September 26, 2025 • 48 mins
Long before we knew what serial killers were, a family in remote Kansas was disposing of victims at their family farm. Listen in to the Tale of the Bloody Benders if you dare!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This mind boggling episode is an old timey true crimey.
It concerns one of the worst families to ever set
up shop in Kansas, which is really saying something. In
the early eighteen seventies, the Bender family surreptitious killings pree
carried out in their own home no less, resulted in
the murders of at least twenty one people which are
(00:21):
in the family, the nicknamed the Bloody Benders. This episode
will knock your socks off, assuming they're still on your
feet after the other episode so far. Welcome to Stuff
You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome
(00:43):
to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's
here too, So this is Stuff you Should Know. The
Murder Family edition.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, Halloween right around the corner.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I've always liked to think of you, me and Jerry
as a kind of murder family.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
As in, you and I and Jerry. Right. We always
have to correct that because people think you're talking about
you and your wife, right, Okay, yes, you me kamma
you kamma me kamma No.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
No, I mean me, my wife, Umi and Jerry. I've
always thought of this as just you know, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I miss what you said though.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
You thought of this as what a murder murder family?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, sure, in the kindest possible way.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Exactly, exactly. No, we're no murder family. And after everybody
learns about the Bloody Benders, they'll be like, yeah, Josh
and Chuck and Jerry are no murder family, and we
wouldn't want to be either, because it turns out murder
families are not so great.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Chuck, right, And can we shout out a listener who
submitted this topic? Oh yeah, definitely, that's I feel like
that's happening more and more like a lot.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
As our world gets smaller, our listeners are reminding us
that it is quite large. And we got this one
from a Canson.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Oh that's very appropriate.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Is that how you say it?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
I think it's Kanzinia Knight.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Okay, Kenzinia Knight named Star White. And apparently Starr was
traveling with the family through Kansas and saw signs in
Montgomery County for the Benders, the Bloody Benders and things
commemorating this and said, I'm a Kenzania Knight and I
(02:24):
had no idea that this was a thing. I got
to learn more about this, So we're doing one. You know,
we like to keep it spooky in October where we
can for sure, and there's nothing spookier than a serial
killing family.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Interestingly, too, this past I think March, what I'm taking
to be is one of the definitive books on the
Benders came out. It's called Hell's half Acre and it
is by an author.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Named named a drum roll.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Named Susan Joe Nosis. That's how I'm going with her
last name. But it came out in March called Hell'shead Figure,
and it does look pretty awesome, so I figured that
had to do with this, But no, it's just completely
off the cuff from a listener from Kansas.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Huh, just driving through.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Great name too, by the way, Star White, what a
great name. It's almost like star wipe.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
No one, do you like it? It's your favorite transition?
Speaker 1 (03:20):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I do know a bender actually, but this is I
don't think there's any relation.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, because it's not entirely clear that that was even
their names too, so we should tell a good point.
We're talking about a family that lived in Kansas in
the eighteen seventies at a time when Kansas was like
the front Tier, maybe even beyond the front Tier. The
Trail of Tears had happened by this time. So the
O Sage people who had lived there previously have been
(03:49):
forced off their land and moved further west to Oklahoma,
and the federal government said, come anybody, all you criminals,
you unsavory characters, people escaping your past, come and settle
here in Kansas. It's like Australia, but in the center
of the United States. That's right.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Did you do bad things back east? Just pick up
your bags and head west.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
That's precisely right. And so a lot of them stopped
in Kansas. Again, this was the frontier, but people were
still going west too. So as we'll find out, this family,
the Bender family, kind of put up a claim or
set down a claim. They did something with a claim.
I'm not quite up on my old prospect or terminology.
They claimed something, yeah, on this road that kind of
(04:31):
kept leading west, and they set up a tavern in
for people to stop in, which is neither here nor
there quite yet, but I just kind of wanted to
foreshadow that there's going to be a tavern coming in
the future.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
That's right, And that's probably a generous term for what
they set up. Yeah, it was a pretty remote well,
I guess, you know, not to make too many Kansas jokes,
but it was a pretty remote part of Kansas and
southeastern Kansas in eighteen seventy. It was not cherry Bell yet,
but it would eventually become cherry Vale, right. And at
first the two gentlemen arrived John benderr. He was around
(05:08):
sixty years old. People called him Pa. He didn't talk
a lot. When he did talk, it was mostly in German.
And then he was with a younger guy in his twenties.
