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I'm listening constantly, long drive dog walks, cooking dinner, on the loo, etc. And as an audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalogue. There's biographies, wellness, classics and pretty much everything that you could want to know about. New members can try audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash red handed or text red handed to 500-500. That's audible.com slash red handed or text red handed to 500-500. There's more to imagine when you listen.
I'm Hannah, I'm Sruti and welcome to Red handed. Where this week I'm actually going to break the number one rule of podcasting. I'm going to take this fucking headphones off. We've got this like clicking going on and I think it's going to send me into a conibction if I keep some. So don't do this, podcasters. Don't try this at home, but this is the sound of me taking them off. Oh no, I can also hear it and it's really irritating. I'm just going to keep an eye on my way forward.
Okay, welcome to red handed. There's merch. There'll be merch. Here'll be merch. So get yourself over to redhandedshop.com where you can get all of those merges. Spooky bitch. Not in this economy. No fuck boys. All there. Take, take, take. Take, take, just in time for your summer's wounding. Get yourself a giant hoodie for the summer. Yeah, great. I don't know. Why don't you put boys hat for the sun? Fuck the sun. Fuck the sun, exactly. Oh, yeah.
We've got a live show coming up but it's sold out so don't worry. But we'll be for the first time ever releasing the footage. The footage? The recording. Just audio. Just audio of that from Islington Assembly Hall. So that's quite exciting. And we've had some feedback that sometimes when podcasts do live shows that incorporate some sort of visual element. It's quite irritating for the listeners at home who don't know what that visual element is.
We have listened and we're going to be putting our visual elements on our website. So you'll be able to watch and listen along at her under your own steam. So that's that. And this is this. This is one of the most surprising stories. I think it's just a classic Western, which is not something we've ever even come close to doing. So I'm pretty pumped for this one. It reads like the plot of a Western noir. Yes, exactly. It's like there will be blood for old men.
Yeah, crossed with murder on the midnight express, the ballad of buster strokes. So strapping. In May 1921, a teenage boy who was out squirrel hunting with his dad and his friend. Near three mile creek in the town of Fairfax. The boy ran ahead of the other two, shot a squirrel and chased it down a woody slope. But it wasn't just the body of a squirrel that he found down there. The two men heard the boy scream and ran to see what had happened.
There they found the bloated and decomposing body of a Native American woman lying on her back. Her skin was black and her body was swollen close to bursting. The body was brought back into the town to the undertaker, who wondered if this was Anna Brown, a wealthy member of the Osage tribe, who hadn't been seen for a week. But with most of her face missing, he struggled to tell. So he called one of Anna's sisters, Molly Burkehardt, to help to identify the body.
Molly instantly recognized the clothes because she'd washed them for Anna just before she disappeared. Molly broke down in tears. She had just lost her other sister Mini a few years before. Mini had only been 27 and by all accounts in excellent health. Until she suddenly contracted what the family doctors, the Schoon brothers, called, a quote, peculiar wasting disease, which is very 1918 of her. Yeah, I think that's what they used to call syphilis, isn't it? Oh, really? It's the wasting disease.
Or maybe TB. Yeah, I think it's could TB is one of them. Consumption, I think. Yeah, there's definitely one that was specifically called the wasting disease. Yeah, I think it was probably just some sort of TB strain. I think syphilis was like the madness. They've gone mad. And then knows this full enough. From all that shagging. Oh, yeah, fact I learned the other day speaking of mysterious diseases.
I desperately tried to read this book called the Silk Roads were on holiday, but I couldn't have failed. But one tip bit that I did pluck out of that book is that the first round of bubonic plague happened before Islam was established as a religion. Wow. Isn't that topsy-turvy term? That's crazy. I know you told me by the pool and I was so shocked. But coming back to the 1920s and people dying of peculiar wasting diseases, Molly was bereft.
She'd lost many and now she'd lost Anna. Molly only had one sister left. Molly had thought that Anna had been dancing and drinking in the surrounding boom towns. Like we said, she'd been missing for a week. Anna was after all a bit of a party animal. And she just divorced her husband. So I guess everyone's just thinking she's on some renegade one woman divorce party. And boom towns, full of single men. Well, there you go. She and I saw something really depressing the other day.
And I'm going to show you, I hope I still have the screenshot because it really is needed to do it justice. But I don't know if it made me so depressed I deleted the screenshots. So while we were away in Bali, you remember I told you that somebody pack here had gone to Ibiza and was at some like fucking 24 hour rave. And so I just went on the Instagram of that party club promoter. I don't even know. And they were advertising this. Please, please tell the people Hannah.
Yes, I will. I will give you a dramatic reconstruction of what I'm looking at. I'm looking at a blue ticked Ibiza account. And it's a lady coming out of the water and there's writing in the writing says, no ring, comma, no tan line, full stop, winky face emoticon like we're in the fucking 90s. And then it says discover the divorce package. Yes, summer.
