William King Hale was a cattleman from Texas who became one of the most powerful men in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the years when oil made the Osage people some of the richest in the world per capita. He leased tens of thousands of acres of Osage grazing land, controlled a bank in Fairfax, served as a deputy and gave money to local causes, and he called himself a friend of the Osage. Federal investigators later concluded that he had arranged the killing of members of one Osage family, the family of his nephew's wife, Mollie Burkhart, so that their oil wealth would pass toward his own household.
He was convicted of one murder. In January 1929 a federal jury at Pawhuska found him guilty of the murder of Henry Roan, an Osage man shot in his car in early 1923, on the theory that Hale had hired and paid the gunman, John Ramsey. Hale held a $25,000 life insurance policy on Roan. He was sentenced to life, served his term at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, and was paroled in 1947 over Osage objections. Men convicted of other Osage killings named him as the man who ordered them: Kelsie Morrison for the shooting of Mollie's sister Anna Brown in 1921, and Hale's nephew Ernest Burkhart for the 1923 bombing in Fairfax that killed Mollie's sister Rita Smith, Rita's husband Bill Smith and their housekeeper Nettie Brookshire. Hale was never tried for those killings, and he never admitted any of them. He died in Arizona in 1962.
The case was the first major homicide investigation of the federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency later renamed the FBI. In the newspapers of the 1920s, and in Osage memory since, the years of killing in Osage County are known as the "Reign of Terror." The number of people who died in those years has never been settled.
Hale was born near Greenville, in Hunt County, Texas, on Christmas Eve 1874, according to a 2023 account by the writer Greg Daugherty for HISTORY; the Oklahoma Historical Society's encyclopedia also calls him a native of Greenville. Accounts of the exact town differ. His father farmed and raised cattle. At 16 he left home to work as a cowboy. Years later, Hale described those days to a man he did not know was an undercover federal agent, telling him how he had run away from home and become a cowboy; the agent recorded that Hale liked to talk about his boyhood and his cattle deals.
He spent the following years buying and selling cattle between Texas and the Indian lands to the north. Daugherty writes that he was accused of rustling some of that stock. Around 1902, newly married to a young schoolteacher, he settled in the Osage hills, and the couple spent their first spring living in tents. Smithsonian Magazine, drawing on Grann's research, likewise places his arrival in Osage territory around the turn of the 20th century.
Osage County, which is the same land as the Osage Reservation, covers about a million and a half acres of rolling grassland and wooded canyons in northeastern Oklahoma. It is excellent cattle country. Hale built his fortune there through leases. By the 1920s, according to a 1953 internal history written by the FBI, he controlled about 45,000 acres of Osage grazing land by lease and owned 5,000 acres outright. He controlled a bank at Fairfax, had an interest in a store there, kept a house in Fairfax and a ranch house near Gray Horse, and owned fine horses.
He also cultivated people. The FBI history describes a man who put others under obligation to him through gifts and favors, co-signing notes, buying suits of clothes for friends and giving ponies to boys. He donated to schools and hospitals, acted as a deputy sheriff in Fairfax and signed some of his letters "Rev. W. K. Hale," according to the law professor Douglas O. Linder's account of the case. A historian quoted by Smithsonian said he spoke Osage. The Osage Nation describes him as one of the most prominent citizens of the area at the time, a wealthy rancher with banking and business interests across the county.
His dealings reached into Osage inheritances. A 1930 federal court decision in a land case shows that in 1919 Hale paid the Osage man George Bigheart for an interest in a 160-acre allotment that Bigheart believed he had inherited from his dead son, and then sued the son's surviving sister, a minor, to partition the land. In 1930 a federal judge held that Hale's purchase from Bigheart was valid but that the partition suit had not taken the girl's share from her, because the Secretary of the Interior had never approved it as federal law required for restricted Osage land.
The wealth that drew Hale and many others lay underground. Under the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, the minerals beneath the reservation stayed in tribal ownership and were held in trust by the United States. Royalties from oil and gas leases were pooled and divided equally among the 2,229 Osage on the tribal roll. Each share was called a headright. A headright could not be bought or sold, but it could be inherited, and, as the Oklahoma Historical Society's encyclopedia notes, the heir did not have to be Osage. The Osage Nation states plainly that this was the motive for the killings.