And you know, we're going to say things like identified
as his son or you know, may or may not
have been the daughter. Like this is because of a
lot of things, partially just you know, a lot of
(05:29):
record keeping back then wasn't super solid, especially when it
turns out you may be using aliases and you may
be faking that you're a family or you may actually
be a family. Like no one really knows for sure
the facts of this, but John Bender Junior was with him,
and he also occasionally went by an alias put a
(05:50):
pin in this one named John Gebhart, Chris Gebhart. He's
a comedian, he's great.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
But apparently John Gephart or John Bender Junior, was a
bit of a comedium's himself, but from some reports, he
was his own audience and no one else was. So
to put it in another way, he apparently laughed at stuff
like inappropriately, like Doctor Hibbert, and also at times when
(06:20):
exactly that was a great John Bender Junior impression, by
the way, but at times where people were like, this
guy ain't quite right. And he also talked a lot,
so he was kind of an odd fixture as well,
as we'll find out the whole family was.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, he had a German accent, but did speak fluent English,
and some people think he may have been intellectually disabled
looking at kind of some of the things that happen,
it seems like I don't know about clear, but you know,
at a time in eighteen seventy, they wouldn't have been
categorizing people as such anyway, you.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Know, no for sure, but from the articles of the time,
that's what I'm going from now on. They nobody said
anything even remotely like that. I saw it on one,
I think a Crime Reads article, and that was about it.
I just got the impression that was really kind of
weird and almost like a Jethro Clampet type. That's who
(07:16):
he reminds me of.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Okay, so what they built on their one hundred and
sixty acres was you called it a tavern. I call
it just a big room, kind of like a bunk
of a bunk house. Maybe they called it. Or Olivia,
who helped us with this, called it a foothouse. But
it was sixteen feet wide twenty four feet long. So
what they eventually did was they would put up a
(07:39):
canvas sheet kind of splitting it into They lived in
the back, and then they called you know, they called
it an inn. You called it a tavern. It was
really just a room with some can goods and supplies
and I think a couple of beds, sort of like
a bunk house. It was not fancy at all.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
No, but I'm guessing like as you were passing through
Kansas then and maybe even today, it was pretty appealing.
You think, well, I mean it was better than sleeping
out on the open prairie with the bedroll, right. You know,
there was a hot meal. You know, they probably had tobacco,
and yeah, I mean it was better than nothing. And
I think I get the impression also one of the
(08:18):
things that made it better than nothing was the daughter
who I say, we meet right now. Her name was Kate,
and she showed up after this this tavern, this house
had been built.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
That's right. The two ladies were sent for after everything
was done, and it was Ma Bender who everyone just
sort of assumed was the wife and the matriarch of
the family. She went by Elvira sometimes. She was maybe
in her fifties and led on like she didn't speak
any if very little, if any English at all, but.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I had like a terrible temper. She was widely reputed
from anybody that met her that she was just a
terrible cuss of a person from when I gather.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, in fact, I think she may have been the
one sort of leading this whole charge that we'll get to.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
I've seen both. I've seen her or I've seen Kate
and Kate. Kate was the daughter. She was in her twenties.
But I think more than anything, she kind of attracted
passers by with flyers advertising her mediumship like she was
into spiritualism and free love apparently too.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
And who knows what that means. In eighteen seventies Kansas,
she's shown a little ankle I don't know, like, I
have no idea what free love means in that context,
but it was unusual at least and got attention. Some
people thought she may have been the daughter. Other people
thought that they presented she and John Junior as a couple.
So it was just sort of one of those things.
(09:50):
It's loose out there in eighteen seventies Kansas, right.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So one other thing I read, Chuck that Livia didn't
quite hit on was that this family, they weren't like
exactly act, you know, fading into the woodwork or the
prairie like. They were well known in their little community,
mainly because there were only like eight or ten other
settlements around them at the time, but also because I
think they were the only ones running a tavern and
(10:13):
they had an orchard That will factor in later, but
apparently their cherries and apples and peaches were like really
prized out there at the time. So they were part
of the community, but they were known to be weird
and maw in particular, which you just kind of avoided
her as best as you could.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Right. So they have this thing set up. It's on
the edge of the Great Osage Trail, which is, like
you mentioned, earlier, where a lot of people continued westward
and it was a good place to have a little
bunk house that, you know, sold a few things. What's
the word, I'm looking for.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
A general store, Ali's, bargain houses.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Rations, Oh okay, yeah, selling rations and things like that.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
They sell rations at Ali's.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
What is Ali's.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
It's like a deep discount liquid or like if you
stole a truck, you just drive it over there and
they'll buy everything and then turn around and sell it.
I don't think they actually do that, but it's the
appearance of that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, we should be clear, like, I've never heard of Ali's,
so I'm innocent of this.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
You should go wander around one. You'd be like, okay,
I gotcha. Here's an oriental rug. Here's some off brand
bleach on the next stile. Like it's just just that, yes,
oh yeah, it's like that places all over the place,
in every strip mall, in every city, in every in
every country in the world.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
It may be one of those things. It's so ubiquitous.
I've just never noticed it. Yeah, right under my nose.
