Mollie Kyle

Mollie Kyle was an Osage woman whose family possessed valuable oil headrights in Oklahoma. During the Osage Reign of Terror, several of her relatives were murdered in a conspiracy designed to transfer their wealth to white heirs and guardians.

Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, participated in the plot directed by his uncle William Hale. Mollie survived suspected poisoning and became one of the central victims whose family history exposed the organised exploitation of the Osage.

In David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, when Mollie Kyle’s sisters Anna Brown and Rita Smith, her mother Lizzie Q and other Osage people died violently or under suspicious circumstances, the losses revealed a campaign to obtain valuable headrights through inheritance. Cattleman William Hale used his local influence and his nephew Ernest Burkhart’s marriage to Mollie as part of a conspiracy built on intimidation, poisoning, shootings and bombing.