It begins on May 24, 1921, with the disappearance of a thirty-four-year-old Osage woman named Anna Brown. Brown was a drinker and a carouser. "She had often gone on 'sprees,' as her family disparagingly called them," Grann writes. Still, there was cause for alarm. Anna's sister Minnie had died mysteriously three years earlier. Another Osage, a man named Charles Whitehorn, had just gone missing.
Then, a week after Brown's disappearance, an oil worker came across Whitehorn's body near the base of a derrick. He'd been shot, twice, between the eyes. "Around the same time," Grann writes, a teenage squirrel hunter came upon another corpse: "There was the bloated and decomposing body of what appeared to be an American Indian woman: she was on her back, with her hair twisted in the mud and her vacant eyes facing the sky. Worms were eating at the corpse."
Brown's and Whitehorn's deaths were just the beginning. In February of the following year, William Stepson, a twenty-nine-year-old Osage in perfect health (he'd been a champion steer roper), died suddenly in his home. Stepson had been poisoned, it turned out, with strychnine or some similar substance. Less than a month later, another Osage died of suspected poisoning. And in July, an Osage man died after taking a sip of poisoned whiskey. Alarmed, the Osage called on a local oilman—fifty-five-year-old Barney McBride—to travel to Washington and ask the federal authorities for an investigation. "When McBride checked in to a rooming house in the capital," Grann writes, "he found a telegram from an associate waiting for him."
Wealthy as they were, the Osage did not necessarily have direct access to their own money. In accordance with federal law, "guardians" were appointed to the Indians deemed "incompetent" by the Department of the Interior. "In practice," Grann writes, "the decision to appoint a guardian—to render an American Indian, in effect, a half citizen—was nearly always based on the quantum of Indian blood in the property holder, or what a state supreme court justice referred to as 'racial weakness.'"
What this meant was that if a full-blooded Osage, like Anne Brown's sister Mollie Burkhart, married outside the tribe, the husband might become his wife's guardian. (In Burkhart's case, that was what had happened.) In the event of Mollie's death, her wealth—and the wealth associated with Anna's headright—would pass to the husband. And, of course, it wasn't just Anna who'd died. Minnie's headright had already passed to Mollie, upon Minnie's death, and Anna's murder was followed by the mysterious death of Mollie's mother, Lizzie, and that of another sister—Rita—who died in an explosion that also took the life of her husband, Bill, and that of their white servant, Nettie.
Their wealth passed to Mollie as well. It did not go unnoticed on the Osage reservation that the last person to have seen Anna alive, on the night of her disappearance, was Bryan Burkhart—the younger brother of Mollie Burkhart's husband, Ernest. And, before long, Mollie herself became ill.