August 13, 2012 • 25 mins
The Bender clan settled in Kansas in 1870, building a combined store and inn. They weren't popular. Only the comely Kate Bender drew admirers. When people began disappearing, the Benders weren't suspects ?? until a doctor vanished after visiting the inn.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. Time to
Blaine and Chocolate Boarding, and today's story starts with a
mystery that began to unravel in Labette County, Kansas, in
(00:21):
the spring of eighteen seventy three. Colonel ed Yorke was
searching for his brother, Dr William Yorke, who had vanished
without a trace in early March of that year. So
when he went missing, according to an article by David
McCormick in Wild West, the doctor had been looking into
another disappearance, that of a man named George Lnker and
(00:41):
his young daughter. Dr Yorke had apparently sold Lonker a
wagon and a team that had later turned up inexplicably deserted.
Neither longer nor his daughter were anywhere to be found
near this team and wagon. So it was while he
was on his way back from i ding this team
and wagon in Fort Scott, can This that Dr York disappeared.
(01:02):
Colonel ed York did have a little bit to go
off of, though. While he was looking for his brother,
people had supposedly spotted Dr Yorke on his way home
riding along this road. The Hostage Mission Road, and it
was somewhere along that road, which connected Fort Scott with Independence, Kansas,
that his trail ended, and somewhere, in fact, right around
(01:24):
the home slash Inn that was run by a family
called Benders, and interestingly several others. Anywhere from ten to
twenty people had mysteriously disappeared in this general vicinity near
the township of Cherry Vale during the years spanning from
eighteen seventy one to eighteen seventy three, and in many cases,
family members and other interested parties had traced the missing
(01:47):
person's progress from town to town, and then, as with
the case of York, their trails just vanished right around
this spot. So it was clear that something was going
on here in northwest Labette County and residents of the
area we're pretty freaked out about it, understand as you
would be. So in this episode we're going to find
out what was the deal with all of these missing people,
(02:08):
why were they disappearing, and what did that family that
we mentioned, the Benders, have to do with it all.
So to answer these questions, we're going to have to
rewind a little bit to about eighteen seventy when the
Vendor family first showed up in this area. The exact
circumstances of their arrival are somewhat up for debate, as
a few points in this story are according to Mike
(02:30):
Mayo's book American Murder, they arrived in Cherry Vale and
the company of a small cult of spiritualists, and if
you remember from our episode on The Fox Sisters last year,
spiritualists basically believe that people who have physically died continue
to exist in kind of a spirit world, and that
they can continue to communicate with us in the material world,
(02:50):
usually through special people called mediums. So the rest of
the spiritualist cult moved on, but the Benders stayed where
they were. The area held some attraction at this time
for lots of people, white settlers at least, who wanted
to put down roots. The O Sage Indians who had
once lived in the area had been relocated to Indian
Territory in present day Oklahoma after the Civil War, and
(03:14):
home stutterers were granted parcels of land, So when the
vendors arrived, they claimed about a hundred and sixty acres
of land right around the Sage Mission Road also known
as the Sage Trail, which connected as we mentioned, Fort
Scott to independence and was about five miles from cherry Vale,
which was the nearest town. So they built a small
house there, basically a cabin, right near the road, which
(03:37):
was very well traveled, and understandably they got into the
business of tourism. I guess you would say. They divided
their home into two separate areas by hanging a piece
of canvas as a partition, and on one side of
that partition the family lived. On the other side, which
was the front of the house, they ran an in
(03:58):
slash grocery store, and it unclear whether their establishment had
a specific name, but they did put a fine outside
that the grocery, So if you were traveling along with
heavily traveled trail, you would know the Benders was a
place where you could refuel and maybe even spend the night.
There were four members of the Bender family, Paul, who
(04:18):
was also John Sr. Ma, John Jr. And Kate, and
they were said to be German immigrants. So we need
to tell you a little bit about all these characters
because it's sort of essential to getting an idea of
what's going on in the story and their interesting characters
and character study. So John Bender Senior was about sixty
years old, and by all accounts, he was a pretty surly,
(04:41):
unpleasant guy. Mob Bender was said to be somewhere in
the same age range as Paul, but there's still some
debate over the exact number. Generally people think she was
between fifty and sixty years old. She was also heavy
set and bad natured and unfriendly. But maybe she was
unfriendly because nobody really knew her name. I mean, that's
one of the things. That she was just mom. That
(05:03):
was one of the interesting things about the stories that
there's never a name in any of the sources listed
for her. She's just a mom. So John Junior, however,
we do know his name, sort of at least. He
was about twenty five years old, and he came off
somewhat nicer than both Mom and Pop. But he apparently
had a nervous giggle that went along with just about
(05:23):
everything that came out of his mouth, So this made
people believe that he was somewhat simple minded and probably
adds to the creepy reputation around town too. Um. In general,
these three vendors made neighbors and anyone in the general
community who encountered them not really want to come around
and visit too much, not go get your growthries at
(05:44):
the vendor's place. But Kate was a different story. She
was a couple of years younger than John Jr. And
by most accounts, she was very attractive. She was an
auburn haired beauty, and she was also outgoing and talkative.
So she also had a five career that was separate
from her family's grocery store. In business, she margreted herself
(06:04):
as a healer and a spiritualist and called herself professor
Miss Kate Bender, and she would travel around to different
towns leading public seances and healings and spiritual performances, all
according to Mayo's book, and she was quite a hit.
