Bloody Benders

You're heading west with big dreams, staking your claim to one of those parcels of land promised in the Homestead Act. You're carrying everything you own, which was never much, but that's all going to change. Now you've made it as far as southeastern Kansas. You're tired, oh, bone tired, looking for a spot to lay your head, if only for a night.

Word has it there's a family up the road yonder there that takes in travelers. Nothing fancy, just a simple cabin over in Labette County. They say the daughter talks to the dead, but you know how folks like to gossip about their And a bed's a bed, especially out here on the prairie, where a person could ride for days on end and not encounter another human soul.

Just go on up the road a ways and ask for the Bender's Place. And then, hope to God you make it out alive. And then they got a small beam of light. True. Stuff. They call the 30-year stretch between 1970 and 2000 the golden age of serial killers in America, which is actually pretty twisted, isn't it? Experts on the subject credit that golden age to the phenomenon of urbanization.

Urbanization combined people living right on top of each other with a trend toward ever increasing anonymity, and that created the perfect hunting ground for a predator. Lots of potential victims, most of whom had little to no contact with each other. Because that so-called golden age of serial killers coincided with mass media and spawned a list of monsters with now marquee names, it's tempting to think that serial killers are a modern invention.

They're not. Serial killers are also not an American invention, although it's fair to say that this is an The U.S. dominates the global serial killer leaderboard to an embarrassing degree. In 2020, the U.S. was ranked first in serial killers with a total of 3,204. Our nearest competitor, England, held the second place position with only 166.

Wow. Even after you factor in our free press and our significant law enforcement resources, Team USA might have some explaining to do. What is it about American culture and society that gives rise to this most extreme and antisocial kind of deviance? You'll find people who blame violence in movies, television, video games, people who point to the divorce rate, the ending of prayer in public schools, additives in food, or the internet.

What all those arguments miss is that serial killers got here long before Hollywood, fruit by the foot, and the internet. Those arguments try so hard and want so desperately to lay the blame outside the human heart, to blame anything except human nature, because the idea that the impulse to murder lives inside some of us is terrifying.

There are certain kinds of murder that we think we can understand, although we don't condone it. Impulsive acts, crimes of passion, the fury of a moment, the white hot rage, the temporary loss of reason or sanity. Terrible things can happen when we lose control. Things we've never imagined doing in our right minds. The actions of a serial killer, though, don't fall into the category of crimes most of us think we can comprehend.

What kind of data, what statistic could even begin to explain the predatory sadism, the raw cruelty, the sheer remorseless indifference to human suffering that we see in the actions of serial killers? That's why we call them monsters. And the Bender family? What they did was truly monstrous. So, before you hobble the horses and shoulder your saddlebags, just grateful that tonight you'll sleep under a roof and not the stars, take another look at your hosts, the Benders.

Pa, his eyes averted, his face seemingly frozen in a perpetual scowl. Ma, showing you only her rigid back. John, chortling to himself, though no one's made anything even approaching a joke. And Kate, brazenly staring, her face a wolfish blink. I know you're weary and desperate this night to sleep anywhere but on the hard, unforgiving ground.

Are you sure about this, though? Are you sure you want to accept the Benders' hospitality? Our modern notion of the serial killer is a lone male psychopath. Sometimes, he's hiding in plain sight as an upstanding member of the community, like John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown. Sometimes, he's a troubled nomad with a history of other crimes, like Richard Ramirez, the night stalker.

Sometimes, he's the nebbishy dad, the clipboard-toting functionary with the forgettable face, like Dennis Rader, who labeled himself the BTK for buying, torture, kill. The idea of a family working together in the business of serial murder is so shocking and repugnant and mystifying that it just seems too unlikely to be true.

Your mind reels, like, how? How can a whole family be bent towards such unthinkable and vile acts? How can everyone be on board with cold-blooded murder? Maybe you're thinking, look, we can't even agree on what movie to watch at our house. How are we going to pull together enough to agree to kill the neighbors and wear their skin?

Which is what makes the story of the Bender family of Labette, Kansas, so chilling. The Benders were the first serial killers to dominate the American press and imagination. They were a family of four. John Gebhardt, John Bender, Ma Bender, and daughter Kate. Right from the jump, this was a family steeped in mystery. No one was sure of anything where the Benders were concerned.

Not where they came from. Not even what their relationship to each other was. Ma and Pa Bender spoke in mostly guttural German and seemed to have very little grasp of the English language. It was unclear if John and Kate were brother and sister or husband and wife or some incestuous mix of both. John was often described as acting like a simpleton and Kate was a self-proclaimed spiritual medium.

