Pod Insights Infamous America ENCORE: OSAGE MURDERS Ep. 4 | “New Evidence, New Suspects” About this episode Mercifully, the murders in the Osage Nation paused in 1924 and 1925. J. Edgar Hoover became the director of the Bureau of Investigation and assigned a new man to the case of the Osage murders. Special Agent Tom White succeeded where all others failed. He eliminated suspects; uncovered lies and corruption; and discovered new evidence. In the process, he believed he learned the identities of some of the killers.
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1:07 Speaker 01 J. Edgar Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 because President Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923. Obviously, it's more complex than that, but that's when the dominoes started to fall. Harding died a little over a month after the latest rounds of murders and suspicious deaths in Osage County. He was only in office for three years, and he was one of the most unlikely candidates to have been there at all. He was a senator from Ohio, who was a long shot to win the Republican nomination for president in 1920. Teddy Roosevelt was considered the overwhelming favorite to lead the Republican Party and probably reclaim the White House in 1920,
1:51 Speaker 01 but he died suddenly in January 1919. There was no obvious successor, so the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1920 turned messy. The electors couldn't agree on who to nominate for president. After 10 rounds of voting, they finally chose Harding.
2:11 Speaker 01 During his time in office, he was loved by both the American public and foreign leaders. But now, he's widely viewed as one of the worst presidents in American history. And that was because of the scandals that came to light soon after he died. In fairness, a couple of his cabinet members did do great things. But at the same time, a few more were brazenly corrupt. And their corruption was indirectly related to and would indirectly affect Osage County. Harding's Secretary of the Interior and his Attorney General were put on trial for separate cases of corruption. And the scandal that brought down the Secretary of the Interior was about oil.
2:53 Speaker 01 Two oil barons bribed the secretary to win a contract to drill oil in Wyoming. The ordeal is known as the Teapot Dome scandal, which was named after a distinctive rock formation in the area. Those two oil barons were Edward Dohini and Harry Sinclair. For people who have lived in or spent time in Los Angeles, the name Dohini should sound familiar. Dohini Avenue is a major street that's basically the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Edward Dohini helped create the modern city of Los Angeles. He drilled the first successful oil well in LA, and eventually created a company that dominated oil drilling in Mexico and South America.
3:38 Speaker 01 By 1920, his company was the largest oil company in the US, ahead of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Harry Sinclair's Sinclair Consolidated Oil. Harry Sinclair made his fortune in the Osage oil fields. While many of the other oil companies of the era have merged or changed names, you can still find Sinclair gas stations in America to this day. Dohini was one of the richest men in the world. And he and Sinclair bribed the Interior Secretary to get the contract for the Wyoming oil project. Sinclair ended up winning, but it came with a price. Dohini and Sinclair were put on trial for bribery.
4:21 Speaker 01 They were eventually found not guilty, but interestingly, the Interior Secretary was found guilty of accepting their bribes.
4:30 Speaker 01 And at the same time that trial was happening, Harding's Attorney General was also on trial for accepting bribes. He was Harding's campaign manager and is generally credited with making the backroom deals that got Harding nominated. As a reward, Harding gave him the position of Attorney General. After Harding's death, investigations revealed that the Attorney General was accepting bribes from lots of people, including bootleggers who paid him to keep them out of trouble, a fact that was dramatized in the HBO TV show Boardwalk Empire. So, by 1924, the Attorney General was out of office, and so was the flamboyant detective whom he'd hired to run the Bureau of Investigation.
5:15 Speaker 01 And that was how J. Edgar Hoover became the acting director of the Bureau, all because, or kind of because, Warren G. Harding had a heart attack. The former Attorney General and the former Bureau Director didn't spend much time and effort on the Osage murders, which the Osage were well aware of. The Osage sincerely hoped that the new director, this 29-year-old bureaucrat, would be different. If they hoped J. Edgar Hoover would ride in like a knight in shining armor and save them, they would be disappointed. But he did just enough so that his agents would break the case wide open and put the Osage on the road toward at least a little justice.
