Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Oil and Blood: The Osage Murders

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Minnie Smith grew sick quite suddenly. She had been young, fit and healthy - and the doctors were baffled when she died. "A peculiar wasting illness," they called it. Then, her sister Anna went missing. Her rotting corpse was found a week later, a bullet hole through her skull. When a third sister, Rita, was blown up in her own bed, a grim pattern was clear: the family was being targeted.Lawman Tom White strode into town to investigate - and uncovered a vicious plot that chilled him to the bone...This episode is based on David Grann's book, Killers of the Flower Moon, and is the first of two cautionary tales produced in association with Apple Original Films. The film of the same title is in movie theaters now. It's directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone. Next week, we'll hear more on this story from former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation Jim Roan Gray.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin This cautionary tale is based on David Granzburg, Killers of the Flower Moon, and produced in association with Apple original films. The film of the same title is now exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the Osage Nation stretched across the center of the North American continent. From the Rocky Mountains through to what is now Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma, President Thomas Jefferson viewed the Osage people with wary respect. When in 1804 he met with a group of towering Osage chiefs of the White House. He remarked that they

were the finest men we have ever seen. The wary respect did not last. By 1870 the Osage people had been pushed into buying land that one observer described as broken, rocky, sterile and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death of the buffalo and brutal attacks from settlers, only a few thousand of them remained alive. The Osage chief, Wati Ankar, tried to look on the bright side. My people will be happy in this land. He said, there are many hills here. White man does not like a country where there are hills,

and he will not come. But the white man did come. Osage children were forcibly enrolled in Catholic boarding schools days travel away from their parents, and made to change their names and their clothes to the European style. The United States policy was that the Indian must conform to the white man's ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.

In 1906, the US government wanted to create a new state, Oklahoma, and handed over to white settlers. They pressed the Osage Nation to agree to a new deal concerning the rights to the land they had purchased. The Osage negotiators played a weak hand well. Under the deal that they agreed, the entire tribe of 2,229 souls collectively held the rights to whatever lay beneath their land. And what lay beneath? As the Osage negotiators suspected, then the white man had not guessed, was oil. Vast reserves of black gold. As the oil started to flow, so did the money.

Every quarter, every member of the Osage tribe received a check to reflect the money being paid by the oil man. At first it was little more than pocket money. Soon each check, each individual, was the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in today's money every quarter. The checks kept growing. Newspapers couldn't get enough of stories about what they called the red millionaires. Osage girls dressed in the latest Parisian fashions. Osage cookouts, a circle of expensive automobiles

surrounding an open campfire where the bronze and blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style. Osage elders arriving for a ceremonial dance in a private plane. Luck had finally smiled on the Osage Nation. Or had it. I'm Tim Halford, and you're listening to Corsion Retails. Mini Smith was the first of the four sisters to die. She had been young, fit and healthy. And then she'd grown ill quite suddenly. The doctors in Osage County were baffled by her death, but of course they had a diagnosis, a peculiar wasting illness. Maybe.

Peculiar it certainly was. Mini left behind a husband, a white man called Bill Smith. A few months after Minnie's death in 1918, Bill married another of the sisters, Rita. Then there was Anna. She'd also married a white man, but she'd divorced him, and at the age of 34, she had a habit of disappearing on wild nights of drinking and dancing. She had plenty of places to go, as the oil flowed in Osage County, once modest settlements became hustling towns full of oil workers, bootleggers and gangsters.

One overnight oil rush town was named WhizBang, where people whizzed all day and banged all night. Anna enjoyed such places, but they were risky. She always kept a small pistol in her purse. And then, one night, in 1921, she went out partying and didn't come home. Not the first night, not the second, and not the third. Which brings us to sister number four, Molly, the serious responsible sister, the one who ended up taking care of all the others and their mother too. In her hunt for her missing

sister, Molly could call on perhaps the most influential man in Osage County. Her husband's uncle, William Hale, the man they called the King of the Osage Hills. Hale had been a cowboy when he was young. Now he was a bespectacled, three-piece suit-wearing pillar of the community. Behind his out-ish glasses he remained a formidable character. He was not the kind of man to ask you to do something, he told you, said Molly's husband Ernest. But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering, he was also a reverend, and a deputy sheriff, and widely regarded as the most public-spirited man in Osage County. He had supported local schools and charities before the Osage people struck oil.

