How William Hale Orchestrated the Murder of an Entire Osage Family

[00:00:01]May 27th, 1921. A group of hunters walks through a ravine in Osage County, Oklahoma. The smell reaches them before they see anything. Down in the brush, they find a body. It has been there for days. The woman is Anna Brown. She is 36 years old. She is oage and she is one of the wealthiest people in America. Local officials look at the scene, note the whiskey bottles nearby, and write down a simple explanation. Death by exposure.

[00:00:29]Maybe alcohol poisoning. Case closed. No real investigation follows. But when an undertaker examines her more closely, he finds something the first men missed. A bullet hole, small, clean, fired into the back of her skull. Someone had killed Anna Brown execution style, then walked away, confident that no one would ask questions. And for a while, no one did. Anna was not the first Oage person to die that year. Under strange circumstances, she would not be the last. Over the next four years, dozens of Oage men and women would be shot, poisoned, or blown apart in their own homes. Their killers were often people who sat at their dinner tables, people who called them family, people the law was supposed to protect them from. This is the story of the Oage Reign of Terror. How a wealthy Native American nation was hunted for its oil money and how one of the first major investigations of the newly formed FBI cracked open a conspiracy that went all the way to the top of local society. If stories [music] like this matter to you, stories that history tried to bury, hit subscribe now and turn on notifications.

[00:01:36][music] This channel exists to tell the cases that deserve to be remembered correctly. Let's get into it. To understand why anyone would want to murder an entire community, [music] you have to understand what the Oage had and how they got it. In the 1870s, the United States government forced the Oage nation off their lands in Kansas and relocated them to a reservation in what is now Oage County, Oklahoma. It was meant to be a punishment disguised as a resettlement, rocky, difficult land that white settlers did not want. It turned out to be sitting on an ocean of oil. In 1897, drillers struck oil beneath the reservation. By the 1920s, that oil had turned the Oage into per capita one of the wealthiest peoples on the planet.

[00:02:22]Here is the part most people don't know.

[00:02:24]The Oage had been smart. When the US government forced a lotment on tribes across the country, breaking up communal land into individual parcels, which usually left native nations poorer, the Oage negotiated differently. They kept the mineral rights to their land held in common as a tribe. Every enrolled member received a share called a headright of whatever the oil below the ground produced. By 1923, the trib's royalties topped $30 million in a single year. In today's money, that is well over $370 million. Oage families built mansions.

[00:03:00]They hired chauffeers. They sent their children to boarding schools in Europe.

[00:03:04]Newspapers across the country ran astonished headlines, calling the Oage the wealthiest people, man for man, in the country, richer per person, than the oil barons of Texas. And that wealth drew a crowd. Oil workers by the tens of thousands poured into Oage County looking for jobs. Along with them came something else. Men who saw the Oage not as neighbors, but as a resource to be extracted, the same way the oil was.

[00:03:30]There was also a legal trap waiting underneath all that money. In 1921, Congress passed a law requiring that any Oage adult classified as half blood or more have a court-appointed guardian to manage their own royalty payments, regardless of their education, their age, or their ability to run a household and raise children. The courts making these decisions were local Oklahoma probate courts, and the guardians they appointed were almost always local white men, lawyers, bankers, ranchers. Think about what that meant in practice. An Oage woman with a college education running her own home could be declared legally incapable of handling her own paycheck, while her white neighbor with none of her wealth or education faced no such restriction. One woman was assigned a guardian specifically because she had savings in the bank. The court decided that not spending her money proved she didn't understand its value. It was a system built on a racial assumption dressed up as protection. In just one small county seat, Por Huska, eight lawyers were practicing law for a town of roughly 8,000 people. The same ratio of lawyers you'd expect in a city of 140,000. Attorneys, bankers, and businessmen circled the guardianship system the way vultures circle a wounded animal because managing an Oage estate meant handling and often skimming from enormous sums of oil money every single month. Among those newcomers was a rancher from Texas named William King Hail. William Hail was born in Texas in 1874. He came to Oklahoma sometime around the turn of the century before statehood when the Oage reservation was still mostly open range and cattle country. He built a name for himself as a rancher and businessman. And over two decades, he became one of the most recognized and on the surface most respected men in the county. Hail was not an outsider stumbling into a strange land. He learned the customs of Osage County. He learned the tribal role system, the guardianship courts, and exactly how money and land passed from one Oage family member to the next when someone died. He served as a reserve deputy sheriff. He donated to churches.