So they do, I have either divorce packages called no ring no tan line, which is maybe kind of hilarious because there's probably a market there, but also quite depressing, which is why it's in my deleted. Yeah, I'm depressed. Fucking hell. Oh, actually, so I was really yesterday to do some hinging for me. And then we got really distracted and then forgot. So yesterday, last night, I went rogue on my own. So one of his things is like, what's your biggest fear? And he was like, deep waters.
So I, that's just, I don't want to set off your fear, but do you know about the loniest whale? No response. I mean, I think it's like 10 messages per 10. I can't even get the matches, mate. Yeah, for me. Because my last match in a week, it's grim. It's grim. It be grim. It be grim. Maybe just go to no ring no tan line. Fucking maybe, maybe it's my only option. I've been saying for years I was going to have to wait for the first round of divorces. Maybe this is my time.
Maybe we go to take you to the boom towns. Yeah. The boom docks. Anyway, coming back to what's going on in our store, what's going on in our story. Yeah, everybody just thought that Anna was a bit of a party animal. She's out. She's letting off some steam and she'll be back. Obviously not because now she's dead. But nobody ever saw this coming, especially Molly. And she had no idea that the death of her sister was just the beginning of a series of mysterious deaths.
And one of the most diabolical conspiracies in American history. That since been dubbed the Osage Rain of Terror. Like their parents before them, Molly and her sisters had their names on the Osage role, which meant they were registered members of the Osage tribe. It also meant that they were absolutely bazonka salt and paper stinking rich. Really, really rich. In fact, the Osage people were the richest human beings per capita on the planet at that particular time, which is quite the achievement.
There is so much of this story that I just did not know. Firstly, this story, somebody sent it in as a request, one person, one single solo trip person, multi-pants. And they were clearly very pleased with themselves when they found out. I wish I remembered your name. I'm so sorry. Give yourself a pat on the back if it was you. It's a wild one. Also, did you know that Scorsese is currently telling this into a film? Only because you're brother to help with this. Yes. Coming out soon.
I'm not going to be in it. Of course. I'll watch the show. He's so overrated. Okay. Let fight me. I don't think Leonardo DiCaprio is a very good actor. I don't think he's a good actor at all. I think he just yells. Do you know who he... Are we watching the same person? I just... No, I just think he yells. He commits 100%. But I don't think he's a very good actor. I don't think he yells once in the great Gatsby. No. I'm not convinced by him. Okay. Moving on.
Moving on to my favourite bit, the Red Handed Rundown of how the Osage tribe people, family, made their fortune. The ancestral lands of the Osage lay between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers. And as was the case for the majority of Native American tribes, they were forced to leave their land by the US government in the early 1870s. They were initially made to relocate to a reservation in Kansas. But they sold it onto settlers shortly after.
Their chief decided it would be more prudent to move to land that the whites had no interest in so they'd be left alone. And so they paid for a million and a half acres of seemingly worthless, barren, rocky land in Northeastern Oklahoma and made that their home instead. The federal government wanted the Native Americans to give up their way of life and assimilate into white society.
And one way they went about this was through the Doors Act, the Doors Act, which is DAWES, which I realised in my British accent, my sounds like I'm saying Doors, like a door. Doors Act, Doors Act. Doors Act. Doors Act, anyway. And essentially the Doors Act of 1887 essentially turned Native Americans into private property owners, making it easier for whites to buy their land from them. Another reason for this was that the US wanted to absorb the tribal territories into the state of Oklahoma.
But in order to do so, all the land had to be individually owned. But since the Oceh had paid for their own reservation land, they were exempt. Trying to shop healthy and convenient often seems like a combo that never really works. That's why I am so jealous of my friends in the US who used Thrive Market. When Hannah and I were over there a few months ago, a friend had a Thrive Market delivery. And I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing.
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But it turns out that sense of wonder doesn't need to end when you get turned into a grown-up by the adolescence fairy. With therapy, you can learn to find the sense of excitement in the every day that you had when you were a little bean. I've actually found therapy really useful. It's a nice opportunity to stop, think, and ask some questions. Like, what do you think? Like, why did I do that thing last week? And why did doing that thing make me so terribly anxious?
And given that it made me so anxious, why did I do that thing again the very next day? These are the kind of questions that therapy can help you get answers to. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with the licensed therapist and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Rediscover your curiosity with BetterHelp.
Visit BetterHelp.com slash Redhanded today and get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com slash Redhanded. The Osage Chief at the time was a man called Chief James Bigheart, who spoke seven languages, Ponca, Sue, Cherokee, Osage, French, English and Latin, Bola. Bigheart made the incredibly wise decision to include the following unique provisions in the Osage Allotment Act in 1906.
Firstly, the Osage would keep their mineral rights, meaning the right to mine or produce oil and gas, rocks and minerals under the ground. And secondly, the tribe's mineral rights would be shared equally amongst each individual tribe member. And these rights to the mineral interest income were known as head rights. And these head rights could only be passed on from generation to generation by inheritance they could never be bought or sold.
