If you’ve seen the new film Killers of the Flower Moon you may remember the explosive courtroom scenes involving William K. Hale’s lawyer, W.S. Hamilton, played by Brendan Fraser.
Fraser yells to an open court that he hasn’t been able to speak to his client, Ernest Burkhart, and that he’s been missing for several months.
But what actually happened between 1923 and 1928 was a legal jurisdiction quagmire that might be even wilder than what’s depicted in the film. Oklahoma played host to a series of legal twists and turns involving questions of which jurisdiction to try the case, witness tampering, and some questionable tactics involving Hale’s lawyers. In total, it took four trials for Hale, the mastermind behind many of the Osage murders in Fairfax, to be convicted.
That history is now on display at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, where one of the murder trials took place.
Arvo Mikkanen, Kiowa/Comanche attorney, is a former tribal judge and Assistant U.S. Attorney, and currently the head of the Oklahoma Indian Bar Association and the first Senior Counsel for Tribal Relations for the Western District of Oklahoma in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He researched all the cases involving Hale, John Ramsey and Burkhart. He’s also a big reason the exhibit was made.
“It was very important for me to document the history, to document what actually took place in the three federal trials and the one state trial that ultimately held these individuals responsible for these terrible crimes,” Mikkanen said.
He spent two years analyzing thousands of documents to put this untold legal history of the Osage Reign of Terror together.
Through his research, he found it was important for officials who prosecuted the case to get it out of Osage County, where Hale’s influence and money ran deep.
“So, that was the primary interest of the Department of Justice to get this matter in front of federal judges, federal jurors with federal prosecutors that were able to have more resources, more investigators, and ultimately the ability to hold these individuals responsible,” Mikkanen said.
One of the prosecutors was Special Assistant Attorney General Timothy John Leahy, according to his great-granddaughter, former Osage Nation Congresswoman Shannon Edwards. She said he was in charge of federal litigation and is played in the film by John Lithgow. She said Leahy is wrongly identified in the film as Prosecutor Peter Leaward. In fact, a cursory search on Newspapers.com does not show proof of a Peter Leaward in Oklahoma during the 1920s or 1930s.
Edwards, an attorney herself, said her dad gave her a newspaper clipping mentioning that her great-grandfather prosecuted the murders, but that’s all she knew.
“How brave was my great-grandfather to go out and challenge Bill Hale in his own backyard with little or no protection? Really, most of the law enforcement wouldn’t even cross him,” Edwards said.
The exhibit features documents about the trial, court records and faded newspaper clippings. But the exhibits also contain something else … the presence of the Osage culture and people who lived through this time. It’s not known how many Osages fell victim to murderous plots, but some estimates say more than 200.
Inside display cases at the courthouse are Osage finger weavings, shawls worn by contemporary Osages and an Osage wedding coat owned by Lillie Morrell Burkhart. Mikkanen said it was important to have Osage culture on display.
“Part of the educational process is not just what’s going on in the court system, but we need to actually include who are the people involved, who are the victims, who are the witnesses,” Mikkanen said.
Alexandria “Allie” Toineeta, who is a Tribal Court Civil Clerk for the Osage Nation, and her mother Angela went to the opening of the exhibit. They were blown away by some of the stuff they saw and some stuff they never knew.
“There’s stuff that we’ve never even seen before that I can’t wait to go back and look at the little archives and stuff like that,” Allie Toineeta said.”To be on the footsteps of all those people that were involved. It kind of gives you chills,” Angela Toineeta said.
The exhibit and the cases of those involved in the murders bring up important questions tribal nations in Oklahoma are very much grappling with today, like reservation and jurisdictional boundaries that impact where perpetrators and their victims get justice for their crimes.
The exhibit: “The Osage Reign of Terror: The Untold Legal History” is on display at the Bankruptcy Court in the Western District of Oklahoma, which is located at 215 Dean A McGee Ave. Ste 147, Oklahoma City. The exhibit will be on display through 2024.
This article was also published by Osage News.