[00:05:38]He lent money to people who needed it, including Osage neighbors. Local newspapers referred to him, without irony, as the king of the Osage Hills.

[00:05:48]But underneath the reputation, investigators would later show, was a man building something much darker. A network of debts, loyalties, and threats that gave him near total influence over a small, isolated county. He surrounded himself with men who owed him money or favors.

[00:06:07]>> You just make sure that's taken care of.

[00:06:10]>> Ranch hands, ex-convicts, petty criminals passing through the oil boom towns. When Hail needed something done, he had people willing to do it. His two nephews, Ernest and Byron Birkhart, came up from Texas to work for him. Ernest, in particular, was described by those who knew him as easily led, a man who did what his uncle told him to do without much resistance. That trait would matter enormously.

[00:06:37]>> In 1917, [music] Molly Kyle married Ernest Birkhart. It was a union born of love and framed [music] by a dark unfolding tragedy.

[00:06:47]>> Because in 1917, Ernest Birkhart married a full-blooded Oage woman named Molly [music] Kyle. Molly was thoughtful, private, and deeply devoted to her Catholic faith. She had grown up speaking Osage as her first language.

[00:07:03]She had a mother, Lizzy Q, Kyle, and three sisters, Anna, Minnie, and Rita.

[00:07:09]Each of them held valuable head rights.

[00:07:11]Under the strange, often cruel guardianship system the US government had imposed on the tribe. Courts had ruled that full-blood Oage adults were legally incompetent to manage their own money regardless of their education or intelligence and assigned white guardians, often local lawyers and businessmen, to control their finances.

[00:07:33]It was a system built on the assumption that native people could not be trusted with their own wealth. And it created the exact opening men like William Hail needed because under Oklahoma inheritance law, if a headwright holder died without children, that headwright passed to their next of kin, even if that kin was not Oage at all. Marrying into an Oage family wasn't just a personal decision. It was for some men a financial strategy. Investigators would later conclude that Hail saw exactly what Ernest's marriage to Molly could become. a pipeline. If Molly's mother died, if her sisters died, if eventually Molly herself died, all those headwrites would funnel into one place, Ernest's hands. And Ernest, prosecutors argued, did what his uncle told him to do. The killing did not happen all at once. It happened slowly, deliberately, spread out just enough that each death could be explained away on its own.

[00:08:30]Minnie Smith, Molly's sister, died in 1918 at just 27 years old. Doctors at the time called it a wasting illness. No autopsy was performed. No one asked hard questions.

[00:08:43]Later, investigators would come to believe she had been slowly poisoned.

[00:08:48]Anna Brown, the sister found in the ravine in May 1921, was the one who could not be quietly explained away because of the bullet. Anna had been out drinking with a man named Kelsey Morrison and Ernest's brother, Byron Birkhart, on the night she died. Morrison would eventually confess that Hail had asked him to kill her and that after driving Anna to a remote creek bed, he shot her.

[00:09:13]Lizzy Q. Kyle.

[00:09:15]Molly and Anna's mother died only 2 months after Anna in July 1921 while living in the Birkhart household.

[00:09:23]Officials attributed her death to old age. She had been in declining health, yes, but investigators later suspected the decline had help. With Anna and Lizzie both gone, their combined headrights now belonged to Molly. Then, in February 1923, Henry Ran, a cousin of the family, was found shot in his car on the reservation. Hail had loaned Ran money and had secretly arranged to make himself the beneficiary of Ran's $25,000 life insurance policy, an amount worth close to half a million dollars today.