And she was also, like many of her fellow spiritualists, an advocate for free love. Whatever else they were, the Benders had something in common with thousands of other Americans and newly arrived immigrants. The dream of settling the West. Or if that sounds too lofty, then call it the dream of getting more land for free than they could ever manage to purchase on their own.

In 1870, just eight years after the passage of the Homestead Act, the Benders made their way to the unincorporated town of Cherryvale, Kansas and staked their claim. Under the Homestead Act, settlers could pay a small filing fee and claim up to 160 acres of public land. The deal was open to male U.S. citizens and any male intending to become a U.S. citizen.

The only requirement was that the claimants had to live continuously on the property and plant crops for a minimum of five years. The Benders were among the four million people who took advantage of this visionary, even revolutionary, piece of legislation. Under the Homestead Act, which was still in effect in the lower 48 states until 1976 and until 1986 in Alaska, the Homestead Act gave away over 270 million acres of public land deeded to private citizens.

And that's about 10% of the whole area of the United States. The land might have been free, but the living was anything but easy. Today, the U.S. is crisscrossed with countless roads, highways, interstates, rail lines. Getting from one side of the country to the other is now an easy six-hour plane ride. Sure, the seats are cramped and miserable and you never know which of your fellow passengers might go nuts and try to open the plane door mid-flight.

But have you ever tried walking across the continental United States in woolen skirts and a bonnet? I promise it's harder. This country stretches 2,680 miles east to west and 1,582 miles north to south. When the Benders made their way to Cherryvale, Kansas, they were following the Osage Mission Trail. Instead of cruising along at 55 miles an hour plus on six or eight lanes of smooth blacktop, settlers on foot, horseback, and in covered wagons traveled pathways originally stamped out by herds of migrating buffalo and other wildlife.

And of course, now I've got to point out that these settlers were not bravely venturing into an empty landscape waiting to be tamed, but were instead shuffling through the ancestral That's a big story itself for another time. But as much as the dangers of encountering hostile natives were hyped, would-be homesteaders had a long list of other things to be fearful about.

Weather, illness, injury, wildlife, hunger, thirst, and each other. And if their journey took them along the Osage Mission Trail and through Cherryvale, Kansas, especially each other. Now, chances are your ideas of the state of Kansas probably lean toward things like heartland and wholesome and maybe even Dorothy and Toto and the Wizard of Oz.

But the Kansas that the Benders settled in is a very different, more lawless kind of place. Even the Kansas Historical Society is like, look, back then we had no organized civil law. We had no stable social institutions. And without the help of the U.S. Army, we had no way of keeping any sort of peace. You had white settlers encroaching on protective Native American lands.

You had hostile tribes attacking peaceful tribes. You had people running roughshod over government property and each other. It was dangerous and chaotic. It was the frontier. And no matter how much we romanticize that now, the Army had a real job trying to maintain order. Kansas, after all, had earned the nickname Bloody Kansas in the years prior to statehood when the Free State or pro-slavery and abolitionist movements collided in one violent conflict after another.

You could almost believe that the bloody lawless reputation was the very thing that drew the Benders to Cherryvale. As it happened, though, the Benders were one of a group of five families of spiritualists that made their way to Levette County, Kansas. That might sound like kind of a weird situation to us today, but the spiritualist movement had exploded during the Civil War and in the years that followed.

And no wonder. Spiritualists promised communication with the dead. And America was a country in deep mourning. 650,000 lives lost during the Civil War created a near-desperate craving for closure among the grieving. Closure in the form of the living speaking to and with the dead. Closure that might be purchased for a small sum.

And the Benders were, among other things, in the selling of closure business. This might be why news accounts at the time pointed to Kate Bender as the real brains of the operation. Her seances not only lured unsuspecting souls to the cabin, but they also offered an ideal setting for murder. The cabin the Benders erected in 1871 wasn't anything fancy, just a simple one-room dwelling.

The Benders hung a large piece of canvas to divide the room. Sleeping quarters made up the rear, and the remainder of the space was given over to a makeshift grocery store and inn. The property was rounded out with a barn, a well, and a small corral. A crudely lettered sign that read, Groceries, was hung by the door. Groceries on the Osage Mission Trail meant flour, cornmeal, tobacco, liquor, gunpowder.