6:03 Speaker 01 From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season, we're telling a tragic story of conspiracy, greed, and betrayal that became known as the Osage Murders. This is episode four, New Evidence, New Suspects.
6:22 Speaker 01 Back in the summer of 1923, in July, one month before the president died, the Osage were reeling from one of the deadliest months in the time period known as the Reign of Terror. Four people died that month, though only half were on the Osage side of the ledger. An Osage man named George Bigheart died of suspected poisoning at the end of June, and his friend and lawyer, W.W. Vaughan, was murdered shortly thereafter. Reportedly, both men had significant information about the conspiracy and killers in Osage County. But now, whatever that information was, it was gone. If there was a criminal mastermind behind many or most of the Osage murders,
7:07 Speaker 01 he or she was good at covering his or her tracks. And that seemed to be what happened with the other two deaths in June. Henry Grammer, a notorious bootlegger, died in a car crash. It was revealed later that his car had been tampered with, and the crash probably wasn't an accident. One of Henry's top henchmen, Asa Kirby, died just two weeks later. He tried to rob a jewelry store and was shot by the owner. On the surface, that didn't seem overly unusual. But as investigators would learn later, there was a whole other way to look at it. For now, those investigators just needed to get onto the case.
7:52 Speaker 01 There were two more murders before the violence finally slowed down. In early February 1923, an Osage man named Henry Roan had been found dead in his car outside the town of Fairfax. He had been shot in the head. Sometime before his death, Henry allegedly passed some information about the Osage murders to his friend Henry Bennett. Henry Bennett took the information to Oklahoma City to try to pass it to higher authorities than the lawmen in Osage County. Bennett was shot and killed in Oklahoma City, just two blocks from the Capitol. The other man who died was Hugh Gibson, an Osage rancher. He had also been trying to help investigators,
8:36 Speaker 01 before he conveniently fell down a flight of stairs and died in an alley. He was reportedly drugged. Whatever caused the fall, it was unlikely that it was just a clumsy accident. Then, mercifully for everyone in the Osage Nation, the murders paused. As the days and weeks ticked by with no new reports of dead bodies, the people likely started to wonder if this was just another calm before the storm, or if the reign of terror had really stopped. It was too soon to know either way, but the rest of 1923 passed without incident. And so did 1924, though the same couldn't be said for the federal government.
9:17 Speaker 01 The scandals of the Harding administration started to come to light, one after another. The Teapot Dome scandal involving the Secretary of the Interior. The Justice Department scandal involving the Attorney General. And the Veterans Bureau scandal involving the Director of the Veterans Bureau, who defrauded the government while supposedly trying to build new hospitals for America's veterans of World War I. In May of 1924, with a new President and a new Attorney General in place, the Director of the Bureau of Investigation, William Burns, was forced to resign. J. Edgar Hoover received a promotion from Deputy Director to Acting Director.
9:59 Speaker 01 He hoped with every fiber of his being that he would be named Full-Time Director. And he had been on a steady upward climb since he joined the Justice Department in 1917, right after law school. He started as a clerk, then quickly became the head of the Alien Enemy Bureau. That was at the height of World War I, and his job was to investigate suspicious Germans.
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11:30 Speaker 01 The General Intelligence Division. It was more commonly known as the Radical Division, and Hoover's job was to investigate anyone who could be considered radical and potentially dangerous to the US government. It was the height of America's first Red Scare, so anyone who was even remotely connected to communism, whether in rumor or fact, was investigated, arrested, and sometimes deported. Two years later, in 1921, as the situation in Osage County exploded, Hoover rose to Deputy Director of the Bureau. Three years after that, he got his chance at his dream job. He was 29 years old, and he was the Acting Director
12:12 Speaker 01 of the Bureau of Investigation. And just like his predecessor, William Burns, he wanted nothing to do with the case of the Osage Murders.
