October 9, 2025 • 29 mins
Dark forces gather as the Benders’ presence grows more controversial. The couple’s jungle fortress stands apart from everything around it - lavish, secretive and utterly out of place. Neighbours speculate. Resentments stir. Mystics speak of a curse. Behind the gates, the atmosphere shifts as the couple’s physical and mental health start to decline.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Virginia, March nineteen ninety eight. This is where John and
Ann's story together begins, but it's also the setting for
a cruel twist of fate that would alter the course
of their lives and set in motion increasingly bizarre behavior,
a slow retreat from reality. They met for the first
(00:42):
time at a drinks party at John's house on his
one hundred acre Virginian farm. She was in her late
twenties and he was in his mid thirties. It's a
beautiful home, Colonial style, with a porch, large shutters, and
manicured lawns in walks. Anne and pattern as she was then.
(01:04):
She was the daughter of an international banker, born in
Rio de Janeiro, where her father was working at the time.
She lived a life of privilege in Lisbon, London, and
New York. She's petite, elegant. He'd worked briefly as a
male model. The attraction is instant. Author Carol Vaughan, who
(01:27):
lives in Costa Rica and wrote a book about the benders.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
They locked eyes across the punch mal and they moved
in to help themselves do some punch, probably non alcoholic
because neither of them drank.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
It was love at first sight for both of them,
and thought John was brilliant and phenomenally handsome. They just
clicked for her. He symbolized a future with a capital F,
she'd say later. John's father Paul saw it as a
meeting of minds too.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
She was obviously very smart, and she was really dressed
and the stuff he was doing.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Anne was a recent Fine Arce grad who'd fled New
York to start again in Virginia. She was done with
city life and wanted to live in a log cabin.
John had a brilliant mind and was also searching for
an inner peace away from people. They seemed to have
so much in common. They both loved animals, nature, and
were lonely, but there was something more they shared.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
John, in reaching down to phil his cup or her cup,
noticed that her hand trembled quite a bit, and he said, oh,
are you okay? And she said, well, I suffer from
bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
We've pieced together this meeting from a number of sources. Apparently,
Anne told John the trembling was caused by her medication.
She said she'd just been diagnosed. Then, it seems John
started talking about mental illness in his family and about
his own experiences of depression. The pair began a wind romance.
(03:01):
Two weeks later, she moved in with him. Soon after,
he proposed, Anne and John married within the year.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
We would laugh because we were supposed to never get married.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
It was a shock to his friends, like Steve Reid.
He thought the bachelor would never get married.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
So then when I heard he got married, I said,
somebody want him over.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
It was written and stone right then and there they
were faded to be together, faded.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
From that day. Anne said there was never any doubt
that they were meant to meet, But fate had other
plans for the couple too, a cruel, unexpected twist of
fate with devastating consequences. It would change them both profoundly
and destroy their dreams, and culminate in a violent death
(03:56):
for which one of them would stand trial from Exactly
Right media and iHeart podcasts produced by Blanchard House. This
is Helen Heaven, I'm Becky Milligan. Chapter two, Trouble in
(04:40):
the Valley. Two years after first meeting in Virginia, John
and Anne moved to Costa Rica With a dream. They
built their enormous house Borachueyanne in Dear Monte valley. It
was four stories with no walls, set in five thousand acres.
(05:03):
The land had apparently cost them ten million dollars, a
lot of money, but not to them. Remember they'd derived
in Costa Rica with a reported six hundred million dollars.
All sorts of stories began to circulate they were laundering
money for the drug cartels in Mexico or involved directly
with them, that precious gems were being smuggled into the house.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
In general, if you live in Costa Rica and you
don't want to be preyed upon and you have money,
they did kind of the opposite of what you're supposed
to do. You'm start to live simply. People come there
to live with nature, to live simply. You know, you
live your life. You don't build grand palaces calling any
attention to yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Nicole Kulvick, who lived near.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
The Venders, I would go on walks through out Lorita
and going up the mountain. There was a little point
where you could stop and look out over the valley
and you could see their house. You know, their powers
in the distance that it, you know, kind of stuck
out like a store of mom People would just say, yes,
(06:09):
they've got a lot of money. You know, they're very private.
They built a little sanctuary over there where they're you know,
for the animals, and there were you know, nature conservationists.
This is a talk in the valley. You know they
did that. They were very wealthy, and you could tell
by looking at their house, you know, how different it
(06:30):
was from everyone that lived there.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Their lavish development benefited the valley with jobs, electricity, and
running water, but their obvious wealth and their intense need
for privacy was not going down well with some of
the old timers.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
I'm Jesse Blena was born in a little town called Westmoreland, Kansas.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Jesse is an engineer and inventor, and his wife, Matty,
is a clairvoyant from Costa Rica. Their land backs on
to Bori Cayenne. From their property, they watched the benders
escalating isolation and witnessed their strange behavior.
Speaker 6 (07:06):
John never left the property except in the helicopter. He
never traveled by road. When they were building the house,
he always had a guard, a machine gun guard with
him and four bodyguards at fifty one hundred yards out
on all corners. It's like he toy lived in fear.
One of the workers evidently I guess went with him
to Columbia and they said somebody flew over in an
(07:28):
airplane and shot him in the arm or something like that.
