♫ On a cool spring night, Anna Brown went out for a good time with friends, moonshine cut through the evening chill as they drove through the dusty back roads of Osage County.

But the men with her were not her friends.

They had other plans and Anna would not make it home.

This fated night would be her last.

Envy and greed led to Anna's death during an era that held the Osage Nation in a grip of fear.

The streets of Pawhuska and Fairfax were choked with grifters and thieves of every stripe.

All of them had dreams of cheating or stealing millions in Osage oil money.

From 1910 to 1930 hundreds of Indians died under suspicious circumstances in what the Osage call the reign of terror.

The great Osage Nation identified themselves as neh o con sca, the children of the mid waters.

The Painter George Catlin described the Osage as the tallest race of men in North America.

In 1825, throngs of settlers and political maneuvering forced the tribe to accept life on an arid Kansas reservation.

By 1870, the push for Kansas statehood meant they would have to move again.

Here's the uniqueness, the Osages were the only tribe that paid for their land.

It was not done by treaty.

So they own in fee simple, this million 500,000 acres.

They have a title to it.

The funds that were not used to purchase the reservation, went into a, a trust fund for the tribe.

And if you took the trust fund and divided it equally among all Osage, the Osage were the richest people in the world.

It's 1893, four years before oil was ever struck in the Osage reservation.

Indian territory was under pressure to become a state.

And in order for the state to exist, they had to break up the land, holdings of the tribes.

Uh, the United States government in 1907 decided, well, all the tribes in Oklahoma will have to allot their land.

Our elders at that time said, well, we own this land.

You know, you didn't give it to us.

We don't have to allot it.

So they, they said, well, we we'll allot the surface rights and we will retain the mineral rights to the land.

You know, everything below the ground.

Uh, we happen to be sitting on a major oil fields and gas fields, and there was coal and other minerals here on the reservation.

This is the only instance in allotments of tribes in Oklahoma, where the mineral rights were separated from surface rights.

Whereas there, the royalties were managed by the federal government and paid out per capita head rights.

1906, there were 2,229 Osages listed on the original rolls.

So 2,229, headrights.

The agreement with lawmakers said the headrights could never be sold.

They could only be inherited.

This is the richest area per acre in the world, in terms of wealth.

It's unbelievable how much money is being produced.

Essentially every member of the tribe was a millionaire.

And, and, and could purchase, you know, or do whatever they wanted to do.

So that, that, uh, that attracted good people and it attracted bad people.

It was set up to fail.

It was set up to fail that it would incite all the criminal activity.

We ended up having so many different banks, so many different kinds of flem-flam people coming around here.

And the hard part is that my people didn't even speak English.

There were some of them who didn't quite understand.

From 1910 to 1930, the population of Osage County swelled from 10,000 to 35,000 people.

Phil Sheridan, or somebody like that, ask him about it, his definition of reservation.

And he says, it's an area of land surrounded by thieves.

It permeates all levels of Osage.

There are bootleggers, they're prostitutes, they're gamblers.

There are burglars.

There are rustlers.

There are, there are armed robbers.

They go, all of these people victimize the Osage but they're not the only ones, the merchants had created a two-tier pricing charging the Osage more than they're charging non Osage customers.

There are doctors in the County who deliberately get Osage patients, uh, addicted to drugs and act as a, as drug suppliers.

European settlers already held a racist beliefs towards the American Indian and the Osage specifically, especially after the discovery of oil, they not only didn't develop land and cultivate it.

They also were filthy rich.

And this was just an aggravation for Europeans, essentially, because they had already spent over a century categorizing and labeling American Indians as something subhuman.

The federal government put in place, a guardian system meant to protect the Osage, but it made them targets instead.

There are guardians guardians that live in Pawhuska, Hominy or Fairfax, and they they're appointed by the court to look after an Indians, um, holdings.

And, uh, of course, back in those days, you know, they were the chief culprits.

So they would get appointed and you didn't have to have any legal training, or you didn't have to have any credentials at all.