She was. She also offered private sciences back at the
Bender home so people could come there and visit her too,
(06:27):
and that if he didn't go for groceries, maybe you
would go first. Yeah, maybe you don't want groceries, but
if you've seen her act and you think she's pretty cool,
maybe you want to come get a private session from
Kate at her house. So it was an odd family,
even if you took it at face value as we've
described it here. But it's also worth noting that a
lot of people believed that they weren't even all related
(06:47):
to each other. There were different sources give us sort
of different scenarios on this, but some say that John
Junior and Kate were actually a couple rather than brother
and sister. Others say that they were half brother and sister,
and that John was actually Ma's son from a previous marriage,
and that his last name wasn't Bender at all, but
it was actually GiB Heart. Still other sources say that
(07:08):
all four of these people might have been completely unrelated
and not mom and Pop at all. Nope, not a bit,
Maybe just a clan that came together. Regardless, the foursom
lived as a family in these early years of the
eighteen seventies, and in general, people who lived relatively nearby
and knew them, or at least knew of them, really
didn't want anything to do with them at all, because,
(07:29):
as we mentioned, they weren't very friendly. They weren't for
the most part, dinner and asked how they were actually related. No,
they weren't going to hang out and get to know
their past, and so the Benders in their place just
generally creeped a lot of people out too. I mean
I think that probably their personalities had something to do
with it, but people also mentioned just kind of having
a bad feeling well, So because of that area of
(07:51):
feeling about their business, they really had to rely on
people who were just traveling along the stage trail, people
who didn't know their reputation, and and they were pretty
far from any big town, and even Cherry Vale wasn't
exactly close. So according to Wayne Lee's book Deadly Days
in Kansas, they really did attract a lot of visitors
this way, and people who lived in the area though,
(08:13):
probably didn't have much of an idea about what was
going on with the business. So despite this this bustling
business of visitors and travelers, people who lived in the
area probably didn't have much of an idea about what
was going on with the business, how it was running.
Lee related just a few instances in which people might
have gotten an inkling that weird stuff was going on
(08:35):
at the Bender place, but no real strong suspicion. Yeah.
As an example, Lee brings up a woman who was
kind of thought of as the local crazy lady, and
her name was Hessler. She was a spiritualism devotee and
for that reason pretty drawn to Kate Bender, as you
might imagine. According to Lee, one night, Hessler went over
to the Bender's place wanting a seance, but Kate just
(08:56):
wasn't in the mood to do one. But still, Hessler
said things went okay until about sundown, when the family
started all of a sudden acting very odd. They started
drawing pictures of men on the walls and threw knives
at those pictures. Then Kate told Hessler that the spirits
were moving her to kill. She went towards Hessler with
(09:17):
this weird, scary look on her face and said that
the spirits were moving her to quote, kill you, kill
you now, at which point Hessler ran home as fast
as she could. She just got out of there. So
on the face, that seems like it would be a
huge morning sign and a threat to murder or something,
and it would have been caused for concern when Hessler
(09:40):
related this story to other people, especially since at this
point people were already aware of some unexplained disappearances in
the area. But since we already noted that Hessler was
considered a local eccentric, people just wrote it off. She
must have imagined this or something weird went down between
two sets of weird people. Another story, though, involved a
(10:01):
priest who was traveling along the A Stage Trail and
stopping in at the Benders on a stormy night. He
also ended up finding an excuse to high tail it
out of the Bender's place, out of their house, but
his reasons for doing so had more to do with
just a general bad feeling about the situation. He's one
of those people we talked about in the H. H.
Holmes episode, or rather the opposite of those people. Yeah,
(10:25):
follow your gut, right, he followed it. So even though
people who were living around this area were generally alarmed
about the people who were vanishing around there between eighteen
seventy one and eighteen seventy three, there wasn't really any
particular suspicion thrown on the Benders at this time. Basically
everyone in the O Sage township was under suspicion cozy
little town right until Dr York's case came up, the
(10:48):
one that we mentioned in the intro. He disappeared somewhere
along the O. Sage Trail on March nine, eighteen seventy three,
and his brother ed and his subsequent search in late
March early April of that year, trace Dr York's movements
along the road, and according to McCormick's article, met several
people along the way who said that they had seen
his brother. They had seen the doctor on his trip
(11:11):
back toward his own home. At least one person recalled
that Dr York had said that he planned to stop
at the benders In on the way home too. So
one thing to note here, it's kind of up for
debate why Dr Yorke would have stopped at the vendors
in because he did live relatively nearby. McCormick suggests a
couple possibilities. One was that he was just hungry wanted
to stop at that grocery store. But the other possibility,
(11:34):
and McCormick thinks that this is the more likely one,
maybe while looking into the longer disappearance, he started to
get suspicious of the Benders. Maybe he even confronted them
about those suspicions, and that's why he was there. At
any rate, Ed York decided to stop in at the
benders and inquire about his brother. Makes sense, right, so
(11:55):
the last place that was going to go. Accounts differ
though on what exact lucky they told him when he
got there, but Kate is said to have been really
