Meet William K. Hale, an Oklahoma cattle baron whose legacy lives on as the man who slayed any competition and relation, in search of the riches and greatness of Osage County’s wild prairie.
The story begins just before the turn of the 20th century when Hale moved from his hometown of Greenville, Texas to Oklahoma with a plan to raise cattle and maximize profits by settling in a ranch along the Indian Osage Territory in Kansas, which later became the State of Oklahoma. His goal was to be close enough to the packing houses in Chicago to raise cattle and maximize profits, while avoiding state or municipal jurisdictions for tax purposes.
Over the next thirty years, William Hale built himself a legacy in the land of Yellowstone, a drama on TV that rivals even the brutality and wealth.
“In 1920, Hale had developed the idea of becoming the untouchable King of the Osage Hills, with numerous rags-to-riches stories. He had amassed his riches across different homes in the territory, including a few that had 5,000 acres.”
That’s not even an editorial, the man explicitly referred to himself as the King of the Osage Hills.
In the 1920s, during the time known as the Roaring ’20s, E.W. Marland, a famous oil baron, discovered a massive oil reserve in the sandy hills of Hale County, Oklahoma. This reserve, located in the Osage County, was owned by the Osage people under a federal treaty that granted them rights to the subsurface minerals. The oil area became more profitable than cattle ranching, making it a significant and valuable discovery.
To obtain their federal privileges for an oil windfall, the resolution to his rights predicament was to wed Osage females into the household, desiring to transform his livestock wealth into an oil wealth.
If someone didn’t have enough money to marry, the Hale family decided that there was no reason to keep the rights secured by the native brides.
Hale killed his spouses but retained the property and oil privileges as the remaining widower.
The Hale family enterprise transferred everything, executing a document as effortlessly as designating his nephew as the exclusive heir and proprietor of the family’s oil privileges by eliminating the entire extended family of his nephew’s spouse in the proper sequence. Hale accumulated a heap of homicides somewhere between 18-24 corpses profound throughout his oil-fueled fixation on acquiring land privileges.
Despite William Hale being the primary suspect, no one could gather sufficient proof to even interrogate him, and by 1923, twenty-four perplexing and dubious fatalities remained unresolved.
The people in the area were distrustful of outsiders, so they had either been paid or bribed to remain silent and not speak up. To solve the killings, dozens of private investigators and detectives were hired, but they did not try hard enough, as it seemed.
The Osage Tribal Council pleaded with the US Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to dispatch their most skilled and talented individuals to put an end to the enigmatic murders, until it no longer remained the case.
Since everyone in the area was either suspicious of outsiders or bribed into keeping their mouths shut, four federal agents slowly infiltrated the local population, posing as a cattle industry buyer, insurance salesman, oil prospector, and doctor.
The agents resided in the community and gradually constructing their case against William Hale when he made a mistake.
Only a few days afterwards, he unexpectedly appeared at the insurance office to claim his $25,000, despite the fact that Hale had acted as a pallbearer for the person he had killed. Utilizing one of the agents who pretended to be an insurance representative, Hale had purchased a life insurance plan for his nephews’ cousin-in-law shortly before the individual was found dead.
The nephew, equipped with proof and burdened by his remorse, provided the initial complete admission. Individuals stepped forward, revealing their knowledge and acknowledging their actions, resembling a row of dominoes set up, increasing in number.
The hitman assistant and corrupt attorney, who were involved in Oklahoma’s most infamous serial killer case, were also found guilty. Hale, convicted for his crimes, received a life sentence in 1929 and subsequently underwent arrest and trial. Legal charges were formally pressed.
In 1962, he died. Prior to retiring to Arizona, he resided in Montana, employed as a cowboy. Hale was released on parole in 1947 but never went back to Oklahoma. The narrative doesn’t conclude there, but it also doesn’t precisely continue.
Osage kills 9 by Rmosmittens / CC BY-SA 4.0 (No Modifications Made).