Killers of the Flower Moon

by David Grann

  Margie then mentioned something that I had not seen in any of the FBI records. Her father had told her that on the night of the explosion he and his sister and Mollie had been planning to spend the night at the Smiths’ house. But Cowboy had a bad earache, and they had stayed home. “That’s why they escaped,” Margie said. “It was just fate.” It took a moment for the implication to sink in. “My dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him,” Margie said.

  For a while, we sat in the car in the darkness, trying to comprehend what could not be comprehended even after all these years. Finally, Margie shifted into forward and said, “Well, why don’t we go back to the dances?”

  23   A CASE NOT CLOSED

  History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset. As I combed through the historical records, I could see what Mollie could not see about her husband. (An Osage had told me, “Who would believe that anyone would marry you and kill your family for your money?”) I could see White unable to recognize Lawson’s bogus confession or Hoover’s sinister motives. And as I dug deeper into the Osage murder cases—into the murk of autopsies and witness testimony and probate records—I began to see certain holes in the bureau’s investigation.

  The authorities insisted that once Hale and his conspirators were given life sentences, they’d found the guilty parties. And after White had taken the job at Leavenworth, the cases were closed, closed with great triumph, even though the bureau had not yet connected Hale to all twenty-four murders. Was he really responsible for every one of them? Who, for example, had abducted the oilman McBride in Washington, D.C., or thrown W. W. Vaughan off the speeding train?

  Hale relied on others to do his bloodletting, but there was no evidence that Hale’s usual coterie of henchmen—including Bryan Burkhart, Asa Kirby, John Ramsey, and Kelsie Morrison—had trailed McBride to the nation’s capital or were with Vaughan on the train. Whoever had murdered these men had seemed to get away scot-free.

  I could not find any new leads on the McBride case, but one day when I was doing research in Oklahoma City, I called Martha Vaughan, a granddaughter of W. W. Vaughan’s. She was a social worker who lived in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, which is 160 miles from the state capital. She was eager to talk about her grandfather and offered to drive to see me. “Let’s meet at the Skirvin Hotel,” she said. “It’ll give you a glimpse of some of the riches that oil brought to Oklahoma.”

  When I arrived at the hotel, I understood what she meant. Built in 1910 by the oilman W. B. Skirvin, it was once billed as the finest hotel in the Southwest, with a ballroom that seated five hundred people and chandeliers imported from Austria and pillars topped with busts of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. Hale’s attorney Sargent Prentiss Freeling died—apparently of a cerebral hemorrhage—in one of the hotel rooms while playing solitaire. In 1988, amid a devastating oil downturn, the hotel closed and remained shuttered for years. But nearly two decades later, after undergoing a $55 million renovation, it reopened as part of the Hilton chain.

  I waited for Martha in the lobby, which still has the original arched wooden entryway and the faces of Bacchus peering down from the ceiling. When Martha arrived, she was accompanied by her cousin Melville Vaughan, a biology professor at the University of Central Oklahoma. “He knows a lot about Grandpa Vaughan,” Martha said.

  Melville was carrying two thick binders, and as we sat at the bar, he laid them before me. They were filled with research that over decades the family had obsessively collected about W. W. Vaughan’s murder. The binders included faded newspaper clippings (PAWHUSKA MAN’S NUDE BODY FOUND), Vaughan’s death certificate, and an informant’s statement to the FBI that Vaughan, shortly before being killed, had mentioned having collected “sufficient evidence to put Bill Hale in the electric chair.”

  Martha and Melville said that Vaughan’s widow, Rosa, was left with ten children to raise and no income. They had to move from their two-story house into a storage garage. “They didn’t have money to eat,” Martha said. “The Osage banded together and basically helped feed the family.” Some of Vaughan’s children, including Martha’s father, went to live with Osage families, where they grew up speaking Osage and learning the traditional dances. “My father felt safe among the Osage,” Martha said.

