Killers of the Flower Moon: Chapter 21 Summary & Analysis

Though Leavenworth is a violent and difficult place which houses many ghosts of White’s past—Hale and Ramsey, but also the men who murdered his brother Dudley and many other recognizable, notorious outlaws—White truly believes in improving conditions in the prison, treating all of his prisoners with fairness, and making serious efforts to rehabilitate incarcerated men.

Over the years, Hale never admits to orchestrating any of the murders. White orders a neurological and psychological examination of Hale which finds that he has “extremely vicious components in his make-up” but no psychosis. Over the years, Hale continues to try and bribe and scheme his way out of prison, confident that “through influence of friends” he will be able to walk free one day.

Mollie Burkhart, no longer suffering from medical maladies, returns to social life and church. She falls in love with a part Creek man named John Cobb, and, in 1928, marries him. In April of 1931, a court rules that Mollie is no longer a ward of the state—“restored to competency” at the age of 44, Mollie is at last able to spend her own money as she pleases.

On December 11, 1931, an attempted breakout by two members of the notorious Al Spencer Gang pulls Tom White into the crossfire. The two prisoners take him hostage as they make their escape from Leavenworth, and then attempt to take two more, a boy and a girl from the neighboring town. When White tries to stop the men, they shoot him in the arm, missing his torso and face, and leave him for dead.

A decade later, in December of 1939, Tom White is working at La Tuna prison in El Paso Texas and is nearly sixty years old. He gives an interview to a newspaper reporter and details the shooting—none of the convicts, in the end, managed to get away. Desiring a more stable, less-dangerous environment, White transferred to La Tuna shortly after he was released from the hospital.

A series of high-profile crimes in the 1930s which fall under the jurisdiction of Hoover’s bureau further establish its legitimacy, and soon agents are empowered to make arrest and carry firearms. The bureau is renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and, over the years, as U.S. presidents come and go, Hoover remains firmly in charge of the institution he himself built up.

By the late 1950s, the Osage case has all but faded from public memory, eclipsed by more high-profile crimes such as the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and John Dillinger’s bank robberies. In the late 1950s, White fears that the Osage’s suffering—and his and his fellow agents’ toil on their behalf—will be erased from history forever. White, with the help of a part-Osage Western writer named Fred Grove, begins writing his and his team’s story, and, in the late fifties, contacts Hoover to ask him to write an introduction. Hoover, through the associate director of the bureau (and his rumored lover, Clyde Tolson) declines White’s request. White continues working on the book with Grove even as his health fails him, but publishers find the account “less than captivating,” and it is never published.

In December of 1971, White dies, and his story and memory fade from history. It is not until years later, when the bureau releases several of its files on the Osage investigation, that another layer to the case is discovered—a “darker, even more terrifying conspiracy,” which White himself had missed and the bureau had never before exposed.