One doctor said, I couldn't begin to remember how many sick people have received medical attention at his expense, nor how many hungry mouths have tasted of his bounty. William Hale himself once wrote, I never had better friends in my life than the O Sage's. Uncle William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If anyone could help Molly find her sister. It will be him. In the second half of the 20th century, economists began to observe a pattern. Striking oil is

not the guarantee of national prosperity that you might expect. Indeed, the reverse is often true. Think of Iraq and Iran. Venezuela and Nigeria, there are plenty of countries with vast reserves of oil, and few of them seem to have flourished as a result. Even the wealthy exceptions, such as Saudi Saudi Arabia often have a thin and brittle kind of wealth. It's a challenge to build foundations for enduring prosperity for something that will last longer than whizz-bag when the oil money is gone. Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem and they call it the resource curse. But I

prefer a more lyrical description by a former minister of oil rich Venezuela when he was asked to describe the effect of all that black gold on his country. It is the devil's excrement. He declared, the resource curse or the devil's excrement, though one of their elders seemed to anticipate the idea. Someday this oil will go, he said, And there will be no more fat checks every few months from the great white father. There will be no fine motorcars and new clothes. Then, I know, my people will be happier. But were those fat checks involved in the peculiar death of one sister and the disappearance

of another? Uncle William Hale had quietly expressed his doubts about Bill Smith. He'd married Mini, remember, then she'd died suddenly and mysteriously. Months later, he married her sister Rita. marrying one Osage woman would set a man up for life. marrying two? you had to wander about Bill's motives. but then it wasn't as if Bill had stood to gain financially from Minnie's death.

under the system of head rights, it wouldn't be Bill who'd keep getting those fat checks. Instead, Minnie's headwrites passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's headwrites if anything had happened to Anna. And after Anna had been missing for a week, there was news. A rotting corpse had been discovered. The undertakers scattered salt and ice on it to reduce the swelling and the stink. By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the vultures were wheeling overhead. Was it Anna? The face of the corpse was unrecognizable, but Molly knew the traditional blanket and the clothes were anners.

She had washed them freshly for her sister the last time she saw her alive a week ago. And there was Anna's distinctive gold filling. It was her for sure. Rita wept. Molly was resolute. She hired private detectives, and she had help from her husband's uncle, William Hale, who swore he'd get justice for Anna. He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy.

They found a bullet hole in the woman's skull. Although, even after chopping her brain into mints, they never could find a bullet hole in the woman's skull, although even after chopping her brain into mince, they never could find the bullet. Curious. But as both the sheriff and the private investigators started to look into the mystery, it wasn't just minis and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve. Another one of the sisters did not have long to live. Corsinary tales will return in a moment.

The Indian must conform to the white man's ways. But not like this decided the federal government, not with luxury cars and private planes. Congressional committees took to pouring over reports of Osage expenditure, like disapproving parents, scrutinizing the bank account of a teenager. And that devised a system, just like the one you'd impose on a child.

If the US Department of the Interior decided that a member of a Native American tribe wasn't competent to manage their own affairs, their finances would be handed over to a Guardian. The idea of competence was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was purely a matter of racism. Full-blooded Osage people would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian. Guardianship was supposedly intended to protect Osage people from themselves. In fact, and of course, and by design, it made them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item of expenditure down to toothpaste and groceries. The Guardians were the ones writing the checks, and it was the easiest thing in the world for a Guardian to steal from their

Osage Ward. One scam, for example, was for a Guardian to buy a car for a couple of hundred dollars, then parted onto their ward for a thousand. Since Osage people were forbidden to have direct control of their own money, they might not have known about the deception, but in any case, they were powerless to do much about it. At least some Osage people had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband Ernest was her guardian. That meant she had as much control over her money as most women of the day. And just as you'd expect from the nephew of the upstanding William Hale, Ernest took good

care of Molly. She suffered from diabetes. He made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors. The ones who to his uncle's trusted doctors. The ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her the regular injections of insulin she needed to stay alive. But the private detectives that Molly hired weren't making much progress in figuring out who had shot Anna and why. They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive. Anna's ex-husband was grilled too, but he had nothing to gain from her death.