friendly in general and offered to contact the spirit world
to try to help him figure out what happened to
his brother. Nice off for there, But some sources also
say that the Benders, perhaps specifically John Junr, suggested that
(12:16):
Dr Yorke might have been attacked on the road by
Indians or outlaws, like maybe even Jesse James. There he
is again. Ultimately, it seems that they denied any possibility
that Dr Yorke had come to their end for any
length of time. You know, he didn't stay there, He
didn't have a meal there, although he suggests that Kate
told Ed York that his brother had watered his horse
(12:37):
there and moved on. So we did. We did see him,
but he didn't stick around, and that's probably why you know,
we've been mentioned to you. But he wasn't here for
for any length of time. So Ed didn't make that
much progress at the Benders, but news of his search
and his this latest disappearance seemed to be the final
straw for the surrounding a stage community who was wondering
(13:00):
who is the murderer among us? And as we mentioned,
pretty much everyone in the township was under suspicion at
this point, and not only were they scared, not only
were they concerned, they probably didn't like people from other
areas looking at them like possible suspects. So finally, the
locals decided to gather for a meeting at the Harmony
Grove Schoolhouse, and according to Mayo, there were about seventy
(13:23):
five people in attendance, including the Bender men John Senior,
Don Jr. And during the meeting, the group as a
whole decided to search every single farm and structure in
the community to just squash any possible rumor. So if
there is a murderer, we'll find him. If it's not
our community, we can finally tell all these people stopping by,
(13:44):
it's not one of us. Looks elsewhere, just make sure
that the culprit wasn't any one of them. And depending
on what source you look at, anywhere from a couple
of days to a couple of weeks after this decision,
the entire Bender family just up and vanished, and according
to McCormick's article, a neighbor passed by the farm noticed
they were gone, but they had just really disappeared into
(14:08):
the wind. They left all their livestock. They're unattended, without
food and water, and in pretty bad shape that they
hadn't made any preparations. They're just gone. And the poor
treatment of those animals really riled up a lot of locals.
But some suspected that something even more serious was going
on here. Why has nobody seen them since we have
this meeting. Why did they just suddenly up and leave?
(14:30):
So O s Age Township trustee Leroy Dick went to
check out the situation. He went over to their place
and on May five, seventy three, he broke into the
Bender cabin, broke the lock off their door, and went
into the cellar. While in there, he noticed that there
was this terrible smell, basically the odor of death. A
weird trap door also that led to the kitchen, and
(14:53):
the seller had some bloodstains around it. So Dick came
back the next day with a full on search party.
I think it is initially about fifty people or so,
and then it grew and they had shovels and plows
and stuff and tow and they didn't find any bodies
in the house. I think they tried to check under
the cellar floor, but they did find a couple of
other weird things, like three sledge hammers and an eight
(15:16):
day clock that concealed a knife. And Ed York, who
had been searching for his brother, is said to have
found a pair of eyeglasses in the house that matched
his brother's glasses. So after the search of the house
didn't turn up anything except these sledge hammers and these
other items, they started to search the rest of the
property and came up empty until Ed noticed the mounded
(15:37):
dirt in the orchard and they realized that this must
be graves and the first one that they dug up
revealed the body of Dr York, Ed's brother, and the
body was decomposing badly, but he could still make out
the faith once they cleaned it off. The exact number
of the bodies found in the property varies depending on
(15:57):
what source you look at, but it's generally said to
be anywhere from nine to twelve different people. And the
people that Dr Yorke had been searching for, which was longer,
and his daughter they were buried in the spot also.
But the most horrifying part, at least to me, was
that this little girl, who was said to be five
to eight years old. They thought that she had been
buried alive because she didn't have wounds that she didn't
(16:21):
have the same wounds that the other victims had had,
and she appeared to have been crushed under the weight
of her dad's dead body, so she was just kind
of thrown in there and the body was sort of
thrown on top of her, and that was the way
that she passed away. Some other unidentified this dismembered body
parts were found in the area, as well as the
other bodies of several men, and they were believed to
(16:44):
be victims of the same killers. And of course those
suspected killers were the Benders, because their bodies weren't found
on the property anywhere, and they had obviously left in
such a hurry. So it's unclear how many people they
killed there in that two year span, but some estimates
range over money. So most of the victims who were found,
besides the little girl de Lana mentioned, appeared to have
(17:05):
been killed in the very same way, and that's probably
why most sources do agree that the Benders had this
same murderous strategy. And as with a lot of other
serial killer stories that we've looked at or discussed in
the past, the motivation here appears to have been money,
but according to Lee, the Benders in general were very
careful to target non locals, and some sources even suggest
(17:29):
that's why they placed their cabin where it was in
the first place, because they knew that they have a
lot of travelers passing through stopping in at their inn,
and because there wasn't really another option too. Most sources
also credit Kate Bender as the brains behind the operation.
She chatted the travelers, maybe flirt with them, and trying
(17:50):
to determine who was well healed enough to be worth killing.
We mentioned that curtain that divided the room in their cabin.