The people who were guardians were quite frequently, uh, relatives of the County judge, uh, and other very prominent political figures and economic figures.

So, so it was, it was a good old boy system.

Crooked lawyers would get together, divide up the Osages with large head-rites Judges would often say you vote for me and I'll see you get a good guardianship.

The guardianships of the day were in such a pernicious way that the Osages never really understood how much money they had, things that they bought that they didn't know.

Um, there was just a, it was a reign of terror.

Thats what they call it, there was no other way to describe it.

If you were Osage and you had money and you were a full-blood, uh, you might as well been walking around with a target on you.

Everybody in the world descended into this area to try to find every possible way to separate the Osage from their money.

To be Chief at that time must have been a nightmarish period of time for them personally, for their people to realize there was so little you can do about it.

And the sense of fear that existed throughout the entire reservation must've been just horrible.

Now we have all these different attorneys who were involved.

The Congress was involved.

The bankers, the bankers are involved.

They knew there was a lot of money to be made.

And the easiest way to get to it was through murder.

Anna Brown was a kindhearted free spirit who loved to dress up in the latest flapper, fashions dance, and have a good time.

Anna would frequent the speakeasies in Oklahoma City and shop in Kansas City.

Closer to home, she enjoyed the BoomTown nightlife of Fairfax, Whizbang and Pawhuska.

On a cool evening in May, 1921.

Ex-boyfriend Brian Burkhart and Kelsey Morrison took a heavily intoxicated Anna Brown for a drive.

They drove the dusty roads to a place called Three Mile Creek.

The one murder that that really seemed to touch people with Anna Brown and, and she, she was murdered brutally.

And, uh, in her lifetime, she was taken advantage of brutally Two days later, hunters found Anna's badly decomposed body in a ravine outside Fairfax.

Mollie Burkhart, her sister, identified the body by her clothes.

Local authorities ruled her death as accidental due to alcohol poisoning.

The undertaker found that she had been shot in the back of the head.

Lizzie Q had four daughters, Anna Brown, Minnie Smith, Rita Smith and then Mollie later becomes Mollie Burkhart, married to Earnest.

Lizzy inherited from her husband and then from her two daughters that predeceased her.

The day after her body was found, a wealthy cattleman stopped by Mollie Burkhart's home to pay his respects to his nephew's wife.

His name was William Hale.

I think Bill Hale was a man for all reasons, a man for all seasons, he was a friend to everybody and everybody's enemy.

He built houses.

He loaned money.

That was a big shot in a bank.

He was a cattleman.

Through some ruthless undertakings.

Uh, he became a fairly wealthy man, a man of respect, and he had these two nephews, the Burkhart brothers.

You know, he had control of all the police and the courts and the lawyers.

Two months later, Anna Brown's mother Lizzie Q.

Died of a mysterious lingering illness.

Mollie Burkhart, and her sister Rita Smith suspected that their mother had been poisoned, but my who?

By this time, many Osages had died of questionable circumstances and fear swept through the tribe.

My grandfather, Clarence Gray, on my dad's side, he took precautions by hanging lights around our home in Pawhuska.

And some families that they'd move away for the summer go to Colorado Springs.

In January, 1923, a cousin of Mollie Burkhart, Henry Roan, a prominent member of the tribe disappeared.

Henry was the son Roan Horse.

Um, and Roan Horse was, um, one of our leaders, William had a good story.

He was a fellow who lived with our family and he was telling us that, um, one day he was in Fairfax and Bill Hale asked him, you know, asked him would he like to do some work that he can pay him some money, pay really good money.

And Tom said, yeah!

He said, well, what will you do?

And Tom said, I would do anything.

You know?

And so Bill Hale, he drove him out there, out in the woods that evening.

And it was out West of Fairfax.

And, uh, there was a campfire and was there and they were drinking, sitting around the campfire, talking about things.

