had been to try to identify Anna’s body that day by checking
to see if she had Anna’s idiosyncratic gold teeth fillings. With Anna’s death and with the narrowing
of their family, both Mollie and Rita had become wealthier as they inherited the head rights to
the oil money of other family members. As such, for anyone who was looking to ultimately acquire
a full stake in the oil money which was due to the Brown family it would be necessary to also murder
or otherwise kill Mollie and Rita. Rita and her husband Bill became the next targets of Hale and
his accomplices in their murder spree. An added incentive for Hale was that Bill Smith had been
conducting his own unofficial investigation into both the murder of Anna in 1921 and the mysterious
circumstances in which their other sister, Millie, had died back in 1918. Bill had been married to
Millie originally, before remarrying her sister Rita after Millie’s untimely and suspicious
demise. Though Bill was a former horse thief and a heavy drinker who had been known to strike
Rita when drunk, there is no evidence that he was involved with Hale and the Burkhartts in their
campaign against the Browns and other Osage in the territory. On the contrary, he had met with
several individuals in the early weeks of 1923 that seemed to have information about what
might have happened to Anna a year and a half earlier.
It is probably no coincidence that Hale moved
against Rita and Bill shortly after Bill had been in touch with these sources of information.
Just a few days later the Smiths were at home one night when they heard what seemed to be someone
rustling around the perimeter of their home. They went looking for the source of the noise, but
found nothing. Then, a few nights later, the same noise was heard again. It was enough to convince
Bill and Rita to pack up their things and move to a rented house nearby. But there the peculiar
events seemed to follow them. For one thing the dogs which their new neighbours owned all
started showing up dead, as though they had been poisoned. A few weeks later a bomb was planted
underneath the Smiths’ rented home, detonating at three o’clock in the morning. The explosion killed
Rita and Bill, sending out a blast which was felt all over the neighbourhood and blowing out the
windows of houses in the area. Nearby, Mollie Brown felt the explosion herself which killed the
third sister of hers to die in the space of five years, Millie in 1918, Anna in 1921 and now Rita
in 1923. The noose was tightening around Mollie, even as she inherited a still greater claim to the
oil head rights with the demise of another sister. By the mid-1920s the mounting numbers of murders,
bombings, poisonings, and deaths under suspicious circumstances in Osage territory was beginning
to attract attention from quarters further afield which Hale and his accomplices would have
preferred to have stayed away from Oklahoma, specifically the nascent Federal Bureau of
Investigation. Policing in the United States, as anywhere in the Western world, had been done
on an ad-hoc basis for centuries and even well into the nineteenth century. It was only in 1839
that the Metropolitan Police Act had established a professional police force in Britain, and in
the US policing activities and crime prevention was primarily carried out for decades after
that by local sheriffs and lawmen or by the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Only in 1896 was
the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, the forerunner of the modern Federal Bureau
of Investigation, or FBI, set up. Its remit was expanded in the years that followed as
anarchist and labour movements created the perception of social unrest across America, with
the Bureau of Investigation then established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt. It would
finally manifest into the modern FBI in the early 1930s as J. Edgar Hoover tried to crack down on
criminality at the end of Prohibition, but by then the institution had developed extensively,
in considerable part owing to investigations such as that which was led by a Bureau agent, Tom
White, in Osage territory in the mid-1920s. Tom White was born in Texas a few years
after Hale. He was the son of a local lawman, Robert Emmett White, and moved into the same field
when he came of age, joining the Texas Rangers in the 1900s before becoming a special agent for the
Santa Fe Railway company and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1910s. Thereafter he became a
Bureau of Investigation officer. He consequently had decades of experience when he was assigned
to investigate the murders which were occurring in Osage territory in the mid-1920s. He received
a call from Hoover in the summer of 1925 and was summoned to Washington D.C. where the head of
the FBI informed him that he was to proceed to Osage territory and find out who was murdering all
of these conspicuously wealthy Native Americans. In taking over the Oklahoma field office, White
was assuming a position which was generating more crime per capita than any other field office run
by the FBI. As such, when he arrived to take up the position there in late July he had extensive
work to do. But White was determined and within weeks he had reviewed dozens of case files and was
coming to some initial conclusions. There was no pattern to these murders such as one might expect
from a serial killer or a single individual. Clearly there was more than one person involved
