Killers of the Flower Moon

A coroner’s inquest is “hastily convened” at the ravine. Though by the 1920s, citizens no longer assume the burdens of investigating crimes and maintaining order as they once did throughout the United States before the advent of police departments, in areas such as Pawhuska—areas on the edge of civilization—vestiges of these old systems remain.

A justice of the peace and a group of jurors—selected from the white men who have gathered at the ravine—try to determine whether Anna has died by an act of God or man. Two doctors who often care for Mollie’s family—a pair of brothers named James and David Shoun—begin to perform an autopsy using primitive instruments and a makeshift table. They determine that Anna has been deceased for between five and seven days, and soon notice a perfectly round hole in the back of her skull—about the size of a .32-caliber bullet. The men realize that Anna’s death was an act of “cold-blooded murder.”

In the 1920s—and especially in places like Pawhuska—“lawmen were then still largely amateurs,” David Grann writes. At the time of Anna’s murder, the Osage County sheriff was a “fifty-eight-year-old, three-hundred-pound frontiersman” named Harve M. Freas, who, according to rumor, was “cozy with criminal elements.” Freas allegedly granted not just leniency but “free reign” to gamblers and bootleggers in the area—men like Kelsie Morrison and Henry Grammer, notorious moonshine runners.

When Freas hears word about Anna’s murder, he is already preoccupied with the Whitehorn murder, and sends a deputy to the ravine to collect evidence. The Shouns—the doctors—cannot not, however, find a bullet lodged in Anna’s brain, despite the absence of an exit wound. The only evidence the deputy is able to collect is a bottle of moonshine, which is assumed to be Anna’s. No one takes fingerprints, casts impressions of tire marks in the road nearby, checks Anna’s body for gunpowder residue, or even photographs the crime scene.

When Lizzie hears that her oldest daughter is dead, she plunges into a deep grief—she had already descended into poor health, and her fraught condition begins to worsen. Mollie throws herself into organizing Anna’s funeral, an exorbitantly expensive affair—undertakers at the time frequently charged the Osage unbelievable rates, gouging them and forcing them to pay sums which translate to nearly $80,000 in contemporary currency.

Anna’s funeral reflects a combination of Osage and Catholic traditions, yet due to the seriously compromised state of Anna’s corpse, certain rituals—such as face-painting and ornamentation—cannot be completed. As Anna’s coffin is lowered into the ground, her family recites Osage prayer-songs dedicated to Wah’Kon-Tah—the mysterious life force “around which the Osage […] structured their lives.”