impersonate her so that the friends could collect the headright
payments. (This strategy was not unique—bogus heirs were a
common problem. After Bill Smith died in the house explosion,
the government initially feared that a relative claiming to be his
heir was an impostor.) In 1919, Middleton was convicted of
murder and condemned to die. “There was a point in Mary’s family
that they were relieved the ordeal was over,” Jefferson wrote.
“However, the feeling of satisfaction would be followed by
disbelief and anger.” Middleton’s sentence was commuted to life.
Then, after he had served only six and a half years, he was
pardoned by the governor of Texas; Middleton had a girlfriend,
and Lewis’s family believed that she had bribed authorities. “The
murderer had gotten only a slap on the hand,” Jefferson wrote.
After I finished reading the manuscript documenting Lewis’s
murder, I kept returning to one detail: she had been killed for her
headright in 1918. According to most historical accounts, the
Osage Reign of Terror spanned from the spring of 1921, when Hale
had Anna Brown murdered, to January 1926, when Hale was
arrested. So Lewis’s murder meant that the killings over
headrights had begun at least three years earlier than was widely
assumed, and if Red Corn’s grandfather was poisoned in 1931,
then the killings also continued long after Hale’s arrest. These
cases underscored that the murders of the Osage for their
headrights were not the result of a single conspiracy orchestrated
by Hale. He might have led the bloodiest and longest killing spree.
But there were countless other killings—killings that were not
included in official estimates and that, unlike the cases of Lewis or
Mollie Burkhart’s family members, were never investigated or
even classified as homicides.