  She explained that though many members of her family believed that Hale had wanted Vaughan silenced, they suspected that there was more to the murder. They wondered who the assassin was and how the killing was carried out: Was Vaughan murdered before he was thrown off the train, or did the impact kill him? Someone with influence had made sure that the inquest was a sham—the cause of death was listed as “unknown.”

  For a while, we discussed elements of the case. Melville explained that Vaughan was big and strong, which meant that the assassin had to have been physically powerful or helped by accomplices. Vaughan, I recalled, had told his wife that he had stashed evidence on the murders—as well as money for the family—in a secret hiding place. I asked Melville and Martha how the killer could have determined where this hiding place was. Martha said that there were only two possibilities: the killer either forced the information out of Vaughan before throwing him off the train, or the killer was someone whom Vaughan trusted enough to confide such information.

  Melville said that after Hale had gone to jail, a relative tried to continue investigating the case, but he received an anonymous threat that if he and the family pressed the matter any further they’d all end up like W. W. Vaughan. After that, the family stopped digging. Martha said, “I remember talking to my oldest uncle; my sister and I were visiting with him before he died. We said, ‘Who did this to Grandpa Vaughan?’ He mentioned the warning to the family and said not to go there. He was still frightened.”

  I asked if Rosa, or anyone else in the family, had ever mentioned any potential suspects besides Hale.

  No, Martha said. But there was a man who’d embezzled money from Grandpa Vaughan’s estate after he died and whom Rosa then sued in civil court. I asked what the man’s name was, and Martha said, “Something Burt.”

  “Yes, H. G. Burt,” Melville said. “He was president of a bank.”

  I wrote down the name in my notebook, and when I looked up, I could see the eagerness in their eyes. I suddenly feared that I’d stirred false hope. “It’s been a long time,” I said. “But I’ll see what I can find out.”

  The southwest branch of the U.S. National Archives is in a warehouse, in Fort Worth, Texas, that is bigger than most airport hangars. Inside, stacked in fifteen-foot-high rows, in humidity-controlled conditions, are more than a hundred thousand cubic feet of records. They include transcripts from the U.S. District Courts of Oklahoma (1907–1969), logs on the deadly Galveston hurricane of 1900, materials on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, documents on slavery and Reconstruction, and reports from many of the Bureau of Indian Affairs field offices. The archive reflects the human need to document every deed and directive, to place a veil of administrative tidiness over the disorder of famines and plagues and natural disasters and crimes and wars. Within these voluminous files, I hoped to find a clue regarding the murder of W. W. Vaughan.

  I had already reviewed court records about the lawsuit that Rosa Vaughan had filed against H. G. Burt. At first glance, the dispute, which began in 1923, seemed mundane. Vaughan and Burt, who was the president of a bank in Pawhuska, were considered close friends, and Vaughan had long acted as one of Burt’s attorneys. According to Rosa, Burt owed her deceased husband $10,000, which she was seeking to recover.

  Yet the devilry is in the details, and as I delved deeper, I discovered that the money in dispute was connected to another victim of the Reign of Terror, George Bigheart. Vaughan had also been Bigheart’s attorney. And before Bigheart disclosed critical information about the murders to Vaughan—and before he died of suspected pois
oning at the hospital in Oklahoma City—he had sought a “certificate of competency” from authorities. With this document, he would no longer be designated a ward of the government, and he could spend his headright payments as he pleased. Vaughan had successfully helped him file his application, and for this and other legal services Bigheart had planned to pay him as much as $10,000—a sum that is comparable today to nearly $140,000. Burt, however, had somehow collected the money. Days later, both Bigheart and Vaughan were dead.

  Rosa Vaughan’s suit against Burt, who was represented by one of the same law firms that had represented Hale in the murder trials, was initially dismissed in state court. Martha had told me the family was sure that the jury had been rigged, and on appeal the Oklahoma Supreme Court eventually reversed the decision and ordered Burt to turn over to Rosa Vaughan $5,000, plus interest. “What kind of person tries to steal from a penniless widow with ten children?” Martha had said to me.