The prisoner would typically be seated with his back to
it at the table in the kitchen. Ma would cook
up some food while Kate did the talking kind of
entertain their guests. Leaning back against the curtain as a
(18:10):
guest often would would create sort of an outline of
the visitor's head, and this was the perfect target, apparently
for paw Bender to hit the person with a sledgehammer,
which is how the initial blow and probably often the
fatal blow, was dealt. From there, they would steal the
traveler's money, partially strip them down, and especially if it
(18:31):
were day lad outside or if they were suspecting that
another traveler might be showing up soon. They would dump
the victim into the cellar very quickly through that trapdoor
in the kitchen that we had mentioned. The final step
of these trademark kills was splitting the victim's throat, which
was an act that Lee and other sources say it
was typically performed by Kate, although I'm not really sure
(18:52):
how they know that. I have to be honest, you know,
how they knew it was Kate. Yeah, I'm not sure
how they know that for sure, but a lot of
sources say that it probably was her that did the
throat slitting. In the night though when no one was around,
they would take the bodies out and bury them in
the orchard. And some tend to question whether or not
money was always the motivator for them, because, according to McCormick,
(19:14):
some estimates put the money they made off of the
victims at about five thousand dollars, but some of their
victims didn't seem to have much more than pocket change
on them when they were killed. And I mean there's
always a chance that they didn't know. Maybe they killed
them and then found out, Oh, this guy really doesn't
have any money, but they're killed today for five dollars,
So that's true. But McCormick also suggests that this could
have simply have been bloodlust, so that might have been
(19:37):
part of it, and we should mention that part of
the reason that York situation was different. I mean, they
had been caught at all. They kind of stuck to
this we're only attacking lonely travelers thing, but they didn't realize,
or at least some set sources suggest that they didn't
realize that York was from nearby, and the family follow
(19:59):
up and ya out what happened, and his brother turned
out to be very tenacious and searching for him, and
they probably weren't expecting that. So after the bodies were found,
there was this kind of madness that commenced in which
everybody was pointing fingers trying to found somebody who was
around to blame because the Benders, of course, we're just
out of town. McCormick actually compares it to the Salem
(20:21):
witch trials, and a neighbor of the Benders named Brockman,
who was also German, was suspected of knowing something about
their activities or their whereabouts. He was hanged and revived
several times as people tried to get info out of him,
apparently though he had nothing to tell after this torture treatment. Yeah,
it's kind of terrible. They would just they strung him
(20:42):
up and they would just hang him every time they
were trying to get information out of them, and then
sort of let him down. He would be unconscious a
couple of times. Um, really brutal. But the house, interestingly
was also basically looted after this. The story was all
over the papers, and thousands of people reportedly came to
take what McCormick calls quote maccab souvenirs from the property. Yeah,
(21:07):
to each his own in the souvenir department, I guess.
But he notes that on June seventy three, a Kansas
paper called The Headlight ran a report that said, quote,
the whole of the house, accepting the heavy framing timbers
on the Bender farm, and even the few trees have
been carried away by the relic hunters. And then the
newspaper later addressed the family's escape by saying, quote, the
(21:29):
murders themselves are probably in the middle of China. By
this time, and we'll never be heard from. Well, that's
the real mystery of this story because to this day,
no one knows what happened to the benders. Their wagon
was found abandoned, they were sited getting on a train.
Some people say that they split up. Mom and Paul
went one way, Kate and John Jr. Went another. For
(21:51):
years afterwards, as you could imagine, there were sighting, there
were arrests, even a promising one in Michigan in eighteen
eighty nine, but nothing ever stuck, nothing was ever proven.
Nobody knew what had happened to the vendors. There's even
a legend that they were all murdered by a vigilante
group from the o s Age Township area who killed them,
(22:12):
took their money, and never spoke of it again, basically
like they had gone out right after they discovered the bodies,
managed to find him kill them, and just sort of
kept it to themselves. But there's no proof of this either.
So the whole thing, like you said, is still a mystery.
But present day Cherry Vale Museum still displays some of
the memorabilia that was found, some of the stuff that
(22:36):
didn't get taken away. Um, yeah, I think from that
initial search, some of the things were preserved, so you
can still kind of go and check this out, and
that they have the three I think they have the
sledge hammers, and maybe the eight day clock and the knife. Yeah,
the three sledge hammers. Well, I guess if you do
that much of brisk business, it is um. It's interesting though,
(23:00):
even with three sledge hammers, their approach was so succinct.
It's so well defined in a way compared to some
of the other serial killers we've covered, Like we covered
the H. H. Holmes story and on the roof or
gass them in special rooms. He was very elaborate in
his strategies. Holmes was, and I think they had a formula. Yeah,
(23:23):
so having three sledgehammers maybe isn't so complex when it
comes to this sort of thing. But it's also interesting
to see the similarities between those stories and just how
people react in these situations, you know, having a bad feeling,
feeling a place's eerie. And we finally got one though,
who acted on his bad feeling. We did, I mean,
(23:44):
there was one in the home story to at least
there was the relative of one of the wives who
sort of got out of a bad situation and ended
up not a victims didn't want to take the roof tour.
Occasionally people do follow their instinct, which is a good thing.
But people love these gruesome stories, Sarah. They do. We
are always getting suggestions from you guys for serial killers
(24:06):
and and other murderers, and we even got a book
from one of you. We did. We got the Saga
of the Bloody Benders, uh, and it is a graphic
novel by Rick Geary based on the Bloody Benders story.
And we got that a while back actually from listener Steve.
And I have to apologize to Steve that we've only
done the story now because I think he probably sent
(24:27):
it after we did Bell Gunnis or one of the
other serial killers, and we try to put a little
gap between them. As much as you guys love these
scary stories, sometimes we have two space amount. There's a
long incubation period for certain podcast topics to lists that
have been building for years and years now. Very true.