The payments grew enormously after oil fields were developed. Linder reports that the net annual payment per headright rose from $221 in 1915 to $12,400 in 1923, and the encyclopedia records that the tribe earned more than $30 million in revenue in 1923 alone.
A second system made Osage people vulnerable. The federal government and local courts placed many Osage under guardianship, deciding that they were not "competent" to manage their own money, often on the basis of how much Osage ancestry they had. A guardian, usually a prominent white man, controlled the ward's spending. In a 2017 interview with NPR, Grann called it a deeply racist system. The National Archives, which holds the Register of Guardians kept from 1919 to 1924, notes Grann's finding that guardians often used the arrangement to swindle the people they were supposed to protect.
Mollie Kyle was born in 1886. Grann has described her as growing up in a lodge, speaking Osage and following Osage traditions, and then, within a few decades, living in a large house with servants. Smithsonian, citing Grann, reports that she had briefly been married in her youth to Henry Roan. In 1917, by most accounts, she married Ernest Burkhart, a young white man who had worked as her driver. Ernest and his brother Bryan were nephews of William Hale and worked for him; the 1953 FBI history describes both as dominated by their uncle. Mollie and Ernest had children, among them a son, James, known in the family as "Cowboy."
Mollie's mother, Lizzie Q. Kyle, was an Osage elder. By 1921, according to the encyclopedia, Lizzie held her own headright and three more, inherited from her late first husband and from two daughters who had died. One of those daughters was Minnie, who died in 1918 at 27 of what doctors called a "peculiar wasting illness." Lizzie had two other daughters besides Mollie: Anna Brown, the eldest, and Rita, who was married to a white man, William E. "Bill" Smith.
Lizzie moved in with Mollie and Ernest at Gray Horse around 1920. She had been in poor health. The FBI history says she had been persuaded to make a will leaving most of her estate to Mollie's household, and it sets out the logic investigators later saw in the order of the deaths that followed: whoever in the family died first and last decided which way the headrights flowed. With each death, more of the family's wealth moved toward the last surviving sister, Mollie, and through her toward her husband, Hale's nephew.
Anna Brown was 34 and lived in Fairfax. She had been married to a man named Oda Brown and divorced him. She liked to dance and stay out late with friends. On May 21, 1921, she came to Mollie's house in Gray Horse to see their mother, who was ill. She was drinking that day. That evening Bryan Burkhart drove her away. At a coroner's inquest he testified that he had dropped her at her home in the late afternoon and never saw her again.
On May 27, according to the 1953 FBI history (May 28 in Smithsonian's account), a hunting party found her body in a ravine about three miles from Fairfax, just off the Pawhuska to Fairfax road. She had been shot once in the back of the head. Two local doctors, the brothers James and David Shoun, carried out a hurried autopsy and did not recover the bullet. Mollie's family offered a reward of $2,000. Hale offered rewards too, and told Mollie he would help find the killer.
The case went nowhere for years. Bill Smith, Rita's husband, pressed the inquiry harder than anyone in the family, and he and Rita openly said they believed Hale and his nephews were responsible. Bryan Burkhart was questioned and, according to the FBI history, charged in state court, with Hale furnishing his bond; he was never convicted.
Investigators later reconstructed that night from witnesses. Bryan Burkhart and Anna were seen at roadhouses with a third man until after midnight. The third man was Kelsie Morrison, a petty criminal who for a time had worked as an informant for the very agents who were looking for Anna's killer. In a statement taken at the federal building in Guthrie on May 18, 1926, Morrison said that he and Bryan Burkhart drove Anna, who was drunk, to a ravine; that he later shot her with a pistol Hale had given him; and that Hale paid him. In that statement he put the payment at one thousand dollars plus a debt he owed, paid through signed notes at the Osage bank in Fairfax. Linder's account puts the figure at $1,600.
Two months after Anna's death, in July 1921, Lizzie Q. Kyle died at Mollie's house after a long decline. The encyclopedia says poison was suspected, and Grann told NPR that evidence later surfaced that she had been poisoned. Her death was never charged as a crime against anyone. Because Anna had died first, half of Anna's estate passed into Lizzie's, and Lizzie's estate then passed in large part to Mollie's household, according to the FBI history.
