Sisterhood of Mollie Burkhart and Anna Brown

The sisterhood of Mollie Burkhart and Anna Brown was built into the ordinary rhythms of family life: visits to Mollie’s home, care for their mother, and the familiarity of knowing Anna’s habits. It came into sharpest focus in May 1921, when Anna disappeared and Mollie searched for her, then had to identify her body. Their bond was intimate and practical, but it was also caught in the inheritance chain exploited by the murder plot: Anna’s death redirected wealth within the family, making kinship both a source of care and a route by which the conspirators could pursue control.

Sisters in the Household

Anna was thirty-four and less than a year older than Mollie. She lived in Gray Horse settlement and often came by Mollie’s home after nights of dancing and drinking that the family called “sprees.” Her arrival was familiar enough to have its own domestic details: she would slip off her shoes and move unhurriedly through the house. When she failed to appear for several nights, Mollie missed not simply news of Anna’s whereabouts but the sound and presence she expected at home.

The sisters’ relationship was shaped by their family’s division of care. Their mother, Lizzie, had moved into Mollie’s household after Mollie’s father died, and Mollie looked after her even while raising two small children and managing a busy home. Anna, as the oldest child, occupied a special place in Lizzie’s affection. Though Mollie was the one tending to their mother, Anna was the daughter Lizzie spoiled. That contrast did not cancel the sisters’ connection; it placed Mollie’s practical caretaking alongside Anna’s distinct status in the family.

On May 21, Mollie asked Ernest Burkhart to call Anna and ask her to come help with Lizzie, who was ill in bed. Anna agreed to take a taxi. She arrived in red shoes, a skirt, and a matching Indian blanket, carrying an alligator purse. Mollie noticed that Anna was drunk: her gait was unsteady and her speech slurred. The visit became disorderly, as Anna quarreled with their mother, Mollie, and the guests. Even so, the sisters’ relationship is not reduced to conflict. Before Anna left, Mollie washed her clothes and gave her food, and made sure she had sobered enough to seem like her familiar, bright self. The two shared a quiet reconciliation before saying goodbye.

Disappearance and Identification

Anna did not return to Mollie’s front stoop. As the nights passed, Mollie grew anxious; after the third, she pressed the household to act and sent Ernest to check Anna’s home. It was locked and dark. The search ended at a ravine near a creek, where a body had been found in a state of severe decomposition. The undertaker and the men with him could not identify it, so Scott Mathis, who managed Anna’s financial affairs, contacted Mollie.

Mollie went to the creek with Ernest, her sister Rita Smith, and Rita’s husband, Bill Smith, among others. She and Rita could barely recognize the face. What they could recognize were the Indian blanket and the clothes Mollie had washed for Anna before her departure. Bill opened the dead woman’s mouth with a stick; the gold fillings confirmed what the clothing suggested. Rita wept and was led away. Mollie, who was known for keeping her composure, eventually mouthed her confirmation and left with Ernest. The ordinary act of laundering Anna’s clothes had become, in the absence of a recognizable face, part of the evidence by which her sister was known.

At the inquest, Mollie appeared eager to answer questions and ensure that nothing was overlooked, but the justice of the peace and jurors asked her very little. The narrative raises prejudice against her as an Osage woman as a possible reason. The panel examined Bryan Burkhart more closely because he was the last person known to have been with Anna. Mollie’s determination to account for her sister thus met an official inquiry that gave her little space to speak.

Kinship and the Inheritance Plot

The killings did not end with Anna. As Tom White examined probate records, he saw that successive deaths in Mollie’s family directed more headrights toward her. Anna, divorced and without children, had left nearly all her wealth to Lizzie. Lizzie had willed most of her headright to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita. In White’s reconstruction, Anna’s murder was the first step in a sequence that made the surviving women—and the transfers between them—targets.

The scheme exploited the legal difference between selling a headright and inheriting one: headrights could not be bought or sold, but could pass through an estate. White believed William K. Hale had sought to reach the family’s wealth through his nephew Ernest, whom an agent described as controlled by Hale. The murders of Anna, Lizzie, and later Rita and Bill Smith therefore gave the sisters’ family ties a terrible second meaning. The closeness that had meant shared domestic life also determined where wealth would go after each death. This was White’s interpretation of the pattern and its intended financial logic, not proof that Mollie herself knew of or participated in the plot.

The intended transfer did not unfold exactly as planned. Rita and Bill’s wills stipulated that if they died simultaneously, much of Rita’s headright would pass to Mollie. Bill survived Rita by several days, inherited much of her wealth, and then left it to one of his own relatives. Even so, White concluded that the bulk of the family’s headrights had been funneled to Mollie, whose wealth Ernest controlled. Anna’s death was thus both a personal loss and the opening move in a broader attempt to channel family property.

Memory Across Generations

The sisters’ story persisted beyond the investigation in family accounts and community remembrance. At the Osage Nation Museum, a photograph showed Mollie sitting happily with her sisters. Nearby images of people killed during the Reign of Terror placed the family photograph within a larger record of loss. A 1924 ceremonial panorama had a panel removed because it showed Hale; the image was not erased from memory but withheld because it remained painful. The museum’s choices show that remembering the victims and deciding how to display the perpetrators were part of the same community history.

At the annual I’n-Lon-Schka dances in Gray Horse settlement and other Osage communities, family names mark benches where people gather across generations. Margie Burkhart, Mollie’s granddaughter, attended the dances and spoke of her father, James “Cowboy” Burkhart, and the family losses he endured. She recalled that he spoke fondly of Mollie and remembered her blowing into his ears when he had painful earaches. His memories preserve Mollie not only as a figure in a murder case but as a mother whose care endured in the family’s stories. Margie also said that her parents told her as a child what Ernest and Hale had done; the knowledge left her worrying that she might be a “bad seed.”

The book places the sisters’ private bond within a history whose pain reached descendants who never knew Anna. Community members describe the loss of sisters and other relatives as a wound that does not simply close with the passage of time. In this account, Mollie’s efforts to care for Anna and confirm her identity survive alongside the inheritance scheme that turned their family into a target. The contrast is central: the murders sought to convert kinship into a means of taking wealth, while family testimony and communal remembrance continue to carry the sisters’ relationship forward.