But if you have any other suggestions for us, of course,
we're always open to any kind of story, no matter
(24:51):
how creepy or macaw that might be, and you can
write us those suggestions at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook, and we're on Twitter and industry
and if you want to learn a little bit more
about people like the vendors, we do have an article
called how serial Killers Work. You can search for that
on our homepage at www. Dot how stuff works dot
(25:12):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. Time to
Blaine and Chocolate Boarding, and today's story starts with a
mystery that began to unravel in Labette County, Kansas, in
(00:21):
the spring of eighteen seventy three. Colonel ed Yorke was
searching for his brother, Dr William Yorke, who had vanished
without a trace in early March of that year. So
when he went missing, according to an article by David
McCormick in Wild West, the doctor had been looking into
another disappearance, that of a man named George Lnker and
(00:41):
his young daughter. Dr Yorke had apparently sold Lonker a
wagon and a team that had later turned up inexplicably deserted.
Neither longer nor his daughter were anywhere to be found
near this team and wagon. So it was while he
was on his way back from i ding this team
and wagon in Fort Scott, can This that Dr York disappeared.
(01:02):
Colonel ed York did have a little bit to go
off of, though. While he was looking for his brother,
people had supposedly spotted Dr Yorke on his way home
riding along this road. The Hostage Mission Road, and it
was somewhere along that road, which connected Fort Scott with Independence, Kansas,
that his trail ended, and somewhere, in fact, right around
(01:24):
the home slash Inn that was run by a family
called Benders, and interestingly several others. Anywhere from ten to
twenty people had mysteriously disappeared in this general vicinity near
the township of Cherry Vale during the years spanning from
eighteen seventy one to eighteen seventy three, and in many cases,
family members and other interested parties had traced the missing
(01:47):
person's progress from town to town, and then, as with
the case of York, their trails just vanished right around
this spot. So it was clear that something was going
on here in northwest Labette County and residents of the
area we're pretty freaked out about it, understand as you
would be. So in this episode we're going to find
out what was the deal with all of these missing people,
(02:08):
why were they disappearing, and what did that family that
we mentioned, the Benders, have to do with it all.
So to answer these questions, we're going to have to
rewind a little bit to about eighteen seventy when the
Vendor family first showed up in this area. The exact
circumstances of their arrival are somewhat up for debate, as
a few points in this story are according to Mike
(02:30):
Mayo's book American Murder, they arrived in Cherry Vale and
the company of a small cult of spiritualists, and if
you remember from our episode on The Fox Sisters last year,
spiritualists basically believe that people who have physically died continue
to exist in kind of a spirit world, and that
they can continue to communicate with us in the material world,
(02:50):
usually through special people called mediums. So the rest of
the spiritualist cult moved on, but the Benders stayed where
they were. The area held some attraction at this time
for lots of people, white settlers at least, who wanted
to put down roots. The O Sage Indians who had
once lived in the area had been relocated to Indian
Territory in present day Oklahoma after the Civil War, and
(03:14):
home stutterers were granted parcels of land, So when the
vendors arrived, they claimed about a hundred and sixty acres
of land right around the Sage Mission Road also known
as the Sage Trail, which connected as we mentioned, Fort
Scott to independence and was about five miles from cherry Vale,
which was the nearest town. So they built a small
house there, basically a cabin, right near the road, which
(03:37):
was very well traveled, and understandably they got into the
business of tourism. I guess you would say. They divided
their home into two separate areas by hanging a piece
of canvas as a partition, and on one side of
that partition the family lived. On the other side, which
was the front of the house, they ran an in
(03:58):
slash grocery store, and it unclear whether their establishment had
a specific name, but they did put a fine outside
that the grocery, So if you were traveling along with
heavily traveled trail, you would know the Benders was a
place where you could refuel and maybe even spend the night.
There were four members of the Bender family, Paul, who
(04:18):
was also John Sr. Ma, John Jr. And Kate, and
they were said to be German immigrants. So we need
to tell you a little bit about all these characters
because it's sort of essential to getting an idea of
what's going on in the story and their interesting characters
and character study. So John Bender Senior was about sixty
years old, and by all accounts, he was a pretty surly,
(04:41):
unpleasant guy. Mob Bender was said to be somewhere in
the same age range as Paul, but there's still some
debate over the exact number. Generally people think she was
between fifty and sixty years old. She was also heavy
set and bad natured and unfriendly. But maybe she was
unfriendly because nobody really knew her name. I mean, that's
one of the things. That she was just mom. That
(05:03):
was one of the interesting things about the stories that
there's never a name in any of the sources listed
for her. She's just a mom. So John Junior, however,
we do know his name, sort of at least. He
was about twenty five years old, and he came off
somewhat nicer than both Mom and Pop. But he apparently
had a nervous giggle that went along with just about
(05:23):
everything that came out of his mouth, So this made
people believe that he was somewhat simple minded and probably
adds to the creepy reputation around town too. Um. In general,
these three vendors made neighbors and anyone in the general
community who encountered them not really want to come around
and visit too much, not go get your growthries at
(05:44):
the vendor's place. But Kate was a different story. She
was a couple of years younger than John Jr. And
by most accounts, she was very attractive. She was an
auburn haired beauty, and she was also outgoing and talkative.
So she also had a five career that was separate
from her family's grocery store. In business, she margreted herself
(06:04):
as a healer and a spiritualist and called herself professor
Miss Kate Bender, and she would travel around to different
towns leading public seances and healings and spiritual performances, all
according to Mayo's book, and she was quite a hit.
