These were a series of murders of Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s. The Osage land happened to be oil-rich. Each Osage man had a headright, to a lucrative annual share of the oil revenues. And they were getting mysteriously killed. Newspapers described the increasing number of unsolved murders as the “Reign of Terror”. Estimates are that 60 or more wealthy, full-blood Osage were killed from 1921 to 1925. Whites would then get their headrights.
The obscure branch of the Department of Justice tasked with investigating would eventually become the FBI. An undercover operation discovered that a wealthy white rancher and his two nephews had arranged the killings. One nephew married an Osage woman, Mollie Kyle, then murdered her sisters, mother, and cousin to inherit the headrights and cash in on insurance policies. The ranchers killed more and more to silence co-conspirators and witnesses. And investigators, when they got involved, discovered Mollie was already being poisoned. The proto-FBI findings lead to Congress passing a law which prohibited non-Osage from inheriting headrights from Osage, who had half or more Native American ancestry.
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