Speaker 7 (07:32):
Who was that.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Worker, I don't know, Okay, so we weren't actually able
to verify that. Unlike her husband and did venture out
of the house.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
She would leave occasionally, even on the bus to San Jose.
One time in the post office, she was trying to
hide her appearance, so it was very mysterious. One of
the workers said that he had to take Anne to
Sandy Cedrew and put her on the bus and he
said she was dressed up like an air He may
have just meant very very disguised, or maybe she was
(08:06):
physically dressed up like an Arab for nobody to see her.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Later, Jesse and Matty would be bystanders to the terrible
events which would unfold in the Bender's home. Jesse and
(08:30):
Matty's place is down a grassy track and really difficult
to find unless you spot the mailbox at the side
of the road with their names on it. It's a
nadylic plot. They have a wooden house. Jesse has added
to it over the years, but it isn't large or
very modern. They live a very simple life. It's surrounded
(08:51):
by fruit and nut trees, taller coconut palms. Sway above us,
and beyond is rainforest. Oh aren't they beautiful? They're so
delicate and lovely. Beautiful orchids, aren't they? The sound of
the birds here? Pale, pink, delicate orchids grow tall along
(09:13):
the path, And if you stop and listen, tiny birds
flutter around and seem to talk to each other, chirping
back and forth. There's a pond too, with freshwater prawns.
It's covered in lily pads.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
I've always loved nature, and when I heard about Costa Rica,
I wanted to see the tropics. So I end up
coming to Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
It was in the nineteen seventies that Jesse first visited
the country. He kept returning until he took the plunge
and stayed for good. He was the first foreigner to
settle in the valley thirty nine years ago. Now, and
since then a lot more have come to live there,
including the Benders. And with all those years he's clocked up,
he has this observation that all the new arrivals have
(09:58):
one thing in common.
Speaker 6 (10:00):
Reason were I always say we're escaping something. Some of
them were criminals too, all right, lots of foreign criminals
come to Costa Rica escaping. If you want to say justice.
In my case, I like to say it's escaping the cold.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And he bought a little land.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
Planeted it to exotic fruits where we have over two
hundred and twenty species of exotic fruits, which is probably
the best collection in Kostrica. And what kind of fruit
Durians feed you longan tearing the new cherry brunet cherries.
We have the paradise cream nuts. I have three different
species of those that taste like coconut with peanuts, tarap
(10:39):
that tastes like banana pudding with vanilla ice cream.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
When we visited Jesse, he showed us one of the
nut pods which hang from his trees as big as
tennis bulls.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
When they're ready, the lid falls off.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Then we have these nuts inside paradise cream nuts.
Speaker 8 (11:01):
This is delicious.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Living so close to the venders, Jesse quickly realized that
his new neighbors didn't want to have anything to do
with the local community. In fact, he hardly ever saw them.
What he did see were the guards who were under
strict instructions not to talk to anyone, but Jesse was
really curious, so just kept asking questions.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
They weren't even supposed to tell their wife anything, not
even where they were going, how much money they made.
They were supposed to be totally silent, and that was
that was the rules, total silence on everything.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
How did you know that? Did they tell you?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Well?
Speaker 6 (11:38):
Yeah, they specifically told me that. I'm basically I'm not
supposed to tell you this, you know, But like you know,
we had whatever this morning. We had to be at
the beach at five o'clock because John arrived in the
helicopter and then went out in the speedboat. And after
a while they came back and we don't know, we
don't know what, you know, what happened. They can't say.
I mean, we could imagine, but we don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
What do you imagine?
Speaker 6 (12:03):
Well, I personally thought he was probably somebody very big
in the drugs.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Jesse, remember, had been living there for years, and he
wasn't just driven by curiosity about his new neighbors, but
also a concern about the farmers who'd lived in the
valley for generations and sold up to the benders.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
One family that sold to him. They got hundreds of
thousands of dollars and within a few years it was
all gone, and you know, they'd broke up with their
family and they're much worse off now than before. They
just work hour with ages. They have basically nothing. I
think one has an old truck.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
That added to the local anger and resentment, which Anne
acknowledged in a later TV interview. She said that there
was a sense of who are these rich gringoes and
who the hell do they think they are? John's dad,
Paul Bender.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
He did not have the greatest relationships with all the
people around that place because what he was doing was
sometimes inconsistent. I think were some of the people around
wanted to do so he was not trying, I don't think,
to develop friendly relations with his neighbors there, except for
the animals.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Set apart in their big new house on the hill,
the Benders were not proving popular with the locals. But
some suggest there's another reason why the couple would never
find the happiness they were craving in the jungle, that
there were other forces at work.
Speaker 9 (13:38):
I believe that the valley it's a portal in itself.
You know, it's quite the energetic magnetic field, you know
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
We spoke to Jose, a Colombian American who runs Eco Maste,
which is described on its website as a healing sanctuary
blending shared ancestral wisdom and ecological education. It's in the valley,
not far from John and Anne. Jose believes the valley
has a peculiar force field which can be disrupted by
(14:13):
foreigners moving in. Like John and Anne bender.