Bill Smith did not believe Lizzie's death was natural. He suspected poison, and he connected it to Minnie's death and Anna's, and to the headrights that the family held.
Henry Roan was a full Osage, about 40 years old, who lived in Fairfax with his wife, Mary, and their two children. He was tall and wore his hair long in braids. He drank heavily and sometimes left home for weeks at a time, so when he was not seen for several days in late January 1923 no one raised an alarm. He had once tried to take his own life, a fact that would matter in court.
On February 6, 1923, a boy found his car in a rocky hollow a few miles northwest of Fairfax, a couple of hundred yards off the back road to Burbank. Roan was on the front seat. He had been shot once in the head from behind. The FBI history estimated from the state of the body and the weather that he had died around January 26. The land where he died was a restricted Osage allotment belonging to an Osage woman, Rose Little Star, a fact that later gave the federal courts their jurisdiction.
Hale was a pallbearer at the funeral. The mayor of Fairfax said Roan considered Hale his best friend. Shortly after the death, Hale presented a $25,000 policy on Roan's life for payment. The company refused, alleging fraud and misrepresentation, and Hale sued in federal court.
The details of that policy were set out later in the federal appeals court's 1928 opinion. Hale had procured the policy, claiming that Roan owed him $25,000 on a promissory note dated January 1921; the government contended that the note had in fact been made around June 1921, when the policy was issued. When the policy was written, Hale asked when it would become impossible for the insurer to contest it on grounds such as suicide or fraud. He was told one year. He paid two premiums and kept the policy in force for more than a year before Roan died. The FBI found court records showing that, in reality, Roan had owed Hale about $6,000, the balance on a house in Fairfax.
The man who fired the shot was John Ramsey, a bootlegger about 50 years old who had served a prison term for cattle theft and worked for Henry Grammer, a rancher and whiskey dealer. In the confession the agents took from him in January 1926 and later read to a jury, Ramsey said Grammer called him out of the bunkhouse at his ranch early in 1923, where Hale was waiting, and that Grammer told him Hale had a job: an Indian he wanted killed. Ramsey said Hale gave him $500 to buy a new Ford roadster and later paid him a further $500; that Hale pointed Roan out to him on the street in Fairfax without telling him his name; that he befriended Roan by selling him whiskey; and that one day near Salt Creek in the Sol Smith pasture he shot Roan from behind as Roan sat in his car. Ramsey said he learned the name of the man he had shot only when the body was found. Ernest Burkhart, in his own statement, said Hale had planned for Ramsey either to give Roan poisoned whiskey or to shoot him and leave a gun beside him so that it would look like suicide, and that Hale was angry the shot had come from behind.
Bill and Rita Smith had moved from the country into a new house in Fairfax, hoping to be safer. In his statement, Ernest Burkhart described a money dispute between Hale and Smith dating to 1918 or 1919 over a $6,000 check, after which there was bad feeling between the two men. Burkhart said Hale spoke about having Smith killed for more than a year, and tried to recruit gunmen, including the bank robber Al Spencer, who refused.
At about 2:50 in the morning on March 10, 1923, an explosion destroyed the Smith house. The FBI history says a large charge of nitroglycerin had been placed beneath it. Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire, the Smiths' 17-year-old housekeeper, were killed. Bill Smith was pulled from the wreckage and lived about four more days. According to Linder, Smith's lawyer later said that Smith had told him from his hospital bed that he had only two enemies in the world, Hale and Ernest Burkhart. Mollie's son Cowboy, who sometimes stayed at the Smith house, was not there that night because he had an earache, Smithsonian reports.
Hale was away. He and Henry Grammer had gone to the stock show in Fort Worth, Texas. In court in 1926, Ernest Burkhart testified that on the afternoon of March 7 Hale had told him to drive to Ripley the next morning and tell John Ramsey to have Asa "Ace" Kirby do the job while Hale and Grammer were in Fort Worth, and that he drove there on March 8 in Hale's red Buick roadster and delivered the message. The FBI history says Hale hired Ramsey and Kirby for the bombing and paid Ramsey $1,600.
The killings did not deliver all that investigators believed they were meant to. Rita and Bill Smith had made a joint will, and because Bill survived Rita by several days, her estate passed to him and then, at his death, to his daughter from an earlier marriage, who lived in Arkansas.