Inn on the Osage Mission Trail meant sharing a room and most likely a mattress with whoever else happened to be staying the night. And this is where we take a moment to count the many blessings. Lord, that is the courtyard by Marriott. Can I get an amen? Amen. Can I get a witness? Can we thank you? Courtyard by Marriott.

Now, back to Kansas with the Benders. Being such an unfriendly, uncommunicative bunch, they were hardly the family you'd have picked to get into the hospitality business, right? Looking at the facts now, it seems fairly obvious to us that their grocery and inn existed purely as a trap for unwary travelers, not as a respite.

Think about it. Settlers heading west brought with them everything of value they owned. They carried what money they had in the whole world. And those sums could be substantial. Remember that these were homesteaders and many carried with them all the funds needed to purchase tools and lumber and livestock to build out their claims.

They were vulnerable to robbery and worse, every wearisome, parched, aching step of the way. Rustic as it was, shabby even. They built it right on the Osage Mission Trail, right on the prairie, and not, as one news report noted, in the sheltering timber, as was the more usual choice. You just couldn't miss the Bender cabin.

How very, very convenient. And the Benders had a lot on offer for the weary traveler. Safe spot for the horses. Tobacco and whiskey. The promise of convening with the dearly departed, should Cape Bender be of the mind. And a night indoors. Crowded maybe and none too clean, but out of the elements at least. And those are just the amenities we can talk about in polite company.

A story in the Parsons Daily Eclipse, published in August 1880, hinted that Cape Bender, though apparently weirdly married to John, was thought unwilling to earn an extra dollar or two by tending to the needs of transients, horse thieves, and cowboys. Describing her as a, quote, red-faced, low-browed, square-shouldered Amazon strong enough to throw a bull by the tail, the story was skeptical about Cape's spiritualistic doctoring and implied that she was more likely to kill a man with a hammer blow than heal him.

Decent people, the story concluded, avoided the Bender's grocery and meal. Decent people who knew to avoid it, that is. Because when the Bender's first opened for business in 1871, there wasn't any reason to be suspicious. It didn't take long, though, before something strange was observed. People had started to go missing along that section of the Osage Mission Trail.

You know, just because folks back then didn't have phones doesn't mean that they didn't have friends and family in the U.S. Postal Service. Mail traveled more slowly in the 1870s, of course, but barring a stagecoach robbery or a disaster, it mostly got where it was headed. The first transcontinental telegraph line was a decade old by then, making communication between the East and West Coast nearly instantaneous.

What I'm saying is, many people crossing the frontier did their best to keep the folks they'd left behind posted on their progress and well-being. And if that ceased, of course it was noticed. Relatives back East were frantic. These disappearances caused real alarm. A stonemason named Jones vanished in the fall of 1872.

Ben Brown, W.F. McCruddy, Henry McKenzie, Red Smith, Abigail Roberts, John Greary, Johnny Boyle, three more men from Howard County, Kansas all disappeared. All travelers on the Osage Mission Trail all vanished as though the earth itself had yawned wide and swallowed them whole. And these are the names we know. There were others, their identities lost, their lives reduced to piles of bones and tattered, moldering clothing.

Serial killers are in one way, just like the rest of us. Luck plays a bigger role than we like to admit in how our stories turn out. And the benders, they're about to get terribly unlucky. A widower named George Longcore, grieving the death of his wife and infant son, purchased a team of horses from a neighbor and packed up his only surviving child, a young daughter, to return to the home of his parents in Iowa.

The Longcores had been living in Independence, Kansas, neighbors of one Charles Ingalls and family. Does that ring a bell? That's THE Charles Ingalls, also known as Pa in the classic Little House on the Prairie books. Author Laura Ingalls Wilder was only five years old when tragedy struck the Longcore family, so she has no role in this story.

This is just one of those fascinating little connections that history loves to offer up. Almost like every now and again, history just gets so tired of having to be so serious all the time and just wants to have the same fun as a box of cereal with a prize in it. But back to the Longcores. Weighed down by sorrow, father and daughter left their home in Independence and began making their way north and east to Iowa.

They couldn't have been more than 15 or maybe 20 miles from home when they vanished. They were never seen again, nor were their horses. So shocking was their disappearance, so inexplicable, that the neighbor who'd sold Longcore that team of horses set out to search for his friend and the child. And then he too vanished along the Osage Mission Trail.

