The real history behind Killers of the Flower Moon: author explains true story of Osage Nation

Is Killers of the Flower Moon based on a true story?

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a true series of murders that was described by press at the time as the “bloodiest chapter in American crime history”. The case became the subject of one of the fledgling FBI’s first major homicide investigations.

David Grann’s non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI was first published in 2017, and is the basis of Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film. It detailed the conspiracy and the horror of the murders’ exposure, its impact on the Osage, and the breadth of the tragedy, much of which would remain hidden until decades later.

It’s a story that was forgotten in the history of the United States for many years, though crucially, explains David Grann, not by the Osage Nation. “I should make it abundantly clear that it was not ignored by the Osage,” said Grann, speaking on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “The Osage remember this history to this day. And for them, it remains living history.

“But for most people in the United States and beyond, they've never heard of this. I had never heard of this.”

Read on for an explainer to the real history behind the big-screen story.

*Warning, there are spoilers to the ending of the book and film ahead*

What was the position of the Osage Nation in early 20th-century America?

“The Osage had once controlled much of the mid-west of the country during the 17th century, all the way from the edge of Arkansas to the edge of the Rockies,” explains Grann. “And they were a dominant nation. President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 referred to them as the great nation.”

Jefferson also met with several Osage chiefs the following year, and promised that they would be treated like friends, but within a few years they were driven off their lands.

“Like so many Native American nations,” says Grann, the Osage “were eventually bunched into reservations, losing their territory. The Osage ended up in Kansas on a reservation in the 1800s, and they were promised that, okay, you’ll finally be safe here and be left alone.”

But once more, by the 1860s, the nation was under siege by settlers. “There were massacres,” says Grann, “they were starving, and they knew they needed to move on. They were being driven off their land again.”

At this time, an Osage chief considered where the nation might go. He chose an area of land in what would later become northeast Oklahoma, explains Grann, “because it's rocky. It's infertile. You can't do agriculture.” The chief expressed hope that ‘maybe the white man will finally leave us alone’.

But in the late 19th century, the US government legislated that Native American Nations needed to break up reservations, the territories that they had been forced on to as white settlers had taken their land. In accordance with a law called the Dawes Act, smaller pieces of land would be parcelled instead to individuals.

“The process was called allotment,” explains Grann, “and it was done in theory, they would say, because they wanted to ‘civilise’ Native Americans and turn them into private property owners. It was also really done so that it would be easier to obtain their land. And this process happened to the Osage as well. They were allotted and their land was broken up.”

But, Grann explains, the Osage had cleverly obtained a crucial negotiation with the US government during the allotment process: that they would maintain all the subsurface mineral rights.

“Even when their land began to be broken up, they communally controlled all the rights to what was underneath. They had had some hints that there was oil, but nobody suspected that it was sitting on these huge deposits.”

Where did the Osage Nation’s wealth come from?

In 1897, the land that the Osage settled on was later discovered to be sitting upon some of the largest deposits of oil then in the United States. While sure enough, the surface territory of the Osage reservation gradually got “gobbled up” by settlers and disappeared, the rights to the minerals underneath were retained.

Each person of the Osage nation was granted what was called a ‘headright’. “There were only about 2,000 or so Osage,” Grann explains, and “a headright essentially meant that they had a share in the mineral trust.” 2,229 headrights were granted.

When prospectors came into the region and found oil, they had to pay royalties to the Osage, all of which went into the communal pot. Each Osage who had a headright, got a percentage of it.

“A headright could not be sold or bought,” says Grann. “It could only be inherited. And this was a way to keep that mineral trust within the hands of the Osage. So even as they lost their surface land, they were able to hold on to this this underground reservation.”

How wealthy were the Osage, and how did outsiders react?

“To give you some sense of the Osage wealth, in 1923, these 2,000 or so Osage received what would be the equivalent today of about $400m,” explains Grann. “They were enormously wealthy.”

This, of course, belied long standing stereotypes of Native Americans and American Indians that traced all the way back to the first contact with settlers, says Grann.

“The press would regale the populace with stories of ‘the red millionaires’ and ‘plutocratic Osage’. And they would describe how they lived in mansions and how they had chauffeurs.

“They were shocked to report that the Osage had white servants who did their menial tasks. They reported that while each American might own a car, each Osage owned eleven of them.”

This caused a great sensation at the time, Grann says, and also a great deal of envy. As one Osage chief, Bacon Rind, said: “They bunched us up here, down on this rock. And now that it's worth millions, everybody wants to get a piece of it.”

Yet due to the racialised prejudices of the day, although the Osage were millionaires – “they sent their children to the best boarding schools. They were very educated”, says Grann – the US government passed legislation that forced Osage people to accept a guardian, “a white guardian, who would oversee their wealth.”

“What this literally meant is that an Osage who was a millionaire – who may be a chief of a great nation – that when he wanted to go to the store and buy toothpaste, he had a white guardian who had to authorise these purchases.”