After a while, Tom was, you know, inquiring about what work he was supposed to be doing and Hale handed him a gun and said, there's an Indian, who's passed out in a car out, out there in the woods.

He's brought over in this direction.

Just go out there and shoot him in the head and kill him.

And Tom said, well, he explained to Bill Hale that he wasn't quite up to that, but he'd have to get some courage up or whatever you have to get up to, uh, to do such a thing.

So they, they kept drinking and these guys, uh, he hung out there for awhile and then Tom, um, saw an opportunity and he kind of made a little break for it.

And he got out into the woods where no one could see him.

And he, uh, um, found his way back to Fairfax.

And then a few days later, he had heard that, uh, the, the indian out there was, um, Henry Roan and that Henry Roan had been killed.

Henry Roan was, uh, uh, he was taken outside, out West of Fairfax.

There's a place out there.

We called the point.

Uh, they got him drunk and, and set him up beside this old car and shot him and left him.

Uh, he was there for several days before they found him.

I know some of his, uh, relatives and descendants.

In fact, they're cousins of mine.

Bill Hale tried to cash a $25,000 life insurance policy on Henry Roan and served as one of his pallbearers.

It was a scary time, of course.

And men were afraid for their families, especially the ones that lived out in the country.

It was just terrible.

People didn't want to venture out of their homes.

Over 60 Osage had died mysteriously.

The tribal council pleaded with the federal government for years to help.

But it wasn't until after an explosion in Fairfax, that agents of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation were sent to Osage County.

The police, were, you know, were bought, the police were, um, could not be trusted.

So in addition to local law enforcement, you had doctors that were also not trustworthy.

You had medical examiners, you had coroners.

Um, it went all the way up to, to the top New director of the FBI, 29 year old J Edgar Hoover selected ex Texas Ranger, Tom White, to lead the investigation.

White called in other former Texas Rangers, men who were good at infiltrating the wild boomtowns, dealing with outlaws, and getting information from characters suspicious of strangers.

In fact, this is one of their first investigations, successful investigation to help build their reputation as a law enforcement agency.

Early on the investigation centered on William Hale, the so-called King of the Osage Hills.

Hale's connection to Brown's family was clear.

His weak-willed nephew Earnest Burkhart was married to Anna sister, Mollie.

After Anna, her mother, and the two sisters died in that order, all of the headrights would pass to his nephew and through his nephew, Hale would control half a million dollars.

On the night of March 10th, 1923, Anna's younger sister, Rita Smith, her husband, Bill, and their housekeeper Nettie Brookshire turned in for the night.

They had no way of knowing that one of Bill Hale's henchman had crawled under their house in Fairfax and planted a bomb.

Yeah.

That house blowing up sat right across the street from where I live now.

You know, it damaged, not on their house, but other houses knocked buildings off supposedly knocked buildings off the foundation and that sort of thing, you know, nitroglycerin, supposedly nitroglycerin was easy to come by because of oil field work.

They said when they blew that house up it just blew stuff all over the city, and there were like arms legs and stuff.

You know in people's yards.

As criminals go, I think he was probably resented by other criminals because they had a good thing going there as long as they were subtle.

The FBI investigation wasn't going well, the locals weren't talking.

Hale had threatened or paid off many of them.

In the end, Bill Hale's nephew, Earnest Burkhart, Mollie Burkhart's husband broke down and confessed and agreed to testify against Bill Hale and the others.

Um, Bill Hale and his associates, um, that they wanted the, uh, his attorneys probably wanted state jurisdiction because they might've been able to fluent influence.

They had a lot of influence in the State House in Oklahoma City.

Uh, might've been able to influence the judges, the juries, the prosecutors.

Brian Burkhart turned state's evidence and never served time.

Ernest Burkhart was sentenced to life in prison and was sent to Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAllister.

He was released in 1959 and received a full pardon in 1966 from Governor Henry Bellman.

After four trials, Bill Hale was convicted in 1929 for the shooting death of Henry Roan and sent to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.

