Madi’s Reviews > Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI > Status Update

The murder plots depended upon doctors who falsified death certificates and upon undertakers who quickly and quietly buried bodies.

By all rights, their higher standard of living should have brought the Osages a lower death rate than America’s whites. Yet Osages were dying at more than one-and-a-half times the national rate—and those numbers do not include Osages born after 1907 and not listed on the roll.

Margie then mentioned something that I had not seen in any of the FBI records. [...] “My dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him,” Margie said.

There was another layer to the case—a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy, which the bureau had never exposed.

The Osage Tribal Council was the only governing body to publicly single out and praise White and his team, including the undercover operatives.

Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase [...] he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.

White realized that the conspirators were not only erasing evidence—they were manufacturing it.

In December 1924, Stone gave Hoover the job he longed for. Hoover would rapidly reshape the bureau into a monolithic force—one that, during his nearly five-decade reign as director, he would deploy not only to combat crime but also to commit egregious abuses of power.

An agent from the Office of Indian Affairs soon picked up another report: Mollie wasn’t dying of diabetes at all; she, too, was being poisoned.

The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered. The press later described the killings as being as “dark and sordid as any murder story of the century” and the “bloodiest chapter in American crime history."