“Not only was it greatly paternalistic and racist”, explains Grann, “it opened up a system of enormous graft, because these guardians began to skim and get kickbacks, and abscond with millions of dollars of the Osages’ money.”

What was the Osage ‘Reign of Terror’?

As the Osage became wealthier, from the early 1920s people began to be mysteriously murdered, one by one, for their oil money. The string of murders, which are suspected to have been committed between 1921–26, took the lives of more than 60 men, women, and children, many of the Osage Nation – though the final number of victims remains unconfirmed.

“These crimes were astonishing in their breadth and in their various means,” explains Grann.

“I describe in the book how one Osage family, the family of a woman named Mollie Burkhart (played by Lily Gladstone), became a prime target.”

In May 1921, Mollie’s elder sister, 34-year-old Anna Kyle Brown, disappeared; her body was later found in a ravine, shot through the back of the head. Mollie and Anna’s mother Lizzie died soon afterwards of suspected poisoning. Mollie’s younger sister Minnie had died three years earlier, and though it had been attributed to a wasting disease, Mollie would later have her doubts.

Grann describes a further, particularly chilling moment that followed in March 1923. “One day, Molly was in her house, it’s about three in the morning,” says Grann. She was asleep, in the house that she shared with her husband, Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), when she felt an enormous explosion. “It was so powerful that it shook all the houses for miles in the area. Windows were blown out and shattered. People who were sitting on their chairs were literally blown backwards.”

When Mollie went to the window, and she could see a large orange fireball rising into the sky. The fire came from the remains of a house, inside which had been Mollie’s other sister, Rita, and Rita’s husband, Bill Smith.

“Someone had planted a bomb under her sister’s house and blown it up, killing her sister and a white servant who lived in the house,” says Grann. Bill Smith died in hospital days later, seemingly unable to provide any information as to who had planted the bomb.

“This gives you a sense,” says Grann. “There were shootings, there were poisonings, there was a bombing. And these murders began to spread and target various families, not just Mollie’s family.”

Over the years that followed, people who might have held crucial evidence or who tried to investigate the murders were also brutally killed – and not just within Oklahoma. One white attorney WW Vaughan was thrown from a moving train while on his way to advocate for further investigation of the Osage killings, while another man was abducted from his boarding house, a plastic bag placed over his head. His body was found the next day in a ravine, beaten to death and stripped naked.

“There was a sense of genuine terror,” explains Grann. “Nobody knew who would become the next target.” Many Osage people strung lights around their houses at night so their land was in a permanent glow, so afraid were they of the faceless predators. “People wouldn't open their doors. Children weren't allowed to wander the streets,” says Grann. “The sense of terror was palpable.”

Why did the Osage Reign of Terror continue for so long?

All the lawmen in the area were white, explains Grann, and so there was a great deal of prejudice. “And because of that, many of these crimes went on to be unsolved, not just because people had been targeted, but also because there was just such racial prejudice that people did not treat the victims of these crimes like full blooded human beings.”

It's also important to understand, says Grann, that the 1920s was a remarkably lawless time in the United States, and there were very few competent local police forces, which meant very little training and hardly any forensic evidence.

People including Mollie Burkhart pleaded for the authorities to investigate the cases, but they were often met with indifference.

“There was a genuine conspiracy,” explains Grann, “where you had a power structure that was making millions of dollars by pilfering Osage money, and by murdering them to get their money. And so there was there was a complicity, there was a silence. There were willing executioners.”

The way that society responded “is part of the tragedy of these cases,” says Grann. “It's pretty abhorrent that for many years bodies piled up and nobody did a damn thing.”

Mollie Burkhart was one of the Osage who used own her money to fund private investigators and offer rewards. “But often the private investigators were themselves easily bought off by the killer or themselves were corrupt.”

Eventually, explains Grann, the Osage Tribal Council issued a formal resolution, pleading for federal authorities to send in investigators. These pleas reached an obscure branch of the US Justice Department, then called the Bureau of Investigation, which would later become known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

How were the Osage murders investigated by the FBI?

The Osage murders became one of the FBI's first major homicide cases, and also one of the first major homicide cases of its new director, J Edgar Hoover.

Hoover had been named acting director in 1924, then a 29-year-old with “dreams of building a bureaucratic empire”, says Grann. But at the time of the Osage murders, Hoover was still very insecure in his job. He was trying to professionalise the bureau, and brought in more formal training, college educations, and adopted more forensics.

“But the bureau initially badly bungled this case,” says Grann. “For two years there was no arrests. And most famously, they had made a huge, embarrassing, bloody mistake.” To gain evidence, they had taken an outlaw informant out of prison. The informant managed to slip the bureau’s forces and proceeded to rob a bank and kill a police officer.

Hoover, facing a potential scandal, brought in a frontier lawman and former Texas Ranger, a man named Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons).

Read more

Who was Tom White in Killers of the Flower Moon?

How did Tom White investigate the Osage murder case?

