Killers of the Flower Moon: Real Story Behind Osage Murders And What's Different In The Movie

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon was one of the highly anticipated movies of 2023. The crime drama is based on the real-life killings of Osage members in Oklahoma in the 1920s and is based on the namesake book by David Grann.

Killers of the Flower Moon explained:

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The David Grann book investigates the series of murders of wealthy Osage people who became very rich after the discovery of oil reserves under their land. After they were awarded the right to make profits out of it, a complex plan emerged to kill Osage's inheritors one by one. While as per the official record only 20 people died, Grann in his book suspected that there were hundreds who may have been killed because of their ties to oil.

The book talks about how the Osage became very rich because they had oil under their land. But some white men wanted to kill them and take all their money and things. However, in the movie, they changed the focus. Instead of showing how the government stopped the killings, they talked about the love story between a man named Ernest Burkhart and a rich Osage woman named Mollie Kyle.

How did Osage people become wealthy?

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After the US government made Osages leave their land in Kansas to move to Oklahoma, they used the money they got from selling their land in Kansas to buy new land in Oklahoma. They soon discovered that the new land had oil deposits and that is what made them filthy rich, raising a lot of eyebrows.

They were then awarded headrights in court to the profits made from oil deposits found on their land, which meant 2,229 members of the tribe were entitled to an equal share of profits. As per The New York Times, each member would get about $13,000 per year.

This attracted the jealousy of the rest of the nation who also wanted easy money, especially white people. In 1921, the US government passed a law that said they would appoint "guardians" to take care of the Osage people's money because they were deemed "incompetent" to do so on their own. These guardians were mostly white, and they started stealing from the Osage people, but they couldn't do it directly as the law stated that the headrights couldn't be bought or sold, they could only be inherited. So, they started marrying the Osage women

One of these men was William King Hale, the antagonist in the film.

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The film talks about how William King Hale (played by DeNiro) made a master plan, made his nephew marry Mollie Kyle and have her children, thereby becoming a recipient of all her assets, and then eliminated the rest of the family to inherit the property. This included Burkhart slowly poisoning his diabetic wife and other family members.

The government started investigating the deaths. When the family asked for help, the FBI got involved, which in turn went undercover to investigate. Hale and the others responsible for the deaths used the money to intimidate Osage people and stop them from talking. Hale was pretending to help in the investigations. He in fact offered money to those coming forward with leads. His plan ran successfully for two years, but after that people started speaking out against him. And finally, in 1926, Burkhart and Hale were arrested on charges of murder. While Hale didn't admit the crime, Burkhart on the other hand did.

How is the movie different from the novel?

The narrative

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Martin Scorsese wanted to tell the story in a different way. He didn't want to focus only on the white guys, like in other movies. While the book also details how federal agents helped in stopping the killings, Scorsese focuses on the tragic love story between conflicted World War One veteran Ernest Burkhart (played by DiCaprio) and a wealthy Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). As Scorsese said bluntly, he didn't want the film to be about "all the white guys."

Why did he choose to focus on the love story? The couple's granddaughter had convinced him to make their grandparents' story, he said, adding that Burkhart's crime makes it hard to believe this.

The Tulsa massacre connect

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Scorsese has tried to show a comparison of the Tulsa massacre and the Osage murders. He also talks about the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, another event that not many people know of.

The ending

The book ends on a very sad note when Grann reveals that more Osage people died apart from Mollie and her family and most of their families were still looking for answers that they will probably never get.

The film, however, has radio clips of Hale and Ernest and what happened to them before Scorsese appears as the narrator to reveal that after Mollie divorced Ernest and died, there wasn¡¯t a single mention of the murders in her obituary¡ªbefore cutting to an overhead shot of the Osage playing a drum and dancing together.

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