Killers of the Flower Moon

by David Grann

  The private detective, sensing that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, hurried to the Ralston business where the call originated. The proprietor insisted that he hadn’t called Anna’s house and that nobody else would have been allowed to make a long-distance call from his phone. Bolstering his claims, no Ralston operator had a record of the call being patched through to the Fairfax operator. “This call seems a mystery,” No. 10 wrote. He suspected that the Ralston number was really a “blind”—that an operator had been paid to destroy the original log ticket, which revealed the true source of the call. Someone, it seemed, was covering his or her tracks.

  No. 10 wanted to look closely at Oda Brown. “General suspicion points towards the divorced husband,” he wrote. But it was getting late and he finished his report, saying, “Discontinued on case 11 P.M.”

  A week later, another operative from the team—No. 46—was sent to locate Brown in Ponca City, twenty-five miles northwest of Gray Horse. A savage storm blew across the prairie and turned the streets into rivers of mud, so the private detective didn’t arrive in Ponca City until dark, only to discover that Brown wasn’t there. He was said to be visiting Perry, Oklahoma, where his father lived. The next day, No. 46 took a train south to Perry, but Brown wasn’t there, either; he was now said to be in Pawnee County. “Consequently I left Perry on the first train,” No. 46 wrote in his report. This was what Sherlock Holmes stories left out—the tedium of real detective work, the false leads and the dead ends.

  Back and forth No. 46 went until, in Pawnee County, he spied a slender, cigarette-smoking, shifty-looking man with rust-colored hair and flat gray eyes: Oda Brown. He was with a Pawnee woman whom he’d reportedly married after Anna’s death. No. 46 stayed close, shadowing them. One day, No. 46 approached Brown, trying to befriend him. The Pinkerton manual advised, “The watchful Detective will seize the Criminal in his weakest moments and force from him, by his sympathy and the confidence which the Criminal has in him, the secret which devours him.” No. 46 wormed his way deeper into Brown’s confidence. When Brown mentioned that his ex-wife had been murdered, No. 46 tried to elicit from him where he’d been at the time of her death. Brown, perhaps suspecting his new friend was a professional snoop, said that he’d been away with another woman, though he wouldn’t disclose the location. No. 46 studied Brown intently. According to the manual, a criminal’s secret becomes an “enemy” within him and “weakens the whole fortress of his strength.” But Brown didn’t appear at all nervous.

  While No. 46 was working on Brown, another operative, No. 28, learned a seemingly vital secret from a young Kaw Indian woman who lived near the western border of Osage County. In a signed statement, the woman claimed that Rose Osage, an Indian in Fairfax, had admitted to her that she’d killed Anna after Anna had tried to seduce her boyfriend, Joe Allen. Rose said that while the three were riding in a car she’d “shot her in the top of the head,” then, with Joe’s help, dumped the body by Three Mile Creek. Rose’s clothes got splattered with Anna’s blood, the story went, so she took them off and discarded them in the creek.

  It was a grim tale, but operative No. 28 was buoyed by the discovery. In his daily report, he said that he’d spent hours with Mathis and Sheriff Freas, whose trial was still pending, pursuing this “clue that seems to be a lead on the case.”

  The private detectives, though, struggled to corroborate the informant’s story. No one had spotted Anna with Rose or Joe. Nor were any clothes found in the stream by the body. Was it possible that the informant was simply lying to get the reward?

  Sheriff Freas, his flesh unfolding from his voluminous neck and chest, urged the private detectives to discount Rose and her boyfriend as suspects. Then he offered a counter-rumor: two hard-boiled characters from the oil camps had purportedly been seen with Anna shortly before her death, and had afterward skipped town. The private detectives agreed to look into the sheriff’s story. But concerning the allegations against Rose, No. 28 vowed, “We are going to follow out this theory.”