The deaths in Mollie's family were part of a wider pattern. The encyclopedia names other Osage whose deaths alarmed the Tribal Council, including Joe Grayhorse, William Stepson and Anna Sanford. Stepson, a champion steer roper, died in convulsions in 1922 in a way that pointed to strychnine. Barney McBride, a white oilman trusted by the Osage, went to Washington in 1922 to ask for a federal investigation and was found stabbed to death. In June 1923 W. W. Vaughan, a local lawyer and former prosecutor with ten children, went to Oklahoma City to see George Bigheart, who was dying of suspected poisoning and had information about the killings; Vaughan was later found dead beside the railroad tracks, thrown from the train. None of these deaths was ever proved against Hale.
Osage families strung lights around their houses at night, locked their doors and kept their children close. Some moved out of the state. Grann told NPR that by then at least 24 Osage had been murdered and that the Osage would later describe the departures as a diaspora.
Local law enforcement did little. Private detectives hired by families achieved less, and some, the FBI history says, were in the pay of the people they were meant to catch. In 1923 the Osage Tribal Council passed a resolution asking that the Secretary of the Interior obtain the services of the Department of Justice to catch and prosecute the people killing members of the tribe. Smithsonian reports that the Osage pooled $20,000 to pay for the investigation. Sources date the request to March 1923 (the encyclopedia) or April 1923 (the FBI). On March 24, 1923, according to Linder's chronology, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs asked the Bureau of Investigation for help.
The Bureau was small then and had limited powers. One of the few kinds of crime it could investigate was crime on Indian reservations. Its first efforts in Osage County went badly; one outlaw released as an informant escaped, robbed a bank and killed a police officer, Grann has said.
In the summer of 1925 the new director, J. Edgar Hoover, gave the case to Tom White, a former Texas Ranger who ran the Bureau's Houston office, and put him in charge of the Oklahoma City field office. White, born in a log cabin on the Texas frontier, assembled a small team of agents with frontier experience. According to the FBI, he led a team of four. Most of them worked undercover: one as an insurance salesman, one as a cattleman from Texas, one as an oil prospector and one, an American Indian agent, as a traveling medicine man. The insurance man actually sold policies, met Hale in a Fairfax hotel, and nearly sold him one. He recorded that Hale was nervous, complained of stomach trouble and sleeplessness, talked about taking a long rest, and was giving away gifts and favors to build goodwill.
The agents worked through the false leads that Hale and his friends spread. Hale circulated a rumor that the man courting Roan's wife had killed Roan, and agents spent months proving that man innocent. A convict at McAlester confessed to the Smith bombing in a story the agents traced back to Hale. They followed leads to California, New Mexico, Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Arizona.
White focused on the Roan insurance policy. The salesman who wrote it told agents that Hale, not Roan, had asked for it, and that Hale had to find a doctor willing to pass a heavy drinker; Dr. James Shoun approved him. Witnesses placed Bryan Burkhart with Anna Brown on the night she died, contradicting his testimony at the inquest. An informant named Asa Kirby as the man who had built the Smith bomb, but Kirby was already dead, shot during an attempted burglary of a store whose owner had been warned to expect him. The FBI history says Hale set up that burglary; that claim was never tested in court.
In 1925 Mollie Burkhart was seriously ill. She was receiving injections from the Shoun brothers that she understood to be insulin. In the fall of 1925, Linder reports, she told a priest that she believed someone was trying to poison her. The agents arranged for her to be taken to a hospital. Once she was out of the care of her husband and his uncle, the FBI recorded, she recovered. No one was ever charged with poisoning her. Had she died, the FBI noted, Ernest Burkhart would have inherited the fortune of her mother's family.
Warrants for Hale and Ernest Burkhart for the murders of Bill and Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire were issued on January 4, 1926, according to Linder's chronology, and both men were taken into custody that month. Hale told reporters he would not try his case in the newspapers but in the courts.
At Guthrie, White and Agent Frank Smith questioned Ernest Burkhart. They confronted him with an outlaw, Blackie Thompson, who told him he had given agents an account of Burkhart asking him to kill Bill Smith in exchange for a car. On January 6, 1926, Burkhart gave the agents two statements, one on the Roan killing and one on the bombing, in which he described Hale's plans and named John Ramsey as Roan's killer. He refused to implicate his brother Bryan, but he identified Kelsie Morrison as the man who shot Anna Brown.