She was. She also offered private sciences back at the
Bender home so people could come there and visit her too,
(06:27):
and that if he didn't go for groceries, maybe you
would go first. Yeah, maybe you don't want groceries, but
if you've seen her act and you think she's pretty cool,
maybe you want to come get a private session from
Kate at her house. So it was an odd family,
even if you took it at face value as we've
described it here. But it's also worth noting that a
lot of people believed that they weren't even all related
(06:47):
to each other. There were different sources give us sort
of different scenarios on this, but some say that John
Junior and Kate were actually a couple rather than brother
and sister. Others say that they were half brother and sister,
and that John was actually Ma's son from a previous marriage,
and that his last name wasn't Bender at all, but
it was actually GiB Heart. Still other sources say that
(07:08):
all four of these people might have been completely unrelated
and not mom and Pop at all. Nope, not a bit,
Maybe just a clan that came together. Regardless, the foursom
lived as a family in these early years of the
eighteen seventies, and in general, people who lived relatively nearby
and knew them, or at least knew of them, really
didn't want anything to do with them at all, because,
(07:29):
as we mentioned, they weren't very friendly. They weren't for
the most part, dinner and asked how they were actually related. No,
they weren't going to hang out and get to know
their past, and so the Benders in their place just
generally creeped a lot of people out too. I mean
I think that probably their personalities had something to do
with it, but people also mentioned just kind of having
a bad feeling well, So because of that area of
(07:51):
feeling about their business, they really had to rely on
people who were just traveling along the stage trail, people
who didn't know their reputation, and and they were pretty
far from any big town, and even Cherry Vale wasn't
exactly close. So according to Wayne Lee's book Deadly Days
in Kansas, they really did attract a lot of visitors
this way, and people who lived in the area though,
(08:13):
probably didn't have much of an idea about what was
going on with the business. So despite this this bustling
business of visitors and travelers, people who lived in the
area probably didn't have much of an idea about what
was going on with the business, how it was running.
Lee related just a few instances in which people might
have gotten an inkling that weird stuff was going on
(08:35):
at the Bender place, but no real strong suspicion. Yeah.
As an example, Lee brings up a woman who was
kind of thought of as the local crazy lady, and
her name was Hessler. She was a spiritualism devotee and
for that reason pretty drawn to Kate Bender, as you
might imagine. According to Lee, one night, Hessler went over
to the Bender's place wanting a seance, but Kate just
(08:56):
wasn't in the mood to do one. But still, Hessler
said things went okay until about sundown, when the family
started all of a sudden acting very odd. They started
drawing pictures of men on the walls and threw knives
at those pictures. Then Kate told Hessler that the spirits
were moving her to kill. She went towards Hessler with
(09:17):
this weird, scary look on her face and said that
the spirits were moving her to quote, kill you, kill
you now, at which point Hessler ran home as fast
as she could. She just got out of there. So
on the face, that seems like it would be a
huge morning sign and a threat to murder or something,
and it would have been caused for concern when Hessler
(09:40):
related this story to other people, especially since at this
point people were already aware of some unexplained disappearances in
the area. But since we already noted that Hessler was
considered a local eccentric, people just wrote it off. She
must have imagined this or something weird went down between
two sets of weird people. Another story, though, involved a
(10:01):
priest who was traveling along the A Stage Trail and
stopping in at the Benders on a stormy night. He
also ended up finding an excuse to high tail it
out of the Bender's place, out of their house, but
his reasons for doing so had more to do with
just a general bad feeling about the situation. He's one
of those people we talked about in the H. H.
Holmes episode, or rather the opposite of those people. Yeah,
(10:25):
follow your gut, right, he followed it. So even though
people who were living around this area were generally alarmed
about the people who were vanishing around there between eighteen
seventy one and eighteen seventy three, there wasn't really any
particular suspicion thrown on the Benders at this time. Basically
everyone in the O Sage township was under suspicion cozy
little town right until Dr York's case came up, the
(10:48):
one that we mentioned in the intro. He disappeared somewhere
along the O. Sage Trail on March nine, eighteen seventy three,
and his brother ed and his subsequent search in late
March early April of that year, trace Dr York's movements
along the road, and according to McCormick's article, met several
people along the way who said that they had seen
his brother. They had seen the doctor on his trip
(11:11):
back toward his own home. At least one person recalled
that Dr York had said that he planned to stop
at the benders In on the way home too. So
one thing to note here, it's kind of up for
debate why Dr Yorke would have stopped at the vendors
in because he did live relatively nearby. McCormick suggests a
couple possibilities. One was that he was just hungry wanted
to stop at that grocery store. But the other possibility,
(11:34):
and McCormick thinks that this is the more likely one,
maybe while looking into the longer disappearance, he started to
get suspicious of the Benders. Maybe he even confronted them
about those suspicions, and that's why he was there. At
any rate, Ed York decided to stop in at the
benders and inquire about his brother. Makes sense, right, so
(11:55):
the last place that was going to go. Accounts differ
though on what exact lucky they told him when he
got there, but Kate is said to have been really
friendly in general and offered to contact the spirit world
to try to help him figure out what happened to
his brother. Nice off for there, But some sources also
say that the Benders, perhaps specifically John Junr, suggested that
(12:16):
Dr Yorke might have been attacked on the road by
Indians or outlaws, like maybe even Jesse James. There he
is again. Ultimately, it seems that they denied any possibility
that Dr Yorke had come to their end for any
length of time. You know, he didn't stay there, He
didn't have a meal there, although he suggests that Kate
told Ed York that his brother had watered his horse
(12:37):
there and moved on. So we did. We did see him,
but he didn't stick around, and that's probably why you know,
we've been mentioned to you. But he wasn't here for
for any length of time. So Ed didn't make that
much progress at the Benders, but news of his search
and his this latest disappearance seemed to be the final
straw for the surrounding a stage community who was wondering
(13:00):
who is the murderer among us? And as we mentioned,
pretty much everyone in the township was under suspicion at
this point, and not only were they scared, not only
were they concerned, they probably didn't like people from other
areas looking at them like possible suspects. So finally, the
locals decided to gather for a meeting at the Harmony
Grove Schoolhouse, and according to Mayo, there were about seventy
(13:23):
five people in attendance, including the Bender men John Senior,
Don Jr. And during the meeting, the group as a
whole decided to search every single farm and structure in
the community to just squash any possible rumor. So if
there is a murderer, we'll find him. If it's not
our community, we can finally tell all these people stopping by,
(13:44):
it's not one of us. Looks elsewhere, just make sure
that the culprit wasn't any one of them. And depending
on what source you look at, anywhere from a couple
of days to a couple of weeks after this decision,
the entire Bender family just up and vanished, and according
to McCormick's article, a neighbor passed by the farm noticed
they were gone, but they had just really disappeared into
(14:08):
the wind. They left all their livestock. They're unattended, without
food and water, and in pretty bad shape that they
hadn't made any preparations. They're just gone. And the poor
treatment of those animals really riled up a lot of locals.