Chief Bigheart may have not known it at the time, but these stipulations would go on to completely reverse the economic misfortune of his people. Eyes on the contract, eyes on the fine print. Because as it so turned out, the worthless land that the Osage had bought, remember they bought that rocky barren million and a half acres so that the white people would leave them alone, was actually sitting on some of the largest oil deposits in the world at the time.
Honestly, this episode just feels like a film. Imagine they're just like, we're going to go live here so that we can just live our lives in peace, boom, oil. And over the following two decades, the Osages Underground Reservation generated more wealth than all of America's gold rushes combined. You know, if I didn't know what was going to happen, I would now go off on life. You know what, you just love to see it. The land looking after its own people. It happens for some sometimes.
Sometimes it do be like that. In order to drill on Osage land, oil companies had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. And these did not come cheap. In 1923 alone, the tribe made more than $30 million. $30 million in 1923. In today's money that is $400 million. So now, the once impoverished Osage tribe were living in brick and terracotta mansions with chandeliers hanging from their ceilings. They were diamond rings and fur coats and traveled around in expensive chauffeur cars.
In many cases, they even had white servants. And there's nothing that white people hate more than brown people with more money than them. Can confirm we really don't like that. Especially in the 20s. Nobody was a fan of that. Also, if histories taught us anything, it's that when white people are not happy, especially when you're talking about the past no time, bad shit happens. Famously bad losers.
But let's put a pin in all of that information that we've just learned for now and get back to where we left off the discovery of Anna Brown's body. The two doctors who cared for Molly's sickly mother, the Schoon Brothers, were tasked with performing the autopsy. I imagine there wasn't that many people kicking around able to do it. And based on her state of decomposition, they guessed that Anna had been dead for about a week.
And when they turned Anna's head to the side, her scalp slipped off and exposed a bullet hole in the back of her skull. So it was official, Anna Brown had been murdered. It's quite difficult to shoot yourself in the back of the head. Strangely, even though there was no exit route in Anna's skull, the doctors, the Schoon Brothers, claimed that they couldn't find the bullet in Anna's head. But they did note that it was likely from a 32-calibre gun.
What's more, the discovery of Anna's body came during the same week as the body of an Osage man named Charles Whitehorn had been discovered in Polhaska. He'd been shot twice between the eyes. And two bullets were found in his head. Both were, you guessed it, 32-calibre. I feel like they're always 32-calibre. How many calibres are there? I feel like it's always a 32. 22? 32, 32, they're the two I know. Yeah, those are the two. Those are the two ones.
It's important to note that although this was the 20s, this particular part of America was pretty much still the Wild West when we were like putting this case together. I had to look up, actually, when the Wild West ran from and ran till. It actually ended in the 20s, or like 1920, but this part of America it was slow to let that lifestyle go. Well, especially if there's still oil pissing out of the ground. Exactly.
So given how lawless this part of the country was at this time, authorities had next to no forensic training and were essentially amateur gunfighters who were just tasked with bringing in criminals dead or alive. But nevertheless, the sheriff determined to be useful, went down to the creek where Anna was found. He wasn't that useful, he didn't find the missing bullet. But he did manage to find some blood smears on a rock by the bank, next to a half-empty bottle of moonshine.
From this, he assumed that Anna had been sat there drinking, when someone came up and shot her in the back of the head. He also found two sets of tire tracks. He didn't take casts of the tracks, or even bother to dust the bottle for fingerprints, and he didn't take a single photo of the crime scene. Despite this, Molly still had hope that Anna's killer would be brought to justice. And that's because she had a supremely powerful ally.
Like many Osage women at the time, including her three sisters, Molly had married a white man. Ernest Birkhardt had grown up in Texas, son of a poor cotton farmer. Until he packed up and moved to Osage, enticed by the stories of cowboys on the last frontier. He began working for his uncle William Hale, who became a sort of surrogate father to him. And speaking of his uncle, Ernest once said, quote, he was not the kind of man to ask you to do something.
He told you. When William Hale arrived in Osage County, a couple of decades before, seemingly out of nowhere, he turned up in town, and again, this is just so like movie, so cinematic. And like guys, we're not even just pumping up the father's cinematic, like this is one of the most fucking bonkers cases we've ever covered. So, stay tuned.
So yeah, when he turns up in Osage County, William Hale turned up with nothing, but a copy of the Old Testament, and a relentless energy to accomplish whatever task he set his mind to. Initially, he found work as a cowboy on a ranch, laboring day and night, until he eventually saved up enough money to buy his own herd of cattle. As his profits grew, Hale gradually bought more and more land from the Osage and the surrounding settlers, until he had around 50,000 acres of land, and a small fortune.
Hale turned in his dirty cowboy clothes for a fancy suit, and was named the Reserve Deputy Sheriff in Fairfax. It was an honorate title that didn't really mean anything, but this is the Wild West after all, and the US. So of course, William Hale carried a badge and a gun. It seems like no one who was carrying a badge and a gun actually meant much. I don't think you needed to pass like an exam. He's like, but look at me, I have a suit, and I am the Reserve Deputy Sheriff of Fairfax.