and given the wealth and status of many of the victims there was a clear motive. Whoever was
killing the Osage was doing so for their money. White’s investigations would soon lead him to the
Burkhartts and then to William Hale. Meanwhile, in Washington Congress decided in 1925 to pass
a law banning anyone who was not at least half Osage from inheriting the head rights of an Osage
when they died. Thus, in the nation’s capital it was clear to many what was really at the root
of what was happening far away in Oklahoma. White’s investigations into the events
occurring in Osage territory began just as Hale’s great plan to capture the wealth of the
Brown family was about to come to fruition. With her three sisters dead, Mollie Brown was now the
recipient of a great amount of oil money coming from Osage head rights. Should she die, her
payments would begin accruing to her children, who were William Hale’s great-nieces and nephews
through his being the uncle of her husband, Ernest Burkhartt. It appears, though, that Hale
and Burkhart were anxious to avoid Mollie’s demise coming about through as clearly suspicious
circumstances as had occurred with Anna in 1921 or Rita in 1923. If Mollie was gunned down like
Anna or her house exploded like Rita’s had then surely the local authorities, as much as they
might have been inclined to avoid casting a net of suspicion over Hale or his relatives, would
have to investigate the matter further. Thus, Hale and Ernest began plotting a way to get rid
of Mollie in a more subtle way after Rita had died. Her diabetes seemed a perfect smokescreen
to suggest that her health was deteriorating naturally. Hence, in the mid-1920s Hale saw to
it that they began slowly poisoning Mollie.
This was a slower method of murder, and
also an infinitely riskier one. She might well realise what was happening and there
was certainly sufficient grounds for her to be hyper-vigilant given what had happened to
her family members and so many other members of the Osage in recent times. And so, when
Mollie’s health began deteriorating sharply in the course of 1925, she became suspicious,
and eventually she came to the conclusion that as much as her marriage to Ernest had
initially seemed to be one of affection, that he was most likely poisoning her. This
was certainly the conclusion she had come to by late 1925 when she sent a message to a local
priest in which she outlined her belief that her health was deteriorating owing to being
poisoned rather than from her diabetes. She would ultimately be the lucky member of the
Brown family. Shortly afterwards she left Ernest with their children and would live to tell
the tale of her brush with William Hale and the Burkhartts. Conversely the net was tightening
by this time on Hale and his accomplices. When Tom White had acquainted himself
sufficiently with the evidence concerning the murders of the Osage in the 1920s, he
began to focus on one case in particular, the murder of Henry Roan back in the spring of
1923. Roan’s case was especially suspicious, given that Hale had only recently taken out
a $25,000 insurance claim on his life. This clearly created a certain amount of circumstantial
evidence, but there was no direct evidence such as eyewitnesses or a murder weapon that could
clearly link Hale to the murder. However, it raised enough suspicions for White to place
Hale at the centre of a vast conspiracy to collect Osage head rights, with the murder of
Mollie’s family members over a period of years from 1918 onwards being the central plank
of Hale’s conspiracy. This conclusion led him to begin looking at Ernest Burkhart, Hale’s
nephew who had married Mollie many years earlier and the man who, if anything happened to her,
would now acquire a huge controlling interest over the many head rights which had fallen to
Mollie. It was this which led White to begin investigating both Hale and the Burkhartts
and Ernest would prove to be the weak link. By the dawn of 1926 White had acquired enough
evidence to issue a warrant for the arrest of Hale and Ernest for the murders of Rita and
Bill Smith. Hale absconded and could not be located when the arresting officers
went for him on the 4th of January, but Ernest was picked up and taken
in for questioning. In the meantime, Hale presented himself to federal agents and
calmly protested his innocence. But Ernest was another matter. Under questioning in January
1926 he eventually began to reveal details of the intricate conspiracy which his uncle had overseen
for the better part of a decade and which had come so close to being concluded if only Mollie had not
grown suspicious and had continued ingesting the poison that was being surreptitiously given to
her. When White and other prosecutors revealed that they had testimony from a certain Blackie
Thompson that Ernest had tried to hire him to carry out several of the murders years earlier
the floodgates opened. Ernest revealed that he had married Mollie many years earlier on Hale’s
directive that he should be in a position to collect the many head rights which would be
accruing into her hands as her family members kept dying. Thus did he implicate his uncle. In
the weeks that followed Ernest was placed on trial and was sentenced to a reduced term in prison in
return for his co-operation in prosecuting Hale. Hale’s trial soon followed. It became a circus
as Ernest refused to deliver on his promise to testify against his uncle and instead agreed