Speaker 9 (14:17):
The energy that produces that little part of the valley,
it's quite amazing because you have clouds coming in from
the mountains, which then are meeting up clouds that are
coming in from the ocean, and then it creates this
very unique place where it's like superhumid and super dark.
(14:38):
So the message from the mountain was that the land
was very sick because there's a lot of people in
the area, and this happens all around the world where
they come in and they want to do things in
the land without even you know, meditating or consulting with
the land or get to know the land first. So
(15:00):
they said, yeah, if the land is sick, and this
is because of what had happened in the past, which
was a lot of our indigenous killings and indigenous artifacts
being taken from the earth. So this created an unbalance
for the land, and the land was hurt because of this,
you know, like it wasn't stick physically but energetically.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
We heard this a number of times. This area is
uniquely dark and energetically strange. In fact, its other name
is Las Toumbas the Tombs. It's an Indian graveyard and
this is where Borichayanne was built. Beautiful but with a
dark history. And it's this place, last tombas dear Monte Valley,
(15:48):
shrouded in mystery with echoes from the past, where our
movie star couple landed with seemingly limitless funds. Very little
was known about what went on behind the barbed wire
perimeter fence, but one man knows more than most. We
returned to Asvaldo Rojas and when on as Valdo Rojas
(16:12):
hired as their main head of staff, who we also
met in chapter one. Is clean cut, quietly spoken, and
has black rimmed glasses which look a bit too large
for his face. He's nervous. He doesn't normally talk about
his time working for the Benders, but agreed to speak
to us at first he's hesitant, his arms crossed, but
(16:37):
he begins to relax. From the start, John was not
an easy person to work for. It started with the
complicated and ambitious construction of the house.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Initially, the house was going to be all covered by glass,
but there was a technical problem with the glass and
these will break, so he just got rid of them.
This was a big problem for John. That's kind of
how we got to know him, because he just shouted
and screamed when the glass was shattered.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Over time, things got worse. There was trouble with the orchids,
which John loved.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
Taking care of them was part of his routine almost
every afternoon, and God forbid if something happened to any
of them. There were some orchids brought from the mountains
that needed un nest in order to grow, for which
he ordered special containers to be made. In fact, the
(17:38):
guards were supposed to guard him.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
John was fascinated by rare species. One unusually had to
be planted in an ant hill, the nutrients in the
soil helping it flourish, and that meant the ants needed
to be protected.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
But one night, an and either managed to get in
and ate all the ant that was a huge problem
for John. A guard even got fire over that.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
It wasn't just the orchids that triggered John's anger, but
also protecting the birds. The problem was that some of
the smaller houses on the property were made of glass.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
And will no birds can crash into the windows and die.
Enough animals and couldn't bear to see something that happened
to them. But he would get so angry that people
would afraid of him, so we had to run to
put courtons in those places.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
I remember one.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Time when our guard brought him a bird that had
crashed into one of the windows, and he was screaming
and shouting all over and I had to tell them,
next time you'll find a bird, just don't bring it
to him.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
So he could get angry sometimes.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Yeah, practically all the time.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Staff had to adapt in other ways too, take us
val there's cleaning.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
Time.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
We readily spoke to John. Everything was done through Anna.
We communicated with her through walkie talkies. We had to
ask for permission before going into the house, but we
wouldn't do everything on the same day as we arrived.
We waited until Anna said it was okay to come in.
(19:21):
We did the basics to keep the house clean and tidy.
Then the next day came over again to do other
clean activities because he didn't like outsiders inside the house
for too long.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And what was their routine each day?
Speaker 4 (19:39):
They got up early between five five six in the morning.
I arrived at seven and John was already in front
of the computer. Anna would prepare breakfast and he could
spend the rest of the day on the second floor
where he normally worked.
Speaker 8 (19:54):
On his computer.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Sometimes he went for a walk inside the property, but
it was not quite a In the afternoon, they will
drink some coffee that Anna will prepir. At three pm,
I will leave the property and after that I don't
know much.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
We know that both John and Anne had mental health issues,
but increasingly at the center of their lives were problems
with Anne's physical health. Back to Virginia, the place where
John and Anne first met in March nineteen ninety eight,
and it's probably here at some point that Anne was
(20:34):
bitten by a tick, a deer tick, which can be
as small as a poppy seed. So what you might ask,
but it would dramatically alter the course of their lives
because Anne was infected with a bacteria which causes limes disease.
The effects can be devastating if it's not spotted quickly
(20:54):
and treated, and it seems that Anne's condition wasn't diagnosed
earlier enough. There's a long list of symptoms fatigue, migraines,
memory loss, joint swelling, and pain to the point of
making walking difficult. It can infect your central nervous system too,
cause heart problems. The list goes on. Anne was only
(21:17):
in her thirties and was walking with a cane. A
few years later she would have to be carried around
by John. The illness transformed her. Remember this wasn't long
after they had arrived in Costa Rica.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
She took burnt out over time. Her physical and mental
health was in the cane. That beautiful, spectacular woman that
we met when SHARAIV just vanished.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
As Anne became weaker, John took her health into his
own hands. He turned to a natural resource, the jungle.
Speaker 8 (21:53):
There's a lot of medications, a lot on everything everywhere
in the trees around you. Through there right now, you'll
find aspiring.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
John Colvic told us about what he'd learned about the
jungle's natural kills.