Agents picked up Ramsey. Shown Burkhart's statement, he confessed to the Roan killing and admitted a part in the Smith bombing, naming Hale as the organizer of both and naming Henry Grammer and Ace Kirby as well. Grammer had died in a car crash in June 1923. Ramsey later recanted. Hale denied everything. When White told him the government had signed statements naming him as the principal in the Roan and Smith murders, Hale answered that he would fight it.
The prosecutors wanted to try Hale in federal court, away from Osage County, where his money and friends were strongest. A federal prosecutor warned, in words quoted by the public radio station HPPR's later retelling, that trying him in state court would be useless and dangerous. Federal jurisdiction over a murder in Oklahoma existed only if the crime involved an Indian and took place in Indian country. That is why the government built its case on Henry Roan: he was killed on a restricted Osage allotment.
The federal district court disagreed at first. On a demurrer, it ruled that a restricted allotment, owned in fee by an individual Osage but unsellable for 25 years, was not Indian country, and it dismissed the indictment. The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court. On June 1, 1926, in United States v. Ramsey, the Court reversed. Writing for the Court, Justice Sutherland held that the Osage remained wards of the United States and that a restricted allotment kept its Indian character during the restriction period, so a murder there could be tried in federal court.
While that question was pending, the state charged Hale and Ramsey with murder so they could not slip away. At a preliminary hearing at Pawhuska on March 12, 1926, Ernest Burkhart took the stand for the prosecution, then left it to confer with Hale's lawyers in the judge's chambers. The next day he testified for the defense and denied that Hale had ever discussed killing Roan with him. He also sued the agents, claiming they had forced his confession at gunpoint.
The state tried Ernest Burkhart at Pawhuska in May and June 1926 for the murder of Bill Smith. Hale testified that agents had threatened him with a gun, hooded him and spoken of the electric chair; White called the account a fabrication from start to finish. The judge excluded Burkhart's January statement, not because he believed the torture claims but because it had been taken in the early morning after long detention.
The trial was interrupted by the death of Mollie and Ernest's young daughter. On June 8, Burkhart passed a note asking to see John Leahy, a lawyer the Osage Tribal Council had hired to help the prosecution. The next day, June 9, he dismissed his defense lawyers in open court and pleaded guilty. He read a statement saying he had carried Hale's message telling the bombers that it was time to blow up the Smith house, and he said, "I feel in my heart that I did it because I was requested to do it by Hale, who is my uncle." He admitted that the story of abuse by agents was false. On June 21, 1926, he was sentenced to life in the state penitentiary at McAlester.
From then on he testified for the government.
A federal grand jury at Guthrie indicted Hale and Ramsey for the murder of Henry Roan on July 8, 1926. The indictment named Ramsey as the gunman and charged that Hale, "a white person," did "aid, abet, counsel, command, and procure" him. The trial opened at Guthrie on July 26 with witnesses under guard. The prosecutors were U.S. Attorney Roy St. Lewis and Leahy.
Burkhart was the main witness. Bootlegger Matt Williams testified that Hale had told him about the insurance policy in January 1923 and about arrangements with Ramsey. A member of Al Spencer's gang testified that Hale had tried to hire him to kill Osage people. An insurance examiner testified that when he asked Hale whether he meant to kill Roan for the insurance, Hale answered that he did. Hale testified that he had never devised a scheme to have Roan killed and never wanted his death. The defense offered witnesses who tried to place the blame on Roy Bunch, who had been involved with Roan's wife and married her within 60 days of Roan's death, or on a dead outlaw. One of those witnesses later admitted that a defense lawyer had persuaded him to lie.
On August 25, 1926, after five days of deliberation, the jury reported that it could not agree, and the judge declared a mistrial. St. Lewis said in court that at least one juror had been bribed. The jury, it later emerged, had split six to six. In October a grand jury indicted Jim Springer, a defense lawyer in the case, and several witnesses for obstructing justice in the first trial.
The second trial opened in Oklahoma City on October 20, 1926. It was tighter. On cross-examination, a defense lawyer listed Mollie's dead relatives and asked Burkhart whether his wife had any surviving relatives besides their children. She had none, he answered. After a day of deliberation, on October 29, 1926, the jury found Hale and Ramsey guilty of first-degree murder, and they were sentenced to life. The vote had been unanimous on the first ballot. They were sent to Leavenworth.