And look at this badge I definitely didn't make for myself. Am I 32 or 22, caliber gun? And scoff, as we might about his potentially arts and crafts badge, William Hale was actually very, very powerful, because his influence grew to the point that local politicians knew that they could not win an election without his support.
Hale was one of the few white men who had helped the Osage people before they made their oil fortune, and he'd done that by donating to charities and paying for medical bills that they couldn't afford. He once wrote a letter to the Assistant Chief of the Osage Tribe saying, quote, I never had better friends in my life than the Osages. I will always be the Osages true friend. And William Hale was regarded by many as the King of the Osage Hills.
And that's why Molly was hopeful that Anna's murder would be solved. Hale had promised her that he wouldn't rest until the killer was found. He described Anna as a mighty good friend, and he was not about to let that go, and to be honest, by the sounds of it, he sounds like the best place man to figure it out. I mean, he's saying things like mighty good. I have faith in him. There's nothing more charming.
Ernest brother Brian told investigators that he dropped Anna off at her house on the day she was murdered at around 5pm, and then never saw her again. People suspected that the killer was somebody from off the reservation, possibly Anna's ex-husband, Odor Brown. Possible motive was obviously the divorce, and then after the divorce, Anna had struck Brown off her will, denying him any inheritance, and signed almost all of her fortune over to her mum. But motive isn't enough.
There was no solid evidence to go on. Molly's family, together with William Hale, offered up a huge cash reward to anyone who came forward with information leading to the killer's arrest. But still, nobody ever did. And while all this was going on, Molly's mother Lizzie grew more and more ill. She seemed to be suffering with the same symptoms that Molly's sister mini had had with her peculiar wasting disease. And eventually, Molly's mum Lizzie passed away that July.
Molly had once the biving sister Rita, her husband Bill Smith suspected that there was no wasting disease at all, and that they had actually been poisoned. Bill Smith is on to something. Bill knows. Bill Smith in the world, world-west. That's part two. What a banger. What a tune. In fact, Bill was convinced that many Lizzie and Anna's deaths had something to do with their valuable head right in Osage Oil. He just couldn't prove it.
As time went on, it became clear that the local law officials weren't getting anywhere with their investigation. And so William Hale hired a private detective from Kansas City. A man named Pike. Come on. A man named Pike. Yep. Who's from Kansas City, which may or may not be in Kansas? Oh, I'm not getting to that again. Oh, my life. I know I'm feeling reckless. Kansas City is apparently in two states. That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Let's move on. Sort it out. Right.
A private detective, the man named Pike from Kansas City. Yep. We don't know which side. Call me Pike. He turns up with a toothpick in his mouth. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Call me Pike. Call me Pike. About nine months after the murders of Anna Brown and Charles Whitehorn, the investigations, no matter how spiky Pike's cocktail stick was, ground to a halt. Pike had actually all been given up. In the meantime, more and more Osage members were dying in strange circumstances.
In February 1922, a 21-year-old Osage man called William Stepson suddenly got a call and left his house in Fairfax. He came home to his wife and children a couple of hours later, but there was clearly something very wrong with him. He collapsed and began having violent convulsions. Within a matter of hours, he was dead. His suspected Stepson may have been poisoned with striccnein.
Forensic Toxology, surprisingly, had been around for quite a while by the 1920s, but the coroner's in Osage hadn't caught up with the time so it was pretty useless. And it also meant that poisoning was essentially the perfect way to get away with murder. The following month an Osage woman died in what was believed to be another case of poisoning, followed by a couple more.
As the bodies racked up, a number of Osage people got together and sought the help of Barney McBride to get the federal government's attention. McBride was a wealthy oil man who regularly did business with the Osage. They trusted him because he'd always treated the Osage people fairly. And because he had a number of connections in the capital, he was the perfect man for the job.
And so after learning about the string of suspicious deaths of Osage people, McBride went directly to Washington, DC to try and bring a federal investigation into the murders. But when he arrived at his hotel room in the capital, McBride found a note on his bed that read, be careful. I mean, this is just, I know this is the past okay, but it really is just so on the nose, isn't it? So shrugging off the ominous note on his bed, McBride headed out for the night.
And when he was leaving a pool, someone put a burlap sack over his head and snatched him off the street. Why not? Sure. Listen, I know you're incredibly busy being an oil man, but we really, really need you for the sack race down the road at the primary school. So if you could just kindly come with me. Absolutely. You're completely misunderstanding this. No one's abducting you. I'm talking to you in a very calm voice. Please stop screaming.
If you're a good boy, we'll let you in the egg and spoon. Well, there you go. And whatever happened at that sports day must have been fucking wild because McBride's body turned up the following morning. And he'd actually been stripped naked and stabbed 20 times. And his skull had also been caved in. Investigators believe they've been followed all the way from Oklahoma by multiple assailants. Six months passed, and in that time there were no more suspicious deaths of the Osage people.