Speaker 8 (22:08):
You can take a scrape of bark off the tree
and drop it in your tee. There's a little plant
that would grow right next to our farm. It tastes terrible.
It's the worst tasting thing you've ever had. If you
licked it, you would taste like if you put an
aspir in your tongue all the way to your toes.
And then when you have dysentery and you feel like hell,
(22:28):
when you feel like you're gonna die, you drink a
couple of pups of this in the morning, a couple
of cups in the evening. All of a sudden, it's
all gone. You know, the little you know, the little
grasses on the ground that you touch and their leaves close.
If you pull those out of the ground, wash the
roots off, and you have toothache. You can make a
tea with those, And then when you garble and rinch
with that, your toothache goes away. Go figure, right, do
(22:48):
don't understand how it works or why it works, but
it definitely does. And when you start looking into these
medicinal plants that are there and they're uses the people
that know how to use it, you get into the
pharmaceutical names, and then all of a sudden you find
out the pharmaceutical industry has been refining these things and
making them, and that's what we're buying off the shelves.
(23:10):
There's an analyst apply of flora and tlauna that you
can treat things with.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
John took that idea and really ran with it. He
started to concoct potions using the plants to help his
wife recover.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
I do know that she had a lot of medical problems. Yeah,
he got really involved in that.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
He told his dad Paul, about the discoveries he was making.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
He was really into that part of her life.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Jack Schwager, who visited with his son in the last episode,
remembers John working on finding a cure.
Speaker 7 (23:42):
He dyings are really smart eye. So at the time,
one thing he was doing, I remember, he was doing
research to try to find you to come up with
some cure or to figure out what was wrong with
Anne and stuff like that. And he took care of
her and so he was heir of devoted to her.
As I recall, she wasn't getting help from conventional medicine,
you know, and no doctors had ended up coming up
(24:03):
with anything, and so he was kind of researching himself.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
John's background wasn't in medicine. Yet he was determined to
develop treatments for his wife, but her health continued to
get worse. Anne's illness only seems to be part of
(24:31):
what was going on at Bora Cheyenne. There seemed to
have been other factors at play too. Anne was becoming
a shadow of her former self, increasingly staying trapped in
the house.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
Not anto excess of it. She often went to the
Seema private hospital. She would go abroad to continue with
her treatment, so she wasn't trapped physically, but perhaps mentally
she was.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Meant As Valdo's face titans as he speaks the distress clear,
I ask him an easier question about how they were
as a couple. He starts to answer, but then stops.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
Sorry, there are more things I would like to say,
but I just can't because I might get in trouble.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
But he did put their relationship this way.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Yes, Sometimes in the afternoons, when I get ready to leave,
they'd be sitting on the terrors of the second floor
to watch the sunset. One would imagine this is a
beautiful couple, but it was exactly the opposite.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
The lovers, the pair falling for each other over the
punch bowl years before a whirlwind romance. We're now facing isolation,
chronic illness, and local suspicion in the middle of the
deer Monte Valley. Yet things were about to get worse.
The world they were trying to leave behind was catching
(26:01):
up with them. Yes, oh hi, my name's Becky Milligan.
I'm giving someone who we're calling Michael a call. He
didn't want his voice used, so we're using an actor
for his side of the conversation. My audio is from
(26:23):
the original call. My colleagues and I work for a
podcast company and we're doing the story about John Bender.
I didn't know him, but was told that he was
somehow entangled in the story about John Bender. So what
would you call yourself? What would how would you describe
your job? It quickly became clear that Michael was the
(26:43):
sort of person you ring when you have a problem
and you need it fixed, a serious problem.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
We're not related to military at all. Really interesting.
Speaker 8 (26:53):
Basically, I don't like the term.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
I don't like the term.
Speaker 8 (27:00):
What do you call it?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Mercy?
Speaker 7 (27:03):
Correct?
Speaker 4 (27:03):
I don't like that, But basically that's that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Are you involved in this sort of work? Still?
Speaker 3 (27:10):
I retired in two thousand and eight, but I still
have some clients in Central America.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
So at the time, trouble is brewing for John Bender
in the valley, Michael's phone starts to ring.
Speaker 9 (27:23):
I was contracted by a third party to kind.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Of intercept mister Bender and send him to the stake.
Speaker 8 (27:30):
So we've worked on intelligence to get mister Bender's whereabouts
and what we did. We mounted an intervention to kind
of capture him.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Who wanted John Bender intercepted? And why? That's next time
on Hell in Heaven and they went back to get
the money. What did you hear though? Tell me what
you heard? All I heard was a shot. You've been
(28:06):
listening to Helen Heaven from Exactly Right Media and iHeart
Podcasts produced by Blanchard House, hosted, written and produced by
me Becky Milligan. The producer and co writer is Poppy Damon.
Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmanell, and Toby Mattamon.
The sound recordist and head of sound and Music is
(28:28):
Daniel Lloyd Evans. The lead sound designer is Vulcan Kiseltoog.
The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac for Exactly Right Media.
The executive producers are Karen Kilgarreth, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer,
with consulting producer Lilly Ladderwig and associate producer Jay Elias.