Hale appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, and on March 27, 1928, it reversed his conviction. Judge Van Valkenburgh's opinion rejected most of Hale's arguments. It held that the trial had been held in the proper court even though Osage County had been moved into a newly created Northern District of Oklahoma in 1925, that the indictment was sufficient, that a special assistant to the Attorney General could lawfully sit in the grand jury room, and that the trial judge had shown no bias.
But it found two serious errors. First, Hale should have been tried separately from Ramsey. Ramsey's confession, which named Hale as the man who hired him, was admissible only against Ramsey, and the court thought no instruction could undo its effect on the jury. The court observed that Hale's connection to the crime rested almost entirely on the testimony of Burkhart, "a confessed criminal," and that it was debatable whether the jury would have convicted on that alone. Second, the trial judge had allowed Burkhart to describe the message he carried from Hale about the Smith bombing, a separate crime for which Hale was not on trial. The court also criticized the prosecutors' closing arguments, including an appeal to the jurors to win "the plaudits of the people," and ordered a new trial.
Some later accounts, including the FBI's 1953 history, say the conviction was reversed because the case had been tried in the wrong district. The opinion itself says the opposite: it upheld the trial court's power to try the case where it did.
Ramsey's separate appeal reached the same court on the same record, and on July 1, 1929, it reversed his conviction for the same reason concerning the Smith testimony.
Hale was retried separately in the federal court for the Northern District of Oklahoma at Pawhuska, the county seat of Osage County. The FBI's history describes defense witnesses who perjured themselves and prosecution witnesses who were threatened; agents found letters in the bedding of Hale's cell from a witness who wrote that he had lied for Hale before and meant to do so again, and those letters were used against Hale at his final trial. A witness named Dewey Selph testified that Hale had hired him to kill Kelsie Morrison's former wife, Katherine Cole, a witness to the Anna Brown killing, and that he had lost his nerve.
In January 1929 the jury found Hale guilty of the murder of Henry Roan, and he was again sentenced to life imprisonment. Linder gives the date of the verdict as January 26, 1929; the Osage Nation gives January 27 as the date of sentencing. Hale appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeal was docketed and dismissed on February 7, 1930, and the conviction became final.
Ramsey was tried separately and convicted in November 1929 and sentenced to life; his own appeal to the Tenth Circuit was dismissed on April 28, 1931, on the government's motion.
The Anna Brown killing was a state matter, because it did not take place in Indian country. Kelsie Morrison recanted his confession, and in a letter to Hale that prison authorities seized he promised his "old friend" that he would not forget him. He was tried in state court at Bartlesville. Bryan Burkhart was given immunity and testified for the state. Katherine Cole testified that she saw Morrison and Bryan walk Anna, very drunk, from their car toward a ravine and come back without her. The jury convicted Morrison of Anna Brown's murder, and he was sentenced to life. The encyclopedia dates the life sentence to November 1926; Linder dates the trial to November 1927. Bryan Burkhart was never convicted of any part in his sister-in-law's death.
The federal government had no jurisdiction over the Smith bombing either. Ernest Burkhart's guilty plea was the only conviction for those three deaths. Hale was never tried for them.
Hale entered the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, as inmate number 26518; Ramsey was 26519. By then the warden was Tom White, the agent who had led the investigation. White insisted, according to Linder, that Hale be treated like any other prisoner. Hale spent much of his sentence working on the prison's farm, where he tended pigs, and was considered a model prisoner.
He never admitted ordering any killing. Before his release he wrote that he wanted to go home to Osage County: "I had rather live at Gray Horse than any place on earth," he wrote, in a letter Linder quotes.
Hale was paroled in 1947, at the age of 72. The Osage Nation says he served 18 years of his sentence; Linder counts 21 years at Leavenworth. Daugherty dates his release to July 1947. The encyclopedia notes that he, Ramsey and Ernest Burkhart were all paroled despite Osage protests. A condition of Hale's parole kept him out of Oklahoma.
Not everyone in Osage County shunned him. Dr. Joe Conner, an Osage citizen who had lost relatives in the killings, recalled that when Hale came through Fairfax word went around town that "Bill Hale is here," and people gathered as if for a parade. To Osage families still living there, the welcome said a great deal, the scholar Shannon Toll wrote in 2023.
