Sisterhood of Mollie Burkhart and Rita Smith

The sisterhood of Mollie Burkhart and Rita Smith comes into view through a family crisis that first takes Anna Brown and later leaves Mollie as the only surviving sister. Their shared recognition of Anna’s body makes kinship a concrete, painful form of knowledge; the subsequent bombing that kills Rita turns the loss into part of a wider pattern of deaths and inheritance.

Sisters and the Recognition of Anna

Anna was the oldest of the sisters and held a special place in their mother Lizzie’s affections. On a day when Mollie was hosting a luncheon, she asked Ernest Burkhart to summon Anna to help care for their ill mother. Anna arrived visibly drunk, and her arrival unsettled the gathering, but the request itself shows the family turning to her in a caregiving role despite the strain and disorder that accompanied her.

After Anna’s body was found in a ravine, Scott Mathis contacted Mollie, who went to the creek with Ernest, Rita, and Rita’s husband, Bill Smith. The sisters had difficulty identifying the badly decomposed face, but they recognized Anna’s Indian blanket and clothes that Mollie had washed for her. Bill opened Anna’s mouth with a stick, revealing her gold fillings; after he identified her, Rita wept and was led away. Mollie, usually composed, confirmed the identification with a quiet gesture and withdrew with Ernest. Their shared recognition rests on ordinary family knowledge—clothes handled and worn, a sister’s presence—when the body itself could scarcely be recognized.

Rita’s Death and the Inheritance Pattern

The bombing of the Smith home killed Rita and left Bill Smith gravely injured. Searchers found Rita beside him in her nightgown, her face apparently untouched but the back of her head crushed. When Bill understood that she was dead, he cried out in anguish. Ernest Burkhart watched the rescue in a bathrobe, unable to turn away; before Mollie could see Rita’s remains, they were taken for embalming. With Anna and Rita dead, Mollie was the only sister left.

The sequence of deaths also altered what the sisters could inherit from one another. White’s review of probate records showed that Lizzie had left most of her headrights to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita. Rita and Bill’s wills provided that if they died at the same time, much of Rita’s share would pass to Mollie. The bombing appeared designed around that possibility, but Bill survived Rita by several days and inherited much of her wealth himself; after his death, that portion went to one of his relatives. The near-simultaneous deaths therefore did not produce the complete transfer the plot seemed to anticipate, even as the wider pattern directed most of the family’s headrights to Mollie, whose wealth was controlled by Ernest.

Guardianship, Inheritance, and the Wider Pattern

The sisters’ losses were bound to a system that joined family inheritance to outside control of Osage wealth. When Tom White traced the headrights through probate records, he found that Lizzie had left most of hers to her surviving daughters, Mollie and Rita. As Anna and then Lizzie died, the family’s shares became concentrated among fewer heirs; Mollie’s marriage to Ernest Burkhart placed the wealth that reached her under his control. This pattern gave the sisters’ deaths consequences beyond bereavement, while White’s reconstruction suggested a financial logic behind the killings without, by itself, establishing who had committed each one.

A handwritten Office of Indian Affairs guardianship logbook later made the scale of the system visible in another way. It listed Scott Mathis, owner of the Big Hill Trading Company, as guardian to nine Osage, including Anna and Lizzie; seven of the nine were marked dead. At least two of those deaths were known to be murders, but the records did not establish that Mathis had caused the deaths. Other guardians’ lists showed similarly extraordinary numbers of deceased wards: one had eight deaths among eleven wards, another had more than half of thirteen, and another had lost all five. Many cases had never been investigated, so the log could reveal a disturbing pattern without identifying the perpetrators or determining how many deaths were criminal.

The surrounding records also show why the sisters’ story could not be disentangled from the institutions meant to administer justice and property. Mathis had been part of the inquest into Anna’s death, yet the bullet that should have been recovered from her skull was missing; the inquest testimony had also disappeared. Investigators later described Mathis as a guardian of Anna and Lizzie and as a figure apparently under William K. Hale’s influence. Reports raised suspicions about doctors, undertakers, local officials, and guardians, but suspicion and documented connections were not the same as proof of participation in a particular murder. The distinction matters: the record supports a picture of compromised safeguards and concentrated financial power, not a verdict against every person connected to the sisters’ affairs.

The surviving evidence makes the sisterhood legible through both intimate traces and administrative ones. At the creek, Mollie and Rita recognized Anna through the blanket and clothes Mollie had washed for her, while the guardianship lists reduced the deaths of Anna and Lizzie to a word beside their names. The contrast is stark: the sisters knew one another through shared life and care, whereas official records registered them as wards and heirs within a system that failed to protect them. Rita’s death left Mollie the last surviving sister, but it did not make her loss a private family matter; it exposed how inheritance, guardianship, and uninvestigated deaths converged around the family.

Family Memory and the Historical Record

In 2012, an exhibit at the Osage Nation Museum preserved a different kind of trace from probate files and guardianship lists: a photograph of Mollie Burkhart sitting happily with her sisters. Nearby images showed other people killed during the Reign of Terror, placing family life and its destruction within the same visual record. A panoramic photograph of a 1924 ceremony made that tension sharper. The Osage had removed the section showing William K. Hale; the missing panel was not an erasure of the murders but a visible refusal to forget him. The surviving image of Mollie and her sisters thus belongs to a history in which kinship endured in family memory even as violence and compromised institutions repeatedly turned relatives into victims, heirs, and entries in official records.