to testify in his defence. Meanwhile, Burkhartt also tried to sue the government for extracting a
confession from him under duress. Other witnesses and individuals allegedly implicated in the
various murders either pulled out of testifying or refused to co-operate as Hale began trying to pull
strings to intimidate anyone that was possibly going to proceed against him. At one point even
Ernest came to the conclusion that his uncle was trying to have him killed before he could testify
against him. Eventually Ernest flipped again and did testify against Hale in his first trial, which
was held in Guthrie from late July 1926 onwards, but such was the convoluted nature of the
evidence and overlapping conspiracies, as well as Hale’s influence in the wider
region, that the jury, when it finished deliberating on the 25th of August, returned
a hung verdict and a mistrial was declared. The government and the Bureau were not going to
let matters slide. By the autumn of 1926 too much was riding on the result of the investigation
back in Washington and Hoover ordered that Hale and his accomplices were to be prosecuted in
any way possible. As a consequence, a grand jury indicted Jim Springer, Hale’s attorney, on the
grounds that Hale had sought to intimidate several witnesses in his client’s initial trial. With
this a second trial commenced in October 1926, one which was short-lived and resulted in a guilty
verdict just nine days later. Hale was sentenced to life in prison at Leavenworth Prison in
Kansas, ironically a penitentiary where Tom White, the federal investigator who led the Osage
investigations, would soon be appointed as warden. Yet even then, Hale managed to exploit
several legal loopholes to try to wriggle free, successfully disputing the results of his second
trial on the basis that he was tried in the wrong district court within Oklahoma. In the end, it
would take a third trial, this time prosecuted in a federal court, before Hale was finally
definitively sentenced to life in prison in January 1929. Justice had been slow in coming, but
at last, eleven years after the first murder had been committed with the poisoning of Millie Brown,
Hale entered Leavenworth with a lifetime sentence. He would be out in under twenty years.
Ultimately the conviction of Hale and the Burkhartts and their accomplices was just the
tip of the iceberg. While Hale had doubtlessly been the most prominent individual when it came to
carrying out the murders of the Osage there were many others who were acting independently of him.
In fact, while the official murder rate for the Reign of Terror stands at about 60 people, David
Grann, in his award-winning book on the topic, Killers of the Flower Moon, cites Louis F. Burns,
a leading historian on the Osage murders who claimed there were probably hundreds of killings,
many of them recorded as accidents or people who died under mysterious circumstances after
unusual illnesses. For instance, Kelsie Morrison, a man who was probably involved in the murder
of Anna Brown, was possibly also involved in several other poisonings in the 1920s which were
never investigated as murders. He subsequently married Tillie Stepson, an Osage woman whose
husband had been poisoned in 1922. She in turn became suspicious of Kelsie when she overheard him
talking about the use of strychnine as a poison, but before she could divorce him and remove her
two Osage children from his guardianship, she too died under suspicious circumstances. Morrison had
almost certainly poisoned her. And there were many others like this. Often groups of individuals
were aiding each other to murder families of Osage throughout the area. For instance, the
local doctors certainly killed several Osage and benefited from their head rights, but they
also supplied poison to others. The murders which occurred during the Reign of Terror were an
open secret throughout Osage county, as the white population literally conspired to kill as many
of the Natives here as possible, even as the FBI tried to intervene, in a sort of localised
genocide being perpetrated over oil money. Despite being sentenced to life in prison in 1929,
William Hale would serve less than twenty years for the multiple murders he orchestrated. On the
31st of July 1947 he was paroled at the explicit command of President Harry S. Truman. Truman came
from Missouri not far from Osage county and had spent much of his early life in the 1900s, 1910s
and 1920s living in this part of the Midwest in Kansas City and other locations. As such, he had
grown up in the region and was immersed in the settler community that Hale and others had lived
in when they committed their crimes. Consequently, as inexcusable as his actions seem in retrospect,
he seems to have viewed Hale and others with some sympathy and arranged for Hale to be pardoned
after serving eighteen years in prison. Eventually many others who were involved in the Reign of
Terror murders would be paroled early. Ernest Burkhartt was released initially in 1937, but
he repeatedly broke the law in the years that followed and was in and out of jail for much
of the 1940s and 1950s. His final release came in 1965 when the Oklahoma governor, Henry
Bellmon, fully pardoned Burkhart for his crimes. Back in 1947, when he was released from prison,
Hale headed north-west to Montana, one of the most underpopulated and rustic parts of the United
States by the middle of the twentieth century and an environment which was similar to that which he
