What Happened To The Real Mollie Kyle?

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Mollie Kyle married Ernest Burkhart in 1917. According to The New Yorker, Kyle seems to have genuinely loved her new husband, who was a little rough around the edges but had taken pains to learn the Osage language in order to speak to her. The following year, 1918, Kyle lost her younger sister Minnie Kyle, whose strangely rapid deterioration may or may not have been the first family murder.

In the years that followed, oil money continually arrived thanks to leases with oil companies, the first of which was signed in 1896, per The Osage Nation. Then the money came in a flood, culminating in the enormous final payout that made the tribe incredibly wealthy โ€” and Kyle's family members began to die under suspicious circumstances. Kyle's sister Anna Brown โ€” was brutally shot and left in a ravine, and their cousin was also found dead on the same day, per National Geographic. Additionally, their mother, Lizzie Kyle wasted away due to poisoning, and many of her relatives were killed as well. Kyle's younger sister, Rita Smith (pictured), grew rightfully paranoid about the mounting murders, and she and her husband eventually became victims when a bomb was planted under their house.

Before long a now very wealthy Kyle was the last woman standing โ€” but she too would get sick when her husband began feeding her whiskey laced with poison. Thankfully, the terrible truth about the origins of the murders would soon be revealed when the fledgling FBI got involved in the case.

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