Anna's money went to her mother, Lizzie. The evidence to charge anyone seemed thin. Anyway, the locals sheriff and his deputies were busy, busy taking bribes, busy colluding with bootlegging gangs, and soon enough, they were busy dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set in. Osage people began to install electric lights outside their homes, pushing back the darkness in the hope of dissuading the creep, creep of the assassins. Who would be next? At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage, William Hale, seemed to be a target. Unknown men set fire to his pastures, and the flames spread for mile upon mile.

If the king of the Osage Hills could be attacked, nobody was said. Rita's husband, Bill Smith, developed his own suspicions about what was going on. He hired his own private detectives. He told friends he was determined to get to the bottom of the killings and That he was getting warm But perhaps his enemies were getting warm too On several nights Bill and his wife Rita were awoken by movement outside the house It sounded like intruders sc scouting around, getting the lay of the land.

Rita and Bill were scared. Leaving many of their possessions behind, they abruptly moved to a neighborhood in the town of Fairfax. Most people there had a guard dog. But over the course of a few days, one by one, the neighborhood guard dogs began to sicken, lay down, and die. In the early hours of window shattered, timber snapped, doors flew from their hinges, people were knocked flat. Further away, the town shook and shook and wouldn't stop. A rush of bewildered town spoke headed towards the epicenter. It was Bill and Rita's new house. There was nothing left of it but rubble and choking black smoke.

Apparently Bill Smith's investigation had got a little too warm. Molly was the only one of her sisters left. And despite regular injections to treat her diabetes, Molly herself was getting sicker and sicker. In 1925, a law man strode into Osage County, Oklahoma. Tom White was a movie caricature of a western hero, six foot four, square jawed, incorruptible and fearless. He wore a big cowboy hat even when in the office. The office itself was the Bureau of Investigation at Washington, DC.

A new organisation run by an ambitious young man, Jay Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted to make the reputation of his new bureau by solving a high profile case, a case that had gripped the nation. So, he had sent Tom White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made no progress in solving any of the crimes. Neither the deaths of Molly's family, nor around 20 other murders of the Osage and their allies. There were too many possible suspects, too many rumors and stories, and no hard evidence. Witnesses had a tendency to die in strange circumstances.

A car crash, bad whiskey, falling down the stairs. When the cowboy-hatted Tom White agreed to go to Osage County, he knew that investigations had been stalled for years, that the local officials were corrupt and that some previous investigators had been murdered themselves. If he took the job, he'd have a target on his back. It wasn't going to stop him. Tom White summoned a posse of undercover agents to join him in Oklahoma City. The only member of a Native American tribe who worked for the Bureau,

John Ren, who was part-yued, several experienced gunslingers who could easily pose as cowboys or rustlers. A former insurant salesman, whose cover story was that he was an insurance salesman. More than 20 Osage people had been murdered, along with several other locals. White decided to focus on a few, including the sisters, Anna, who were shot, Rita, whose house exploded. In his book, Killers of the Flower Moon, David Graham describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness of mirrors.

Evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctor's managed to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking leads turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially said Anna had been killed by a jealous wife after fooling around with the husband, but later admitted that a strange white man had come to her house and forced her to sign a fake statement. And Tom White realized something else. Some unknown person in his team was a double agent, leaking the Bureau's internal reports,

feeding back everything to the men they were pursuing. Who were those men? After spending the summer of 1925 trying to navigate the wilderness of mirrors, Tom White started to piece together a theory. One of the murdered Osage men had a life insurance policy for $25,000, a huge sum. But rather than naming his wife as a beneficiary, he'd named his wealthy friend, William Hale, the king of the Osage Hills. That seemed strange, although Hale explained to White that the poor man had discovered his wife was having an affair, and Hale had comforted him in his distress. That would explain everything. Then a woman who lived near Hales Farm told investigators

that when Hales Land had been set ablaze, it was by Hales workers on Hales orders. It collected $30,000 in insurance money. Hales controlled everything around here. She told the agents. White looked more and more closely, but Hale's affairs. Those headwrites, the unbelievably lucrative rights to the money from Osage County's oil fields, couldn't be bought or sold, they could only be inherited.