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13:04 Speaker 01 price tag. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/infamousamerica. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash infamous America. J. Edgar Hoover had two priorities above everything else. Number one, to make himself look good. Number two, to make his beloved Bureau look good. Those priorities never changed over the 50 years that he ran the Bureau that would soon be called the FBI. Now, here in
13:48 Speaker 01 the summer of 1924, newly-promoted Acting Director Hoover desperately wanted to impress his bosses, the Attorney General and the President of the United States. As such, he didn't want the first big murder investigation under his watch to be a loser, and that was how he viewed the case of the Osage murders. He badly wanted to dump it back on the state of Oklahoma and tell them to figure it out. But he had a problem. It was the worst-case scenario for Hoover's two priorities: a possible scandal. A scandal could tarnish his reputation and the Bureau's reputation, and at this critical moment, when he was in a tryout period to
14:29 Speaker 01 become the permanent director, it could cost him his dream job. The potential scandal involved a local Oklahoma gangster named Blacky Thompson, who would play a larger role in the Osage murder case over the next two years. Ironically, it was the failed attempt to work with Blackie Thompson that forced Hoover to take the step that eventually solved the case.
14:55 Speaker 01 Federal agents convinced the governor of Oklahoma to release Blackie Thompson from prison. He was serving time for bank robbery, but the agents believed he could be a valuable undercover operative. They wanted him to go back into Osage County and reunite with his old criminal cronies. Blackie could gain access to groups that agents couldn't hope to infiltrate. Hopefully, he could learn something about the Osage murders and report back to the Bureau. The governor reluctantly agreed, and Blackie Thompson walked out of prison. Federal agents supervised him as he returned to Osage County, but they quickly lost him.
15:36 Speaker 01 He was free to do whatever he wanted, which turned out to be robbing a bank and killing a police officer. He was eventually captured and sent back to prison, but the whole affair was a black mark on Hoover and the Bureau. Hoover was scared that the scandal would become public, and he thought the only way to avoid the fallout was for his agents to solve the case of the Osage murders. So, he summons Special Agent Tom White to Washington DC for an emergency meeting. White was the quintessential old-time frontier lawman. He was 44 years old, and a former railroad detective and Texas Ranger. He began his career by tracking outlaws on horseback, carrying a six-shooter in his holster
16:21 Speaker 01 and a Winchester rifle on his saddle. Now he wore suits and rode the train. He had been with the Bureau for seven years, and he had recently cleaned up the federal prison in Atlanta. It was rife with corruption and notorious for its horrible conditions and practices. In the summer of 1925, Hoover recognized that he needed an old-time lawman like Tom White to handle the investigation in Osage County.
16:49 Speaker 01 The 1920s were a crossover period between the old and the new. Hoover wanted to transform the Bureau into his ideal agency, but it would take time. He wanted his agents to be young men with law degrees. They would be clean-shaven, have short haircuts, and wear suits. They would not carry guns. They would investigate, but they would not make arrests. When it came time to capture a suspect, they would work with local lawmen to make the arrest. Hoover had some of those ideal agents on the payroll, but he also still had the cowboy lawman holdovers from the previous generation. Bureau agents had failed for two years to make any real progress on the Osage murders,
17:33 Speaker 01 so now it was time to try a new tactic.
17:37 Speaker 01 In July of 1925, Special Agent Tom White traveled to Washington to learn about his new mission straight from Hoover himself. Hoover told Tom to take over the field office in Oklahoma City and get up to speed on the events of the past four years in Osage County. Then, Tom needed to succeed where the others failed. He needed to solve the damn case.
18:05 Speaker 01 Tom White started immediately. He was in his new office in Oklahoma City by the end of July, and his first step was to assemble a new team. The corps would be five men, all old-school lawmen like himself. One was a former Texas Ranger. One was a former New Mexico County Sheriff. One was a gifted investigator who was half Native American, which would be valuable to the team.
