The Bloody Benders

Join Kelli as she talks about a serial killer out of Kansas in the post-civil war era. Taking advantage of westward expansion and a tense climate, the Bender family - Ma, Pa, John, and Kate - were responsible for the murders of at least 11 people... including an 18-month-old baby girl.

Today we explore their dark, dingy, bug-infested cabin to find out what happened to these weary travelers on the Great Osage Trail, looking for a homestead plot and a better life, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sources:

• Slavevoyages.org
• Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier by Susan Jonasus

Transcript

The Bloody Benders
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that covers the… unpopular stories from history - tales about disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.

Today I’m going back to an old favorite niche, the violence of the era of westward expansion. But because it’s APHOUT, it’s gotta be gross, right? So today, we’ll look at a family of serial killers operating out of Kansas in the late 19th century.

On May 5th, 1873, Deputy Sheriff Leroy Dick of Osage Township, Kansas, came to the Bender’s plot of land on the Great Osage Trail, one of the only main thoroughfaires heading into the Western plains. The day before, a neighbor had reported some odd smells coming from the deserted Bender cabin. But when Leroy arrived, as a veteran of the Civil War, he knew exactly what he was smelling – the rotting and unmistakable smell of human decomposition.

Over the next few days, 8 bodies – including one of an eighteen month of baby girl – were recovered from the property. And previous bodies with matching injuries were attributed to the Bender family.

So in today’s episode, I want to talk about all of that. But more importantly, the history surrounding the Benders – what was going on in late 19th century America that facilitated this kind of life? What was happening in and around Kansas in this period of time? How does the Civil War factor into this? What other histories can we uncover through this gruesome tale?

As always, we’ll start by taking a look at the historical context leading up to this event – we need a good understanding of what Midwest America looked like in the 1870s to better see what life was like. Then, as we go through the story, we’ll also take some side tangents into relevant histories, like that of the buffalo soldiers. And of course, we’ll go into all the nitty gritty details of the Bender family’s crimes and what happened to them.

You know who they kind of reminded me of? The Baker family from Resi 7. Just… abject horror, bugs, grime, death, violence… all of it. I mean, the Benders weren’t under the influence of bioengineered mold or anything… but it gives me the same vibe. 

And if you’ve not played or watched Resi 7, perhaps think of the killer family from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Also a similar vibe.

Now a quick note before I get started, this story has became more than just history – at this point, it is also legend and has entered the realm of folklore. I read an incredible book called “Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier” by Susan Jonusas. She did an excellent job using primary source evidence to tell the real story, best we know it, also taking care to discuss potential motivations behind various statements and pieces of evidence. She’s done a great job parsing out fact from fiction, and I will do my best to do the same.

So let’s get started!
Historical Context
The Bender Family committed the bulk of their crimes in Kansas in the 1870s, so let’s focus on that. What was life like in the Midwest in the mid- to late-19th century?

Well, of course, we can’t tell this story without starting at the Civil War. Many of the people involved in the story were veterans. So let’s set up the broader picture of how the Civil War shaped life in Kansas, both before and after. 

I’ll give the briefest of summaries for those of you outside the US who didn’t learn about the American Civil War in school, or those of you who did and don’t remember much about it. Plus it’s just good history to know and reflect on. You know, “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” and whatnot. What a shame it would be for us to make the same mistakes over and over again, when we have perfectly good history that will show us what will happen.

Now in the years leading up to the Civil War, there was growing tension between the Northern and Southern states over two main topics: the institution of slavery, and states rights vs. federal authority. The former isn’t so much an issue anymore, but the latter sure is. But in the 19th century at least, the backdrop to both of these issues was social and cultural differences between northerners and southerners.

The antebellum southern economy – antebellum is a fun word that refers to the pre-Civil War period from 1820-1861, just in case you’ve always heard the word but never asked what it meant – the antebellum southern economy was primarily agricultural. You might also hear the word “agrarian” – they are synonyms. Now popular cash crops at the time in many southern plantations were cotton, tobacco, and rice, in that order. Of note, cotton made up approximately ⅔ of antebellum American exports.

Cotton, though, is incredibly labor intensive. In 1793 – almost 70 years before the Civil War began – a man named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which mechanically separated cotton seeds from the cotton fiber, which definitely helped with production. But it didn’t eliminate the need for human laborers – in fact, it had the opposite effect. Since it made production faster, more and more cotton plantations opened up to take advantage of the extra potential profit. Men and women were still needed to grow and pick the cotton from the plant to keep the cotton gins running.

Eli Whitney had hoped his invention would make slavery obsolete – no need to force an entire race into bondage if a machine could do it for you, right? But instead, it actually reinvigorated the slave trade. Faster production meant growing more cotton to keep up with it, which meant more and larger plantations, which meant more and more enslaved laborers.

And besides. The institution of slavery wasn’t just about the labor and economy, right? It was the subjugation of peoples deemed lesser for garbage racist reasons. I’ve done plenty of episodes on that – a popular one seems to be my episode on the Belgian Congo, where I do a deeper dive on imperialism in Africa. Check it out sometime.