That is until one cold winter's day in February, 1923, when two hunters found the body of a 40-year-old Osage man, Henry Rowan. He was frozen solid in the driver's seat of his Buick, a few miles outside of Fairfax. At first they thought he'd just been drunken falling asleep until they looked a bit closer and realized that just like the others, he had been shot in the back of the head. Hail was one of the first people to be notified about Rowan's murder. The two of them had been best friends.
And here's an example of Hail helping out Osage people. Rowan borrowed money off him often because his account was restricted. And Hail said that since he had loaned Rowan so much money, Rowan actually listed him as a beneficiary on his $25,000 life insurance policy, which you could argue puts Hail in the frame a bit.
After Rowan's murder, the Osage people felt like they were being hunted down, with good reason, and they began hanging light bulbs from their roofs and window-sills, hoping that they'd stop anybody creeping up on them in the dead of night. Understandably there was a thick air of terror amongst the community. But regardless, Rita's husband Bill Smith continued with his investigation into the murders because remember Bill is the only one.
Well, no, people know what's going on, but Bill doesn't even believe in this whole like consumption bullshit. No, Bill's the one that raises the alarm first, I think. Yeah, everyone else is looking at the people that have been shot in the back of the head. Bill's like, there are other people dying who have been shot in the back of the head. Yeah, I feel like we should take a look at this wasting disease that's come out of nowhere.
And Bill even told a number of people that he felt he was getting warm. Don't say that Bill, don't tell people that. Don't tell random people that you think you're getting warm. Yeah, please keep your mouth shut. Exactly. And it was just a few weeks after this that Rita and Bill started hearing strange noises outside their house at night as if somebody was lurking in the darkness. They decided it was best to move into the centre of town for the safety of their children.
They packed up and moved into a large two-story house in the middle of Fairfax. They felt safe there. Not only was it a busy neighbourhood, but the neighbours all had guard dogs that barged the second a stranger walked by. One night a strange man knocked on Bill and Rita's door, claiming that he wanted to buy some land. Bill told him that it wasn't for sale, but the shifty-looking stranger seemed more preoccupied with looking around the house, almost as though he was scoping it out.
Earlier that March the neighbours' dogs began to die off, one by one, and their bodies would be discovered on the front porches or in the middle of the street. And the dogs looked like they had been poisoned. Ah, the wasting disease has cross-species. And then after the dog poisons, things got quite a lot worse. Because around 3am on the 10th of March, the people of Fairfax woke up to the sound of an enormous explosion.
Bill and Rita's large two-story house was now nothing more than a pile of smoldering wood and brick. The explosion had been so powerful that the windows and doors of neighbouring houses had been shattered, lamp posts and surrounding trees had been pulled from the ground. Firefighters searched through the wreckage and found Bill and Rita still in their bed. The back of Rita's head had been blown off in the blast, but miraculously, Bill was still alive, but just barely.
David Shone, remember he's the hospital doctor man, injected Bill with morphine and took him to Fairfax Hospital. Rita's body was in balm before Molly could even see her. Molly was now the last remaining sister in her family. David Shone barely left Bill's side in hospital for a moment, and finally, when he regained consciousness after two days, Bill could barely utter a word. And although he had survived, it wouldn't be for long. Because just 14 days later, Bill Smith died.
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That's Bombass.com slash Redhanded and use code Redhanded at checkout for 20% off now. A 54 year old man named WWVorn who was a former prosecutor and attorney living in Pohoska had been helping with the investigations as much as he could. One day in June 1923, Vaughn answered a call from George Bigheart, the nephew of the legendary former Osage chief James Bigheart. George was in hospital in Oklahoma City after having been poisoned and he didn't have much time left.
George told WWVorn that he had information on the murders in Osage, but he wouldn't speak to anybody but him. And George wasn't about to say what he had to say over the phone. So WWVorn, knowing that time was of the essence packed his bags and jumped on the first train to Oklahoma City. Just before he left, he told his wife where he'd stashed all the evidence he'd gathered so far on the murders, along with money for her and their 10 kids, if for whatever reason.
He never made it home, struck down by a peculiar wasting disease perhaps. Vorn made it to the hospital and spent hours talking to George Bigheart before he died. He then phoned the Osage County Sheriff to tell him that he knew who had killed George and a hell of a lot more. Then he jumped on the next overnight train back. But when the train pulled into Pohoska, Vaughn was nowhere to be found.
Almost two days later, WWVorn's body was found with a broken neck lying on the train tracks about 30 miles north of Oklahoma City. He'd been stripped naked and thrown off the moving train in the dead of night. All the documents that George Bigheart had given him were missing, and the hiding place Vaughn had told his wife about had been cleared out before she got there.
In the summer of 1925, 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was the new head of the Bureau of Investigation, and he called on special agent Tom White to report to him in DC immediately. Tom White was a six-foot-four former Texas Ranger who headed the Houston Field Office. He was exactly what we would think of today when we picture a frontier white knight cowboy if you think of the absolute opposite of Mummy's Boy J. Edgar Hoover. That is what Tom White was.