18:32 Speaker 01 One man was retained from the previous staff, and he would become Tom's right-hand man. And the last of the corps group was a deep-cover operative who posed as an insurance salesman in Osage County. His cover was actually real. He opened a real insurance agency and sold real policies, which allowed him to gain the confidence of locals without raising suspicion. Tom White needed all his help, and more, because there was a mountain of information to sift through. And that was the second step. They had to reexamine all the old notes and files about all of the Osage murders and suspicious deaths. They immediately found problems that were either examples of bad police work, or deliberate
19:17 Speaker 01 acts of sabotage. To get a better understanding, they had to go into Osage County. The former Texas Ranger and the former county sheriff posed as ranchers to get close to the king of the Osage Hills, William Hale. Hale might have been viewed by many as a saintly benefactor of the Osage, but he was too connected to too many victims to be ignored. The deep-cover insurance salesman opened his office in downtown Fairfax, just a few blocks from the former home of Bill and Rita Smith, which had been destroyed by a bomb two years earlier. The half-Native American agent went undercover as a medicine man who claimed he was looking for lost relatives.
20:02 Speaker 01 And Tom White and his right-hand man went into Osage County as themselves, federal agents who were here to find out what the hell was going on in the northeast corner of Oklahoma. White met with the Justice of the Peace in Fairfax, the man who had supervised several coroner's inquiries immediately after the bodies were discovered. The Justice of the Peace made a surprising and frustrating announcement: there was virtually nothing left from Anna Brown's inquest. The Justice claimed that someone broke into his office and stole all of his notes and records. Apparently, the only piece of evidence that was left from the investigation was Anna's skull.
20:44 Speaker 01 White went to the undertaker's office and examined it. It clearly showed a small bullet hole that was the entry wound, and no exit wound.
20:54 Speaker 01 That made it highly suspicious that the doctors, the Schoen brothers, claimed they couldn't find the bullet. White met with them and they stuck to their story. They insisted they searched, not once but twice, and still couldn't find it. With no hard evidence at White's disposal, he took the only next step that was available. He and his right-hand man began re-interviewing potential suspects. The first stop was to go back to Anna Brown's ex-husband, Oda Brown. This was Oda's third interview, and he told the same story he told the two previous times, because it was the truth. He was with his girlfriend during the time when Anna was probably murdered.
21:37 Speaker 01 The agents didn't know exactly when that was, but in all likelihood, it was the night of May 21, 1921, a little over four years ago. Anna had been at a party at her sister Molly's house during the day. Then Molly's brother-in-law, Brian Burkhardt, dropped Anna off at her home late that afternoon. Brian then met his brother, Molly's husband, in Fairfax to see a show with some other family members. Anna was shot and killed near a ravine outside Fairfax sometime later that night. Her movements between being dropped off at home and arriving at the ravine were still a mystery, but they wouldn't be for long.
22:20 Speaker 01 The agent's next step was to reexamine another pair of suspects, Rose and Joe Allen. A couple years ago, a young Native American woman told the authorities that she had heard that Rose and Joe killed Anna Brown. According to the story, Rose was mad at Anna because she thought Anna was trying to steal Joe away. Tom's right-hand man had interrogated Rose and Joe at the time, and they had both told the same story. They were at a shady motel 17 miles away from the area where Anna was killed. The motel owner verified the story, but the agent remained suspicious. Now, Special Agent Tom White wanted to reexamine the whole Rose and Joe angle, but he didn't
23:04 Speaker 01 want to go with them directly. He wanted to take a more subtle approach, so his team enlisted the help of a small-time crook named Kelsey Morrison.