But let’s look at the data to back up my claim that more people were enslaved after the cotton gin was invented. It’s important to make sure there’s evidence to back up your arguments.

There’s a brilliant tool at “slavevoyages.org” which has collated centuries of data. You can even track individual ships and look at their manifests to see who was taken where.

I focused on the data for years where ships left Africa for just the mainland United States – we know, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, that the bulk of African slaves were actually brought to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and South America. Conditions there were just… beyond awful. New slaves were constantly brought in to replace men, women and children who died as a result of punishing labor in the extreme heat. I once read the age expectancy for a male African slave on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean was like, in the lower 20s. And many would die within the first year. Story for another day!

Of the ones brought to the United States, there’s clearly a trend.

Before the cotton gin, it seems like 1765 was the year when the most slaves disembarked on North American soil, at 1,958 people.

And in fact, the overall trend in the years leading up to 1793 was going down – only 169 enslaved men and women were brought over in 1790.

The year the cotton gin was invented, that number was up to 954.

In 1796, it climbed to 4,790.

The biggest year? 1807. 25,890 people.

And why was that the biggest year, you might ask? The international slave trade was banned a year later in 1808.

To help provide some additional context here, because we know slavery continued well past 1808, please also remember that shipping enslaved men, women, and children over from Africa was not the primary way American slaveholders got new slaves. That happened through… this sounds so callous… natural increase. Babies born to enslaved parents were also slaves. And then there was internal slave trading within the US, which was still permitted. Think back to any media you’ve seen depicting those horribly dehumanizing slave auctions.

My broader point is that slavery was alive and well in the pre-Civil War south thanks to the growing agrarian economy, streamlined with machines like the cotton gin.

The north, though, was not agrarian. The north was industrial. Men were paid for their work there, even if it was inconsistent with conditions depending heavily on the business owner. Business, pay, and safety wasn’t regulated until the early 20th century, but that’s a story for another episode. Maybe I’ll do one on the Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 one of these days. So no massive slavery institution in the north like there is in the south.

Could things have carried on in this way for a while longer? Probably. But some changes were happening that tested this balance between northern industry and southern agriculture.

And we can boil one of those big changes into this question – What do we do with new states? Do they carry on with the institution of slavery? Or will they be “free” states?

So let’s look at Kansas, which is the geographic heart of today’s broader story, and to a lesser extent Nebraska.

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act created two territories – Kansas and Nebraska – but the bigger question was whether or not they would be slave-holding territories. Well, the Kansas-Nebraska act allowed for popular sovereignty – the idea that people would choose. And the governments of each territory would do what the people wanted. You know, like a proper democracy. Where the people’s will is taken into account.

The 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act also repealed parts of a previous piece of legislation, the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which (among other things) allowed Missouri to be formed as a slave state. But more importantly, the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in the vast “Louisiana Territory” north of the 36 degree 30 minutes parallel line, which in today’s geography is the Arkansas-Missouri border. It made sense, they thought, to repeal this rule in 1854, since the new territories were now allowed to vote, via popular sovereignty, whether or not they would be slave states or free states. Right? Makes sense, I guess. For the time. If you’re giving people the choice of whether or not these new states would be slave states or not, you can’t have that blanket ban on slavery.

That sounds so weird to say out loud. Obviously slavery and the institution of slavery is wrong, even though it still exists in the modern era, but I don’t want to rant about that right now. But at the time, that was the logic.

And when I tell you that repealing that part of the Missouri Compromise led to conflict? I’d be underselling the history. So many people had stakes in this game, and I don’t even just mean the men, women and children who would be enslaved or not enslaved depending on how the vote went. It was kind of assumed that Nebraska, the more geographically northern of the two, would vote for freedom over slavery. But Kansas? 

Well, by repealing the part of the Missouri Compromise that banned slavery north of the 36 degrees 30 minute parallal line, the anti-slavery crowd was now concerned that slavery would creep north. And also, apparently, it was up to the settlers of those states to decide something as major as slavery? Not Congress? Ah, the swings of a democracy, ay? 

The conflict between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery camps in Kansas became violent as people argued over slavery and federalism and states rights in their newly created territory. The tension boiled over into an event known as “Bleeding Kansas” that occurred between 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, and 1859 – right before the Civil War. There was electoral fraud, there were raids, assaults, political murders, and just, in general, more acts of violence across the board. Anti-slavery factions in the state had to contend with pro-slavery factions, with people from both camps coming in and settling in the new territory to try and change the outcome of the popular sovereignty vote. 

Overall, the majority of Kansans wanted Kansas to be a free state. And during the secession crisis of 1860-1861 that triggered the American Civil War – when 11 Southern States formally seceded from the Union to create the Confederate States of America – Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state.

Bleeding Kansas is seen as the precursor to the Civil War. It’s not the only place where violence erupted from the tensions of slavery vs. freedom, or the rights of states vs. the federal government, but it sure was one of the main events that led to the secession crisis. And once Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, and Southern states felt their institution of slavery and states rights were threatened, they left the union and formed their own government.

