Killers of the Flower Moon spoilers below.
As the horrors of an orchestrated attack on a tribe of Native Americans in the 1920s is retold through Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a century later, the ancestors of the Osage tribe find their painful personal history in the spotlight.
The film tells the story of the oil-rich Osage community in Oklahoma, who were exploited and then murdered by William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his associates, including his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), who was told to kill his Osage wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), and her family by his uncle, in order to inherit her family’s wealth and land.
One of the sole survivors of the family is Margie Burkhart, 61, who is the late Mollie’s granddaughter. Mollie married Burkhart in 1917, and Hale ordered the deaths of her sisters, Anna, Reta and her husband, and then her mother, Lizzie and other sister also died mysteriously. Hale and Burkhart were later sentenced to life imprisonment for their crimes, but were paroled later, with Burkhart serving just 11 years.
According to People, despite Burkhart’s death in 1986, she still finds it difficult to comprehend her grandfather’s wickedness. “I have a lot of anger towards him [Ernest]. He took away my whole family,” Burkhart told the magazine. “He took away potential cousins. I don’t have any relatives on my Osage side.”
She added that on meeting him once when she was young: “He just looked like a sweet little man, and if you saw him on the street, you would never know what he was capable of doing or what he did. It was wild to me how he just looked normal.”
The film is based on the 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, and back in 2021, Margie told magazine TulsaKids: “I’m glad the story is getting out there. It was a story that needed to be told.”
She explained that her father, James, also known as Cowboy – Ernest and Mollie’s son – and his sister felt ostracised from their community growing up, and that he struggled with alcoholism as a result. He attempted to reconnect with Ernest following his release from prison in 1959, but found it too difficult: “My dad was very upset.”
Margie also added that she and her husband spoke to DiCaprio for several hours ahead of the filming of the movie to help work out the complicated relationship between Ernest and Mollie; who divorced him, but still supported him in his murder trial: “He [DiCaprio] wondered how somebody could love someone and murder the rest of the family. It was hard for him to wrap his head around it told him that Ernest was so under the influence of his uncle, he would have done anything asked of him.”
As for Scorsese, she said she knew that her family’s history would be in good hands: “I was kind of concerned in the beginning. But I could tell he’s going to be very sensitive to the story.”
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is in cinemas 20 October