His accomplice, John Ramsey was convicted for pulling the trigger on Roan.

Even though he was convicted of several murders, he wasn't directly implicated, you know, he didn't point the gun at him He had all these other guys do the dirty work for him.

And, um, he, um, uh, Was sentenced to a federal penitentiary or a penitentiary in Arizona, which was kind of like a big, uh, country club Hale was sentenced to life in prison, but was paroled on July the 31st, 1947.

Hale's daughter, Willie was married to a man connected to the powerful US Senator Tom Pendergast of Missouri.

Harry Truman's first act after he became president was to let Bill Hale and Burkhart out of the pen.

The story of Mollie Burkhart.

And her family is famous because it's the only case to go to trial.

But there may have been over a hundred additional cases that were never investigated.

Barney McBride, an oil man, uh, a local oil man went to Washington to meet with federal officials, to bring this to their attention, to try to get them to take action.

They found his body in a, in a culvert in, uh, place called Meadows in Maryland.

There was, uh, a lawyer in Pawhuska named WW Vaughn.

And one of his clients was George Big Heart and George Big Heart was poisoned and was dying in a hospital in Oklahoma City and WW Vaughn went down to see him and supposedly Big Heart told Vaughn something, but no one will ever know because, uh, he was murdered on the way back to Pawhuska.

He was thrown off the train.

This man supplied whiskey.

Uh, give this whiskey to my grandfather.

He knew it was poisoned, um, for the purpose of doing him in and which was what happened.

Legend has it, my granddad come home one day and laid down on the couch and never got up again.

There have always been rumors that it was bigger than Bill Hale, and there, I think there is a possibility that it was bigger than Bill Hale, but, uh, I think at this time trying to come up with any real evidence that it was a, that what Hale was doing was part of a much larger conspiracy would be rather difficult.

Bill Hale died in Arizona in 1962 and was buried in Wichita, Kansas.

He left behind a legacy of pain.

For the Osage, there are reminders of that pain, all around.

A lot of the buildings like the triangle building in Pawhuska that was built with Osage money and then same transaction with a sham bankruptcy.

But I knew lawyers who were friend of mine in that triangle building, but I know we had more lawyers per capita in Osage County before statehood probably didn't have had any place in world.

And we have had ever since because it's been a lawyer's paradise.

That triangle building was built in the twenties sometime and I said very clearly.

They were full of lawyers who were screwing Osages.

What I'd like people to know is that it happened.

It was just a genocide.

And they tried to, um, wipe us out over the greed of the money.

I don't think the memories, the collective memory of our tribe has ever really gotten over that.

There was a whole variety of ways in which full-blood Osage head-rite owners lost their lives.

And it wasn't just part of that little ring of murders that took place that the FBI investigated.

This was all over the reservation.

The strange thing is today that there are people descended from some of these people still in Fairfax and married to Osages.

And that is kind of weird.

I'm not going to name who they are.

I don't know what good it would do, but they're still there and they're still kind of in charge around there.

And to this day, over a fourth of the headrights of the Osage mineral state do not belong to Osages.

A fourth of our wealth has, is gone.

It belongs to other, other people, other institutions, and it wasn't until the late seventies did that ever really change where they actually passed a federal law saying only Osages just can inherit a share of the mineral state.

The headstones in Osage County are cut deep with the names of men and women who died too young.

The victims of that dark chapter were buried and buried with them are the answers to mysteries that will never be solved, justice that will never be served.

You know, it is still such a personal, horrible story because we still suffer from that today because we still have, um, murders.

So many murders that were unsolved.

So many suspicious deaths.

Our headrights have been taken from us.

Our land has been taken from us.

Um, and, and these people, these murderers, you know, they, they get royalty checks every quarter.

And what I want to say is that it's not about the money because no matter how much they took from us, they can't ever be us.

All of the families have stories, all of the families tragedies.

And all the families have accounts of being taken advantage of.

It's a part of our history now, and hopefully we're making progress at not being victims any longer.