Minis and Anna's headwrites had gone to their mother, Lizzie. Then Lizzie herself had died from a mysterious illness. All of her accumulated headwrites went to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow-burning family tragedy started to develop a remorseless logic in Tom White's mind. Even the use of a bomb to murder Rita and her husband Bill, because they're will specified that if they died simultaneously, everything would pass to Molly. Molly herself was very ill. Molly herself was very ill. Despite the close attention she was receiving from William Hale's personal physicians.

She hadn't died, not yet. But perhaps the killers weren't in a hurry since Molly's money was all controlled by her husband, Ernest, a man who was absolutely loyal to his uncle, William Hale. Ernest, it seemed, might be complicit in the plot to murder every member of his wife's family, and, presumably, his wife herself. Solving the mystery was one thing. Securing a conviction was quite another. In an Oklahoma court,

everyone from the sheriff to the jurors would be bought and paid for by William Hale. Even if Tom White could get the case tried in a federal court, would a white jury convict? As one Osage elder commented, the question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder or merely cruelty to animals.

The trials were a sensation. I say trials, since there were several murders and several murderers working for Hale. One was declared a mistrial after it became clear that members of the jury had been bribed. Ernest made a full confession of his and his uncle's crimes. Then, with Druid, and agreed to testify for his uncle's defence. Then, repented and confessed again. It's hard to know why he changed his mind.

But perhaps it was the sight of his wife, Molly, sitting silently in the courtroom, day after day, solemnly watching as it became clear that the man she had loved had conspired to murder every member of her family, including her. Finally, a jury reached a verdict. The clerk read it out. To the charge of first degree murder, William K. Hale had been found guilty. But the jury ruled out the death penalty that would normally be a foregone conclusion.

Hale and others would serve long prison terms for their appalling crimes. Orson Wells once said that if you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story. It's tempting to stop the story on November 17th, 1926. Tom White has gone out on a high, retiring from the Bureau to take a more settled job, does the warden of Levenworth prison. And he's just learning the ropes of the new job when some new inmates shackled, pale and blinking in the sunlight are walked up the prison driveway of the US marshals. US Marshals. White recognizes the distinctive round face of William K. K. and Hale recognizes him too. 5. Hello Tom, offers Hale. Hello Bill says Warden Tom White. He shakes William Hale's hand

and watches as Hale is marched off to his self. But I can't end the story there. When Tom White and the Bureau of Investigation convicted Hale and his immediate conspirators, they declared victory and got out of town. conspirators, they declared victory and got out of town. But the killings didn't stop then. You can still drown in the devil's excrement, even if the devil himself has gone to jail. Corsionary tales will return after the break. This cautionary tale relies on David Graham's magisterial book, Killers of the Flower Moon. When I told David I was hoping to base an episode on it, he told me, take a look at the final section of the book.

That's the part of the history that often gets left out. The final section begins in 2012, almost 90 years after our comic book hero Tom White strode into town. Another investigator followed in his footsteps. He wasn't a former Texas Ranger, standing tall, packing heat and wearing a cowboy hat. He was a bespectacled writer from New York. David Graham himself. Graham had questions in his mind about the murders. And he wanted to see Osage County, to meet some of the 21st century Osage people. The oil boom ended in the 1930s. The boom towns of the area are

depopulated now. Whizbang is long gone, the clues that it ever existed, covered by grass. There's still a little oil and still a little money for the people with headwrites, but not enough to change a life, or to end it. Under the headwite system, some of that money remains in a trust and some things don't change. It isn't managed by the Osage Nation, but by the US government. Miss managed, the Osage say, and their legal struggle over the money continues.

The Osage Nation is 20,000 strong, of whom 4,000 still live in Osage County in and around their capital, Pohaska. The Osage have an elected government and ratified a new constitution in 2006. In some ways the Osage Chiefs' prophecy has come true. Someday this oil will go, and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the great white father. Then I know, my people will be happier. But the terror of the 1920s is a low bar for happiness. One Osage historian, Louis F. Burns, wrote, to believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind.