It's possible, all right. So they set up an Ali's
right there on the grade o Sage Trail and maybe
this is a good place to take our first break.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Oh, I wasn't expecting that. Let me see. Okay, that
sounds good, okay, chuck. So one of the things that
(12:27):
made the Benders made us call the Benders of murder
families that they started murdering people pretty shortly after they
set up this homestead along the Osage Trail. And one
of the things about Kansas at the time was it
was really really violent, not just in the wars against
the Native Americans. There there were also pro slavery and
(12:50):
anti slavery factions that committed atrocities against one another. The
Civil War eyebrid kind of broke out thanks to Kansas
struggling which kind of state it was going to be.
So it was a really violent place. And it was
with that kind of violent backdrop that a family could
just kill a bunch of travelers without anyone really taking notice.
(13:13):
Because it was also just the kind of place where
people just went missing. It just happened. It was a
really dangerous place to travel. So when it happened, it
didn't exactly like set off the media and search parties
didn't usually come out for people.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, However, when they start turning up in regular
order around town, then you've got a problem. And that's
what happened. In May of eighteen seventy one, the body
of a man was found in local Drum Creek there's
the southeast of the Bender's house. And this is very
(13:48):
key here. He'd been brained, he had his skull bashed
in and had his throat cut, which, as you will see,
becomes the recurring mo of this family.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yep. Two more men were found shortly after, I think
a few months later. A few months after that, another
body was found all in the creek, and apparently they
all had that same kind of mortal wound or that
combination of injuries. And one of the bodies was identified
as a man named William Jones, and he had been
(14:20):
carrying known to have been carrying about two hundred and
fifty dollars, which at the time was like a lot
of money to today six close to it, okay, And
he was going to pay off his mortgage for his homestead,
which is something people did at that time too. It's
another thing that made it dangerous. A lot of people
were walking around with a lot of cash because they
were going to buy land payoff mortgages do god knows what,
(14:43):
and there weren't banks, so they were traveling with cash
and this guy was exactly that. And there was a
farmer whose land he was found on that was initially
accused but they were like, I don't think it was him,
so he got off but I'm sure he was like
wait what what? No, it wasn't me.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, And the way he got off to was kind
of frustrating as a like a crime enthusiast reader, because
they investigated it and they found that the wagon that
dropped him had a very distinctive track, that one of
the back wheels was off center, and I kept waiting
for that to come back as like, remember that wagon,
(15:21):
that's what eventually led to the killers. But spoiler alert,
that does not happen. So don't put a pin in it.
Take the pin out of that.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, just take throw that pin away, break in two.
So the thing about I think one of the reasons
why people started getting hot under the collar about these
murders too, is that this area got a really bad
reputation really fast. Like it was like you avoid the
spot as best you can, like maybe go out of
your way to avoid this area. On the Osage Trail
(15:50):
because people just wind up missing there and that kind
of got people aware of like the whole, the whole
problem that the area was facing, but they didn't know
who it was, and they certainly hadn't centered on the benders.
The benders just had a reputation as being odd and
possibly a little maybe violently unusual, but not murderers by
(16:14):
any stretch. They just weren't suspected for a really long time.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Violently unusual. Yeah, what a reputation.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Yeah, that's pretty serious.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Here's another story too that you do need to get
that pen out, put it back together, that you Josh
told you to break an eye. Sorry everybody, and put
a pin in this story because this was chronologically speaking.
February eighteen seventy three, a woman who didn't really have
any money apparently stopped at the home, asked to rest,
asked for some food, fell asleep on a bed in
(16:47):
the back, and then when she woke up, there was
mo bender and she pointed to a table covered in
pistols and knives and said, there, your supper's ready. So
this lady somehow apparently manages to stay composed and not
like react with alarm.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Like waking up fiddlesticks.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah exactly, and said I just need to step outside
for a minute to do something. Just apparently made a
private excuse, is what the Kansas City Time said. Yeah,
and and ran and took off, running barefoot, basically, you know,
in her sleeping clothes, ran for a couple of miles
to find help. And it's hard to parse together what
(17:32):
this sentence from the Times even means, but I'm taking
it to mean that it didn't. Really, it still didn't
set off alarm bells for this family.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
It didn't. And that, by the way, is a classic
example of being violently unusual. Right, Okay, you know, if
you're violently unusual, you have the kind of house that
people run two miles away from in their bare feet.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, where guns and knives are presented as supper.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Exactly, right. So this is just kind of going along.
The benders are homing along doing the murdering thing. People
don't really suspect them, but the area's got a bad reputation.
But there was a series of murders, actually a combo
won two punch of murders that finally led to their
discovery as a murder family. And the first thing started
(18:17):
with the guy named George Newton long Core, who left Independence, Kansas,
which was just to the west of Cherry Vale along
the O Sage Trail, and he was on his way
to Iowa, so he would have passed through Cherry Vale
along with his eighteen month old daughter, Mary Anne, and
he never made it to Iowa. And that caught the
(18:38):
attention of another man, a physician named William Yorke, who
was his neighbor and was concerned enough that he started
traveling around inquiring about him to see if he could
figure out what happened to George and his daughter mary Anne.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah. Good neighbor, Yeah, really good neighbor, like to do
such a thing to take this trip. So starts investigating,
finds out that the horror wagon team was abandoned near
Fort Scott, Kansas and in the spring. I mean, I
think that's what led him to go out there. So
he's out there in the spring, he gets to Fort Scott,
(19:13):
all that stuff is still there. Basically all of their
stuff had been abandoned. They were nowhere to be found.