He still wore his cowboy hat and carried the winter-star rifle and six-shooter that he'd used as a ranger when he used to track down criminals on horseback across the prairies. Roosevelt had to create the Bureau of Investigation in 1908 in an attempt to bring about some structure to federal law enforcement. But at the time, the Bureau's 100 or so agents didn't even have the power of arrest, nor were they strictly speaking authorized to carry weapons, but who was?
They mainly investigated theft and fraud. But Hoover wanted to change that. Hoover had up the standards of requirement for new special agents, and most of them were college boys with accountancy degrees. But Tom White was one of a few special agents who'd been a fronted lawman and a small group known in the Bureau as the Cowboys.
White met with Hoover in his office in DC, where Hoover told him that he was to head up the biggest murder investigation the Bureau had ever undertaken, the Osage murders, and when he added, the failure was not an option. White took over the Bureau's field office in Oklahoma in 1925 and began going through the mountains of documents regarding the strained killings in Osage County.
There were records of 24 Osage murders at this point, including the bombing of Bill and Rita Smith and the shootings of Anna Brown, Henry Rowan and Charles Whitehorn. There wasn't much to link them all, except for the obvious. They were rich members of the Osage tribe and they'd all been murdered. And of course, that Anna Brown, Rita Smith and Lizzie were all related. White found it strange that nobody had ever interviewed Molly Burkehart, the last remaining sister.
And another strange thing he recognised were the methods, shootings, poisons, and a huge bomb blast, and White realised being of the smart cowboy he was, that that meant there was likely to be multiple killers, possibly working for one singular, intelligent, and calculated mastermind pulling the strings. And although he did prefer to work alone, White knew this case was too big for one man, no matter how big his cowboy hat.
So he put together a team of the Bureau's cowboys and sent them undercover, one by one, into Osage County. White began looking at Anna Brown's autopsy records and couldn't get his head around and how a bullet was never found when there was no exit wound. It had to be in there somewhere. It could only mean that somebody at the autopsy had swiped it.
He wondered whether it could have been one of the Schoon brothers who carried out the autopsy so that would make the most sense, but he couldn't be sure. As the summer of 1925 was coming to an end, White was fully focused on the last person to have seen Anna Brown alive, Molly's brother-in-law, Brian Burkhart. And if you remember, cast your mind's back, Brian Burkhart was obviously the one who spoke to the police and said, oh yeah, I dropped her back at home at 5pm, the day she went missing.
Apparently he had done that and then gone to the theatre in Fairfax with his brother Ernest and Uncle William Hale. And Hale and Ernest backed up this alibi. And if you are the witnesses also claim that they had seen their group out together in Fairfax 2, but there had been rumors that Anna had been seen with Brian in a car in the early hours of the morning, outside a hotel in the town of Ralston.
White found these witnesses and they insisted that they'd seen Anna, Brian Burkhart, and a third man in a car together. White then found out that Brian, Anna, and this unknown man had been drinking in a speaky-sy until 3am. This was the first crack in Brian's alibi, but the problem was, after this last 3am sighting, nobody had a clue where Anna had gone. But Brian's neighbour said that he'd seen Brian arriving home alone that night and said that Brian had paid him not to tell anyone.
It wasn't long before White looked into the PI that Hale had hired to investigate the murders back in 1921 to back a spit pike from Kansas City. He heard that Pike, apparently, knew the identity of this mystery man who was seen with Anna and Brian before her death. So White and his squad of cowboys tracked Pike down, and after a lengthy interrogation, Pike revealed that Hale had never actually hired him to investigate the murders.
Tadah! Instead, Pike revealed that Hale paid him to cover up Brian's tracks on the night of Anna's disappearance. Hale had also instructed him to help solidify Brian's alibi by creating false, evidence and coaching witnesses, hiding in plain sight, with a PI named Pike. I feel like Pike could have tried a bit harder to maintain his professional integrity. He's just like, oh yeah, this is what happened, this is what I did. See you next week. Thank you, come again.
Pike couldn't tell White what he wanted to know the most, though, which was Hale simply covering for his nephew. Or was Hale the final boss? In September 1925, White began to wonder whether Bill Smith had figured out the case before he'd been blown up. So White went to the hospital where Bill died and spoke with the nurse who had treated him. The nurse told White that before Bill had passed away, the shown brothers and a lawyer had paid him a visit.
And so White, who already suspected that the shown brothers may have been responsible for swiping the bullet during Anna's autopsy, brought them in for questioning. After a few hours of interrogation, the brothers revealed that Bill had told them that he only had two enemies in the whole world. William K. Hale, the king of the Osage Hills and his nephew Ernst Berkhardt.
White and his team began digging through the paperwork and found out that James Schone had been named as the administrator of Rita Smith's estate on the day they'd visited Bill in hospital. And as the administrator, guess what? James Schone would be paid huge amounts of money. Another thing that never sat right with White was how Hale had come to be named as the beneficiary of Rowan's 25,000 life insurance policy.
And as it turned out, White discovered that a number of insurance companies had rejected Hale's attempt to take out life insurance on the 40-year-old Rowan, who had a liver damage from drinking moonshine, and had once crashed his car from drink driving. Not the best bet. Pre-existing conditions and recklessness and a tendency to smash into things with his car.