But some suspected that something even more serious was going
on here. Why has nobody seen them since we have
this meeting. Why did they just suddenly up and leave?
(14:30):
So O s Age Township trustee Leroy Dick went to
check out the situation. He went over to their place
and on May five, seventy three, he broke into the
Bender cabin, broke the lock off their door, and went
into the cellar. While in there, he noticed that there
was this terrible smell, basically the odor of death. A
weird trap door also that led to the kitchen, and
(14:53):
the seller had some bloodstains around it. So Dick came
back the next day with a full on search party.
I think it is initially about fifty people or so,
and then it grew and they had shovels and plows
and stuff and tow and they didn't find any bodies
in the house. I think they tried to check under
the cellar floor, but they did find a couple of
other weird things, like three sledge hammers and an eight
(15:16):
day clock that concealed a knife. And Ed York, who
had been searching for his brother, is said to have
found a pair of eyeglasses in the house that matched
his brother's glasses. So after the search of the house
didn't turn up anything except these sledge hammers and these
other items, they started to search the rest of the
property and came up empty until Ed noticed the mounded
(15:37):
dirt in the orchard and they realized that this must
be graves and the first one that they dug up
revealed the body of Dr York, Ed's brother, and the
body was decomposing badly, but he could still make out
the faith once they cleaned it off. The exact number
of the bodies found in the property varies depending on
(15:57):
what source you look at, but it's generally said to
be anywhere from nine to twelve different people. And the
people that Dr Yorke had been searching for, which was longer,
and his daughter they were buried in the spot also.
But the most horrifying part, at least to me, was
that this little girl, who was said to be five
to eight years old. They thought that she had been
buried alive because she didn't have wounds that she didn't
(16:21):
have the same wounds that the other victims had had,
and she appeared to have been crushed under the weight
of her dad's dead body, so she was just kind
of thrown in there and the body was sort of
thrown on top of her, and that was the way
that she passed away. Some other unidentified this dismembered body
parts were found in the area, as well as the
other bodies of several men, and they were believed to
(16:44):
be victims of the same killers. And of course those
suspected killers were the Benders, because their bodies weren't found
on the property anywhere, and they had obviously left in
such a hurry. So it's unclear how many people they
killed there in that two year span, but some estimates
range over money. So most of the victims who were found,
besides the little girl de Lana mentioned, appeared to have
(17:05):
been killed in the very same way, and that's probably
why most sources do agree that the Benders had this
same murderous strategy. And as with a lot of other
serial killer stories that we've looked at or discussed in
the past, the motivation here appears to have been money,
but according to Lee, the Benders in general were very
careful to target non locals, and some sources even suggest
(17:29):
that's why they placed their cabin where it was in
the first place, because they knew that they have a
lot of travelers passing through stopping in at their inn,
and because there wasn't really another option too. Most sources
also credit Kate Bender as the brains behind the operation.
She chatted the travelers, maybe flirt with them, and trying
(17:50):
to determine who was well healed enough to be worth killing.
We mentioned that curtain that divided the room in their cabin.