So he's like, something is going on. I need to
go back to Independence. And then he disappears.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, and that really caught the attention to people because
it turned out doctor William York. And if I said
Edward the first time, please forgive me. His name was William,
and he was a doctor, and he was a York,
and there were two other Yorks. He had a brother
named Edward who was neither here nor there, but he
had a really important brother named Alexander York who was
a colonel from the Civil War and also a Kansas senator.
(19:46):
So they had murdered the brother of a Kansas senator
who was known to be out looking around the area
of Cherryvale for somebody else who had gone missing. And
that really got people's antenna.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, big time, enough to wear They got a search party,
Colonel Alexander. I think that about seventy five men set
off and they were, you know, they were scouring around.
They were They basically kind of figured out at one
point that they definitely went by the Bender's house. So
let's go by and talk to these people, see what's
going on when they do this mob Bender you know,
(20:22):
claims to not speak English, which seems like her main jam.
Her big joke besides, here's your supper of guns and knives?
Was I also don't speak English, Kate Young Kate says,
I don't know anything about this guy, and then John
Junior said, hey, listen, I was shot at when I
was out there at Drum Creek where all these bodies
(20:43):
have been found, and I can take you out there,
and like, maybe the people that shot at me killed
your friends as well.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, and again, just imagine just throw Clampet saying this
and taking people out to look at a place where
he claims to have been shot at. Right, Just that
bit so so, but he's also just kooky. You know.
Did you watch The Beverly Hillbillies? I did, like a lot.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Yeah, yeah, I watched it a lot.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
So do you remember the time or the period? I
guess it was a phase where Jethrow ended up becoming
like a movie producer in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was got a little weird later
in that show.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
It really did get weird. So it's not clear whether
this is that Hollywood producer of Jethrow or the original
mountaineer son of Jethrow. Either way, it works pretty good,
but he takes Alexander and the search party out there.
I guess he gave enough of an explanation and was
you know, pointing out different spots well enough that they're
like either they believed him or they just didn't really care,
(21:48):
and they kind of headed on basically.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, I mean he showed bullet holes in a tree,
or not holes, but bullet markings, which you know Kansas
in the eighteen seventies, about half the tree said bullets
in them. So that doesn't prove anything, but like you said,
it was enough at least to sniff him slightly off
the case, at least temporarily. But they came back a
few days later said, listen, we heard about this lady
(22:13):
over the past few days who came here and I
don't want to really start anything, but she said that
you said, here's your supper, and it.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Was guns and knis there's something about a pistol supper
or something like.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
That, and that's weird. She ran away barefoot for two miles
and no one made a big deal out of it,
But now we kind of want to know. This is
where mob Bender all of a sudden starts speaking English.
Apparently the quote is she flew into a violent passion
and went off saying, you know that that lady was
a witch and she has you know, cursed Kate's coffee
(22:52):
that she was going to drink, and if she ever
comes back here, I'm going to kill her. We got
her out of here. She was a witch.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yes, she converted Kate's coffee into that mushroom coffee, and
now Kate refuses to drink it.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
What's mushroom coffee?
Speaker 1 (23:06):
It's exactly what it sounds like, exactly doesn't actually have coffee.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
No, oh, it's made out of mushrooms.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, yeah, you should try it sometimes just to say
you tried it.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Now. That's what on those survival shows. They get like
roots and twigs and boil that stuff down. They're like,
here's my morning coffee.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Coffee.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Have fun with that.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
So they so again still like they were kind of like, Okay,
this family's really weird, but we don't really have anything
on them. But it was enough that Alexander York kind
of stuck around town and they held a meeting with
basically the whole town that Pa and John Junior even attended,
(23:47):
and they said, hey, this place has a bad reputation.
Something's going on. These two people at the very least
have been have turned up missing. We need to just
search everyone's homestead and apparently very brassly. At least one
neighbor said, I've got nothing to hide, search my homestead,
and Pa said the same thing. He said, I don't either,
You guys search my homestead. And so I guess they
(24:10):
kind of did a slow motion search, because it was
at least a week I saw, if not a couple
of weeks before they finally made it out to search
the Bender's place. And when they showed up, they realized
very quickly that the Benders weren't there and probably hadn't
been there since the night of that meeting.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, when they realized, they told people to come search
their house. You said, what my favorite part about Kate's
jam is that they asked her to do the seance
to like give some more information, like, well, if you're
so good at that, and she said, now, it's like
it's it's daytime. There's too many people around, Like, have
you ever seen a seance? She's like, why don't you
come back tomorrow night, just the two of you and
(24:49):
we'll do one. And they were like, no, thank you, right,
I think I'll take the zero in that one.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, doctor, Colonel. No, Colonel, Alexander
York was a sharp dudeasically.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, but the townspeople weren't sharp enough to go. I
don't know if they were searching other places. I know
there was a weather issue, but like you said, by
the time they got there, they were Gonzo's. They left there.