[00:09:55]That detail alone would eventually help convict him because Ran's murder happened on reservation land, which made it a federal crime and gave federal agents jurisdiction to pursue Hail directly. Just weeks later, in March 1923, came the attack that finally made national headlines. In the middle of the night, a massive explosion tore apart the home of Molly's sister, Rita Smith, and her husband, Bill Smith, in the town of Fairfax. The blast, later found to have used roughly 5 gallons of nitroglycerin, killed Rita and the family's live-in servant, Netty Brookshire, instantly. Bill Smith survived the initial blast with catastrophic injuries. Before he died 4 days later, he was able to tell people he believed he knew exactly who was behind it. Tell Sarah that I am truly sorry.

[00:10:45]I tried my best to make it back home.

[00:10:49]>> By this point, one woman, Molly Burkhart, had lost her mother and every one of her sisters. She herself had begun falling mysteriously ill, growing weaker by the week, for reasons her doctors could not or would not explain, and she was living the entire time in the same house as the man later accused of orchestrating it all. It's worth pausing here to say plainly, Anna, Minnie, Lizzy, Rita, and Henry Ran were not statistics. They were people with routines, friendships, and plans for the years ahead. Anna Brown was known around Fairfax as independent and outspoken, unwilling to quietly accept the restrictions placed on her by the guardianship courts. Henry Ran stood well over 6t tall and was remembered by those who knew him as a striking, dignified man who had simply gone through a rough patch in his marriage.

[00:11:42]Rita Smith had been so frightened by the murders around her that she and her husband deliberately moved their household closer to town, hoping proximity to other people might keep them safe. It didn't. That detail, a family moving closer to town out of fear only to be killed anyway, tells you something important about this case.

[00:12:02]There was no real safe distance. The threat wasn't a stranger in the dark. It was already inside the family. Here is the part of the story that should make your skin prickle. For years, almost nobody in a position of power did anything. Local law enforcement in Osage County was compromised from top to bottom. Some officials owed hail favors, others were simply intimidated. When Osage families tried to push for real investigations, they were met with silence or worse. In 1922, desperate for outside help, the Oage turned to a white oilman named Barney McBride, asking him to travel to Washington DC and appeal directly to the federal government. On his very first night in the capital, McBride received an anonymous telegram warning him to be careful. The next morning, his body was found dumped in a culvert in Maryland. He had been bound, stabbed more than 20 times, and left naked. The message could not have been clearer. Anyone who tried to expose what was happening in Osage County would be silenced. Then, in June 1923, an Oage man named George Bigart, the son of the trib's last hereditary chief, was rushed to a hospital in Oklahoma City, believed to have been poisoned.

[00:13:18]>> I do not trust them. and they are tracing my every move. William, >> I will get these papers to the proper authorities.

[00:13:25]>> Before he died, he told his lawyer, William Vaughn, that he knew who was behind the killings and that he had documents to prove it. Vaughn boarded a train that same night to bring that evidence back to poor Husker. He never made it. The next morning, railroad workers found Vaughn's body along the tracks, his skull crushed. The documents he had been carrying were gone. Big Hart died the same morning in the hospital.

[00:13:51]By 1925, the confirmed death toll among wealthy full-blood Osage stood at roughly 60 people. And researchers who have studied the case since believe the true number, once you include deaths quietly written off as illness, accident, or suicide, may run into the hundreds. Newspapers in Colorado were the first to give the crisis a name that stuck, the reign of terror. By 1925, the Osage Tribal Council had run out of patience with local authorities. With the help of a local law officer named James Monroe Pile, tribal elders formerly requested help from the federal government's Bureau of Investigation, the young agency that would later become the FBI. The bureau assigned a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to lead the investigation. White inherited a case that had already been badly mishandled.

