***David Grann speaks to The Telegraph’s Alex Diggins:***
In 2012, in a small town in Oklahoma, David Grann met the devil. The magazine journalist was on the hunt for his next story and he stumbled into the Osage Nation Museum, which commemorated the history of the local Native American tribe. There he saw a giant black-and-white photo of Osage Indians and white settlers peering into the camera; at first, he was simply impressed by its panoramic size, cramming dozens of faces together.
Then, he noticed an oddity: one face in the corner of the image had disappeared. The figure seemed to be a well-dressed white man, poised in a commanding, patrician stance. But their head was gone. Instead, their face was a cross-hatch of furious lines. It was as though the picture had been attacked.
He asked the museum curator, an Osage woman called Kathryn Red Corn, about the defaced photo. “That was where the devil stood,” she said.The “devil” was William Hale. At the time the picture was taken, in the early 1920s, Hale was the centre of the Osage community. He’d risen from his hardscrabble, cattle-wrangling youth to become a prominent rancher, businessman and politician; his influence fell across every aspect of local affairs. He styled himself “King of the Osage hills” and considered himself a pivot between the indigenous Osage Indians and more recent white arrivals. He was also – unbeknownst to everyone else in that photograph – a mass murderer, engaged in a systematic campaign to kill and rob his family, neighbours and colleagues.
“The members of the Osage tribe removed that image not because they didn’t want to remember – but because they couldn’t forget,” Grann tells me now. “They suffered one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, yet many people, myself included, weren’t taught about it. We’ve effectively exercised it from our consciousness.
”In the 1890s, oil was discovered on Osage land. As the tribe retained the “head rights” to the fields – effectively holding the licences to drill – they became fabulously wealthy almost overnight. By the 1920s, they were among the richest per capita citizens in the world.
Hale took advantage of this sudden good fortune, orchestrating a slow-burning campaign to steal their wealth. He inveigled himself into the community, marrying off his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, to a full-blood Osage woman called Mollie, stitching his bloodline to the tribe’s. Yet all the while, he was leading a conspiracy to kill off the Osage and inherit their head rights. Mollie’s mother and two sisters were murdered; numerous other Osage were shot, poisoned and bludgeoned. Local police and doctors were complicit, working to cover up the crimes. Many of the deaths were listed as accidents and suicides – or simply went uninvestigated. After all, as Grann notes, a common saying at the time held that it was “easier to kill an Indian than a dog”.
Grann spent five years investigating these crimes. The resulting 2017 bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon, brought the “Osage reign of terror” sickeningly to life. Now, his book has been turned into an extraordinary three-and-a-half-hour epic by Martin Scorsese, with Robert DeNiro as William Hale. Leonardo DiCaprio plays his nephew, Ernest, and Lily Gladstone his wife, Mollie. While Grann’s book is an expansive, thrilling true-crime read, Scorsese’s film is a more intimate watch. Anchored by Gladstone’s remarkable performance, it’s a clammy, claustrophobic study in how love and family loyalty tangle and collide.
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***David Grann speaks to The Telegraph’s Alex Diggins:***
In 2012, in a small town in Oklahoma, David Grann met the devil. The magazine journalist was on the hunt for his next story and he stumbled into the Osage Nation Museum, which commemorated the history of the local Native American tribe. There he saw a giant black-and-white photo of Osage Indians and white settlers peering into the camera; at first, he was simply impressed by its panoramic size, cramming dozens of faces together.
Then, he noticed an oddity: one face in the corner of the image had disappeared. The figure seemed to be a well-dressed white man, poised in a commanding, patrician stance. But their head was gone. Instead, their face was a cross-hatch of furious lines. It was as though the picture had been attacked.
He asked the museum curator, an Osage woman called Kathryn Red Corn, about the defaced photo. “That was where the devil stood,” she said.The “devil” was William Hale. At the time the picture was taken, in the early 1920s, Hale was the centre of the Osage community. He’d risen from his hardscrabble, cattle-wrangling youth to become a prominent rancher, businessman and politician; his influence fell across every aspect of local affairs. He styled himself “King of the Osage hills” and considered himself a pivot between the indigenous Osage Indians and more recent white arrivals. He was also – unbeknownst to everyone else in that photograph – a mass murderer, engaged in a systematic campaign to kill and rob his family, neighbours and colleagues.
“The members of the Osage tribe removed that image not because they didn’t want to remember – but because they couldn’t forget,” Grann tells me now. “They suffered one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, yet many people, myself included, weren’t taught about it. We’ve effectively exercised it from our consciousness.
”In the 1890s, oil was discovered on Osage land. As the tribe retained the “head rights” to the fields – effectively holding the licences to drill – they became fabulously wealthy almost overnight. By the 1920s, they were among the richest per capita citizens in the world.
Hale took advantage of this sudden good fortune, orchestrating a slow-burning campaign to steal their wealth. He inveigled himself into the community, marrying off his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, to a full-blood Osage woman called Mollie, stitching his bloodline to the tribe’s. Yet all the while, he was leading a conspiracy to kill off the Osage and inherit their head rights. Mollie’s mother and two sisters were murdered; numerous other Osage were shot, poisoned and bludgeoned. Local police and doctors were complicit, working to cover up the crimes. Many of the deaths were listed as accidents and suicides – or simply went uninvestigated. After all, as Grann notes, a common saying at the time held that it was “easier to kill an Indian than a dog”.
Grann spent five years investigating these crimes. The resulting 2017 bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon, brought the “Osage reign of terror” sickeningly to life. Now, his book has been turned into an extraordinary three-and-a-half-hour epic by Martin Scorsese, with Robert DeNiro as William Hale. Leonardo DiCaprio plays his nephew, Ernest, and Lily Gladstone his wife, Mollie. While Grann’s book is an expansive, thrilling true-crime read, Scorsese’s film is a more intimate watch. Anchored by Gladstone’s remarkable performance, it’s a clammy, claustrophobic study in how love and family loyalty tangle and collide.
**Read the full interview:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2023/10/16/killers-of-the-flower-moon-osage-murders-david-grann/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2023/10/16/killers-of-the-flower-moon-osage-murders-david-grann/)
I’m getting this show shoved down my throat because of Reddit ads so the promotional team is hard at it