  The private detectives shared what they knew with Bill Smith, Mollie’s brother-in-law, who was still conducting his own investigation. The twenty-nine-year-old Smith had been a horse thief before attaching himself to an Osage fortune: first by marrying Mollie’s sister Minnie, and then—only months after Minnie’s death from the mysterious “wasting illness” in 1918—by wedding Mollie’s sister Rita. On more than one occasion when Bill drank, he’d raised his hand to Rita. A servant later recalled that after one row between Bill and Rita, “she came out kind of bruised up.” Bill told the servant, “That was the only way to get along with them squaws.” Rita often threatened to leave him, but she never did.

  Rita had a keen mind, yet those close to her thought that her judgment was impaired by what one person described as “a love that was truly blind.” Mollie had her doubts about Bill: Had he, in some way, been responsible for Minnie’s death? Hale made it clear that he didn’t trust Bill, either, and at least one local attorney speculated that Bill was “prostituting the sacred bond of marriage for sordid gain.”

   Mollie’s sister Rita Credit 20

  But since Anna’s murder Bill had, by all appearances, vigorously sought to discover who the culprit was. When Bill learned that a tailor in town might have information, he went with a private detective to ask him questions, only to find that he was spreading the now-familiar rumor: that Rose Osage had killed Anna in a fury of jealousy.

  Desperate for a break, the private detectives decided to install a listening device to eavesdrop on Rose and her boyfriend. At the time, statutes governing electronic surveillance were nebulous, and Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph—a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier. “Burns was the first American to see the immense possibilities of the instrument in detective work,” the Literary Digest reported in 1912. “He is so enamored with it that he always carries one in his pocket.” Just as Allan Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century, was known as “the eye,” Burns, in the twentieth century, had become “the ear.”

  The detectives, hiding in another room, began listening to the staticky voices of Rose and her boyfriend through earphones. But, as is so often the case with surveillance, the rush of excitement gave way to the tediousness of other people’s inner lives, and the private detectives eventually stopped bothering to jot down the innocuous details that they overheard.

  Using more conventional means, however, the private detectives made a startling discovery. The cabdriver who’d taken Anna to Mollie’s house on the day she vanished told them that Anna had asked him to stop first at the cemetery in Gray Horse. She had climbed out and stumbled through the stones until she paused by her father’s tomb. For a moment, she stood near the spot where she, too, would soon be buried, as if offering a mourning prayer to herself. Then she returned to the car and asked the driver to send someone to bring flowers to her father’s tomb. She wanted his grave to always be pretty.

  While they continued to Mollie’s house, Anna leaned toward the driver. He could smell her liquored breath as she divulged a secret: she was going to have “a little baby.”

  “My goodness, no,” he replied.

  “I am,” she said.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  Detectives later confirmed the story with two people close to Anna. She had also confided to them the news of her pregnancy. Yet no one knew who the father was.

  One day that summer, a stranger with a Chaplinesque mustache showed up in Gray Horse to offer his assistance to the private eyes. The man, who was armed with a .44-caliber, snub-nosed English Bulldog, was named A. W. Comstock, and he was a local attorney and the guardian of several Osage Indians. Some locals thought that Comstock, with his aquiline nose and tan complexion, might be part American Indian—an impression that he did little to discourage as he built up his legal practice. “The fact he represented himself to be an Indian would make him get along pretty well with the Indians, would
n’t it?” another lawyer skeptically remarked. William Burns had once investigated Comstock for allegedly assisting an oil company in a scheme to bribe the Osage Tribal Council for a favorable lease, but the charge was never proven.

  Given Comstock’s numerous contacts among the Osage, the private eyes now took him up on his offer to help. While the detectives were trying to establish a connection between the slayings of Charles Whitehorn and Anna Brown, Comstock passed on tidbits that he collected from his network of informants. There was chatter that Whitehorn’s widow, Hattie, had coveted her husband’s money, chatter that she’d been jealous of his relationship with another woman. Was it possible that this woman was Anna Brown? Such a hypothesis led to the next logical question: Was Whitehorn the father of her baby?

  The detectives began to follow Hattie Whitehorn around the clock, relishing being able to see without being seen: “Operative shadowed Mrs. Whitehorn to Okla. City from Pawhuska….Left Okla. City with Mrs. Whitehorn for Guthrie….Trailed Mrs. Whitehorn, Tulsa to Pawhuska.” But there were no developments.