We know the Confederacy didn’t last long. And secession was made unconstitutional in a later ruling, Texas v. White, 1869, where it was decided that the US is an "indestructible union" from which states cannot legally leave. So any talk of seceding from the union is expressly unconstitutional.

The broader picture I’m painting here is that Kansas in the period before, during, and after the Civil War, was a tense place. Violence became the norm. People were constantly travelling into and out of the state, either with their own political aims or to move out west and try their luck with unclaimed land. Let’s talk a little about that, because it’s important to the story.

The height of westward expansion was roughly in this same period – It started with the gold rushes of the 1840s – check out my first ever episode on the Donner Party for a look at the most infamous story of 1840s westward expansion. But it continued through the middle of the century with the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of free land to any union settlers willing to farm it for at least 5 years and turn a profit. I say “union” settlers because I meant it – the homestead act only applied to people who had never taken up arms against the US. So no confederates. As a result, over 270 million acres, roughly 10% of total US land, was settled with homesteads. 

Sometime soon, I really need to do an episode on the impact all of this had on the indigenous populations. Perhaps it’s time to put together an episode on the Trail of Tears. Or maybe the Najavo Long Walk. Maybe both, together.

You know what else helped explain the transit of people moving into and through Kansas? The Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in 1869. That was an excellent people mover through the Midwest to the Pacific and other territories in between.

This whole period of Westward Expansion – pre- and post-Civil War – gives us some of the most enduring and gross stories of violence in early American history. I just mentioned the Donner Party, which happened over the very dark and cold winter of 1846-1847. There was the Kentucky Cannibal Levi Boone Helme – not really associated with Kentucky, to be fair, except that he happened to be born there. And there’s even Alfred Packer, the Colorado Cannibal, who in 1874 led a bunch of men into the woods and was the only one to return… with his belly full of long pork. Fun fact, did you know that long pork is a euphemism for human flesh? If you didnt… Now you do! You’re welcome.

I did episodes on all of those things, so give them a listen to get a greater sense of the time period if you are interested.

But the bigger point is that Kansas, in the 1870s at least, was a place where the adults lived through Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. They experienced the violence, rise in gang activity, political killings, the tension between anti- and pro-slavery groups. People were constantly coming and going as a result of westward expansion, the transcontinental railroad, and later even bison hunting. And on one little plot of land, one particular homestead situated on the Great Osage Trail, a family set up a dry goods store and inn to take advantage of all of the new travelers coming through the state. Many people stopped by on their journeys, but not all of them left.
Meet the Benders
In October 1870, two men named John were sniffing around the plots of land in Labette County, Kansas, just outside Cherryvale. For those of you who are more geographically minded, Labette County is on the southern border of Kansas next to Oklahoma, very near the SE corner of the state. It’s one county over from the corner.

Now the two Johns entered the trading post of Edward Ern and Rudolph Brockman, inquiring about open land in the area. They wanted to claim one of those free 160-acre plots on which they could build a homestead for their family. 

The elder was John Bender, known as Pa Bender. I’m just going to call him “Pa” from now ton to differentiate. The younger was John Gebhardt… Relation to Pa Bender unknown. I like the way Jonusas puts it in her book, quote:
“Though the two men did not share a surname, a natural assumption existed that they were related either by blood or by marriage. Neither man ever elaborated on the matter.”

End quote.

The four men, all German, connected over their shared heritage. Ern and Brockman told them of an available plot nearby – they were all square-shaped plots, if that helps you picture this. Pa Bender got a plot directly east of Ern, and directly northeast of Brockman. Another plot was claimed north of that one to a “John Bender.” So it seems each man claimed his own parcel of land. But the events of today’s story happened on Pa Bender’s claim. I’m just going to simplify it to the Bender plot. 

The Osage Trail went right through the middle of the Bender Plot. So once the men claimed the land, they set up a dry goods store and inn to make money off anyone travelling through.

The following year, the women joined the family – Ma Bender, real name lost to history, and Kate Bender. 

The four shared a small cabin on the Bender plot, marked with a misspelled sign that read “Grocrys” – G R O C R Y S. Missing the e. Later, one of them – probably Kate – flipped the sign around and wrote it properly.

It was a one room cabin divided by a heavy canvas – the type of canvas that would cover up a wagon heading west. One of those thick ones. In the main compartment was the dry goods grocery – really, just a set of goods on a few shelves. It was whatever Kate could get from town whenever she felt like restocking. Ma and Pa were rarely seen outside of their plot. Pa spoke German and a bit of English, but he was a gruff old man. Ma Bender was even more unfriendly. She spoke broken German that only her family could even understand, and no English whatsoever. She would only leave the homestead with Kate, or to visit the other homestead neighbors. So not a fixture in Cherryvale at all.

