Killers of the Flower Moon

In the 1920s, the Osage of Oklahoma were the richest people per capita on earth, made wealthy by the oil beneath land they had been pushed onto decades before. Then they began to die — shot, poisoned, blown up in their homes — in what the Osage came to call the Reign of Terror. As the death toll climbed into the dozens and local investigations stalled or were corrupted, the killings revealed how thoroughly the machinery of law, guardianship, and commerce had been turned against the tribe.

David Grann's 2017 investigation follows the case on two tracks: Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman who watched the murders close in on her own family, and Tom White, the former Texas Ranger whom a young J. Edgar Hoover assigned to the case as he built the fledgling Bureau of Investigation into the modern FBI. Their threads converge on one of the most sinister criminal conspiracies in American history.

Drawing on archives and Osage testimony, Grann reaches past the official convictions to argue that the true scope of the killings, and the number of people complicit in them, was far larger than the Bureau ever acknowledged. The result is both a gripping true-crime narrative and a reckoning with a foundational American crime.