  By February 1922, nine months after the murders of Whitehorn and Anna Brown, the investigations into the cases seemed to have reached a permanent impasse. Pike, the detective Hale had enlisted, had moved on. Sheriff Freas was also no longer leading the investigation; that February, he was expelled from office after a jury had found him guilty of failing to enforce the law.

  Then, on a frigid night that month, William Stepson, a twenty-nine-year-old Osage champion steer roper, received a call that prompted him to leave his house in Fairfax. He returned home to his wife and two children several hours later, visibly ill. Stepson had always been in remarkable shape, but within hours he was dead. Authorities, upon examining the body, believed that someone he met during his excursion had slipped him a dose of poison, possibly strychnine—a bitter white alkaloid that, according to a nineteenth-century medical treatise, was “endowed with more destructive energy” than virtually any other poison. The treatise described how a lab animal injected with strychnine becomes “agitated and trembles, and is then seized with stiffness and starting of the limbs,” adding, “These symptoms increase till at length it is attacked with a fit of violent general spasm, in which the head is bent back, the spine stiffened, the limbs extended and rigid, and the respiration checked by the fixing of the chest.” Stepson’s final hours would have been a hideous torment: his muscles convulsing, as if he were being jolted with electricity; his neck craning and his jaw tightening; his lungs constricting as he tried to breathe, until at last he suffocated.

   William Stepson Credit 21

  By the time of Stepson’s death, scientists had devised numerous tools to detect poison in a corpse. A sample of tissue could be extracted from the body and tested for the presence of an array of toxic substances—from strychnine to arsenic. Yet in much of the country these forensic methods were applied even less consistently than fingerprint and ballistic techniques. In 1928, a survey by the National Research Council concluded that the coroner in most counties of the United States was an “untrained and unskilled individual” and had “a small staff of mediocre ability, and with inadequate equipment.” In places like Osage County, where there was no coroner trained in forensics and no crime laboratory, poisoning was a perfect way to commit murder. Poisons were abundantly available in products found on the shelves of apothecaries and grocery stores, and unlike a gunshot they could be administered without a sound. And the symptoms of many toxic substances mimicked natural ailments—the nausea and diarrhea of cholera, or the seizure of a heart attack. During Prohibition, there were so many accidental deaths caused from wood alcohol and other toxic brews of bootleg whiskey that a killer could also spike a person’s glass of moonshine without ever arousing suspicions.

  On March 26, 1922, less than a month after Stepson’s death, an Osage woman died of a suspected poisoning. Once again, no thorough toxicology exam was performed. Then, on July 28, Joe Bates, an Osage man in his thirties, obtained from a stranger some whiskey, and after taking a sip, he began frothing at the mouth, before collapsing. He, too, had died of what authorities described as some strange poison. He left behind a wife and six children.

  That August, as the number of suspicious deaths continued to climb, many Osage prevailed upon Barney McBride, a wealthy fifty-five-year-old white oilman, to go to Washington, D.C., and ask federal authorities to investigate. McBride had been married to a Creek Indian, now deceased, and was raising his stepdaughter. He had taken a strong interest in Indian affairs in Oklahoma, and he was trusted by the Osage; a reporter described him as a “kind-hearted, white-haired man.” Given that he also knew many officials in Washington, he was considered an ideal messenger.

  When McBride checked in to a rooming house in the capital, he found a telegram from an associate waiting for him. “Be careful,” it said. McBride carried with him a Bible and a .45-caliber revolver. In the evening, he stopped at the Elks Club to play billiards. When he headed outside, someone seized him and tied a burlap sack tightly over his head. The next morning, McBride’s body was found in a culvert in Maryland. He had been stabbed more than twenty times, his skull had been beaten in, and he had been stripped naked, except for his socks and shoes, in one of which had been left a card with his name. The forensic evidence suggested that there had been more than one assailant, and authorities suspected that his killers had shadowed him from Oklahoma.

