The Anna Brown murder began with a disappearance that her family first tried to explain away and ended with the identification of her decomposed body beside Three Mile Creek. Its discovery turned anxious uncertainty into the first public evidence of a killing, but the early inquest would preserve few clues capable of identifying the murderer.

Disappearance and Discovery

On the evening Anna was last seen, her sister Mollie Burkhart stayed behind to care for their mother while Ernest Burkhart took guests to Fairfax, five miles northwest, to meet William K. Hale and attend a touring musical. Bryan Burkhart offered to drive Anna home. Before they parted, Mollie washed Anna’s clothes, gave her food, and waited until she seemed sober enough to be herself again. The sisters shared a quiet reconciliation; Anna said goodbye with a gold filling flashing in her smile.

As the nights passed without Anna, Mollie became increasingly anxious. Bryan maintained that he had taken Anna straight home and left her there before going to the show. After the third night, Mollie pressed the family to act and sent Ernest to Anna’s house. He found the door locked and the rooms dark. Anna’s absence still admitted less terrible possibilities: perhaps she had gone to Oklahoma City or Kansas City, or to a jazz club she liked. She often carried a small pistol in her alligator purse, and Ernest reassured Mollie that she would soon return. The reassurance could not quiet the growing unease, especially because Charles Whitehorn, another Osage man, had disappeared a week before Anna. He had left home for Pawhuska on May 14 and never returned.

About a week after Anna vanished, an oil worker on a hill a mile north of downtown Pawhuska noticed something in the brush near a derrick. It was a badly decomposed corpse with two bullet holes between the eyes. The body was so damaged that those who gathered could not identify it by appearance. A letter found in one pocket supplied the name: it was addressed to Charles Whitehorn. Near the same time, a teenage boy squirrel hunting with his father and another man by Three Mile Creek spotted a body in a ravine near Fairfax. He called his father down to the creek, where the men found a dead woman.

Unable to find lawmen in Fairfax, the men went to the Big Hill Trading Company, whose proprietor, Scott Mathis, alerted the undertaker. The group hauled the swollen corpse from the ravine, placed it in a wooden box beneath a blackjack tree, and covered it with salt and ice. Mathis, who managed Anna’s financial affairs, contacted Mollie. She came with Ernest, her sister Rita Smith, and Rita’s husband, Bill Smith, followed by people who had known Anna and by curious onlookers, including the bootlegger Kelsie Morrison.

The body’s face was almost impossible to recognize. Mollie and Rita identified the Indian blanket and clothes Mollie had washed for Anna. Bill used a stick to open the dead woman’s mouth, revealing the gold fillings Mollie had seen when the sisters said goodbye. The family recognized Anna. Rita wept and was led away; Mollie, usually composed, silently confirmed the identification and left the creek with Ernest. A family farewell that had seemed an ordinary moment of reconciliation now returned as the last time Mollie had seen her sister alive.

A coroner’s inquest was hastily convened at the ravine, with a justice of the peace selecting jurors from the white men present, including Mathis. The jurors were charged with determining whether Anna had died by an act of God or by human violence and, if a felony had occurred, identifying those responsible. Doctors James Shoun and David Shoun, who cared for Mollie’s family, examined the body. Decomposition prevented a precise estimate, but they judged that Anna had been dead for five to seven days. When they shifted her head in the wooden box, part of her scalp slipped away, exposing a small, round hole in the back of her skull. The wound and the bullet’s downward path made clear that she had been shot; the inquest’s initial question of how she had died had become a question of murder.

Investigation, Conspiracy, and Trial

The inquest established that Anna had been murdered, but the scene yielded little that could identify the killer. Investigators found blood smears beside a rock at Three Mile Creek and a bottle partly filled with clear liquid that smelled of moonshine. They surmised that Anna had been drinking on the rock when someone approached from behind and shot her at close range. A marshal also found two sets of car tracks leading between the road and the gulch, apparently entering from the southeast and circling back. The lawmen made no cast of the tracks, searched no fingerprints from the bottle, tested no gunpowder residue, and took no photographs; the crowd had already disturbed the scene.