Hale lived his last years in Arizona. He died in August 1962 in a nursing home in Phoenix, aged 87, and was buried in Wichita, Kansas.
Ernest Burkhart was paroled in 1937, according to Smithsonian and Linder, returned to prison after a robbery, and was released again in 1959; the Osage Nation's own summary gives 1947 as his parole year. In 1965 Oklahoma Governor Henry Bellmon granted him a full pardon, over Osage protests. Ramsey was paroled in 1947. Morrison served his life sentence for Anna Brown's murder in the state system.
Mollie Burkhart divorced Ernest during the trials and remarried in 1928. In 1931 a court vacated the order that had declared her incompetent, and she gained control of her own money. She died in 1937, at about 50. Her granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, told Grann what it was like to grow up without aunts or cousins, and that her father, Cowboy, had grown up in a house where his mother was the target and his father one of the killers.
In 1925, while the investigation was still going on, Congress changed the inheritance rules: from then on, people who were not Osage could not inherit the headrights of Osage with more than one-half Osage blood. The Osage Nation and the encyclopedia both present the law as a measure to prevent another such period of killing.
The Bureau presented the case as proof of what professional federal investigators could do. Hoover and the Bureau claimed they had ended the killings by arresting Hale and his accomplices, and Grann has said that Hoover wanted to declare victory and use the case to build the reputation of the agency. After the convictions, the FBI history records, the Osage Tribal Council passed resolutions thanking the agents. The case files, including the indictments, the Leavenworth files on Hale and Ramsey and the guardianship registers, are held by the National Archives at Fort Worth and Kansas City.
David Grann's book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI was published by Doubleday in 2017. It began, Grann told the National Archives' Prologue magazine, with a visit in 2012 to the Osage Nation Museum, where he saw a 1924 panoramic photograph with a section cut out. The director told him the missing panel had shown one of the men behind the killings, and that "the Devil was standing right there." Martin Scorsese's film of the book, released in October 2023, starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart and Robert De Niro as Hale, with Lily Gladstone as Mollie; it was made in extensive collaboration with the Osage, received ten Academy Award nominations, and Gladstone's performance won a Golden Globe in January 2024. In December 2023 an exhibit at the federal court building in Oklahoma City, "The Osage Reign of Terror: The Untold Legal History," put the trial documents on public display. Shannon Edwards, a former member of the Osage Nation Congress and great-granddaughter of the prosecutor John Leahy, said of him, "How brave was my great-grandfather to go out and challenge Bill Hale in his own backyard."
For the Osage, the case is not a closed story. A great-grandson of Henry Roan told Grann that the killings are still in the back of people's minds and that they leave people slow to trust. An Osage teacher, Mary Jo Webb, spent years investigating the death of her own grandfather and in the 1970s gave a booklet of her findings to the Fairfax library; within a week it was gone. As one Osage citizen put it to Grann, the Osage were victims of these crimes, but they do not live as victims.
What is proven in court: that Hale procured the murder of Henry Roan (federal conviction, final 1930); that Kelsie Morrison murdered Anna Brown (state conviction); that Ernest Burkhart took part in the murder of Bill Smith (guilty plea); and that John Ramsey shot Henry Roan (federal conviction, final 1931).
Attributed to Hale but never tried against him: the shooting of Anna Brown, on Morrison's confession and testimony; and the Smith bombing, on Ernest Burkhart's plea and testimony and Ramsey's withdrawn confession. Federal investigators were convinced of both. No court ever ruled on Hale's part in either.
Suspected only: the death of Lizzie Q. Kyle in 1921, which the encyclopedia says was suspected poisoning; the death of Minnie in 1918; the poisoning of Mollie Burkhart in 1925; and the deaths of Ace Kirby, Henry Grammer and the outlaw Curley Johnson, each of which the FBI history and later writers have linked to Hale's wish to silence witnesses. None of these was ever charged.
Not linked to Hale by the evidence: Grann's later research pointed to other people for some deaths once grouped with the Hale case. He argued that the murder of Charles Whitehorn, an Osage man shot near Pawhuska in May 1921, was arranged by people close to Whitehorn's widow, and that a Fairfax banker who lent money to the Osage, Herbert G. Burt, had a strong motive in the deaths of George Bigheart and W. W. Vaughan. In Grann's words, quoted by Linder, the evil of Hale "was not an anomaly." The Bureau, he wrote, had preferred a theory of a single mastermind.