They took a train because they found their horse and
wagon and even their dog just on a public street
near the train station. And they got the heck out
(25:23):
of Dodge, well not out of Dodge, out of what
would become Cherryvale.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Very close, very close. So the volunteers were like, well,
I guess since they left, we can just go ahead
and go on in. And apparently they found very quickly
that there was a trap door in the floor. And
when they opened the trap door, I guess a lot
of them gagged because it smelled like decaying human remains.
And even though they looked in there and there weren't
(25:48):
actual bodies, there was so much blood and gore in
this cellar rotting that it was enough to make a
person gag even without a full body decomposing. There.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
It's a great place for our second break. Oh okay,
the height of suspense.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
We'll be back and talk about what was making that
smell right after this. All right, So they have a
(26:39):
stone cellar under the house covered in blood and stinks
like dead bodies even though there's no dead bodies. And
we said we were going to get to the bottom
of the smell. The bottom of it is there were
dead bodies in there previously. Yeah, so they had this
pretty easy.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
They had the trap set up, the trap door set up,
so it led to a hole in the cellar, and
then there was a like a way outer I guess,
a way in from the foundation and they would kill people,
put them in the trap door through the trap door
to the cellar, and they'd retrieved them at night when
there weren't prying eyes around.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, pretty good system they had going. They started searching around.
They did eventually find bodies. They found William Yorke's body
buried in the orchard. They found a Lonker's body buried
along with young Mary Anne, who the two gentlemen had
the head wounds in the throat wounds. Maryanne, I've seen
(27:36):
variously was either suffocated or suffocated from being buried alive
man but not brained in throat slit at least tragic
either way, of course, sure, but very very sad case.
Eventually they would go on to find about a dozen
bodies and were eventually implicated in as many as twenty
(27:59):
one murders.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Yeah, they found it. Yeah, I saw eleven I think,
including Mary Anne. A bunch of them were in the orchard.
They looked around the property and realized that there were
a bunch of depressions in the orchard, and they're like,
I wonder if those are graves, And they turned up
people in the graves. They found somebody in the well,
and then yeah, when you add them together with all
(28:21):
the people dumped in Drum Creek, I guess it comes
to about twenty one. And they developed this theory of
what had happened, in part based on some people who
had narrowly escaped with their lives and hadn't realized it
until after the Benders became national news. But that curtain
that they had dividing the tavern, the Olie's bargain bin
(28:45):
from the rest of the house was right behind the
seat where they would have travelers and guests sit when
they were eating a meal.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Right, Yeah, And they would have them sit there, and
you know, from the other side it would you know.
They would be silhouetted by the candlelight so they could
see clearly where they were, and then Paw or John
Junior would either use like the butt of an axe
or a hammer to brain them. They would put them
(29:14):
in the cellar and rob them and then slit their throat.
And that's how it was sort of a I don't
know the fact, like, all right, let's go ahead and
tell the stories about the other guys. Because after this
came out, people started coming forward, like you said, a
guy named mister Wetzel said, hey, wait a minute. They
tried to get me to sit right by that curtain
(29:35):
and I wouldn't sit by the curtain, and mob Bender
got really mad about that, and so we got the
heck out of there. And then another guy named William
Pickering said, yeah, I didn't want to sit by that
curtain because it was dirty and gross, and I took
a different seat and they got in a big fight
and Kate came at me with a knife. So I
don't know why they just didn't come up behind them
(29:58):
and brain them like the Maybe the felt the curtain
offered some sort of cover. It just seems very like stubborn.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Oh, like they had to follow procedure or else the person.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, like allowed you have to sit there. I'm like, well,
you can't murder a guy in another chair.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Well I don't. Yeah, I don't think it would have
been as easy to come up behind him from the
from the curtain, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Maybe it sounds a little I mean, I guess they
got away with it for a little while, so but
I don't know, it sounds a little amateurish.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Sure, or they were such professionals they just stuck to
the script and if the script deviated it, they didn't
take chances. And there's there's actually a good suggestion of
why they didn't take chances, because there were later discovered
in the house bullet holes in the walls and in
the door frames, and that was taken to be from
people who had tried to fight back when they realized
what was going on. But I guess they had ultimately
(30:51):
been unsuccessful, because nobody escaped that house saying they had
shot at everyone because they tried to brain them, you know.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Or maybe it was just supper.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I guess sol pistol suffer, You're right.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Who knows? So the story gets out becomes, you know,
for the eighteen seventies, becomes a pretty big media storm
whatever that looked like back then, and that people, you know,
it became like a bit of a tourist stop. Like people.