The missing bullet became another unresolved clue. During a later federal investigation, Tom White examined the skull the undertaker had secretly retained. He saw the entry wound at the back and no exit wound in front, evidence that the bullet had lodged inside Anna’s head. Since it should have been found during the autopsy, White suspected that someone present had taken it. The justice of the peace shared the suspicion, but neither he nor White could establish who had removed it. The coroner’s inquest testimony had also vanished: the justice said his desk had been broken into and the records taken. The case thus opened with evidence of a deliberate killing and an investigative record already compromised.

Bryan Burkhart’s account that he had left Anna safely at home began to unravel when witnesses placed him with her after he said he had dropped her off. One witness saw Bryan driving and wearing a cowboy hat as he and Anna went west through town. Another reported them at a speakeasy until about ten at night, then at a second drinking place several miles north of Fairfax, where they stayed until roughly one in the morning. The presence of Bryan’s uncle there raised the possibility that he, too, had concealed what he knew. Later sightings were less certain: some placed the pair at another speakeasy; others said a third man accompanied them. The last reported sighting, around three in the morning, was of a car stopping near a Fairfax home and a man believed to be Bryan calling for Anna to get into it. Bryan returned home at sunrise, according to a neighbor, and paid him to keep quiet. Investigators concluded that Bryan had lied under oath when he claimed to have left Anna at home between 4:30 and 5 p.m.; the lie established that his alibi was false, though the scattered sightings left gaps in the final hours.

The identity of the reported third man emerged later through Ernest Burkhart. He told investigators that it was Kelsie Morrison, a bootlegger and dope peddler who had served as an undercover informant for the authorities while also passing information to William K. Hale. Ernest identified Morrison as the man who had fired the fatal shot. The disclosure exposed a betrayal inside the investigation itself: the supposed source helping agents find the third man was, according to Ernest, the killer they sought. As authorities moved to arrest Morrison, they also arranged for a doctor to examine Mollie Burkhart, who appeared gravely ill. Investigators believed she had been slowly poisoned; an agent later reported that she recovered promptly after being removed from the control of Ernest and Hale. Ernest never admitted knowing of the poisoning, leaving unresolved whether he had been excluded from that plot or simply refused to acknowledge it.

At trial, Morrison’s testimony gave the murder a fuller account while making the prosecution’s dependence on a self-interested accomplice plain. He had changed sides before: when he believed Hale had greater power, he acted as Hale’s double agent; after the authorities exposed him, he turned against the conspiracy. In court he testified that Hale wanted to eliminate Mollie’s family so Ernest would inherit everything, and that Hale had recruited him to kill Anna and supplied a .380 automatic. Morrison said Bryan helped get Anna drunk and drive her to Three Mile Creek. Morrison’s wife was with them and remained in the car while the two men carried Anna, too drunk to walk, down into the ravine. Bryan helped her sit up on a rock; Morrison’s testimony placed the fatal shooting there. The account connected the creekside scene to a larger plan aimed not only at Anna but at the family whose property and inheritance were at stake.

A year after the other prosecution described in the book, Mollie attended the trial for Anna’s murder. Morrison had recanted his confession and again shifted allegiance, seeking compensation from Hale; authorities had seized a prison letter in which he threatened to burn the authorities if he got the chance. Prosecutors granted Bryan immunity, believing his testimony necessary to convict Morrison. Mollie therefore heard the circumstances of her sister’s death from Bryan himself: that he had helped get Anna drunk and supported her body while Morrison shot her in the back of the head. Bryan had also been among the people who went with Mollie and her family to identify Anna’s body. He knew the corpse was there while standing beside Mollie and feigning grief, a fact that transformed the earlier scene of recognition into evidence of calculated deception.

