Mollie Burkhart's Cases

Osage to white settlers, however, they could be inherited. This was a loophole that outsiders used to their advantage in their mission to gain Osage headrights. In many cases, those who were not Osage would marry an Osage spouse purposely with plans to murder them and inherit their headrights. This was just one of the many sinister tactics used to come after the Osage people and their wealth (Klein). One by one, the body count of the Osage people continued to rise through the early 1920s, although many of these murders remain unsolved to this day there is one case that serves as an example of the awful conspiracies made to come after Osage headrights.
Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman, is described by David Grann in the interview with Terry Gross as “a fascinating person. She was born in the 1880s, growing up

Mollie went out looking for her sister Anna but found no trace of her, in the days following Anna’s dead body was found in a ravine. She had been shot in the back of the head (Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon 1-20). Finding Anna’s body was the first piece of the puzzle that lead Mollie Burkhart to realize that her family as well as her entire tribe were all targets of a deathly conspiracy.
The Burkhart case was considered to be the key case that could explain the rest of the mysterious Osage murders occurring at the time. Another point of view on the story of Mollie Burkhart and her family is told by Osage tribal members in the “Osage Murder Trails” documentary. For them the story was just one example of many murders that were taking place at the time for no other reason than greed and prejudice aimed toward the Osage people, oil, and their wealth. The Osage members in the documentary explain that Mollie Burkhart was married to a white man named Earnest Burkhart. Earnest had a brother, Bryan Burkhart, who was ironically the last person Anna Brown was seen alive with. After a long night of what was considered one of her usual