And while I’m describing them, John Gebhardt was a talker. He was described as having a weird laugh, the kind that happens when you are nervous, like a tic. He would laugh in the middle of sentences, making him seem… unserious? Not a threat? But some in Cherryvale and throughout Labette County felt uneasy by it. Probably the right feeling to have, given what we know about them.

Kate Bender was the most approachable of the lot. Not only was she described as a looker, but apparently the men of Labette County would make trips on the Osage Trail just to stay at the Bender Inn. She was apparently, at first, quite genial. She and her… brother? Lover? It’s honestly not clear… her and John would be the ones who went to town to stock up on supplies, talk with the locals, all that stuff.

Again, I love how Jonusas puts it, so I’ll quote her here. Quote!
“The siblings, or lovers, became experts at encouraging people to divulge information without realizing they were putting themselves in danger.”

End quote.

They were fast talkers who ingratiated themselves into the community to get the info and goods they needed. Because they weren’t a family with good intentions trying to make it out west… they were criminals and killers.

Let’s get back to the house.

The front, as I explained, was where people would buy dry goods on their travels. There was also a walnut table with two benches right in front of that canvas curtain. Behind the canvas curtain was the Bender family’s sleeping area – just pallet beds or straw mattresses, infested with bugs. When guests stayed the night, they would either sleep outside – weather permitting, of course – or with their valuables in the main room. Nobody went behind the curtain.

There was also a trap door underneath the curtain and table area; it was an empty space with a large stone slab in the bottle. Nothing was really stored in there, though there were always flies crawling around the trap door floorboards.

And since I mention the flies, it’s worth mentioning that this little cabin was squalid. I mean, sure. Sharing a space with four people is always crammed and there’s probably lots of frontier settlement dirt everywhere. But from the people who came and went from that place, they all remarked on how squalid, dirty, and bug-covered everything was. 

But Kate was charming and apparently pretty enough that it didn’t stop visitors from coming by to shop or spend time there.

In addition to the inn and grocery, Kate Bender also advertised herself as a spiritualist. Spiritualism was a religious movement in the 19th-century based on the idea that the soul survives death and can communicate with the living through mediums. It was a relateiely new movement in this period of time, and there were many who claimed to be spiritualists. Some very much believed in this power, but of course many were just doing it for the grift. Kate Bender, of course, was the latter.

I’ll read out the text of an advertisement Kate put out in the local newspaper, dated June 18th, 1872. Quote!

Title: Prof. Miss Katie Bender

Text: Can heal all sorts of diseases; can cure blindness, fits, deafness, and all such diseases, also deaf and dumbness. Residence, 14 miles east of Independence, on the road from Idnependence to Osage Mission, one and one half miles South East of Norahead Station.

End quote.

Anything for the money, I guess. She was a total scam artist.

But she certainly wasn’t the only one caught up in this spiritualist movement, either for real or for profit. Remember that this was the post-Civil War world, and many were still reeling and grieving from losses stemming from that conflict. Some even before.

Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, was beside herself with grief when her and Abraham’s third son, William Wallace Lincoln, died in the White House of typhoid in 1862 at only 11 years old. Mary Todd was inconsolable. Apparently, Willie was her “favorite” son, which must have been a bummer for her eldest, Robert Todd Lincoln, who was the only one of the four Lincoln boys to survive to proper adulthood. Their second son, Edward, died at age four of tuberculosis in 1850. Their fourth son, Thomas, aka Tad Lincoln, died of either tuberculosis or pneumonia at age 18, shortly after his father’s assassination.

But it was Willie’s death that led Mary Todd Lincoln to the spiritualists. She held numerous seances in the White House to try and speak to her favorite son, which was controversial to say the least. But it gives you and me a good idea of how popular spiritualism was at the time. She reportedly continued to have seances to try and speak with Abraham after his assassination. 

But Kate Bender didn’t provide spiritualist services to comfort the grief-stricken. She had criminal intent. Did she actually believe in it? We don’t and will never know. But she certainly used it to allure people to the Bender cabin, both women and men. And in events where she plugged her spiritualist services, she would also talk about how she believes in the idea of “free love,” which is exactly what it sounds like. That men and women should be free to love who they want regardless of marriage. You could probably imagine why men would want to stop by the Bender cabin and meet with Kate, even if it was a dirty, bug-infested, run-down shack.

But it wouldn’t be long until strange things started happening to people who visited the Benders or made use of their inn.
Early Targets
Now if you recall, one of the two men who recommended the Benders take up a plot on the Osage Trail was Edward Ern, a fellow German who also owned a little trading post in the plot immediately west of the Benders.

Ern get engaged, and if I was reading it right, he got engaged to his foster sister, and wanted to bring his new fiancee and his foster mother – the girl’s birth mother – over from Germany. To do this, he was doing to scout out a new property where they could all comfortably settle down, leaving the store to just Brockman.

When his fiance and future mother-in-law came over, Ern had to go out searching for a new plot, so he recommended the women stay with the Benders next door.