23:18 Speaker 01 Kelsey Morrison was a bootlegger and drug dealer in Osage County, but he recently fled the county after he assaulted a prohibition officer. Agents tracked him to Dallas, Texas, and arrested him. The agents offered him a deal. He could work for them as an undercover informant in Osage County, and in return, they would quash his arrest warrant. Or, he could go to prison for assaulting a federal agent. Morrison took the deal and returned to Osage County. The agents pointed him toward Rose and Joe Allen, and he engaged them in conversation. They steadfastly denied that they were involved in Anna's murder. Morrison reported his findings to White's team,
24:01 Speaker 01 and White decided it was time to go to the source of the story about Rose and Joe. The agents visited the young woman who made the statement against the couple, and it didn't take long for her to crack under the pressure. She admitted that her original story was a lie. She now said that a white man whom she didn't know showed up on her doorstep and forced her to sign a statement that accused Rose and Joe. Agents couldn't pursue the lead much further, but it was a small sign of a conspiracy and a cover-up that seemed to grow by the day. And now the agents moved on to their next target: Brian Burkhart.
24:42 Speaker 01 The agents started by visiting Brian's aunt and uncle in North Texas. On the night Anna was killed, Brian dropped her off at home and then reunited with his brother Ernest. Brian and Ernest met their aunt and uncle, who were visiting from Texas, and they all went to a show in Fairfax. The aunt and uncle said they hung out with Brian for the rest of the night. Their statements lined up perfectly with Brian's statements, and it seemed like Brian was no longer a suspect. The agents moved on to other leads. They followed up on witness statements from people in the tiny town of Ralston, which was right down the road from Fairfax. The original report said that a group of elderly men and women
25:26 Speaker 01 saw Anna on the night of her death, well after Brian dropped her off at home. Special Agent Tom White and his team tracked down a farmer and his wife who had been in that group. The couple confirmed that they saw Anna in a car in Ralston later that night. And then they added the piece of information that would have had every modern TV news person shouting the word “bombshell” during their broadcasts. They said Anna was in the car with Brian Burkhart. Agents used the momentum of the new discovery to dig deeper. They fanned out and talked to more people in Ralston and Fairfax. They learned that Brian and Anna were at a speakeasy, an illegal bar, in Ralston and
26:10 Speaker 01 left at around 10:00 PM. They went to another speakeasy in the area, and they were seen with Brian’s uncle. It was now clear that the aunt and uncle in North Texas were lying to cover for Brian. Later that night, witnesses said they saw Brian and Anna with a third man, but the man’s identity was a mystery. At around 3:00 AM, a woman in Fairfax said she heard Brian shout at Anna. And then, at sunrise, Brian’s neighbor said he saw Brian return home. He also said Brian paid him to stay quiet about witnessing Brian’s early morning arrival. All of that was powerful new information, and it seemed to prove that Brian was lying
26:55 Speaker 01 in his statement on the day Anna’s body was discovered. He did drop Anna off at home after Molly’s party, and he did go to a show with his family. But then he met back up with Anna, and they went out drinking later that night. The problem was, none of the witnesses were there at the time of Anna’s murder. If Brian Burkhart killed Anna, or if he worked with the mysterious third man to do it, there was no hard evidence to support the theory, and no witnesses to confirm it.
27:27 Speaker 01 But then the agents received more circumstantial information that ended up opening their eyes to a shocking new possibility. A private detective contacted them through a middleman. The detective had been hired by the king of the Osage Hills, William Hale, to investigate Anna's murder back in 1921. The private detective offered to talk if he could get paid. Instead, the agents tracked him down and forced him to talk. He revealed that he was hired by William Hale to manufacture an alibi for Brian Burkhart and to protect him from investigation. The private investigator further stated that he had met with Hale and Brian on numerous
28:10 Speaker 01 occasions, and sometimes Brian's brother Ernest was at the meetings. Suddenly, the most influential man in Osage County and his two nephews were the prime suspects in the Osage murders.
28:29 Speaker 01 Special Agent Tom White and his team now had a new focus for their investigation: William Hale and his nephews Ernest and Brian Burkhart.