  As I reviewed various records at the National Archives as well as information from other sources, I began to piece together a clearer portrait of Burt. Born in Missouri in 1874, he was the son of a farmer. Census records indicate that by 1910 he had moved to Pawhuska, apparently one of the legions of acquisitive, dreaming, desperate settlers. He opened a trading store and later became president of a bank. A 1926 photograph shows him dressed in the same style as Hale, with a sharp suit and a hat—an itinerant farmer’s son transformed into a respectable businessman.

  Much of his wealth, though, flowed from the deeply corrupt “Indian business”—the swindling of millionaire Osage. A court record noted that Burt had run a loan business targeting the Osage. During a 1915 hearing before a joint commission of Congress that was investigating American Indian affairs, a tribal attorney said that Burt would borrow money from other whites and then relend it to the Osage at astronomical interest rates. “Mr. Burt is one of the men whom I say and believe is on the inside of affairs at Pawhuska,” the attorney testified. “He told me that he was only paying 6 per cent for this money, and he could make a great deal more out of it by loaning it back to the Indians.” He continued, “He is getting the money for 6 per cent and probably will be able to get—I would be afraid to guess how much—but somewhere from 10 to 50 per cent.”

  Burt employed bizarre accounting methods in order to conceal his fleecing of the Osage. At a probate hearing after the death of George Bigheart, an attorney expressed bafflement at why loans ostensibly from Burt’s bank to the Osage were issued from Burt’s personal checkbook. Burt insisted that he’d “never made any deals I have to cover up.”

  “I did not mean anything personal Mr. Burt, but that is just a little unusual.”

  “It is the way we have always handled it.”

  At the archive in Fort Worth, I pulled records from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Oklahoma that dealt with the murders of the Osage. They contained something that I’d never seen anywhere before: the secret testimony of the grand jury that in 1926 investigated the murders of the Osage. Among the witnesses who testified were many of the principal figures in the case, such as Ernest Burkhart and Dick Gregg. There was no mention of Burt’s testifying. However, the life-insurance agent who had issued a policy to Henry Roan, which had named Hale as the beneficiary, testified that Burt had also recommended another American Indian to target with an insurance-policy scheme.

  I later found, amid the thousands of pages of records on the murders archived by the Bureau of Investigation, two other references to Burt. The first was an agent’s report from a conversation with a trusted informant, who had indicated that Burt and Hale were “very intimate” associates. What’s more, the informant said that Burt and Hale had “split on the boodle”—the sum of money—obtained from Bigheart. It wasn’t clear from the report what, exactly, the amount was, but the bureau had noted that after Bigheart’s death Hale successfully made a claim upon his estate for $6,000, by presenting a bogus creditor’s note. Perhaps “the boodle” also included the $10,000 that Burt had tried to make off with.

  Still, unlike the invaluable headrights involved in the slaying of Mollie’s family members—or the $25,000 life-insurance policy in Roan’s death—none of these sums, especially if divided, represented a significant incentive for murder. This may explain why the Justice Department never prosecuted Hale for Bigheart’s killing or pursued Burt further. Yet it was evident that White and his men were deeply suspicious of Burt. In a second report that I found in the bureau files, agents described Burt as a “murderer.”

  For days, I returned to the archive trying to find a financial motive for the killing of Bigheart. I looked through probate records to see who would have benefited from his death. In an e-mail, Martha had written to me, “As Ol’ Pappy always said, ‘Follow the money.’ ” There was no evidence that Hale or Burt or any other white man had inherited Bigheart’s fortune, which was passed down to Bigheart’s wife and his young daughter. Bigheart’s daughter, however, had a guardian, and this man would have had control of the money. I flipped through the records until I saw the name of her guardian: H. G. Burt.