(28:50):
The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosy Pye. The
executive producer and Head of Content at Blanchard House is
Lawrence Griselle. Listen to Helen Heaven on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Virginia, March nineteen ninety eight. This is where John and
Ann's story together begins, but it's also the setting for
a cruel twist of fate that would alter the course
of their lives and set in motion increasingly bizarre behavior,
a slow retreat from reality. They met for the first
(00:42):
time at a drinks party at John's house on his
one hundred acre Virginian farm. She was in her late
twenties and he was in his mid thirties. It's a
beautiful home, Colonial style, with a porch, large shutters, and
manicured lawns in walks. Anne and pattern as she was then.
(01:04):
She was the daughter of an international banker, born in
Rio de Janeiro, where her father was working at the time.
She lived a life of privilege in Lisbon, London, and
New York. She's petite, elegant. He'd worked briefly as a
male model. The attraction is instant. Author Carol Vaughan, who
(01:27):
lives in Costa Rica and wrote a book about the benders.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
They locked eyes across the punch mal and they moved
in to help themselves do some punch, probably non alcoholic
because neither of them drank.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
It was love at first sight for both of them,
and thought John was brilliant and phenomenally handsome. They just
clicked for her. He symbolized a future with a capital F,
she'd say later. John's father Paul saw it as a
meeting of minds too.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
She was obviously very smart, and she was really dressed
and the stuff he was doing.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Anne was a recent Fine Arce grad who'd fled New
York to start again in Virginia. She was done with
city life and wanted to live in a log cabin.
John had a brilliant mind and was also searching for
an inner peace away from people. They seemed to have
so much in common. They both loved animals, nature, and
were lonely, but there was something more they shared.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
John, in reaching down to phil his cup or her cup,
noticed that her hand trembled quite a bit, and he said, oh,
are you okay? And she said, well, I suffer from
bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
We've pieced together this meeting from a number of sources. Apparently,
Anne told John the trembling was caused by her medication.
She said she'd just been diagnosed. Then, it seems John
started talking about mental illness in his family and about
his own experiences of depression. The pair began a wind romance.
(03:01):
Two weeks later, she moved in with him. Soon after,
he proposed, Anne and John married within the year.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
We would laugh because we were supposed to never get married.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
It was a shock to his friends, like Steve Reid.
He thought the bachelor would never get married.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
So then when I heard he got married, I said,
somebody want him over.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
It was written and stone right then and there they
were faded to be together, faded.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
From that day. Anne said there was never any doubt
that they were meant to meet, But fate had other
plans for the couple too, a cruel, unexpected twist of
fate with devastating consequences. It would change them both profoundly
and destroy their dreams, and culminate in a violent death
(03:56):
for which one of them would stand trial from Exactly
Right media and iHeart podcasts produced by Blanchard House. This
is Helen Heaven, I'm Becky Milligan. Chapter two, Trouble in
(04:40):
the Valley. Two years after first meeting in Virginia, John
and Anne moved to Costa Rica With a dream. They
built their enormous house Borachueyanne in Dear Monte valley. It
was four stories with no walls, set in five thousand acres.
(05:03):
The land had apparently cost them ten million dollars, a
lot of money, but not to them. Remember they'd derived
in Costa Rica with a reported six hundred million dollars.
All sorts of stories began to circulate they were laundering
money for the drug cartels in Mexico or involved directly
with them, that precious gems were being smuggled into the house.
Speaker 5 (05:28):
In general, if you live in Costa Rica and you
don't want to be preyed upon and you have money,
they did kind of the opposite of what you're supposed
to do. You'm start to live simply. People come there
to live with nature, to live simply. You know, you
live your life. You don't build grand palaces calling any
attention to yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Nicole Kulvick, who lived near.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
The Venders, I would go on walks through out Lorita
and going up the mountain. There was a little point
where you could stop and look out over the valley
and you could see their house. You know, their powers
in the distance that it, you know, kind of stuck
out like a store of mom People would just say, yes,
(06:09):
they've got a lot of money. You know, they're very private.
They built a little sanctuary over there where they're you know,
for the animals, and there were you know, nature conservationists.
This is a talk in the valley. You know they
did that. They were very wealthy, and you could tell
by looking at their house, you know, how different it
(06:30):
was from everyone that lived there.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Their lavish development benefited the valley with jobs, electricity, and
running water, but their obvious wealth and their intense need
for privacy was not going down well with some of
the old timers.
Speaker 6 (06:46):
I'm Jesse Blena was born in a little town called Westmoreland, Kansas.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Jesse is an engineer and inventor, and his wife, Matty,
is a clairvoyant from Costa Rica. Their land backs on
to Bori Cayenne. From their property, they watched the benders
escalating isolation and witnessed their strange behavior.
Speaker 6 (07:06):
John never left the property except in the helicopter. He
never traveled by road. When they were building the house,
he always had a guard, a machine gun guard with
him and four bodyguards at fifty one hundred yards out
on all corners. It's like he toy lived in fear.
One of the workers evidently I guess went with him
to Columbia and they said somebody flew over in an
(07:28):
airplane and shot him in the arm or something like that.
Speaker 7 (07:32):
Who was that.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Worker, I don't know, Okay, so we weren't actually able
to verify that. Unlike her husband and did venture out
of the house.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
She would leave occasionally, even on the bus to San Jose.