had known in Oklahoma decades earlier. There, Hale fell back into familiar patterns, despite being
a man nearing his mid-seventies by that time. He acquired a position working as a ranch overseer
in the state on a farm owned by Benny Binion, a career criminal who had first made his fortune in
Texas back in the 1920s operating illegal gambling dens and casinos in the Dallas and Fort Worth
area. He and Hale were likely acquainted with each other from that time, while also having periods
of lengthy incarceration in common, Binion having been implicated in multiple homicides in the
1930s. In the 1950s he made lots of money in the early development of Las Vegas, while Hale managed
to stake out a prosperous enough retirement working with him. In his later years Hale was
often known to state that he and his associates would have got away with everything back in
the 1920s if Burkhartt hadn’t talked to the FBI after he was arrested in 1926. He spent his
last years in Phoenix, Arizona, dying in a nursing home in the city on the 15th of August 1962 at 87
years of age. He was buried in Wichita in Kansas. The Osage killings largely came to
an end in the late 1920s as Hale and his accomplices and others who had acted
independently of his actions were arrested and charged with various murders and attacks
on the Osage over the past decade. However, what exactly had happened remained a mystery
for decades to come and a full understanding of what had occurred still eludes us in all
particulars. John Joseph Mathews, a member of the Osage tribe who was born in Oklahoma in 1894
and who had lived through the Reign of Terror, first sought to begin investigating the events of
the late 1910s and 1920s in a book called Sundown which he published in 1934. Thereafter, charting
the story of the Osage and the crimes committed against them became his life work, culminating in
1961 in The Osages: Children of the Middle Water, a comprehensive collection of oral histories and
statements taken from members of the tribe. Owing to his work and dedicated investigative efforts
by other members of the tribe, the Osage developed a clear idea of what had gone wrong in their
treatment by the government and how the guardian system had led to the Reign of Terror. As a
consequence, in the late 1990s the Osage sued the federal government for mismanagement of their
affairs and misplacement of the funds which were owed to them over a period of several decades.
Some of these claims were backdated to the late nineteenth century. In 2011 the US government
admitted culpability and settled the outstanding claims for approximately 380 million dollars,
a sum equivalent to roughly $25,000 per head of the nearly 16,000 members of the Osage tribe
still alive in the early twenty-first century. The story of the Osage, the Reign of Terror
and the role of William Hale in it has been most notably explored by the investigative
journalist David Grann in his 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon. Grann drew on other studies
by figures like Mathews and Laurence Hogan, but also conducted new research which led to him
speculating about who was responsible for some of the unsolved murders, showing in the process the
way that the orchestrated campaign of terror and murder against the Osage was an open secret within
the wider community in the region in the 1920s, one which dozens of people were actively
involved in. The book went on to win the National Book Award in 2017 and was a number one
bestseller on The New York Times bestseller list for a time that year. It has now been adapted
for the screen by Martin Scorsese and the film, starring Robert de Niro as William Hale
and Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhartt, is due for widespread release in October
2023 with many Oscar nominations predicted. Although the events surrounding the Osage Reign
of Terror remain clouded in mystery today, what is clear from what has been revealed by studies by
Grann and others is that Hale was central to the attacks on the Osage in the 1920s. Few individuals
seem to have been implicated directly in as many of the murders as he was and it appears that
he benefited substantially from them initially, until such time as the nascent Federal Bureau
of Investigation became involved in figuring out what was happening to the Osage. But what was
perhaps even worse about Hale was the manner in which he corrupted others around him. In the
course of the early to mid-1920s he not only orchestrated the murder of many Osage, but he
dragged others into his violent conduct who otherwise might not have become involved
in the violence being aimed at the Osage, notably the Burkhartts. He was unquestionably
the central figure in the Reign of Terror. And yet his story is one about how extreme violence
and murder could meet with little punishment in the development of the United States. Despite
Hale being found guilty of some of the murders and imprisoned, ultimately he was released early
on the back of his connections and lived out the rest of his life as a free man. Had it been
an Osage cattleman orchestrating the murders of oilmen of European descent in Oklahoma in the
1920s, they would hardly have escaped so lightly. What do you think of William Hale? Do you think
he might have been responsible for even more of the murders of the Osage than we know about?
Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank
you very much for watching.