In retrospect, oh god, what a horrible idea. But this was before all the murders, and he had no reason not to trust the slightly weird but harmless Benders. I mean, yeah, John had a weird, offputting laugh and the parents were grumpy, but Kate was nice, right? He reckoned things would be fine.

At one point, Kate decided to take the women out relic hunting – this was a popular pasttime for frontiers settlers at the time, as they were settling on indigenous lands. So there were tons of little relics buried or half-buried in the ground, and people would enjoy looking for them to display in their homes. So the group set off towards some mounds where lots of little relics were buried, but Ma and Pa peeled off from the group early on the trip. Ma seemed to be exhausted, so Pa took her back.

The group had a great time hunting for relics, and the mother-in-law was happy to have some little doo-dads to put up in her new home in America. When she got back to the Bender cabin, she went to put her new treasures away and discovered that their valuables – jewelry and the very important cashier’s checks for $3,200 were missing. That would be roughly $86,600 today.

That was the money Ern was going to use to set up their new life. And it was gone.

The Benders put on a good show. Kate was also shocked and helped the other women look around for the missing box of valuables. I like how Jonusas writes it, quote:
“Furious, [the mother-in-law] confronted Kate, who put on such a believable show of alarm that had the rest of the family not conveniently disappeared, the woman might have been convinced…The cabin that once seemed safe now felt squalid. Dust, mud, and insects seemed to coat everything in a moving layer of filth.”

End quote.

Brother or possible lover John emerged from the shadows with his awkward laugh and a quick story about how it must have been horse thieves; they’d been seen all over the area lately, and they must have ransacked the women’s belongings while the group was out. He offered to take them to another homestead, that of the Dienst family, which would no doubt be safer since it wasn’t on the main road out of town.

Apparently, John never stopped talking the whole way over. And the two Ern women were so flabbergasted and confused by the whole thing that John was able to just quickly and quietly leave once he dropped them off at the Dienst cabin.

Well of course, Ern angrily went round the Bender cabin the next day and demanded the money. But the problem was that he had no proof and no evidence – just anger. There happened to be other guests at that moment, and to the witnesses, it looked like an angry man accosting and confronting this perfectly normal family, with no proof to back up his claims. 

What Ern should have done was go to Leroy Dick in Cherryvale, the local official who would handle these kinds of things. But he didn’t. And when Ern eventually did seek out Leroy’s help, it was too late – there was no tangible evidence, there certainly wouldn’t be any now if they did indeed steal anything, and John’s story about horse thieves was plausible.

Ern married his wife, and the three moved out west to Texas. Leaving the whole affair behind them.

But the Benders escalated from thievery to attempted murder next. And it all centered on Kate Bender.

Now I previously went over how she claimed to be a spiritualist - someone who holds seances to speak with the dead. It was a popular thing at the time, and a good way to grift the vulnerable out of money. But there were other people in Cherryvale who actually believed in this religious movement, and one of those people was a woman named Julia Hestler.

Julia worked at the local hotel in town, and she was a tall woman for the time at a little under six feet. I mean, that’s tall for women now, I suppose. For a time, Kate Bender worked at the hotel too, as a waitress. The two became friends with a shared interest in spiritualism.

On one occasion, Kate invited Julia to the Bender cabin to participate in a seance, and Julia was happy to attend. She took a stagecoach out there and intended on staying the night – after all, it was an inn, as well as the home of her friend. Nevermind that it was definitely small and decrepit looking, she was sure it would be a good time.

But when she went inside, she was shocked to see that it was just the two of them. She had expected a ring of women participating together.

It was dark in there – I mean, they were doing a seance, and all – but Julia felt… weird. There was a weird smell in the cabin, and the flies were everywhere. Julia, not wanting to offend Kate, sat down at the table with her back to the canvas sheet, as directed. Julia closed her eyes, and Kate began the seance. Julia, though, had this bad feeling. I’m sure you’ve felt that before, right? Have you ever just had your intuition tell you that something is seriously wrong? That man on the bus is watching you too much, or the footsteps behind you are matching yours too evenly? Always listen to that instinct, ladies and gentlemen. Seek out help. Go into a store if you are alone. Walk confidently with your head up high, keep your phone near you.

But Julia, you see, was alone in a dark, creepy cabin in the middle of nowhere when she had this feeling. When she opened her eyes, she saw the rest of the Benders standing silently, all together, right behind Kate. She knew she was in trouble. She told Kate she needed to use the bathroom, so she excused herself from the table, and I can imagine used every ounce of strength and control to calmly walk towards the door, past the Benders standing there, watching her.

She saw something in Pa Bender’s hand, and she assumed it was either a gun or a weapon.

Kate made a move towards Julia, and Julia took that as her moment to run. She bolted out the door, falling over in the dirt occasionally, as she heard a gunshot ring out behind her. She panicked and laid low, not wanting to be seen. She heard arguments in German and English, and more gunshots periodically ringing out into the open plains. Julia recounts crawling, as low as possible, in waterlogged soil. She snuck a look behind her and saw Kate holding a lamplight, looking around for her. She had nowhere to hide on this open, flat ground, so she knew she had to run. As soon as she could, when Kate turned around, Julia took off. By the time John found the flattened trail where Julia had been crawling, Julia had already gotten far enough away that a gunshot couldn’t pick her out from the other silhouettes around her.