One time in the post office, she was trying to
hide her appearance, so it was very mysterious. One of
the workers said that he had to take Anne to
Sandy Cedrew and put her on the bus and he
said she was dressed up like an air He may
have just meant very very disguised, or maybe she was
(08:06):
physically dressed up like an Arab for nobody to see her.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Later, Jesse and Matty would be bystanders to the terrible
events which would unfold in the Bender's home. Jesse and
(08:30):
Matty's place is down a grassy track and really difficult
to find unless you spot the mailbox at the side
of the road with their names on it. It's a
nadylic plot. They have a wooden house. Jesse has added
to it over the years, but it isn't large or
very modern. They live a very simple life. It's surrounded
(08:51):
by fruit and nut trees, taller coconut palms. Sway above us,
and beyond is rainforest. Oh aren't they beautiful? They're so
delicate and lovely. Beautiful orchids, aren't they? The sound of
the birds here? Pale, pink, delicate orchids grow tall along
(09:13):
the path, And if you stop and listen, tiny birds
flutter around and seem to talk to each other, chirping
back and forth. There's a pond too, with freshwater prawns.
It's covered in lily pads.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
I've always loved nature, and when I heard about Costa Rica,
I wanted to see the tropics. So I end up
coming to Costa Rica.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
It was in the nineteen seventies that Jesse first visited
the country. He kept returning until he took the plunge
and stayed for good. He was the first foreigner to
settle in the valley thirty nine years ago. Now, and
since then a lot more have come to live there,
including the Benders. And with all those years he's clocked up,
he has this observation that all the new arrivals have
(09:58):
one thing in common.
Speaker 6 (10:00):
Reason were I always say we're escaping something. Some of
them were criminals too, all right, lots of foreign criminals
come to Costa Rica escaping. If you want to say justice.
In my case, I like to say it's escaping the cold.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And he bought a little land.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
Planeted it to exotic fruits where we have over two
hundred and twenty species of exotic fruits, which is probably
the best collection in Kostrica. And what kind of fruit
Durians feed you longan tearing the new cherry brunet cherries.
We have the paradise cream nuts. I have three different
species of those that taste like coconut with peanuts, tarap
(10:39):
that tastes like banana pudding with vanilla ice cream.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
When we visited Jesse, he showed us one of the
nut pods which hang from his trees as big as
tennis bulls.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
When they're ready, the lid falls off.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Then we have these nuts inside paradise cream nuts.
Speaker 8 (11:01):
This is delicious.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Living so close to the venders, Jesse quickly realized that
his new neighbors didn't want to have anything to do
with the local community. In fact, he hardly ever saw them.
What he did see were the guards who were under
strict instructions not to talk to anyone, but Jesse was
really curious, so just kept asking questions.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
They weren't even supposed to tell their wife anything, not
even where they were going, how much money they made.
They were supposed to be totally silent, and that was
that was the rules, total silence on everything.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
How did you know that? Did they tell you?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Well?
Speaker 6 (11:38):
Yeah, they specifically told me that. I'm basically I'm not
supposed to tell you this, you know, But like you know,
we had whatever this morning. We had to be at
the beach at five o'clock because John arrived in the
helicopter and then went out in the speedboat. And after
a while they came back and we don't know, we
don't know what, you know, what happened. They can't say.
I mean, we could imagine, but we don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
What do you imagine?
Speaker 6 (12:03):
Well, I personally thought he was probably somebody very big
in the drugs.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Jesse, remember, had been living there for years, and he
wasn't just driven by curiosity about his new neighbors, but
also a concern about the farmers who'd lived in the
valley for generations and sold up to the benders.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
One family that sold to him. They got hundreds of
thousands of dollars and within a few years it was
all gone, and you know, they'd broke up with their
family and they're much worse off now than before. They
just work hour with ages. They have basically nothing. I
think one has an old truck.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
That added to the local anger and resentment, which Anne
acknowledged in a later TV interview. She said that there
was a sense of who are these rich gringoes and
who the hell do they think they are? John's dad,
Paul Bender.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
He did not have the greatest relationships with all the
people around that place because what he was doing was
sometimes inconsistent. I think were some of the people around
wanted to do so he was not trying, I don't think,
to develop friendly relations with his neighbors there, except for
the animals.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Set apart in their big new house on the hill,
the Benders were not proving popular with the locals. But
some suggest there's another reason why the couple would never
find the happiness they were craving in the jungle, that
there were other forces at work.
Speaker 9 (13:38):
I believe that the valley it's a portal in itself.
You know, it's quite the energetic magnetic field, you know
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
We spoke to Jose, a Colombian American who runs Eco Maste,
which is described on its website as a healing sanctuary
blending shared ancestral wisdom and ecological education. It's in the valley,
not far from John and Anne. Jose believes the valley
has a peculiar force field which can be disrupted by
(14:13):
foreigners moving in. Like John and Anne bender.
Speaker 9 (14:17):
The energy that produces that little part of the valley,
it's quite amazing because you have clouds coming in from
the mountains, which then are meeting up clouds that are
coming in from the ocean, and then it creates this
very unique place where it's like superhumid and super dark.