It sounds like people essentially showed up there and kind
of looted the place. Over time, we're just kind of,
(31:24):
you know, breaking up pieces of the cellar and breaking
up the bed frame and kind of just taking whatever
they wanted with them.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah. And one of the reasons it became such a
media frenzy is they were the first serial killers in
America that America ever produced, at least as far as
the media could tell. A decade later, Austin would have
what's frequently referred to as the first serial killer in
America with the Servant Girl Annihilator, which is pre uh.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
I don't even know if I want to do a
podcast on that.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
No, I don't know that name alone. It's like, yeah,
that's all right.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
That stopped me called. I mean, this was ten years
before Jack the Ripper even right exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And HH Holmes, who's also often referred to as America's
first serial killer, he wasn't until the eighteen thirties or
eighteen nineties, so he was like a good twenty years on.
So it was a big deal. So not only do
we have America's first serial killer, we had America's first
dark tourists show up at their house and take everything
they possibly could as a memento. But one of the
(32:25):
things that happened about this being such a huge media
sensation is that, like the country was following this and
everyone was basically looking for the Benders because don't forget,
they'd vanished. No one knew which way they went. All
they knew was that somewhere not too far off, they'd
ridden their wagon to that train station, and the train
(32:45):
ticket person had said, yeah, those four people definitely bought tickets,
but I can't tell you where. Yeah, And they said,
they said, you can tell us, so I'm a doctor. Right.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
They did arrest twelve men. This sounds a little bit like, hey,
we've got to kind of do something. So they arrest
these guys who they alleged maybe were involved as far
as receiving stolen goods, because they never really found a
super clear motive. I mean, it seemed like a lot
of them may have had like traveling money, or like
(33:18):
the guy who had the two hundred and fifty bucks,
which was a lot of money at the time, but
it was never like one hundred percent established, like their
motive was just to rob people. But they implicated these
twelve guys as guys who may have helped them move
stolen items and money and stuff like that. And apparently
one of the guys was a member of a vigilanti
(33:40):
committee who tried to get on to help lead the
investigation with Colonel Yorke, but was denied and rejected, and
I think that kind of hurt his feelings. And I
think what it came down to was these guys, they
were known as the regulators, these vigilanties. They were throat cutters.
They would cut people's throat instead of like bringing them
back to face trial. And then they just sort of
(34:02):
tied it to these people because of the throat cutting.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, and a lot of pretty innocent a lot of
well a lot of innocent people died as a result.
So these people were bad dudes. But I saw that
it was more than just the throat cutting, that there
was a way that they would particularly leave bodies like you.
They would put the right hand against the right breast
and the left hand down like just by their side.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Like a pledge of allegiance.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Almost, but you're you're like as if you don't know
which side of your chest to put your hand and
you got it wrong, kind of like that. And apparently
they found a lot of the bodies in the orchard
at the Bender's place posed like this basically almost like
this was this is the sign, like this is what
this gang did. So I don't think they were like
(34:48):
in the gang, but it's possible that gang of vigilantes
were fencing this stuff for them, and that they were
at least tangentially related.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
You know, sure, it's possible. Sure, when it comes down
to who these people really were, we're not exactly sure.
There's been a lot of modern investigation about who they were,
and they think that Ma was a woman named Almira
Meek and was from upstate New York near the Adirondack Mountains,
(35:18):
so not German at all. There were some pretty sketchy accounts,
not super well researched, that said she had been married
before and that her husbands had all met violent deaths
from head wounds. So, you know, I don't know if
that's just the internet running with something, or if that's true.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Apparently, out of all of the four, the Ma and
Kate seemed to have actually been related, although I don't
know how. I didn't see how did.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
You like how they were related?
Speaker 1 (35:52):
No? No, no, like they were supposed to be mother
and daughter. But how did how did that ever get
turned up? Like? Where was that? How was that ever defined?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
I think just people doing like modern research on lineage
and stuff like that. Okay, because they think they turned
up her original name too, that Ma was married to
a man named Griffith, and that Kate was really Eliza Griffith.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
John Senior apparently was John Flickinger and was either from
Germany or the Netherlands. And then John Junior apparently israel
name was the alias that he was using that I
said to put up in in John Gerhart.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
And now you can take that pin out and break
in half and throw it away.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah. So if he was using his real name as
an alias, then I'm not sure what was going on
with John Jr.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
No, No, he's a Jettro type, don't forget. So there
were people who are like, oh, we've seen the benders.