  News of the murder quickly reached Mollie and her family. The killing—which the Washington Post called “the most brutal in crime annals in the District”—appeared to be more than simply a murder. It had the hallmarks of a message, a warning. In a headline, the Post noted what seemed to be increasingly clear: CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS.

  6   MILLION DOLLAR ELM

  Even with the murders, they kept on coming, the greatest oil barons in the world. Every three months, at ten in the morning, these oilmen—including E. W. Marland and Bill Skelly and Harry Sinclair and Frank Phillips and his brothers—pulled in to the train station in Pawhuska, in their own luxurious railcars. The press would herald their approach with bulletins: “MILLIONAIRES’ SPECIAL” DUE TO ARRIVE; PAWHUSKA GIVES CITY OVER TO OIL MEN TODAY; MEN OF MILLIONS AWAIT PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENT.

  The barons came for the auction of Osage leases, an event that was held about four times a year and that was overseen by the Department of the Interior. One historian dubbed it the “Osage Monte Carlo.” Since the auctions had begun, in 1912, only a portion of Osage County’s vast underground reservation had been opened to drilling, while the bidding for a single lease, which typically covered a 160-acre tract, had skyrocketed. In 1923, the Daily Oklahoman said, “Brewster, the hero of the story, ‘Brewster’s Millions,’ was driven almost to nervous prostration in trying to spend $1,000,000 in one year. Had Brewster been in Oklahoma…he could have spent $1,000,000 with just one little nod of his head.”

  In good weather, the auctions were held outdoors, on a hilltop in Pawhuska, in the shade of a large tree known as the Million Dollar Elm. Spectators would come from miles away. Ernest sometimes attended the events, and so did Mollie and other members of the tribe. “There is a touch of color in the audiences, too, for the Osage Indians…often are stoical but interested spectators,” the Associated Press reported, deploying the usual stereotypes. Others in the community—including prominent settlers like Hale and Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner—took a keen interest in the auctions. The money flowing into the community from the oil boom had helped to build their businesses and to realize their once seemingly fantastical dreams of turning the raw prairie into a beacon of commerce.

   Frank Phillips (on bottom step) and other oilmen arrive in Osage territory in 1919. Credit 22

  The auctioneer—a tall white man with thinning hair and a booming voice—would eventually step under the tree. He typically wore a gaudy striped shirt and a celluloid collar and a long flowing tie; a metal chain, connected to a timepiece, dangled from his pocket.
He presided over all the Osage sales, and his moniker, Colonel, made him sound like a veteran of World War I. In fact, it was part of his christened name: Colonel Ellsworth E. Walters. A master showman, he urged bidders on with folksy sayings like “Come on boys, this old wildcat is liable to have a mess of kittens.”

   Colonel Walters conducting an auction under the Million Dollar Elm Credit 23

  Because the least valued oil leases were offered first, the barons usually lingered in the back, leaving the initial bidding to upstarts. Jean Paul Getty, who attended several Osage auctions, recalled how one oil lease could change a man’s fate: “It was not unusual for a penniless wildcatter, down to his last bit and without cash or credit with which to buy more, to…bring in a well that made him a rich man.” At the same time, a wrong bid could lead to ruin: “Fortunes were being made—and lost—daily.”

  The oilmen anxiously pored over geological maps and tried to glean intelligence about leases from men they employed as “rock hounds” and spies. After a break for lunch, the auction proceeded to the more valuable leases, and the crowd’s gaze inevitably turned toward the oil magnates, whose power rivaled, if not surpassed, that of the railroad and steel barons of the nineteenth century. Some of them had begun to use their clout to bend the course of history. In 1920, Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance the successful presidential bid of Warren Harding. One oilman from Oklahoma told a friend that Harding’s nomination had cost him and his interests $1 million. But with Harding in the White House, a historian noted, “the oil men licked their chops.” Sinclair funneled, through the cover of a bogus company, more than $200,000 to the new secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall; another oilman had his son deliver to the secretary $100,000 in a black bag.