(14:38):
So the message from the mountain was that the land
was very sick because there's a lot of people in
the area, and this happens all around the world where
they come in and they want to do things in
the land without even you know, meditating or consulting with
the land or get to know the land first. So
(15:00):
they said, yeah, if the land is sick, and this
is because of what had happened in the past, which
was a lot of our indigenous killings and indigenous artifacts
being taken from the earth. So this created an unbalance
for the land, and the land was hurt because of this,
you know, like it wasn't stick physically but energetically.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
We heard this a number of times. This area is
uniquely dark and energetically strange. In fact, its other name
is Las Toumbas the Tombs. It's an Indian graveyard and
this is where Borichayanne was built. Beautiful but with a
dark history. And it's this place, last tombas dear Monte Valley,
(15:48):
shrouded in mystery with echoes from the past, where our
movie star couple landed with seemingly limitless funds. Very little
was known about what went on behind the barbed wire
perimeter fence, but one man knows more than most. We
returned to Asvaldo Rojas and when on as Valdo Rojas
(16:12):
hired as their main head of staff, who we also
met in chapter one. Is clean cut, quietly spoken, and
has black rimmed glasses which look a bit too large
for his face. He's nervous. He doesn't normally talk about
his time working for the Benders, but agreed to speak
to us at first he's hesitant, his arms crossed, but
(16:37):
he begins to relax. From the start, John was not
an easy person to work for. It started with the
complicated and ambitious construction of the house.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Initially, the house was going to be all covered by glass,
but there was a technical problem with the glass and
these will break, so he just got rid of them.
This was a big problem for John. That's kind of
how we got to know him, because he just shouted
and screamed when the glass was shattered.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Over time, things got worse. There was trouble with the orchids,
which John loved.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
Taking care of them was part of his routine almost
every afternoon, and God forbid if something happened to any
of them. There were some orchids brought from the mountains
that needed un nest in order to grow, for which
he ordered special containers to be made. In fact, the
(17:38):
guards were supposed to guard him.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
John was fascinated by rare species. One unusually had to
be planted in an ant hill, the nutrients in the
soil helping it flourish, and that meant the ants needed
to be protected.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
But one night, an and either managed to get in
and ate all the ant that was a huge problem
for John. A guard even got fire over that.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
It wasn't just the orchids that triggered John's anger, but
also protecting the birds. The problem was that some of
the smaller houses on the property were made of glass.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
And will no birds can crash into the windows and die.
Enough animals and couldn't bear to see something that happened
to them. But he would get so angry that people
would afraid of him, so we had to run to
put courtons in those places.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
I remember one.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Time when our guard brought him a bird that had
crashed into one of the windows, and he was screaming
and shouting all over and I had to tell them,
next time you'll find a bird, just don't bring it
to him.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
So he could get angry sometimes.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Yeah, practically all the time.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Staff had to adapt in other ways too, take us
val there's cleaning.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
Time.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
We readily spoke to John. Everything was done through Anna.
We communicated with her through walkie talkies. We had to
ask for permission before going into the house, but we
wouldn't do everything on the same day as we arrived.
We waited until Anna said it was okay to come in.
(19:21):
We did the basics to keep the house clean and tidy.
Then the next day came over again to do other
clean activities because he didn't like outsiders inside the house
for too long.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
And what was their routine each day?
Speaker 4 (19:39):
They got up early between five five six in the morning.
I arrived at seven and John was already in front
of the computer. Anna would prepare breakfast and he could
spend the rest of the day on the second floor
where he normally worked.
Speaker 8 (19:54):
On his computer.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Sometimes he went for a walk inside the property, but
it was not quite a In the afternoon, they will
drink some coffee that Anna will prepir. At three pm,
I will leave the property and after that I don't
know much.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
We know that both John and Anne had mental health issues,
but increasingly at the center of their lives were problems
with Anne's physical health. Back to Virginia, the place where
John and Anne first met in March nineteen ninety eight,
and it's probably here at some point that Anne was
(20:34):
bitten by a tick, a deer tick, which can be
as small as a poppy seed. So what you might ask,
but it would dramatically alter the course of their lives
because Anne was infected with a bacteria which causes limes disease.
The effects can be devastating if it's not spotted quickly
(20:54):
and treated, and it seems that Anne's condition wasn't diagnosed
earlier enough. There's a long list of symptoms fatigue, migraines,
memory loss, joint swelling, and pain to the point of
making walking difficult. It can infect your central nervous system too,
cause heart problems. The list goes on. Anne was only
(21:17):
in her thirties and was walking with a cane. A
few years later she would have to be carried around
by John. The illness transformed her. Remember this wasn't long
after they had arrived in Costa Rica.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
She took burnt out over time. Her physical and mental
health was in the cane. That beautiful, spectacular woman that
we met when SHARAIV just vanished.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
As Anne became weaker, John took her health into his
own hands. He turned to a natural resource, the jungle.
Speaker 8 (21:53):
There's a lot of medications, a lot on everything everywhere
in the trees around you. Through there right now, you'll
find aspiring.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
John Colvic told us about what he'd learned about the
jungle's natural kills.
Speaker 8 (22:08):
You can take a scrape of bark off the tree
and drop it in your tee. There's a little plant
that would grow right next to our farm. It tastes terrible.