So not ideal for life insurance, but after Hale had the Schone brothers write up false medical reports and he forged some creditors' notes, the insurance was eventually accepted by someone. White also found out that Hale had attempted to buy Rowan's head rights, something which I already know because you've all been listening was impossible because they couldn't be bought, they could only be inherited.
And it wasn't lost on White that all of this was merely circumstantial evidence, but something began to add up. With each death, more and more head rights were being inherited by just one person. And if you've been paying attention to listener, then you know that that one person who's passing, going, collecting head rights all over the place and mysteriously not wasting away is none other than Molly Burkard, who just so happened to be married to Hale's nephew, Ernst Burkard.
Gasp. I know, I know. This story is fucking- It's bonkers. Wild. I wonder who's playing Molly. Oh, I wonder what the film's called. Anyway, we're not sponsored by Martin Scorsese's upcoming film on this. So the more White thought about it, the clearer the plot became. Anna Brown, who had no children or spouse, was the first to be killed. And she gave away almost all of her head rights and money to her mother Lizzie.
By killing her first, Hale would have made sure that her money wasn't split up amongst several more people. Their next up was her mother Lizzie, as she was set to give the majority of her wealth to her two remaining daughters, Rita and Molly. And then Rita, being married to Bill Smith, who was sniffing around and running his mouth, with the next obvious targets.
Only Hale knew that he had to kill them at the same time, so that Rita's money would go straight to her sister, Molly, and not circumvent round anyone else, which is why he used the bomb to get them both at once. But because Bill Smith had somehow survived the blast for weeks, he inherited the money and gave some of it away to a relative in the meantime.
Still however, after Bill died, the majority of the money ended up going to Molly, whose money was controlled by her husband and financial guardian Ernest Burkehardt. White wondered whether the sinister plot had begun with Ernest marrying Molly. Had he married this woman, lived with her for years, pretended to love her, and raised three children with her, just as a part of a sinister scheme to steal her family's money. We'll come back to that.
But before we do, what's a financial guardian we hear you ask? Well, basically it's the US government, Brittany-ing, the O.H.A. people. It's a conservatorship. It is. So the US government had decided that the O.H.A. people were too incompetent to manage their own money, and so they put in place what's known as financial guardianship. A.K.A. Brittany-ing these people. This scheme meant that any wealthy O.H.A. member would be officially deemed unable to control their own finances.
Instead, a prominent local white person would be put in charge of their financial affairs. A guardian would oversee and authorise all of their O.H.A. wards, expenditures, down to the toothpaste they bought. Of course these are incredibly horrendously racist laws, but things became even worse in 1921 when all O.H.A. bank accounts became quote unquote restricted. Which is why Rowan had to borrow money off Hale in the first place. Uh-huh.
Basically, this meant that even if a member of the O.H.A. tribe had literally tens of millions of dollars in their bank accounts, they weren't allowed to withdraw more than a few thousand dollars of their own money each year. It didn't matter if they needed the money for their sick children's hospital bills or for their education or for shoes or for anything. It wasn't up to them.
And although some O.H. members were fortunate enough to have a white guardian who actually had their best interests at heart, the vast majority of guardians did everything they could to swindle their wards out of as much money as they possibly could. Just like Britney Stard. A government study found that before 1925, these white guardians stole as much as $8 million from O.H.A. members restricted accounts, which is around $130 million in today's money.
And these guardians were made up of the most prominent people in society. They were typically judges, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, ranches and politicians. Yet another revelation came when white's team were told by an informant that the person who had made the bomb that killed Rita and Bill Smith was an outlaw, named Assa Kirby. But the thing was, Kirby had had his head blown off during a botched robbery of a jewelers. Who wants just getting fucking blown up all the time in this?
I know it's the Wild West, but they're just like, oh yeah, he got himself blown up during a robbery at a jewelers. That's the end of that then. When white spoke to said Jula, he said that Hale gave him the heads up that Kirby was planning on robbing him that day. Pun intended. It also turned out that Hale was the one who had suggested to Kirby that that day was the very best day to commit a jewel fever. So essentially, Hale was just tying up his own loose ends in one fell swoop.
Because once Kirby was gone, nothing could connect him to the bomb plot. Cowboy White paid Molly a visit. She'd understandably become somewhat reclusive and overcome with fear. On top of that she was also dying from diabetes, despite receiving regular injections of the new miracle drug insulin from the shone brothers. In his team, of course, found this to be suspicious and removed Molly from their care and admitted her to a hospital where miraculously she began to get better.
And that's because the shone brothers, if you hadn't got there yourself, were the ones poisoning Molly and the ones who had been poisoning everyone else. Feeling that they had enough damning evidence to get Ernst Bartkart and Hale to confess, the Department of Justice issued warrants for their arrests on the 4th of January 1926. Hale refused to talk on his way to jailing Guthrie Oklahoma, but Burkart wasn't quite as tight-lipped.