The prisoner would typically be seated with his back to
it at the table in the kitchen. Ma would cook
up some food while Kate did the talking kind of
entertain their guests. Leaning back against the curtain as a
(18:10):
guest often would would create sort of an outline of
the visitor's head, and this was the perfect target, apparently
for paw Bender to hit the person with a sledgehammer,
which is how the initial blow and probably often the
fatal blow, was dealt. From there, they would steal the
traveler's money, partially strip them down, and especially if it
(18:31):
were day lad outside or if they were suspecting that
another traveler might be showing up soon. They would dump
the victim into the cellar very quickly through that trapdoor
in the kitchen that we had mentioned. The final step
of these trademark kills was splitting the victim's throat, which
was an act that Lee and other sources say it
was typically performed by Kate, although I'm not really sure
(18:52):
how they know that. I have to be honest, you know,
how they knew it was Kate. Yeah, I'm not sure
how they know that for sure, but a lot of
sources say that it probably was her that did the
throat slitting. In the night though when no one was around,
they would take the bodies out and bury them in
the orchard. And some tend to question whether or not
money was always the motivator for them, because, according to McCormick,
(19:14):
some estimates put the money they made off of the
victims at about five thousand dollars, but some of their
victims didn't seem to have much more than pocket change
on them when they were killed. And I mean there's
always a chance that they didn't know. Maybe they killed
them and then found out, Oh, this guy really doesn't
have any money, but they're killed today for five dollars,
So that's true. But McCormick also suggests that this could
have simply have been bloodlust, so that might have been
(19:37):
part of it, and we should mention that part of
the reason that York situation was different. I mean, they
had been caught at all. They kind of stuck to
this we're only attacking lonely travelers thing, but they didn't realize,
or at least some set sources suggest that they didn't
realize that York was from nearby, and the family follow
(19:59):
up and ya out what happened, and his brother turned
out to be very tenacious and searching for him, and
they probably weren't expecting that. So after the bodies were found,
there was this kind of madness that commenced in which
everybody was pointing fingers trying to found somebody who was
around to blame because the Benders, of course, we're just
out of town. McCormick actually compares it to the Salem
(20:21):
witch trials, and a neighbor of the Benders named Brockman,
who was also German, was suspected of knowing something about
their activities or their whereabouts. He was hanged and revived
several times as people tried to get info out of him,
apparently though he had nothing to tell after this torture treatment. Yeah,
it's kind of terrible. They would just they strung him
(20:42):
up and they would just hang him every time they
were trying to get information out of them, and then
sort of let him down. He would be unconscious a
couple of times. Um, really brutal. But the house, interestingly
was also basically looted after this. The story was all
over the papers, and thousands of people reportedly came to
take what McCormick calls quote maccab souvenirs from the property. Yeah,
(21:07):
to each his own in the souvenir department, I guess.
But he notes that on June seventy three, a Kansas
paper called The Headlight ran a report that said, quote,
the whole of the house, accepting the heavy framing timbers
on the Bender farm, and even the few trees have
been carried away by the relic hunters. And then the
newspaper later addressed the family's escape by saying, quote, the
(21:29):
murders themselves are probably in the middle of China. By
this time, and we'll never be heard from. Well, that's
the real mystery of this story because to this day,
no one knows what happened to the benders. Their wagon
was found abandoned, they were sited getting on a train.
Some people say that they split up. Mom and Paul
went one way, Kate and John Jr. Went another. For
(21:51):
years afterwards, as you could imagine, there were sighting, there
were arrests, even a promising one in Michigan in eighteen
eighty nine, but nothing ever stuck, nothing was ever proven.
Nobody knew what had happened to the vendors. There's even
a legend that they were all murdered by a vigilante
group from the o s Age Township area who killed them,
(22:12):
took their money, and never spoke of it again, basically
like they had gone out right after they discovered the bodies,
managed to find him kill them, and just sort of
kept it to themselves. But there's no proof of this either.
So the whole thing, like you said, is still a mystery.
But present day Cherry Vale Museum still displays some of
the memorabilia that was found, some of the stuff that
(22:36):
didn't get taken away. Um, yeah, I think from that
initial search, some of the things were preserved, so you
can still kind of go and check this out, and
that they have the three I think they have the
sledge hammers, and maybe the eight day clock and the knife. Yeah,
the three sledge hammers. Well, I guess if you do
that much of brisk business, it is um. It's interesting though,
(23:00):
even with three sledge hammers, their approach was so succinct.
It's so well defined in a way compared to some
of the other serial killers we've covered, Like we covered
the H. H. Holmes story and on the roof or
gass them in special rooms. He was very elaborate in
his strategies. Holmes was, and I think they had a formula. Yeah,
(23:23):
so having three sledgehammers maybe isn't so complex when it
comes to this sort of thing. But it's also interesting
to see the similarities between those stories and just how
people react in these situations, you know, having a bad feeling,
feeling a place's eerie. And we finally got one though,
who acted on his bad feeling. We did, I mean,
(23:44):
there was one in the home story to at least
there was the relative of one of the wives who
sort of got out of a bad situation and ended
up not a victims didn't want to take the roof tour.
Occasionally people do follow their instinct, which is a good thing.
But people love these gruesome stories, Sarah. They do. We
are always getting suggestions from you guys for serial killers
(24:06):
and and other murderers, and we even got a book
from one of you. We did. We got the Saga
of the Bloody Benders, uh, and it is a graphic
novel by Rick Geary based on the Bloody Benders story.
And we got that a while back actually from listener Steve.
And I have to apologize to Steve that we've only
done the story now because I think he probably sent
(24:27):
it after we did Bell Gunnis or one of the
other serial killers, and we try to put a little
gap between them. As much as you guys love these
scary stories, sometimes we have two space amount. There's a
long incubation period for certain podcast topics to lists that
have been building for years and years now. Very true.
But if you have any other suggestions for us, of course,
we're always open to any kind of story, no matter
(24:51):
how creepy or macaw that might be, and you can
write us those suggestions at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook, and we're on Twitter and industry
and if you want to learn a little bit more
about people like the vendors, we do have an article
called how serial Killers Work. You can search for that
on our homepage at www. Dot how stuff works dot
(25:12):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com.
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