Killers of the Flower Moon

arranged it so that one of them became the administrator of Rita
Smith’s invaluable estate. The doctors whom investigators
suspected of giving Mollie Burkhart poison instead of insulin.
Many of the cases seemed bound by a web of silent conspirators.
Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner and the guardian of
Anna Brown and her mother, was a member of the inquest into
Brown’s murder that failed to turn up the bullet. He also managed,
on behalf of Mollie’s family, the team of private eyes that
conspicuously never cracked any of the cases. A witness had told
the bureau that after Henry Roan’s murder, Hale was eager to get
the corpse away from one undertaker and delivered to the funeral
home at the Big Hill Trading Company. The murder plots
depended upon doctors who falsified death certificates and upon
undertakers who quickly and quietly buried bodies. The guardian
whom McAuliffe suspected of killing his grandmother was a
prominent attorney working for the tribe who never interfered
with the criminal networks operating under his nose. Nor did
bankers, including the apparent murderer Burt, who were
profiting from the criminal “Indian business.” Nor did the venal
mayor of Fairfax—an ally of Hale’s who also served as a guardian.
Nor did countless lawmen and prosecutors and judges who had a
hand in the blood money. In 1926, the Osage leader Bacon Rind
remarked, “There are men amongst the whites, honest men, but
they are mighty scarce.” Garrick Bailey, a leading anthropologist
on Osage culture, said to me, “If Hale had told what he knew, a
high percentage of the county’s leading citizens would have been
in prison.” Indeed, virtually every element of society was complicit
in the murderous system. Which is why just about any member of
this society might have been responsible for the murder of
McBride, in Washington: he threatened to bring down not only
Hale but a vast criminal operation that was reaping millions and
millions of dollars.