That neighbor was a Civil War veteran and a doctor named William Henry York. And in a stroke of terrible luck for the Benders, he had a brother. That brother, Colonel Alexander York, was a lawyer and an elected member of the Kansas State Senate. Oh, Benders, what a mistake. Now you've gone and done it. You've tangled with the war hero brother of a prominent politician.

Alexander York did not take the news of his missing brother with the sort of, oh, well, it happens attitude the Benders might have hoped for. Instead, Alexander York put his money and his connections to work. He persuaded dozens of men, some reports say that it was as many as 75, to scour the state of Kansas in search of his brother.

And as fate would have it, it was Alexander York himself who paid a visit to the Benders' cabin on the Osage Mission Trail. He was greeted by the ever-grinning John who just happened to be clutching a Bible at that very moment. By his side was Kate Bender. The papers of the day will tell you that she was a wolf-faced she-devil, but I'm here to tell you she was beautiful and charming.

And thanks to her years of conducting seances, she flat knew how to read a room and a potential mark. After questioning John and Kate Bender, Alexander York was fooled, deciding that these dimwitted country folk, his words, could not possibly be involved in his brother's disappearance. So he departed on horseback, the Benders watching him go.

But they were panicked. They knew the game was up. They literally scooped up their belongings, chucked them into a wagon, and disappeared themselves. They told no one they were leaving. And it was a month before anyone noticed they'd gone. It took a neighbor named Billy Toll who happened by and saw that the Benders' animals were clearly starving to death to kick the whole investigation into gear.

Because Billy Toll went from the barn and corral to the Benders' cabin. There he was so overwhelmed by the sickening stench coming from the one-room building that he lost his nerve and galloped to town for help. So remember now, the frontier was crawling with veterans of the Civil War. And the man who accompanied Billy Toll back to the Benders' cabin, a gentleman named Leroy Dick, was one of them.

He recognized the stench coming from that cabin. He knew it well. It was the stench of death, of rotting and decaying human flesh. Leroy Dick began poking about the empty house. When he found a pair of claw-footed hammers and a homemade mallet tucked behind the cabin's wood stove, he believed that these must surely be murder weapons he was holding in his hands.

Leroy Dick called for volunteers to help search for bodies and for Benders. Hundreds answered his call, including Colonel Alexander York. A thorough search of the cabin yielded no bodies, but it did reveal a trapdoor hidden beneath a bed and nailed shut. The men pried it open and descended into a cellar reeking of decay with clotted blood pooled on the floor of the otherwise empty room.

They took sledgehammers to the floor but found no human remains only blood-soaked earth. The volunteers then went so far as to physically lift up and move the Benders' cabin digging frantically in their search for bodies. They found nothing. And then the search moved to the Benders' garden and orchard. The first body they found was that of Dr. William York.

Reports say that the body was face down the soil barely covering the soles of his feet. The next day, they found eight more bodies in the orchard one body in the well and numerous body parts all horrifically mutilated. The worst though was the discovery of the body of Dr. York's young daughter. Unlike the others there was no sign of injury to the child leading a physician on site to speculate that the little girl had very likely been buried alive.

And the Benders? They were gone. Their wagon was found abandoned about 12 miles away from the cabin a team of starving horses still hitched to it one of them lamed. Witnesses later confirmed that the family of four purchased tickets on a train heading for Humboldt, Kansas. John and Kate were then witness changing trains heading south toward Denison, Texas in an outlaw colony somewhere near Texas in New Mexico.

Hearing this, the law elected to not pursue the pair on the grounds that too many lawmen had headed into that region never to be seen again. Kansas Governor Thomas Osborne issued a proclamation offering a $2,000 reward for the apprehension and delivery of the Benders to the Labette County Sheriff. That's $500 per Bender should you be unable to lay your hands on the complete set of four.

And the people of Kansas like everywhere else on the frontier definitely had acquired a taste for vigilante justice which led some folks to doubt the likelihood of the Benders even surviving an angry mob should they be found reward or not. But the Benders, remember had a head start a month's head start on their pursuers.

Wild rumors about the alleged capture and swift vigilante justice served up to the demonic family of four were flying thick and fast. A paper in Topeka reported that the family had been caught and hanged by a vigilance committee. You gotta love that euphemism. And that report came before the bodies had even been discovered on the Bender property.

The paper assured its readers that this was why Governor Osborne had been so apathetic about bringing the killers to justice. The Minneapolis Messenger had a breathless story describing the capture and grim confession of the elder Benders Ma and Pa a story that like the other one sadly turned out to be untrue. The Benders notoriety had people coming out of the woodwork with faked identities and false confessions.

