Killers of the Flower Moon

One thing that remained unresolved for Grann was how many murders had been committed by people besides Hale. The Bureau’s case had focused on Hale and was largely closed after he went to prison. Yet as Grann reviewed all those killed during the Reign of Terror, it didn’t seem possible that Hale could be responsible for all the deaths. Grann contacted Martha Vaughan, the granddaughter of W. W. Vaughan, the lawyer who had visited George Bigheart in the hospital and who was thrown from a train while returning to Pawhuska with information. She and a cousin met Grann and told him that a banker named H. G. Burt, who had embezzled money from Vaughan’s estate, could be a suspect.

At the National Archives in Fort Worth, Texas, Grann found bits of information pointing more definitively toward Burt. Burt was close to Hale; one informant claimed they’d shared the money made from Bigheart’s death. Digging deeper, Grann he found corroborating evidence: Burt had been appointed guardian of Bigheart’s daughter after her father’s death. Grann even found some proof that Burt had killed Vaughan: A newspaper article noted that Burt had been seen boarding the train with Vaughan on the latter’s fatal ride, and then had been the one to report Vaughan’s disappearance. Moreover, Grann came across an interview transcript in which an informant claimed that Burt had killed Vaughan.

Grann reported his findings to Martha. He felt bad when she started to cry, but she assured him, “No, it’s a relief. This has been with my family for so long” (264).

In 2013, Grann was in Pawhuska to watch a film of the Osage ballet Wahzhazhe, which chronicles their history. The Osage have a strong link to ballet through two tribe members who were professional dancers: sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. At the theater, Grann ran into Kathryn Red Corn, who asked him to come see her at the museum the next day. There, she told him the story of her grandfather’s death in 1931. He suspected that his second wife, a white woman, was poisoning him, and even warned relatives who visited not to eat or drink anything she’d made. He died at age 46, an otherwise healthy man. Hale could not have been behind it, as he was imprisoned at the time.

This information caused Grann to look again at the murder of Charles Whitehorn in 1921. Although it happened when Hale was actively killing people, Hale had never been linked to Whitehorn’s death. Grann learned from the records that Whitehorn’s wife, Hattie, had likely killed him with an accomplice. The Bureau had a good deal of evidence that pointed to this, but it did not fit their theory that Hale had masterminded all the murders, so the case was dropped. Grann concludes that the Reign of Terror involved numerous individuals and was much larger in scale than the Bureau’s investigation indicated.

This chapter focuses on a manuscript by Anna Marie Jefferson that Grann found at the Pawhuska Public Library. Jefferson was the great-great-grandniece of Mary Lewis, an Osage woman who was killed in 1918. She had disappeared on a trip to Texas with two white men; her mutilated body was found early the next year. One of the men confessed that they had killed Lewis in order to acquire her headright. This was only more proof that the Reign of Terror had been more widespread than the official record indicated, spanning at least 1918 to 1931.

Grann summarizes his reckoning of the widespread and systematic murders in Osage County, including deaths not investigated or counted as murders, as well as people who were targeted but in the end escaped death. The toll on the Osage Nation was staggering. In the National Archives, Grann found a logbook listing all the guardians for Osage members and noticed an unnaturally high incidence of deaths among their wards.

Back in Oklahoma, Grann visited Mary Jo Webb, whose grandfather had been one of the victims uncounted in the official statistics. He suspected his wife was poisoning him and was in the process of getting a divorce from her. Before he could do so, however, he was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Poison was involved in many of the murders and attempted murders; Webb told Grann that “everyone knew” (290) the Shoun brothers were the source.

The murder conspiracy was made up of people in high places: doctors, lawyers, undertakers, prosecutors, and elected officials. They could all use their power to cover up evidence and escape culpability. As Webb put it, “This land is saturated with blood” that “cries out from the ground” (291).