White put together a “quite extraordinary” undercover team, says Grann. “He took several old frontier agents. One of them posed as an insurance salesman and actually set up an insurance office in town on the reservation, and then sold real insurance policies.”

Another undercover operative was a cattleman and perhaps most remarkably, an American Indian agent was recruited. “There were no statistics back then,” says Grann, “so we don't know for sure. But he was probably the only American Indian agent in the bureau at the time, especially given the prejudices. He went in undercover as well, and they began to infiltrate the region.”

They retained deep cover, Grann explains, because there was such a sense of terror. “They didn't think they could get people to talk. But they also did it because anyone who was going in to try to stop the killings were being killed. And so they were marked men.

“This was a very dangerous operation. And in many ways, for Tom White, it became both a criminal operation and almost like a spy operation, because there were moles, there were double agents or threats of triple agents. The operatives were being followed and trailed while they were carrying out their investigations. They were threatening to tear down a very powerful system and structure.”

What White’s team began to discover was that the guardians – many of whom had been appointed to ‘protect’ the Osage and their fortunes – were, in many cases, criminals.

“These were, in theory, the leading citizens in society,” says Grann. They were often bankers and lawmen and politicians. They were, in effect, using their power to steal and graft.”

Another important thing to understand is that the bureau, the precursor to the FBI, was just emerging from its own corruption scandal, the Teapot Dome oil reserves scandal, in which where members of the bureau and Justice Department had accepted kickbacks from oilmen.

“All this corruption, this kind of sinister, garish corruption, is part of the backdrop in which this investigation is taking place.”

Who was behind the Osage Reign of Terror?

*Warning, major spoilers ahead*

The mastermind behind the conspiracy that carried out the murders of (at least) Anna, Lizzie, Rita and her husband Bill Smith, was a man named William K Hale (played in the movie by Robert De Niro).

A cow-wrangler and farmer turned self-made respectable businessman, Hale was at the heart of a conspiracy to funnel headrights of other Osage towards Mollie Burkhart, the wife of his nephew Ernest.

The plan seemingly was for Hale and Ernest to lay claim to Mollie’s entire fortune in the event of her death (it came to light that she was also being slowly poisoned, supposedly treatment for diabetes. When she was removed from the care of Ernest and two other local doctors, Mollie regained health rapidly.)

Hale had held immense influence over his nephews Ernest and Bryan, and had coerced them into carrying out their parts in an evil conspiracy, including Ernest’s involvement in planting an explosive under the house of Bill and Rita, and Bryan’s part in Anna’s murder.

“Even when they caught [Hale]”, explains Grann, “they didn't know if they could ever prosecute him because they didn't know if they could get 12 jurors, given the prejudice at the time to even rule against him despite the abundance of evidence.”

The result was an immensely volatile and protracted legal battle, during which Hale used means of bribery and intimidation to evade conviction for any crimes. After more than two years, Hale – along with Ernest Burkhart and several accomplices – was sentenced to jail time.

“What is so shocking in this story,” says Grann, “is that we often like to think of evil as a singular figure, and if you catch that figure and purge it, society returns to normal. And in this case, it was one man who was an embodiment in many ways of evil.”

But there were also a vast amount of conspirators in the Osage murder case. “Many of them on the outside seem like perfectly ordinary, law-abiding citizens. But they were participants and they would cover up the crimes.”

Lawmen helped to cover up murders, Grann details. Those who buried victims covered up that there was a gunshot wound in the head or that the person had been poisoned. “There was a complicity of silence by even those who were not directly profiting.”

The fact that these people were Osage, that is, that they were Native Americans, says Grann, allowed these crimes to be covered up and to be treated differently than if the victims had been white.

“The truth be said,” explains Grann, “even though the bureau was able to resolve many of the cases, and Tom White, who was in many ways a very good man, who was quietly a good man, and there's a lot of goodness in the story, not just evil. But even with the bureau's efforts, the breadth of the conspiracy was far wider and far darker than the bureau ever exposed.”

Why were the Osage murders forgotten?

The case initially got plenty of exposure in 1930s America, sensationalised in the press of the day, and J Edgar Hoover used the solving of some of the murders as a cause celebre to showcase the effectiveness of his bureau.

But by the 1930s, explains Grann, Hoover used other cases to publicise his war on crime: “there was [John] Dillinger, there were other outlaws. He paid less attention to this case.”

But also, says Grann, “I think the victims don't write history. I mean, it's a cliche, but it's true.

“And so many of the victims are people who, even though they had wealth, were more on the margins of society. And there was a great deal of racial prejudice. I think there was, whether consciously or unconsciously, an excising of this from history.”

It’s shocking that these crimes have not been more widely known beyond the Osages’ remembering, says Grann.

“This is unquestionably one of the more sinister crimes in American history, one of the worst racial injustices in American history. Also, an incredibly important chapter in American history, because this these forces of the clash between Native Americans and white.”

David Grann was speaking on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI is out now, published by Simon and Schuster