Ernest Burkhart

Ernest Burkhart was a white resident of Osage County, Oklahoma, who became involved in the conspiracy to murder members of his Osage wife’s family for control of their oil wealth. He was the nephew of William Hale, the organiser of several killings during the Osage Reign of Terror.

Burkhart eventually confessed and testified for the prosecution, although his cooperation was inconsistent. His role exposed how marriage, guardianship and inheritance law were exploited in a systematic campaign of fraud and murder against 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.