Who was Tom White in Killers of the Flower Moon?

These were a string of murders that took place between 1921–26, largely on land that’s today in Oklahoma, and involved the killing of many people of the Osage Nation in an attempt to steal their rights to an oil fortune. They included many members of the family of Mollie Burkhart.

David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book, Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI, tells the story of the Osage murders, the sinister events and impact on Mollie’s family and the Osage Nation.

The real Tom White

Born in 1881 in Travis County, Texas, White grew up as the son of a frontier lawman.

“He grew up in a log cabin,” David Grann explained on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “This was kind of a time of raw justice,” when gunslingers and outlaws were rife in the old west. When he was young, he watched his father hang a man.

Once grown, White was tall and imposing, a lawman “with a majestic tread” who “talked like he looked and shot – right on target,” writes Grann.

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The real history behind Killers of the Flower Moon: author explains true story of Osage Nation

It's important to understand, says Grann, that the 1920s was a remarkably lawless time in the history of the United States. There were very few competent local police forces, meaning very little training and hardly any forensic evidence, and all operating inside a fragile legal system. The bureau had been created in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt, hoping to bolster federal law enforcement.

White joined the bureau in 1917, having previously wanted to enlist in the army, though he was unable, due to a previous surgery. “He did not quite fit the image of the new hires at the bureau under Hoover,” says Grann. “He was not college educated, but Hoover was desperate to get results [in the Osage case].”

By the time White joined the case in 1925, the bureau had already made several errors, including using an informant who escaped and killed a police officer, and the young, new director J Edgar Hoover was facing a scandal. It was a situation that Hoover dubbed “acute and delicate”.

White’s life embodies, in many ways, the emergence of the country of the United States as we will come to know it, says Grann.

“By the 1920s, when he's leading the [Osage murders] investigation, he's struggling to use fingerprints. He is learning about handwriting analysis, which becomes a pivotal part of this case. He is wearing a suit and a fedora, rather than riding on horseback carrying a pearl handle pistol. And the thing that he hates most is that he must file lots of paperwork.”

*Warning: spoilers for Killers of the Flower Moon ahead*

White assembled a team of undercover agents to crack the mystery of who had been killing Osage for their oil money.

After nearly two years stationed in Oklahoma, White and his assembled team cracked the case, sifting through murky facts, uncovering the scant physical evidence, and leveraging a complex web of informants, which finally them to a chilling criminal conspiracy.

Though the bureau was able to resolve many of the cases, says Grann, and White was “in many ways a very good man, who was quietly a good man. But even with the bureau's efforts, the breadth of the conspiracy was far wider and far darker than the bureau ever exposed.”

What happened to the real Tom White?

After the case, White was commended by the Osage and the FBI, though in the years that followed, J Edgar Hoover took much of the overarching credit for the bureau’s cracking of the case.

White retired from the FBI shortly afterwards, taking the job of warden of Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. He would go on to preside over convicts that included William K Hale and other accomplices in the Osage murders, and was regarded as a strict warden but guided by a fair hand.

Tom White died in December 1971 following an apparent stroke, at the age of 91. Grann reported in his book one friend’s words: that he had “died as he lived, quietly and with a calm dignity.”

David Grann was speaking on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI is out now, published by Simon and Schuster