William Hale

William Hale was a wealthy rancher and political operator in Osage County, Oklahoma, who organised murders to gain control of Osage oil headrights. Presenting himself as a benefactor, he cultivated influence over local officials, businessmen and members of the Osage community.

Federal investigators connected Hale to a conspiracy involving his nephew Ernest Burkhart and hired killers. His conviction exposed only part of the wider violence and fraud inflicted on the Osage during the Reign of Terror.

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.