Another Kansas paper was forced to print a retraction after publishing a story about the elder Benders captured and it is now my favorite newspaper retraction of all time. The Benders captured in Nebraska were not the Benders after all and they have been released. If they are not the Benders they are at least a pair of demented fools.

Newspapers back then were wild y'all. Salt Lake City, Utah. Laramie City, Wyoming. Fremont, Nebraska. Niles, Michigan. Every time the headlines blared Benders captured the story turned out to be false. A dead end. Four years after the bodies of their victims were found for decades the Benders stayed a step ahead of the law.

They were frequently spotted throughout the Southwest. There were reports of the family living on tribal lands in outlaw colonies and in the kinds of lonely forbidding nooks and crannies of the American West where no honest citizen would dare to go. Pa, Ma John, Kate were all witness to be armed and they were already known to be ruthless in the extreme.

Stories began to circulate of how those who pursued the Benders had a way of disappearing off the face of the earth. An experienced bounty hunter picked up their trail and was never seen again. A detective with the legendary Pinkerton Agency, a man named F.J. Pierce expressed great confidence in his ability to successfully capture Kate of the evil eye as the Atchison Daily Globe described her, along with all of her evil kin. He said that he had info that the family was hiding in the Wichita Mountains.

Off he went, never to be seen again. Some very scary stories do end with the villain locked safely away and justice served. This isn't one of those stories. The Benders were never captured. Not Ma or Pa. Not Kate or John. They murdered at least ten adults and a child and probably many more including that bounty hunter and the Pinkerton detective.

They got away with it. There is not one living soul today who can tell you for certain what became of them. Not one. America's first celebrity serial killer was this family. The Bender family. The family that slayed together and stayed together. So how about it, traveler? What would you give to sleep this night in a bed?

There's a little cabin up the Osage Mission Trail. You can't miss it. The folks that run the place can be a little peculiar. But that's the frontier for you. Come on in. Take a seat. That one. Yes. Right there. The head of the table. You're an honored guest after all. This here's Kate. Maybe you've heard she can talk to the dead.

No, no, no. Nothing to be scared of. The spirits offer comfort to the grieving. Aren't we all? Grieving that is. It's dark inside the cabin. There's a bad smell in the air. That tacked up sheet of canvas? What are those stains? And why is that younger Bender man snickering like that? Suddenly you realize that you've made a terrible mistake in coming here.

Something feels so very wrong about this place. Now your heart is pounding. Sweat is starting to pool under your arms. You want desperately to leave. But it'd be a sin, wouldn't it? To be ungrateful for the Bender's hospitality. Kate's even offered to speak to the spirits for you. She reaches across the table for your hands.

Her lovely young face and the lanterns glow. Suddenly a cold, empty mask. You sense movement behind you. Is that someone standing at the back of your chair? Is that the old man? The one they call Pa? Something in Kate's eyes pins you in place. You dare not, you cannot turn away from the intensity of her fixed gaze. Her small hand is surprisingly strong.

She tightens her grip on your wrists. This night does have one mercy in store for you, traveler. And here it is. You won't see your end coming. Behind you, Pa raises a heavy clawfoot hammer and brings it down with sickening force on the bright side of your skull. The claw end of the tool tearing away flesh, bone and brain as the old man jerks the weapon back.

Your blood spraying in a graceful arc across the dirty stained canvas. In one swift motion, Ma Bender rakes a freshly sharpened blade across your throat. Your life with all your hopes and promise and dreams of settling the West. It's all over. Before Ma can even finish wiping your blood on the hand of her filthy apron.

John Bender now giggling and hooting his high pitch squealing piercing the rancid air of the cabin as he lifts the latch on the trapdoor beneath your seat. As your now lifeless body tumbles through that trapdoor and thuds onto the already blood soaked soil beneath, your spirit has already departed beginning its journey to another kind of frontier.

None living can follow you there traveler. So this is where we must leave you to your eternal rest. One more permanent guest of the Bloody Benders of Labette, Kansas. Just remember me baby when I'm in six feet of cold, cold ground. Just remember me baby when I'm in six feet of cold, cold ground. Always think of me mama yesterday as a good man gone down.

Next time on True Weird Stuff No footprints, no tire tracks, no blood and yet cattle are being mutilated in ways that make no sense. It's not just the 1970's it's in the news right now and it's next time on True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Sam Nash. Copyright 2023, Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

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