Killers of the Flower Moon

(Frankie) #1

Burkhart to confirm his statement to Ramsey. And Ramsey threw
up his hands and said, “I guess it’s on my neck now. Get your
pencils.”


According to his sworn statement and other testimony,
sometime in early 1923 Grammer told Ramsey that Hale had “a
little job he wanted done.” When Ramsey asked what it was,
Grammer said that Hale needed an Indian knocked off. Ramsey,
who referred to the plot as “the state of the game,” eventually
agreed, and he lured Roan down into the canyon, promising him
whiskey. “We sat on the running board of his car and drank,”
Ramsey recounted. “The Indian then got in his car to leave, and I
then shot him in the back of the head. I suppose I was within a
foot or two of him when I shot him. I then went back to my car
and drove to Fairfax.”


White observed the way Ramsey kept saying “the Indian,” rather
than Roan’s name. As if to justify his crime, Ramsey said that even
now “white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an
Indian than they did in 1724.”


White still had questions about the murder of Mollie’s sister
Anna Brown. Ernest Burkhart remained cagey about the role of his
brother Bryan, evidently not wanting to implicate him. But he
revealed the identity of the mysterious third man who had been
seen with Anna shortly before her death. It was someone whom
the agents knew, knew all too well: Kelsie Morrison, their
undercover informant who had supposedly been working with the
agents to identify the third man. Morrison had not just been a
double agent who had funneled information back to Hale and his
henchmen. It was Morrison, Ernest said, who had put the fatal
bullet in Anna Brown’s head.

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