Morrison was convicted. Ernest, who had comforted Mollie at the creek, had known that Anna’s killers were only feet away; he had also known who was responsible for the Smith house explosion and had concealed the truth while Mollie searched for the perpetrators. By the time Morrison’s conviction was secured, Mollie could no longer look at her husband. She soon divorced him and recoiled whenever his name was mentioned. The murder’s aftermath therefore reached beyond the verdict: the search for Anna’s killer exposed the betrayal embedded in Mollie’s marriage, while the conviction could not restore her sister or repair the family that the plot had targeted.

Community Memory and Return

The murder’s afterlife appears in the book’s account of a 2012 visit to the Osage Nation Museum. Its director, Kathryn Red Corn, showed photographs of the 2,229 Osage who received headrights in 1906. Among the images were Mollie Burkhart with her sisters and their mother Lizzie, as well as George Bigheart, Henry Roan, and Charles Whitehorn—faces the visitor recognized as victims of the Reign of Terror. The museum’s display thus placed Anna’s murder within the losses of a community, rather than isolating it as a single solved crime.

A panoramic photograph of a 1924 ceremony carried that history in its own physical alteration. A panel had been removed from the image; Red Corn later showed a small print of the missing portion, which depicted William K. Hale staring at the camera. The Osage had not removed his image in order to forget the murders, the account emphasizes, but because they could not forget. The cut in the photograph made remembrance visible: Hale’s presence remained known even where the public display had left a blank.

The retained skull that had once supplied Tom White with evidence also returned to the story through Red Corn’s account. A man approached her at a party in Bartlesville and said he had Anna Brown’s skull, apparently the portion the undertaker had kept and given to federal agents for analysis. Red Corn insisted that it be buried in the Osage community. She contacted the Osage chief, and the skull was retrieved and interred with Anna’s other remains at a quiet ceremony. An object held back from burial for investigative purposes was finally returned to the dead woman’s resting place.

Red Corn also described how painful it remained for Osage families to speak about the Reign of Terror: so many had lost mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, or cousins, and the pain did not go away. The book sets that continuing grief beside the I’n-Lon-Schka Osage ceremonial dances, held over several June weekends in Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse. The gatherings bring Osage people from across the country together to preserve traditions, reconnect with family and friends, cook, and remember. Anna’s murder therefore ends not simply with Morrison’s conviction or Mollie’s divorce, but within a community’s continuing work of mourning, keeping its history, and sustaining Osage life.

Community Memory and Return

In 2012, a journalist researching the still-unresolved questions surrounding the murders visited the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska. Its longtime director, Kathryn Red Corn, showed photographs of the 2,229 Osage allotted members who had received headrights in 1906. Images of Mollie Burkhart with her sisters and their mother Lizzie appeared alongside portraits of George Bigheart, Henry Roan, and Charles Whitehorn. The display gathered individual lives into a communal record of loss, making Anna Brown’s murder part of a wider history rather than a crime isolated from its victims’ families and people.

A panoramic photograph of a 1924 ceremony made that history visible through an absence. A panel had been cut from the image; Red Corn showed the journalist a small print of the missing portion, which depicted William K. Hale looking directly at the camera. She explained that the Osage had removed the image not because they wished to forget, but because they could not. The blank in the displayed photograph was therefore not an erasure of Hale’s presence: it marked a memory the community continued to carry.

The physical remains of Anna’s skull also returned to the community. At a party in Bartlesville, a man told Red Corn that he had the skull, apparently the portion the undertaker had retained in 1921 and that federal agents had used in their investigation. Red Corn insisted that it belonged buried in the Osage community, contacted the Osage chief, and helped secure its retrieval. It was interred with Anna’s other remains in a quiet ceremony, bringing an object preserved as evidence back to the burial from which the investigation had separated it.

Red Corn described the continuing pain of speaking about the Reign of Terror: Osage families had lost mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and cousins, and the grief had not gone away. The June I’n-Lon-Schka ceremonial dances offer a living setting for that memory. Held over several weekends in Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse, they bring Osage people from many places together to preserve traditions, reconnect with family and friends, and remember. Anna’s murder consequently remains present not only in the criminal record, but in acts of return, remembrance, and community life.