It's the worst tasting thing you've ever had. If you
licked it, you would taste like if you put an
aspir in your tongue all the way to your toes.
And then when you have dysentery and you feel like hell,
(22:28):
when you feel like you're gonna die, you drink a
couple of pups of this in the morning, a couple
of cups in the evening. All of a sudden, it's
all gone. You know, the little you know, the little
grasses on the ground that you touch and their leaves close.
If you pull those out of the ground, wash the
roots off, and you have toothache. You can make a
tea with those, And then when you garble and rinch
with that, your toothache goes away. Go figure, right, do
(22:48):
don't understand how it works or why it works, but
it definitely does. And when you start looking into these
medicinal plants that are there and they're uses the people
that know how to use it, you get into the
pharmaceutical names, and then all of a sudden you find
out the pharmaceutical industry has been refining these things and
making them, and that's what we're buying off the shelves.
(23:10):
There's an analyst apply of flora and tlauna that you
can treat things with.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
John took that idea and really ran with it. He
started to concoct potions using the plants to help his
wife recover.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
I do know that she had a lot of medical problems. Yeah,
he got really involved in that.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
He told his dad Paul, about the discoveries he was making.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
He was really into that part of her life.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Jack Schwager, who visited with his son in the last episode,
remembers John working on finding a cure.
Speaker 7 (23:42):
He dyings are really smart eye. So at the time,
one thing he was doing, I remember, he was doing
research to try to find you to come up with
some cure or to figure out what was wrong with
Anne and stuff like that. And he took care of
her and so he was heir of devoted to her.
As I recall, she wasn't getting help from conventional medicine,
you know, and no doctors had ended up coming up
(24:03):
with anything, and so he was kind of researching himself.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
John's background wasn't in medicine. Yet he was determined to
develop treatments for his wife, but her health continued to
get worse. Anne's illness only seems to be part of
(24:31):
what was going on at Bora Cheyenne. There seemed to
have been other factors at play too. Anne was becoming
a shadow of her former self, increasingly staying trapped in
the house.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
Not anto excess of it. She often went to the
Seema private hospital. She would go abroad to continue with
her treatment, so she wasn't trapped physically, but perhaps mentally
she was.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Meant As Valdo's face titans as he speaks the distress clear,
I ask him an easier question about how they were
as a couple. He starts to answer, but then stops.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
Sorry, there are more things I would like to say,
but I just can't because I might get in trouble.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
But he did put their relationship this way.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Yes, Sometimes in the afternoons, when I get ready to leave,
they'd be sitting on the terrors of the second floor
to watch the sunset. One would imagine this is a
beautiful couple, but it was exactly the opposite.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
The lovers, the pair falling for each other over the
punch bowl years before a whirlwind romance. We're now facing isolation,
chronic illness, and local suspicion in the middle of the
deer Monte Valley. Yet things were about to get worse.
The world they were trying to leave behind was catching
(26:01):
up with them. Yes, oh hi, my name's Becky Milligan.
I'm giving someone who we're calling Michael a call. He
didn't want his voice used, so we're using an actor
for his side of the conversation. My audio is from
(26:23):
the original call. My colleagues and I work for a
podcast company and we're doing the story about John Bender.
I didn't know him, but was told that he was
somehow entangled in the story about John Bender. So what
would you call yourself? What would how would you describe
your job? It quickly became clear that Michael was the
(26:43):
sort of person you ring when you have a problem
and you need it fixed, a serious problem.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
We're not related to military at all. Really interesting.
Speaker 8 (26:53):
Basically, I don't like the term.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
I don't like the term.
Speaker 8 (27:00):
What do you call it?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Mercy?
Speaker 7 (27:03):
Correct?
Speaker 4 (27:03):
I don't like that, But basically that's that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Are you involved in this sort of work? Still?
Speaker 3 (27:10):
I retired in two thousand and eight, but I still
have some clients in Central America.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
So at the time, trouble is brewing for John Bender
in the valley, Michael's phone starts to ring.
Speaker 9 (27:23):
I was contracted by a third party to kind.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Of intercept mister Bender and send him to the stake.
Speaker 8 (27:30):
So we've worked on intelligence to get mister Bender's whereabouts
and what we did. We mounted an intervention to kind
of capture him.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Who wanted John Bender intercepted? And why? That's next time
on Hell in Heaven and they went back to get
the money. What did you hear though? Tell me what
you heard? All I heard was a shot. You've been
(28:06):
listening to Helen Heaven from Exactly Right Media and iHeart
Podcasts produced by Blanchard House, hosted, written and produced by
me Becky Milligan. The producer and co writer is Poppy Damon.
Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmanell, and Toby Mattamon.
The sound recordist and head of sound and Music is
(28:28):
Daniel Lloyd Evans. The lead sound designer is Vulcan Kiseltoog.
The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac for Exactly Right Media.
The executive producers are Karen Kilgarreth, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer,
with consulting producer Lilly Ladderwig and associate producer Jay Elias.
(28:50):
The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosy Pye. The
executive producer and Head of Content at Blanchard House is
Lawrence Griselle. Listen to Helen Heaven on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Emma Jane Kirby
Becky Milligan
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