28:39 Speaker 01 In just one month on the job, White and his team had accomplished more than all the other investigators in the previous four years combined. And like the investigation into Rose and Joe Allen, the agents didn't go straight at their primary suspects. They moved around the edges and worked their way closer to the center. They were investigating multiple murders at the same time, and now it seemed likely that the cases were all tied together. The team couldn't investigate every murder and suspicious death as much as they might have liked to, they simply didn't have the resources. So they focused on three crimes specifically: the murder of Anna Brown, the murder of Henry Roan, and the bombing of Bill and Rita Smith.
29:24 Speaker 01 The agents had learned critical information about Anna's murder, and now they switched to the cases of Henry Roan and Bill and Rita, but now with specific suspects in mind.
29:37 Speaker 01 Tom White and his team interviewed James and David Schoen, the local doctors who had worked on many of the murder cases. They were the doctors who had somehow failed to find the bullet that killed Anna Brown. They had done a cursory examination of Henry Roan, and James had sold his house in Fairfax to Bill and Rita less than two weeks before it exploded. Now, White and his team forced the brothers to admit the truth about the reason why they visited Bill in the hospital right before he died. They weren't there to help catch the bomber. They were there to convince Bill to give James Schoen control of Rita's money. And they succeeded.
30:18 Speaker 01 Bill signed some papers that made James the executor of Rita's estate. Unfortunately, Tom White and his team couldn't prove that the Schoen brothers committed any crimes, but their actions were insanely suspicious. If the brothers were helping cover up certain aspects of the murders and had now directly benefited from one of them, there was a decent chance that they were being paid by or scared by William Hale. The more the agents looked into Hale, the more they found a darker side to the honorable man in the nice suit, spectacles, and felt hat. Hale could be a ruthless businessman who made plenty of enemies on his way to the top. He used his money to buy anyone who could be bought:
31:02 Speaker 01 sheriffs, judges, politicians, lawyers, doctors. If someone couldn't be bought, he used fear to make them loyal. It was likely one of his associates who visited the young Native American woman and made her sign the statement that accused Rose and Joe Allen of Anna's murder. That statement helped keep suspicion off of Brian Burkhart for more than four years. It was hard for Tom White's team to know the extent of some kind of master plan, or how it might have evolved over the past four years. But when agents were able to understand the waterfall of money in Molly Burkhardt's family, a possible plan came to light. Anna's will left all her money to her mother, Lizzie.
31:47 Speaker 01 When Lizzie died two months after Anna, she left all her money to her two remaining daughters, Molly and Rita. Molly was married to Hale's nephew, Ernest Burkhardt. So if Rita and her husband, Bill, died at the same time, Rita's money would pass to Molly. And just like that, Molly Burkhardt would have the accumulated wealth of all of her family members. No one, for a second, suspected that Molly was part of the conspiracy. But it looked like people around her were going to great trouble to make sure she inherited all the money. The only thing that hadn't gone according to plan was that Bill Smith survived the bombing. He inherited Rita's money.
32:30 Speaker 01 But then the Schoen brothers swooped in while he was dying in agony and doped up on morphine and convinced him to give James Schoen control of the money. So it seemed like the spontaneous adjustment kept the master plan on track. And now Molly Burkhardt was the sole survivor of her family. And presumably, her will left her fortune to her husband Ernest, William Hale's nephew. Molly was scared for her life, and with good reason. She had isolated herself from the outside world to try to stay safe. Well, she had mostly isolated herself. Unfortunately, Molly suffered from diabetes. And there was a new product on the market that was being touted as the wonder drug for
33:15 Speaker 01 diabetes. It was called insulin, and it was administered through injections. So, two of the few people whom Molly allowed into her home were doctors James and David Schoen. They gave her injections of what they said was insulin, but instead of improving Molly's condition, she slowly and steadily grew worse.
33:49 Speaker 01 Next time on Infamous America, the investigation accelerates as the agents learn new information about Henry Rone's murder and the bombing of Bill and Rita Smith. They make arrests and hear a startling confession and prepare to put three men on trial for their roles in the Osage murders. There are more twists and turns than ever before. Next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. And they also receive exclusive bonus episodes.
34:30 Speaker 01 Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.
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