Who saw the benders here, they went this way, they
went that away for years and years and years. It
was like like people would would report on their whereabouts,
and it's unclear to this day whether people did or
(37:00):
didn't know where they went. I saw there was one
kind of article I guess from the time that was
basically like, yeah, everybody knows where they are and there's
just nothing anyone can do. They made it to another
state and everybody just kind of leaves everybody else alone
out there. Other people have always reported like, no, they
have no idea where they went. They just kind of
(37:21):
vanished in the thin air. And then there were reports
that were usually incorrect, that they'd either been captured or
that they'd been killed, or there was one report that
Pod died by suicide in Lake Michigan in eighteen eighty four.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Right Another one said John Junior and Kate went to
New Mexico like sort of Texas New Mexico border and
John died of a stroke. Some people said that vigilantes
got them and they burned Kate alive and shot and
killed the other ones and buried him in the prairies,
(37:57):
but no one ever claimed the substantial reward, you know,
close to seventy grand today, So it seems like none
of these stories were probably true, or maybe who knows,
maybe one of them was. It's just no way to know.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
So Laura Ingalls Wilder actually had a family story that
I read that her daughter basically said, hey, you should
weave this into our family story. So it's almost certainly
not true. That she and her family, on their way
to homestead passed by the Bender's tavern, but they didn't
have enough money to go in for food or to
(38:31):
stay there, but they settled in a close enough area
that after the Benders were found out her father, there
was a knock on her family's door and her father
was summoned outside with his gun and he didn't come
back till morning. But that anytime you ever asked him
about the Benders, he would say, they'll never be found again.
Right again, this isn't true. And one of the other
(38:53):
things that really undermines the Vigilanti theories again, seventy thousand
and today's dollars was offered as a reward. Somebody from
that group of Vigilanes would have stepped up and taken it,
or even if they didn't, how could a group of
vigilanes keep that secret for all that time? That it's
still to this day, never came out because that would
be something to boast about that you were among the
(39:15):
group of vigilanes that caught and killed the bloody benders,
you know. Sure, So I think the vigilane thing is get.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
A book deal at the very least for sure these days.
I think it's the kind of thing where a lot
of Kansas Citianites know about it. You know, they celebrated
Bender Days for a while. They had a replica at
Cherry Vale at one point of the Bendor House. More recently,
(39:44):
in fact, just a couple of years ago, a gentleman
named Bob Miller, who was a financial advisor from Independence
and a historian and who knows maybe a bit of
a murder junkie, bought the land and basically said, like, Hey,
the people that own this land never did anything with it.
They never searched for the location of the murder sites
(40:06):
or the house, and I want to do that. I
want to like have like professional expert investigations done on
the property. I don't know if he plans to put
up like a Lizzie boardenhouse or something, but he wants
to get to the bottom of what he can, at.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Least right Yeah, he said he's going to try to
get with UK or K state. I don't remember which
one to do, like ground penetrating surveys, But I don't
know what his endgame is either. But it's pretty neat
that he bought it, And one of the reasons why
he's feeling good about finding something is the family that
he bought it from owned the land for like the
last sixty five previous years, and they showed zero interest
(40:44):
whatsoever in finding the actual site, and they just turned
it all into crop land. So there's a good chance
that there's something like the foundation, maybe even that gastro
seller the well that the one guy was found in
remnants of the orchard. Who knows, there could be plenty
of stuff left there. I don't know if they're gonna
I believe they exhumed all of the bodies that they found,
(41:06):
but that's not to say that they found everybody.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
You know, Yeah, absolutely. There was a movie made in
twenty sixteen called Bender that does not look great. Did
you see the trailer?
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I know, I didn't. I just saw. Livia quoted a
user from IMDb that said it had some of the
worst acting I've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
What was the trailer like uh not, I mean, it
didn't look great. I read some other reviews that said
it was okay, but it wasn't like U super murdery
or super scary, so it kind of fell too much
toward like historical drama.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
They talked a lot about like raising in harvesting grain.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Maybe I don't know, but there was a thing that
in Red Dead Redemption two that is funny because I
kind of forgot about this. I played that game a
couple of years ago, and there's a pig farm where
your character shows up and there's a creepy old lady
and a creepy old man and they're like trying to
(42:10):
get you to stay for dinner. And apparently it's modeled
after this, and you don't really know, and you know,
when you're in those games, you don't know quite what
to do, Like I feel like I should leave. It's
kind of like real life. But they offer you libations,
and you need libations. So if you just I don't
all right, If you want to play this game and
(42:30):
you haven't, it's pretty old, don't listen to this part.
But if you don't care, like most people, don't drink
the drink because as soon as you drink the drink,
the screen goes woozy, and you wake up the next day,
and I'm not sure that good things happened overnight.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Okay, but you're not dead.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Huh, you're not dead.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
That's not very bendery, No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
I think they were inspired by the Vendors a little bit,
but I don't know supposedly.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Also, I've never read American Gods, the Neil game and book.
Have you? Have you read any of his stuff?