The death toll: the encyclopedia and the FBI give about 24 Osage dead by violence or in suspicious circumstances in the early 1920s. The Osage Nation counts more than 60 mysterious or unsolved murders of headright holders between 1920 and 1925, and a National Archives blog post credited Hale with "at least 60" deaths, a figure no court tested. Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear has estimated that at least 5 percent of the tribe, roughly 150 people, were killed. Grann wrote that scholars and investigators now believe the toll ran to scores, if not hundreds. Many of these deaths were recorded at the time as illness or alcohol poisoning and were never investigated. No figure can be attributed to Hale himself beyond the one killing for which he was convicted and the four others his accomplices laid at his door.
December 24, 1874: William King Hale is born near Greenville, Texas.
About 1890: leaves home at 16 to work as a cowboy.
About 1902: settles in the Osage hills with his wife.
June 28, 1906: the Osage Allotment Act keeps mineral rights in tribal hands and creates 2,229 headrights.
1917: Mollie Kyle marries Ernest Burkhart, Hale's nephew (1919 in one account).
1918: Minnie, Mollie's sister, dies at 27 of a "wasting illness."
1919: Hale buys an interest in Osage land from George Bigheart.
1921 (about June): a $25,000 life insurance policy is taken out on Henry Roan, with Hale as beneficiary.
May 22, 1921: Anna Brown is shot near Fairfax; her body is found May 27 or 28.
July 1921: Lizzie Q. Kyle dies at Mollie's house; poison suspected.
About January 26, 1923: Henry Roan is shot in his car near Fairfax.
February 6, 1923: Roan's body is found.
March 10, 1923: the Smith house in Fairfax is bombed; Rita Smith and Nettie Brookshire die; Bill Smith dies about four days later.
March to April 1923: the Osage Tribal Council asks for federal help; the Bureau of Investigation is called in.
June 1923: Henry Grammer dies in a car crash; W. W. Vaughan is killed.
1925: Congress bars non-Osage from inheriting headrights of Osage with more than one-half Osage blood.
Summer 1925: Hoover puts Tom White in charge of the case.
Late 1925: Mollie Burkhart, seriously ill, is removed to hospital and recovers.
January 4, 1926: warrants issued for Hale and Ernest Burkhart for the Smith murders.
January 6, 1926: Ernest Burkhart gives statements to agents; Ramsey confesses soon after.
March 1, 1926: federal district court rules it lacks jurisdiction over the Roan killing.
March 12 to 13, 1926: at a state preliminary hearing, Burkhart recants for the defense.
May 18, 1926: Kelsie Morrison confesses to shooting Anna Brown.
June 1, 1926: the Supreme Court rules in United States v. Ramsey that the Roan case belongs in federal court.
June 9, 1926: Ernest Burkhart pleads guilty to the murder of Bill Smith; sentenced to life June 21.
July 8, 1926: Hale and Ramsey indicted at Guthrie for the murder of Henry Roan.
August 25, 1926: the Guthrie trial ends in a hung jury.
October 29, 1926: Oklahoma City jury convicts Hale and Ramsey; life sentences.
November 1926 or 1927: Morrison convicted of Anna Brown's murder; life.
March 27, 1928: Eighth Circuit reverses Hale's conviction and orders a new trial.
1928: Mollie Burkhart remarries.
January 1929: Hale convicted at Pawhuska of the murder of Henry Roan; life.
July 1, 1929: Eighth Circuit reverses Ramsey's 1926 conviction.
November 1929: Ramsey convicted on retrial; life.
February 7, 1930: Hale's appeal to the Tenth Circuit is dismissed.
1937: Mollie Burkhart dies; Ernest Burkhart is paroled for the first time.
1947: Hale is paroled from Leavenworth at 72 (July, per one account).
August 1962: Hale dies in a Phoenix nursing home, aged 87; buried in Wichita, Kansas.
1965: Governor Henry Bellmon pardons Ernest Burkhart.
2017: David Grann publishes Killers of the Flower Moon.
October 2023: Martin Scorsese's film is released.