Nothing happened as a result – the neighbors thought it creepy, sure, but no crime had been committed. 

But soon enough, crimes would be committed on the Bender homestead. And 11 other people would not be as lucky as the Erns or Julia Hestler to encounter the Benders and get away with their lives.
Murders
In March 1872, walkers stumbled upon a campsite while hunting for Indian relics. But the campsite was a mess - supplies were all over the ground, the place was wrecked… a common even when hogs trample through and eat everything. But things got dark for the walkers when they saw a dismembered foot in a sock. From what remained of the poor man, investigators were later able to tell that the back of his skull was caved in with a blunt object of some kind.

There was nothing else of note, and no way to tell who killed him, so the campsite body disappeared from the public consciousness for a while.

7 months later, in October 1872, two boys were on their way to go fishing in a creek. While trudging through bushes, they noticed rags caught in the branches of a tree, stained with blood. As they went further into the brush, they found the body of a man, later identified as William Jones, who had recently left his family to go work on building a schoolhouse in Osage Mission.

William Jones had a laceration across the neck and a skull injury. Similar to the unnamed campsite body, Mr. Jones had a skull fracture consistent with a blunt force injury. It was so rough that pieces of his skull were lodged in what was left of his brain.

The coroners determined he died 6 days before he was found in the water, so his body was very swollen and waterlogged.

After William Jones was found, three more men disappeared. And then suddenly, people remembered the campsite body – were they connected? Was there a killer (or killers) in Labette County? Was it the horse thieves everyone was talking about?

The man in charge of all this was, still, Leroy Dick. He also thought that perhaps it was the horse thieves. But then, one of Leroy’s relatives – a cousin he didn’t particularly like – went missing. Henry McKenzie.

And then a man named Benjamin Brown, who was looking for land to purchase for his growing family, disappeared somewhere out on the Osage Trail. His wife, inconsolable, went looking for him. And she actually STAYED at the Bender cabin overnight, crying in Kate’s arms, desperate to find the man she didn’t know her hosts had killed.

Another man, William McCrotty, an Irish Union Army veteran, vanished while on his way to the land office, also looking for property.

All of this is happening in 1872, by the way.

Around Christmas, another story broke of a man found mutilated by hogs after being dumped on the open prairie, with similar injuries to the unnamed campsite victim. He was identified as John Phipps, and had $300 on him at the time of his disappearance. In fact, all of the recent men who disappeared had money, too. Some more money than others, but they were travelling with valuables for sure.

And then one man - and his eighteen month daughter - went missing. And that really changed things.

George Longcor was a widower and a blacksmith in Onion Creek Kansas, about 15 or so miles southwest from Cherryvale. His wife passed during childbirth, and he was alone raising their baby – little Mary Ann – all alone. His in laws contacted him and told him to move closer to them, up north, so they could know their granddaughter and help him raise her. Delighted, George picked up his life in Onion Creek and left.

He couldn’t do it alone, though. His neighbor, a Doctor named William York, provided him with a carriage to travel. William York was a decent man, and with his wife (also named Mary), they wanted to help George move closer to family. It was the right thing to do for the baby.

George set off for the north, with a plan to travel up the Osage Trail, towards his in laws.

He never made it to his destination.

When George’s in-laws contacted William and Mary York, asking if they’d heard from his, the doctor was worried for them. They should definitely have arrived by then, based on when they set out. And though William York knew something horrible must have happened, seeing as how he encouraged George to go and even lent him his carriage, William felt compelled to find out what happened to his friend. And so, William went on the same journey.

William, too, went missing.

But William wasn’t some random traveller, far from home, easy to dispatch without too many people sniffing around. His brother, Alexander York, was a promising politician who served in the Kansas State Senate from 1873-1874. And when he found out his little brother was missing? He mobilized everyone he could to find out who did it.

It was the beginning of the end for the Benders. Well, not a satisfying end, I’ll spoil it now. But an end to their murders in Labette Kansas.

By this point, the early months of 1873, the Benders were slowing losing favor in town. Kate, with her unrelenting grift of trying to be a medium for the family of the recently deceased, absolutely hounded the Dienst family. The Dienst family I mentioned earlier – they watched over Ern’s future wife and mother-in-law after the Benders stole all their valuables.

One of the Dienst men died, and Kate would not stop harrassing the Dienst family to perform a seance. It got so bad that the Dienst family, after a solid year of being harassed, publically denounced Kate. People were starting to look at their strange, antisocial behaviors as more than just weird quirks.

So when Alexander York, his brother Ed, and a detective they hired named Thomas Beers appraoched Leroy Dick about potential families in the area that might be suspicious, the Benders came to mind. And the whole crew set off down the Osage Trail to talk to them.