What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. But much of what the Osage Nation had now exists only in memory. David Graham visited the region several times to meet people and hear their stories. He attended a ceremonial dance, watching the drummers and the singers. The dancers in headdresses stepping together counter-clockwise, intensity building. At the dance, a woman came up to David Grand and introduced herself. She was in her 50s, wearing a blue dress with long black hair in a ponytail.

She seemed familiar somehow. Hi, she said, I'm Margie Birkart. She was the granddaughter of Ernest and Molly Birkhart. Molly, who'd watched her sisters and mother die one by one. Ernest, who'd conspired in their murder. Margie talked about her father, cowboy Birkhart, how much he'd doted on his mother Molly, and how haunted he'd been by the crimes of his father. She drove David Graham to the site of the bombed house, and as they sat

outside in the car, she told him that little cowboy and his sister had been due to visit their aunt Rita the night her house blew up. But Cowboy had earache, so it didn't go. Ernest would have known very well what would happen to the house that night, as Margie explained to Grant, my dad had to live, knowing that his father had tried to kill him. The more often David Grand visited Osage County, and the more stories he heard, the more he came to realize that reality didn't quite squeeze into the neat story of William Hale's murderous plot

and Tom White's brilliant investigation. Hale was guilty of organising the murder of Molly Burke Hart's family, to be sure. And the Osage haven't forgotten. In the Osage Nation Museum in Pohoska, there's an expansive group photograph from 1924, depicting many members of the tribe alongside the most influential and admired white locals. A section of the picture has been cut away. A section depicting William Hale.

The museum director, Catherine Redcorn, explained to David Gran that it was too painful to show. The devil was standing right there. But there's no evidence connecting Hale with the murder of Barney McBride, an oil man who'd set off for Washington DC determined to appeal to the federal authorities for help in solving the Osage murders. His naked body was found the next morning, a sack tied over his head, his skull smashed in. He'd been stabbed two dozen times.

Nor was Hale apparently connected with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn, who disappeared around the same time as Anna. He was found under a bush, a bloated, fly-blown corpse, identified only by a letter in his pocket. Between his eyes, gaped two bullet holes. His widow, Hattie, then seemed sure to die of a mysterious illness until her sisters moved her away from the area, where she staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't seem to be behind the death of George Bigheart, who died in an Oklahoma City hospital in 192323 after being poisoned.

Or, WWVorn, Bigheart's lawyer, who rushed to his deathbed to hear his testimony and collect some vital and incriminating documents. Vorn then phoned the Osage County Sheriff to tell him that he knew who killed Bigheart and a lot more than that. Vaughn boarded a train home, but never made it. His body was found by the tracks north of Oklahoma City. Neck broken, incriminating documents gone. In his conversations with Osage people,

Grand kept hearing similar stories. Osage grandparents who died young in the 1920s or 1930s, with the family convinced of foul play, and the authorities showing no interest. Digging into the archives, he sometimes found clues. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Grand Detective Work reveals the identity of the influential man who killed WWVORN. But some of the murders will never be solved.

Too much evidence was deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then there are other heart-breaking cases of white guardians with three, four or more Osage wards who all died young for no apparent reason. Deaths that at the time were never even recognized as murder at all. The resource curse is seen as a subtle economic problem. There's a lively academic debate on why some nations seem to suffer more than others and what policies they should adopt. But the basic truth of the resource curse isn't subtle at all.

It's that money brings trouble. Civil wars, nasty geopolitics, brutal dictatorships. Or if you're the last remaining 2,229 members of the Osage Nation, suddenly rich and hemmed on all sides by a society with no respect for you at all, it brings murder. The Osage was surrounded by murderers. Those murderers weren't all orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't need to be. They had their own methods and their own motives. And they were protected by a white society

that didn't much care about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a conspiracy is so big, you simply can't call it a conspiracy. This cautionary tale is based with permission on David Granzbook, Killers of the Flower Moon. The film of the same title is now in theatres, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone. This episode was produced in association with Apple original films. Next week I'll be back, discussing this story with Jim Rohn Gray, a former principal chief of the Ose age nation. Corsinary tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Alice Fines, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lytale Moulade, John Schnarrs, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Corsary Tales has a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardaw Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. you