[00:14:41]A previous agent had briefly looked into the murders and concluded wrongly that there was nothing more to find. White took a different approach. He understood that in a county where everyone knew everyone and where Hail's influence reached into courtrooms, sheriff's offices, and church pews, undercover work was the only way forward. He assembled a small team, a former New Mexico sheriff, a former Texas Ranger, an agent who had worked the earlier failed investigation, and a Ute Nation agent named John Ren, who could move through the community in ways white agents could not. The agents posed as cattle buyers, insurance salesman, and even a traveling healer, quietly gathering information for close to 2 years. Slowly, patiently, they began to trace the money, and the money again and again led back to one man, William Hail.

[00:15:32]The undercover work was slow and dangerous by design. Oage County was a place where a stranger asking questions stood out immediately, and where loyalty to Hail, whether from genuine respect, fear, or debt, ran deep through the local population. Agents had to earn trust gradually, buying cattle, taking out insurance policies, and sitting through long conversations at general stores and diners, all while quietly noting who benefited financially from each death, and who seemed nervous when certain names came up. The bureau's early attempts at this case, before Tom White took over, had actually made things worse. In one especially damaging misstep, agents released a career criminal named Blackie Thompson from custody, hoping he would act as an informant. Instead, Thompson used his freedom to rob a bank and kill a police officer before he was eventually killed himself. It was a reminder that this investigation was operating in genuinely hostile, unpredictable territory where the line between witness and killer was often blurry. White's approach relied on something simpler and more effective.

[00:16:36]Following the paper trail of head rights, life insurance policies, and wills, every murder in the pattern had a financial beneficiary. Once agents mapped out who profited from each death, the same handful of names kept appearing again and again. And at the center of nearly all of them, stood William Hail.

[00:16:54]The break came when investigators turned to a small-time criminal named Kelsey Morrison, already behind bars on unrelated charges. Facing his own legal troubles, Morrison admitted his role in Anna Brown's murder and named William Hail as the man who had ordered it. Then came the far more devastating confession, Ernest Birkhart himself.

[00:17:15]Confronted with the mounting evidence against him and reportedly warned that Molly, his own wife, was being deliberately poisoned under his own roof, Ernest broke. He told investigators that his uncle had orchestrated the murders of Molly's entire family to gain control of their head rights using a network of hired men to carry it out. One agent later wrote that once Molly was removed from the Birkhart household and placed under separate medical care, she began almost immediately to recover. Molly herself had refused for a long time to believe her husband capable of any of it. She had told people simply that Ernest was a good man who would never hurt her or anyone else. Learning the truth that the man she had built a family with had helped orchestrate the death of her mother and every one of her sisters was its own kind of devastation, one that had nothing to do with courtrooms or headlines. William Hail was arrested. So was John Ramsay, a ranch hand who confessed to personally shooting Henry Ran after Hail allegedly promised him money and a car. Two other men tied to the conspiracy, Henry Grammar and Asa Kirby, never stood trial at all. Grammar died in a car crash before he could testify. Kirby was shot dead while committing an unrelated robbery after someone tipped off the store owner in advance. Investigators later concluded that the tip had come from Hail himself, eliminating loose ends before they could talk. The prosecution of William Hail was by any measure a fight. Trials moved between courouses, juries deadlocked. A conviction was overturned on appeal.

[00:18:50]Witnesses recanted or disappeared. Local prejudice against Oage testimony made federal prosecutors doubt any jury in the region would ever convict a well-connected white rancher of murdering Native Americans, no matter the evidence. Along the way, several other men were convicted of lesser crimes for trying to obstruct the investigation. A lawyer who supplied alcohol to influence a witness. A grand juror who lied under oath. a relative who tried to bribe his way onto a jury.