Burkart told the agents that Hale had organised the plan to blow up Rita and Bill Smith's house, so that Molly would inherit the head rights. He also went on to reveal that Hale had hired an outlaw named Ramsay to shoot Rowan after Hale had managed to get the life insurance policy on him. The agents brought in Ramsay for questioning, and he confessed to everything in assigned statement, including that Hale had paid him to commit the murder. Ernst Bartkart's trial began in June of 1926.
Initially, he recanted his confessions and was adamant that he and his uncle innocent, but something changed in Ernst when Molly's youngest daughter passed away during the trial. Suddenly, he dismissed his attorney and pleaded guilty to all charges. He was sentenced to life in prison, and even volunteered to be the star witness against his uncle in his trial the following month.
And lo and behold, on 20 October 1926, Hale was found guilty in sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in Levenworth. It was revealed during the trial that Bryan Burkart had been present when an outlaw named Kelsey Morrison shot Anna Brown in the back of the head on Hale's instructions. But Bryan was given immunity because he was cooperating. And with that, the trials were over, but it didn't mean that justice had been done.
There were countless murders of the Osage that have never been solved, and their killers have never been found. Many were just overlooked and never tried, like the terrifying shone brothers. During his federal trial, Molly divorced Bryan and remarried God. I know. And she eventually died in 1937 at the age of 50, which in the 30s, yeah, all right. Ernst Burkart was paroled in 1937, but arrested again for robbing a bank. He just can't, can't stop.
You know what, the outlaw life is the life for him. Yeah, it chose him. He was eventually released again in 1959 and lived the rest of his years in a trailer home with his brother, Bryan. And then that leaves us with just William Hale, who only ended up serving 21 years in Leavenworth before being paroled in 1947. He died in a nursing home in Arizona in 1962. Imagine going to prison in 1926 and coming out in 1959. Like imagine how much of a mind fuck that would be.
Not that any sympathy, but just like that. No, no, no, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Just fascinating by the passage of time. Yeah, no. According to the FBI, the official death toll of the Osage reign of terror was 24. But historians and investigators now believe the true number to be somewhere in the hundreds.
At the end of his incredible book, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI, David Grand reveals that there are recorded murders of the Osage for their head rights even after Hale's arrest, so perhaps he wasn't the only one at it. Maybe he was the mastermind behind one of the bloodiest series of murders, but he just can't have been the only one involved. Maybe a better question would be who wasn't involved.
Yeah, I feel like this was one genius scheme that probably William Hell came up with where he was like, okay, you just murder down the line. You murder everybody in her at the head right and her at the head right and her at the head right. Marry that person and then kill them and then you get everything. And everyone was like, wait a minute. Have you seen what he's doing and then they're all at it? Oh, yeah. I mean, he gets caught, so he's clearly not the brightest pixie and the forest.
I imagine that quite a lot of people came up with the same idea. Because it's like, you know, the literally the only way you can get your hands on it is to inherit it. It doesn't take that many cognitive steps to come up with the plan. And you can go after anybody in the Osage tribe because like that original contract was settled that everybody in that tribe was going to get equal head rights. So it just left everybody right for the picking from these terrible people.
And for this incredible story, we only have David Granta thank really. He spent five years digging through historical archives and records piecing together this incredibly complicated story. So without his book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which we cannot recommend enough, this episode would not have been possible. So go out and buy it.
First you're so ourselves into the Wild West world and of course maybe go and see the Martin Scorsese film that comes out later this year we think next November this year. Rob Textineer is playing William Haile. That's, that's good casting. Oh, okay, I can see that. Yeah, all right. Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm pumped. So that's probably the weirdest, most bonkers fucking story you've never heard of. Yes, yeah, we finally lived up to what we promised absolutely.
So there you go, you can take that all the way to the podcast bank, enjoy it. If you would like to come and listen to us talk about something else, you can head on over now
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Imagine you're walking through the park one day and you see a suspicious backpack sitting underneath a bench. You report it to the police and upon investigating they discover two live pipe bombs inside. You rush to clear the area before they explode, saving countless lives and preventing injury. Everyone declares you a hero for a fleeting moment until everything changes and you are declared the prime suspect. This was the story of security guard Richard Jewel.
After the centennial park bombing killed one person and wounded more than 100, public pressure and immediate witch hunt pushed a desperate FBI to find a suspect despite obvious holes in the case and unethical tactics used by the FBI security guard Richard Jewel was under pressure to confess. I'm Aaron Hable and I'm Justin Evans. Join us as we explore the aftermath of the 1996 centennial Olympic park bombing and the newest season of our podcast Generation Y, the Olympic Park Bombing.
Follow Generation Y on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Generation Y ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus. I'm Dan Tabersky. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad and like, stop fucking around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. Like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls.
With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the download. Everybody's thought I was holding something back. Well you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, well, yeah. Now it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new date line and everyone was
trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondry and Pineapple Street Studios. Historical. Follow hysterical on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of hysterical early and add free right now by joining Wondry Plus.