Osage Indian Murders - Investigation of The Murders

Investigation of The Murders

The FBI sent four agents undercover to the reservation. Working undercover for two years, the agents (John K. Wren, who was one of the investigating agents) discovered a crime ring of petty criminals led by Bill Hale, a wealthy rancher, known in Osage County as the "King of the Osage Hills". He and his nephews, Ernest and Byron Burkhart, had migrated from Texas to Osage County to find jobs in the oil fields. Once there, they discovered the immense wealth of members of the Osage Nation due to their having oil-rich lands.

To gain part of the wealth, Hale persuaded his nephew Ernest to marry Mollie Kyle, a full-blooded Osage. She was the sister of Anna Brown and Rita Smith. As the evidence revealed, Hale had arranged for the murders of Mollie’s mother Lizzie Q. Kyle; her cousin Henry Roan; Anna Brown; and the Smiths, to cash in on their insurance policies and oil headrights of each family member. Other witnesses and participants were murdered as the conspiracy expanded. Mollie and Ernest Burkhart inherited all of the headrights from her family, and investigators found that Mollie was already being poisoned when they entered the case.

Due to the investigation of the FBI, Hale, his Burkhart nephews, and one of the ranch hands they hired were charged with the murder of Mollie's family. Two accomplices had died before the investigation was completed. Hale and his associates were finally convicted in state and federal trials from 1926 to 1929, which had changes of venues, hung juries, appeals and overturned verdicts. In 1926, Ernest Burkhart pleaded guilty to being part of the conspiracy. Finally Hale and his accomplice Ramsey were convicted. His accomplice Byron Burkhart, another nephew, had turned state's evidence. The trials, with their deadlocked juries, appeals, and overturned verdicts, received national newspaper and magazine coverage. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Hale, Ramsey, and Ernest Burkhart later received parole despite Osage protests.

In the early 1990s, the journalist Dennis McAuliffe of the Washington Post investigated the suspicious death of his grandmother Sybil Beekman Bolton, an Osage with headrights who died at the age of 21 in 1925, during the "Reign of Terror." As a youth he had been told she died of kidney disease, then as a suicide. His doubts arose from a variety of conflicting evidence.

In his investigation, McAuliffe found that the FBI of the time believed that the murders of several Osage women of that period "had been committed or ordered by their husbands." Most murders of the Osage during the early 1920s went unsolved. McAuliffe found that the court had appointed Sybil's white stepfather A.T. Woodward, an attorney, as her guardian when she was a minor. Also the federally appointed Tribal Counsel, Woodward had four other Osage charges who had died by 1923. McAuliffe learned that his grandmother's murder had been covered over with a false death certificate, and he came to believe that her white stepfather, A. T. Woodward, was responsible for her death. His book about his investigation, Bloodland: A Family Story of Oil, Greed and Murder on the Osage Reservation (1994), presents an account of the corruption and murders during this period.

To try to prevent further criminality, in 1925 Congress passed a law prohibiting the inheritance by non-Osage of headrights from Osage who were half or more of Native American ancestry.