April 4th, 1973. The entire Bender family was at their cabin when Alexander and Ed York, Detective Beers, and Leroy Dick arrived. They were acting weird, as usual, and Kate even told Alexander that if he came back alone, later in the week, she could find out what happened to his brother!

Alexander walked away from that meeting thinking they were weird, but not killers. And that was his biggest mistake.

That very same night, at 9:03pm, the Benders bought train tickets from Cherryvale station toward Humboldt, also in Kansas, along the Neosho River. From there, Ma and Pa would go to Missouri, while Kate and John would head to Texas. They made plans to meet up later on, and from there they’d either disappear out West across the prairies, trying their luck with gangs or various indigenous groups, or they’d head south into Mexico.

From all accounts, they stayed in the US.

Into the Wind
On April 9th, 5 days after the Benders fled Kansas, Detective Beers hears that a wagon was found abandoned by the train station. Inside the wagon was a wooden sign, which on one side had the word “grocerys,” but missing the e. Nobody figured out it was the Bender’s wagon until about a month later.

By this point, William had been missing for a month.

May 4th, 1873. A month after the Benders fled the state. Another neighbor, Billy Tole, who had the plot to the east of the Bender family, goes to call on his neighbors as he hadn’t seen them in a while. He’s greeted with a maelstrom of flies surrounding a rotting cow carcass in the middle of their stable. The whole place was filled with them. He also found a dying sow, a female pig, collapsed on the ground outside their cabin. Once he got the poor things some food and water, he approached the cabin itself – but he smelled something foul, like death. And there were too many flies. He decided to come back with help.

May 5th, 1873. Leroy Dick accompanies Billy Tole to the Bender cabin, but unlike Billy Tole, Leroy knew exactly what that smell was – human blood and decomposition. Leroy traces the smell to the trap door under the cabin, steels himself, and opens it – and finds nothing. It was empty as it always had been. He also finds three hammers hidden underneath the stove: a 3 inch claw hammer, one with a longer handle and elongated head, and a third one, a 5.5 pound handmade sledgehammer. He packaged up the hammers and left with a hunch. Clearly, the Benders were gone. Was that abandoned wagon at the train station theirs? After checking it out, he knew it was, as he was well-acquainted with the Benders and recognized that misspelled sign, among other possessions.

The following day, May 6th, 1873. Leroy brings in more men to search the property. Among the things they searched was that cellar – surely, there must be something in there. Maybe buried under that massive slab? But the cabin was so cramped there would be no way to dig it out, so they – and this mental image always amuses me – hoisted the entire cabin onto logs and rolled that thing away like how the men and women of Rapanui likely move the Easter Island heads around.

Anyway, with the cabin moved out of the way, the smell was able to dissipate a bit, which helped. But when they cracked the pieces of that stone slab and removed them, they didn’t find any bodies. But here’s what they did find.

Quoting Susan again, quote:
“A shout followed by a volley of curses drew the attention of everyone on the site. Billy Tole scrambled from the pit and staggered as far as he could before he threw up. Silas [Tole] remained in the cillar, his face pushed into the crook of his elbow. His shovel had sliced deep into the muck. Then it was drawn out, the smell of putrefaction leaked into the air and Silas dropped the shovel in surprise. The rancid soil spilled across the slab and the men gave the pit a wide birth. Dick reached in and lifted [Silas] out. Silas retched and stalked away from the site to find fresh air. In a show of bravado, an older farmhand leaped into the cellar and began to dig… it took less than three shovelfuls of filth before he too abandoned the task to vomit.”

End quote.

So no bodies, but a whole lot of blood.

Ed York had arrived by this point – his politician brother Alexander was in meetings. But Ed comes to see if he can find any evidence William was there. And he does – he finds William’s bridle amongst other things from the cabin. Ed also notices that the soil around the orchard looks… disturbed. Even a month after the Benders left.

The whole group heads to the orchard, and in one of the fresh-looking mounds, one of them shoved the ramrod of their rifle into the ground. When he pulled it out, short quote, “It gave way to a sucking sound and the men closest to the hole winced at the putrid odor that came with it.” End quote.

Clearly, there was something here.

And that’s where they found the bodies.

First, they found William York. Ed, the poor man, had to identify his own brother’s corpse. He had the same neck laceration as William Jones, the man found in the river. York also had head wounds consistent with blunt force trauma.

The next body was Leroy’s cousin, Henry McKenzie. Same wounds. Leroy was able to identify his immediately.

Then they found William McCrotty, who had tattooed identification on himself: his name, date of birth, and regiment in the Civil War. Thought it would be a good idea in case he died in battle.

Then they found Benjamin Brown, the man looking for a new home for his growing family.

George Longcor was next… and his 18 month old daughter. Her little body was half hidden beneath one of her father’s legs. Unlike the men, there was no mark on her – by all indications, she was buried alive.

They then found another man who went unidentified for a while, but it turned out to be an Irish immigrant named James Feerick, who left his wife on the East Coast to find land out west, but disappeared. He was more decomposed than the rest, so likely the first killed of this set below the orchard.