[00:19:19]The corruption ran wide, but the federal government's jurisdiction over Henry Ran's murder because it happened on reservation land proved to be the case's foundation. In January 1929, after years of legal battles, William Hail was convicted for the final time in federal court and sentenced to life in prison at Levvenworth. John Ramsay was convicted later that same year for Ran's murder and received the same sentence. Ernest Birkhart, having pleaded guilty and testified against his own uncle, was also sentenced to life. Years later, during a parole hearing, Ernest downplayed his own role, describing himself as little more than a messenger who had simply passed along instructions between his uncle and Ramsay. It was an explanation that left out an enormous amount, including the years he spent married to and living beside a woman whose family he had helped destroy. If you are hoping this story ends with the villains locked away for good, it does not. Not entirely. Hail and Ramsay were both released on parole in 1947 despite strong protests from the Oage nation.

[00:20:25]Hail lived quietly until his death in 1962. Ernest Burkhart was parrolled in 1937 only to be convicted again a few years later for robbing the home of his own former sister-in-law. He eventually received a pardon in 1966, partly on the basis of his cooperation decades earlier and lived until 1986. Molly Burkhart remarkably rebuilt her life. She divorced Earnest, remarried, and in 1931 was finally declared legally competent, freed at last from the guardianship system that had controlled her finances for years. She died in 1937 of causes unrelated to the murders and her children inherited what remained of her family's estate. In 1925, in direct response to the case, Congress changed federal law to prohibit non-osage individuals from inheriting headrights from any Oage member with half or more native ancestry, closing the exact loophole men like Hail had exploited.

[00:21:24]For decades, the official record listed around 24 murders directly tied to the conspiracy. But later researchers, including journalist Dennis McAuliffe, who investigated his own grandmother's suspicious death for his book on the case, found evidence suggesting the true toll was far higher. Many Osage deaths during this period were quietly recorded as illness, accident, or suicide, with no autopsy ever performed. Some historians and Osage community members now estimate the death toll reached into the hundreds with some studies suggesting as much as 10% of the trib's full-blood population may have died as a result. In 2000, the Oage Nation filed suit against the federal government, arguing that decades of mismanagement of tribal oil trust funds had cost the tribe enormous sums beyond the murders themselves. That case settled in 2011 for $380 million. one of the largest trust settlements ever paid to a single tribe. Many historians and members of the Oage nation describe what happened during this period not simply as a string of murders, but as a deliberate, sustained campaign to destroy the trib's wealth and its people, a characterization some scholars place within a longer pattern of harm against native nations in America. Estimates of the true scale vary widely, and the uncertainty itself is part of the tragedy. When deaths go unrecorded as murder in the first place, there is no clean final number to point to. What survives instead are family stories passed down for a century about relatives who died too young, too suddenly, and too conveniently for somebody else's benefit. The Oage Nation itself has worked for decades to make sure this history is not forgotten or softened. Tribal members have spoken publicly about walking through cemeteries in Osage County and noticing just how many headstones mark lives cut short in the exact same narrow window of years. A pattern that seen all at once is impossible to write off as coincidence. What makes the Oage murders so difficult to sit with isn't just the violence, it's the machinery around it.

[00:23:33]A legal system that decided an entire people could not be trusted with their own money. a guardianship program that handed control of that money to strangers and a culture willing to look away while a rancher who was called a friend at every dinner table quietly emptied out a family one funeral at a time. Molly Burkheart lost her mother and all three of her sisters. She lived for years beside the man convicted of helping orchestrate it, believing him to be someone who loved her. That is the part true crime often skips [music] past in favor of the arrest and the courtroom. the ordinary unbearable grief of the people who were left standing.

[00:24:13]Now, we want to hear from you. Do you think Hail and the others who were parrolled ever truly paid [music] for what they did? Do you think the guardianship system was its own form of harm, separate from the [music] murders themselves? Let us know what you think in the comments below. If this case [music] affected you the way it affected us, do three things before you go. Like this video, subscribe to the channel, and share it with someone who needs to hear a story. History almost let slip away. There are more cases like this one waiting. Cases where the truth took decades to surface. [music] We'll keep digging them up. We'll see you in the next one.