Don’t kill your beneficiaries—next slide! OK, while the serial murder of the Osage is the elephant in the room here, and the ultimate breach of fiduciary duty, I don’t think it itself qualifies as a lesson that needs to be taught. That said, the vast conspiracy perpetrated against the Osage in the name of pilfering their headrights is illustrative. There wasn’t a single bad actor here, but a legion, and none stepped up to perform the fiduciary duty with which they were charged. This broad dereliction of duty allowed things to escalate to the point that they did. The villains in the story didn’t initially set out planning to murder the Osage, but as more and more “minor” infractions were allowed to slide in the name of lining white pockets, more extreme measures gradually became normalized. This evolution is well-illustrated by Ernest Burkhart, who seemed less like a criminal mastermind and more someone who got caught up in something bigger than himself and went along for the ride because that was what was expected.

Just because trustees have a duty to act in the best interests of the beneficiaries, doesn’t mean that the beneficiaries necessarily need the trustee to protect them. Many beneficiaries don’t particularly need the trustee to hold their hands—often because a trust was set up when they were minors and they’ve now grown into capable adults. It’s part of the trustee’s job to know the beneficiary and what they can handle when making distribution decisions. Treating a beneficiary like they’re less capable than they are, is itself, a dereliction of fiduciary duty.

In the case of the Osage, the trustee relationships at the heart of the story were obviously set up in bad faith, both out of greed and simple racism. That the Osage, who were sophisticated enough to specifically carve out not only ownership of their reservation, but also subsoil rights in their eventual contract with the U.S. government, had no need of white trustees to “protect” them is true on its face.

Striking oil, as the Osage did, is perhaps the most American “sudden wealth” scenario of them all (winning the lottery is the more modern counterpart). Regardless of if it comes from picking the right numbers, coming into an inheritance or a “Beverly Hillbillies”-esque black gold scenario, a sudden infusion of wealth, while carrying obvious benefits can also be hugely destabilizing for clients. Everyone has their own relationships with money and how it informs their lives, such that a drastic change in financial circumstance, even for the better, can actually ruin the careful balance of someone’s life, and leave them worse off than they were before their “windfall.”

Drugs and alcohol are often cynically miscast as “poor people” problems, but savvy advisors know that’s far from the truth. Given unlimited resources, and often nobody to say no to them, wealthy clients are equally at risk for destructive addictions. In fact, sudden access to vast quantities of mind-altering substances is one of the main factors playing into the destabilizing power of sudden wealth discussed in the previous slide.

Anna Burkhart surely had demons of her own, and her murder should in no way be attributed to her alcoholism, but she stands as a stark example of how addiction can manifest among high-net-worth clients. The favored child of a wealthy—and loving—family, bolstered by traditions that stretch back hundreds of years, yet she spends most of her time drunk and hanging out at dive bars with lower-class whites. These aspects seem completely incongruous, yet I’d bet that most readers have at least one client just like Anna.

Legacy can be both a blessing and a curse for beneficiaries. For every person that the family legacy offers a guiding light in times of indecision, there’s another who instead of being bolstered by those traditions, instead withers under the weight of expectations. Why this happens is no mystery—different people in different circumstances need different support to thrive. What buoys one family member may drown another. Too often ensuing generations are brought up to act in support of the family’s legacy, as opposed to adjusting the legacy to best help that generation. Flexibility in this regard is key. If a family too rigidly defines what it’s “about,” then changing times—and generations—will inevitably cause it to shatter.

A Native American tribe is effectively an enormous family, with tradition stretching back, in some cases, thousands of years. Yet not even a family this large and with traditions this well-established is immune to change. The struggles the Osage experience with marrying their traditional ways with the reality of their modern world, both in terms of contact with whites and their great sudden wealth, is front and center in this story. It’s quite literally visible to the naked eye in how the Osage dressed at the time. Some in full traditional garb, others in completely assimilated white fashions, with most adopting an awkward mélange of the two.

Estates are often presented in terms of singular dollar figures. But they’re far more complicated than that. The bulk of most estates are made up of not cash and securities, to which dollar values can be easily applied, but other, more difficult to value (be it monetarily or emotionally) items, such as physical items, real property or even just certain rights. Properly identifying and assigning the correct value to these items is a huge part of ensuring that an estate runs smoothly both from a dollars and cents, tax-facing perspective and in terms of maintaining family harmony among inheritors.

The Osage are unique, for better and worse, as compared to other Native American tribes of the time because they were able to properly evaluate their assets. Everyone’s heard the various stories of white settlers bilking Natives of huge swaths of land in exchange for beads or other such trinkets. Not so the Osage, they were one of the very last to be contractually forced off their traditional lands and used that leverage to negotiate the best possible deal they could in securing their new reservation, including the subsoil headrights at the heart of this tragic story. Their wealth stemmed entirely from their ability to correctly evaluate what they had and what they wanted. As did their tragedy.

One of the most shocking aspects of the Osage story is just how integrated the perpetrators were into the society they were trying to destroy in the name of money. It’s a story of white husbands and grandfathers gradually killing off their wives, children and grandchildren with the eventual goal of inheriting their valuable headrights.

While most families are of the same mind that murder is a step too far (even if it doesn’t always seem that way), that doesn’t mean that everyone in a family is necessarily always working towards the same goal. With the proliferation of blended families, be it through interracial and or gay marriage, divorce and remarriage or even just nontraditional relationship setups that eschew marriage entirely, the blood ties that were once (frankly, incorrectly) assumed to bind families to a shared purpose are less and less common. More often, the disparate threads of a family are bound together by as few as a single person. And plucking that person out, as death so cruelly does, can cause this complicated web of relationships to completely unravel into a giant mess.

Those closest to our clients are not always acting in their best interests. Be it caregivers, children or friends, your client’s closest confidants all have their own motivations—both sinister and innocent—and their proximity to your client, particularly as that client ages and their world shrinks, can give them outsized influence. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s certainly better to have a loving child or caregiver at a client’s side to guide them as they age. However, it’s up to you, the fiduciary to remain vigilant and determine when that influence strays from what’s in the best interest of your client, and perhaps, most challenging, communicate to your client that their closest friend/relative is acting against them. You don’t get paid the big bucks because the job is easy after all.

In the case of the Osage, William Hale is basically undue influence personified. He showed up in Osage territory as a cattle rancher and eventually built himself up, both in terms of wealth and his ties to the Osage community, until he was at the top of the food chain. Then he systematically worked behind the scenes to undermine the Osage and gather as much wealth and power for himself, in the form of their headrights, as he could, eventually masterminding the serial murder of Osage tribespeople known as the “Reign of Terror.”