They found an eighth body in a well, identified as Johnny Boyle. He was badly mutilated, wedged 6 feet down, in an upright position.

In total, with bodies found elsewhere, including the ones with matching injuries that were consumed by local hogs, the Benders had killed 11 people. But probably more that we never found.

The coroner put together a convincing MO. Travelers were fed and entertained by Kate, and like Julia Hestler at that botched seance murder, were placed with their backs to the canvas sheet. Once relaxed, a family member would strike them from behind the canvas curtain to stun them into submission. Then, a hammer was used to beat in temples. Once they were knocked out, someone in the family slit their throat, dumped the body into the trapdoor to bleed out, and then when it was safe for the Benders, they would move the now-dead and bled out body somewhere else. A few were dumped in the prairie, one was in the river, one in the well, the rest buried under the orchard. It explains all that blood soaked into the earth under the trapdoor, and it certainly explains all the flies.

Their plot of land was christened Hell’s Half Acre.

But unfortunately, the Benders were never caught.
Where Did the Benders Go?
So where did the Benders go?

Kate and John likely jumped the train above the Arkansas River, then journeyed through what was called “Indian Territory.” They likely purchased a wagon, horses, and guns to arm all four family members once reunited. We know this because we know that eventually, they went to Denison Texas, where they waited for Ma and Pa. They also had help - a career criminal named Frank McPherson, who had known the Benders from their time before Kansas.

Frank, and later his brother “Missouri Bill” McPherson, ran a gang out on the frontier. It’s likely the McPherson gang fenced much of the stolen property the Benders came across over the years. And we eventually caught both Frank and Bill McPherson, which is how we know a bit about what happened to the Bender family.

And funnily enough, the Benders left Denison Texas for the West on the same day Leroy Dick smelled decomp on their property back in Kansas – May 5th.

Leroy and Detective Beers did manage to track the Benders to the train station, and later to Denison, but it was too late. They were about a month behind. Alexander York, with his connections, got the governor of Kansas to provide some funds to investigators, including the Pinkerton Detective Agency, but those funds always inevitably ran out. And the frontier territory, with its gangs and indigenous populations, put people off from trying to search for the Benders.

We know that the McPherson brothers got the Benders to a cousin, Floyd Slimp, and they were together for a while. A man named Samuel Merrick was also in their orbit for a while, and it’s from these secondary criminals that we learn a bit about what happened to the Benders. Merrick was later arrested for horse theft, and in an attempt to save his own skin, gave up everything he knew about the Benders. He told investigators that the Benders were living on Wild Horse Creek in Chickasaw Nation, between Fort Arbuckle and Fort Sill. But this was also, ready for this, 6 years after their murders in Kansas. And while Kansas still wanted to find them, they were well and truly gone by that point.

Many considered them dead. Those who didn’t, couldn’t convince the Kansas state government to finance expeditions to find them. And they weren’t even in Kansas, so the governor considered it too risky and difficult to coordinate a manhunt across state lines. And so… nothing was done. The Benders got away with it.

In 1889, a woman named Frances McCann, not a spiritualist but a self-styled clairvoyant healer, claims she found the Bender women. If you want the full story, I recommend you read Susan Jonusas book, Hell’s Half-Acre, but Frances was convincing enough that these women – who were in Michigan, were Ma and Kate Bender. Spoiler – they weren’t. But there was a whole trial and everything, with people from Cherryvale claiming they definitely were, or definitely weren’t the Benders. 

They weren’t. The woman who was supposed to be Ma Bender spoke perfect English, but the real Ma Bender spoke only broken German. The women who was supposed to be Kate had different hair and a different face, and was a different height. 

People just wanted an end to the Bender saga. But eventually, evidence cleared these women, as they had alibis for the entirety of the time the murders took place.

The unsatisfying truth is that the Benders killed 11 people, that we know of, fled the state, and got away with it. We don’t know where they went, what happened to them, or how they died. I mean, they’re definitely dead. This was 150 years ago. But we don’t know how they died, or where. They never answered for their crimes.

The Bender family, though not the only group of killers in this period of westward expansion, represent the seedier side of progress and growth. They took advantage of travellers heading west, with money in their pockets and dreams in their heads, taking the Osage Trail through Kansas. It seems as if, for the most part, the Benders only killed people coming and going – they didn’t kill anyone after that attempt on Julia’s life. Perhaps they thought that because Julia was alone, no one would come looking for her? But for 11 other people, including that poor sweet little girl, travelling through Labette Kansas put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And who knows how many other families were robbed and killed like this? People went missing all of the time. Many deaths were blamed on roaming bandits, gangs of horse thieves, sometimes the indigenous. I wonder how many actually fell victim to families like the Benders, existing in this intersection of progress on the frontier, a time of post-Civil War violence, rapid infrastructural growth, and a population on the move.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things! My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode on the Bloody Benders. Thank you for tuning into my podcast, and check out some of the other episodes if you want more!

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