  I felt my heart quickening as I reviewed the facts. I knew that Burt had been a close associate of Hale’s who had been enmeshed in the systematic exploitation of the Osage. I knew that Burt had gained access to Bigheart’s fortune by becoming the guardian of his daughter. I knew, from government records, that Burt had also been the guardian of several other Osage, including one who had died. I knew that Burt had been with Bigheart around the time he succumbed to apparent poisoning—a local lawman had noted that Burt and Hale had both visited with Bigheart shortly before he died. And I knew that the bureau considered Burt a killer.

  Other pieces of evidence also implicated Burt in a crime. Court records showed, for instance, that Burt had stolen money that Bigheart had intended for Vaughan, even though Burt purported to be Vaughan’s close friend. Perhaps Vaughan, blind to his friend’s machinations, had mentioned the investigation that he had been pursuing and confided the location of the hideout containing his money and evidence. And when Vaughan had gone to see Bigheart on his deathbed, perhaps Bigheart had incriminated not only Hale but also Burt in the murder plots.

  The theory of Burt’s involvement in the murder of Bigheart and Vaughan, though, was still based on circumstantial evidence. I didn’t even know who was with Vaughan when he was thrown from the train. Then, while searching through old newspapers, I found an article in the Pawhuska Daily Capital about Vaughan’s funeral. Partway through the story, it mentioned that Burt had boarded the train with Vaughan in Oklahoma City and was on the journey when Vaughan disappeared from his berth. According to another story in the newspaper, it was Burt who reported Vaughan’s disappearance.

  Before I left the National Archives in Fort Worth, I came across a folder that contained an interview with a bureau informant who had been close to Hale and who had provided critical evidence against him in the other murder cases. The informant was asked if he had any information regarding the murder of Vaughan.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I think Herb Burt pulled that.”

  I was conscious of the unfairness of accusing a man of hideous crimes when he could not answer questions or defend himself. And when I called Martha Vaughan to tell her about my findings, I underscored the limitations of what we could know for sure. I then went through the research I had gathered. I also mentioned that at a library in New Mexico I had come across notes from an unpublished interview with the Fairfax town marshal, who had investigated the murders of the Osage. He indicated that Burt had been involved in Vaughan’s killing and that a mayor of one of the boomtowns—a local tough—had helped Burt throw Vaughan off the train. The town marshal also indicated that during the bureau’s investigation into the Osage murders, in 1925, Burt was so scared that he considered fleeing. Indeed, Burt abruptly moved to Kansas that same year. When I finished going through all the details, Martha fell silent, then sobbed softly.

  “I’m sorry,” I sa
id.

  “No, it’s a relief. This has been with my family for so long.”

  While researching the murders, I often felt that I was chasing history even as it was slipping away, and not long after we spoke, I learned that Martha had died from heart failure. She was only sixty-five. A heartbroken Melville told me, “We lost another link to the past.”

  24   STANDING IN TWO WORLDS

  One night in May 2013, the Constantine Theater, in Pawhuska, was scheduled to show a video recording of a performance of the Osage ballet Wahzhazhe. The Osage have long been linked to the world of classical dance, having produced two of the greatest ballerinas, the sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. Maria, considered America’s first major prima ballerina, was born in Fairfax in 1925. In her autobiography, she recalled the oil riches and observed that her Osage father seemed to own the town: “He had property everywhere. The local movie theater on Main Street, and the pool hall opposite, belonged to him. Our ten-room, terra-cotta-brick house stood high on a hill overlooking the reservation.” She also recalled that a house nearby had been “firebombed and everyone inside killed, murdered for their headrights.”

  Wahzhazhe chronicled the sweeping history of the Osage, including the period of the Reign of Terror. Wahzhazhe means “Osage.” I was eager to see the ballet, even if it was only a recording of one of the performances, and after buying a ticket, I headed into the Pawhuska theater where Mollie and Ernest Burkhart had once sat in the velvety chairs and where the oil barons had gathered for auctions during bad weather. In the early 1980s, the theater had been on the verge of demolition, but a group of local citizens volunteered to restore it, clearing away spiderwebs and vermin, polishing the brass plates on the front door, and removing layers of gunk on the lobby floor to reveal a mosaic in the shape of a star.