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Never have.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
I've read some of his short stories and they're amazing,
so I'm surprised I've never read his novels. But in
American Gods, one of the characters is a Slavic god
named Zunborg, so that I'm going with. And every time
the Benders killed somebody, he gained strength from their sacrifice,
which is a pretty neat little take on the whole thing.
(43:22):
You know, because we're so like we have the blinders
on here on Earth, we don't even realize this murder
family is actually contributing to the well being of a
Slavic god.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
I thought you were going to say, whenever they killed someone,
they would yell Zunberg.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Well they did that. Too, but that was never captured
in the articles from the time, Chuck, which, by the way,
if you're like I need to know more about the
bloody Benders, and I will not have it filtered through history.
I need the original stuff. There's a website called Genealogytrails
dot com and if you search that and Bender Family
and your favorite search engine, it will bring up the
(43:57):
crime related news articles from the time about the Bender family.
And it's awesome because it has a bunch of other details.
But also it's got like that old timey nineteenth century
you know, crime reporting too write It's just worth reading,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
It's always fun.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
You got anything else about the Benders?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Well, that said about the Benders for now everybody. And
since Chuck said nothing else, that means it's time for
a listener. Man.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Hey, guys, stumbled across you in the summer of twenty
twenty when I was employed as a USPS Rural Carrier associate,
not a rural juror. I heard it.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Wait wait, now, I need to know what was that.
I can't remember what that's.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
From thirty Rock.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
I still can't place it, but I'll think about it
and I'll say Eureka later.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Okay, well, what's funny is after we talked a little
bit about thirty Rock on our Sitcoms episode and Emily
went out of town for a week and I barreled
through season one of thirty Rock while she was gone,
and it was so good.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah, just really do it again.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
What a show god. Alec Baldwin Yeah, and Tracy Morgan Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
And don't forget Liz Lemon.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
She was great. But uh oh boy, Baldwin and Tracy
Morgan just slavey on the show. I mean, everyone on
that show was really funny.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah. Tracy Morgan's best quote was somebody offered him cash
who's and he said, I'm glad you said that, because
I thought it was a bowl of baby penises.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
His other a good one that I got was you're
talking about how they go together, like peanut butter, and
he said, or like chicken and the chicken container.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
That's pretty good. So.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Rural Juror though, was the movie that Jane Krakowski was in,
and the joke is she goes Rure Duror and like,
no one knows what the title of the movie. He is,
but it had gone so long they couldn't really ask her, uh,
what the name of the movie was.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
I mean, I'm gonna keep watching it. She's so funny too, however, okay,
all right, back to the email. I have heard a
podcasts before, but never gave it much thought until a
friend insisted started to listen to some and they got
to the point of stuff you should Know, where I'd
talk to some much about y'all. My husband finally came
and said, who the Hecker Josh and Chuck, and when
you're going to introduce me to your new friends? But
(46:19):
now the show is our go to for family road trips.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Awesome.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
One neat thing I wanted to write about, though, was
my last dental appointment in February. I decided to bring
along earbuds so I could listen to y'all while getting
some feelings done. I asked the dentist and the assistant
if it would be okay to listen to the podcast
while they work, and the dentist said it was okay,
but asked me what I was going to listen to first.
I told her it was stuff you should Know and
how much I enjoyed it. And I was listening to
(46:44):
the Chowchilla Bus kidnapping episode. My dentist lit up and
told me how awesome that episode was. Her assistant had
never heard of the show, but the dentist was happily
talking about your show so much that my entire visit
I didn't get to listen to the episode because I
was half chatting to my dentist about stuff. You should know.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Thank you for saving me while I was delivering people's mail,
and for keeping company during my commutes with love from
the Land of ten Thousand Lakes. That is Tanya Vanderpool
from Texas. Ten thousand Lakes, Texas has like two lakes.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
What is that Minnesota? Minnesota?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, right, a thousand lakes.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
Yeah, it's gotta be Michigan. No, Minnesota, Yeah, it's Minnesota
for sure. She really didn't say, you're not toying with me.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
I don't know. I mean, I'm saying I'm not toying
with you, but I'm also on the verge of saying
so many things that are wrong about lakes and states
that I'm just stopping.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
That's fine, that's fine, But can you imagine the audacity
of just signing off with the Land of ten Thousand
Lakes and not putting in parentheses. What state you're talking about?
Speaker 2 (47:59):
I mean, I like my email's Chuck of the Peach State.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Okay, well that is pretty audacious. Chuck, it's violently unusual.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
What was the person's name again, Minnesota?
Speaker 1 (48:14):
You're in fine form today, aren't you. You're being playful.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
I'm kidding. It was Tanya Vanderpool.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Okay, thanks a lot, Tanya. We appreciate that, and we're
glad we can keep you company and that we made
your dentist's appointment so special. If you want to get
in touch with us like Tanya did and tell us
about your dental visits, why not, You can send it
in an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This mind boggling episode is an old timey true crimey.
It concerns one of the worst families to ever set
up shop in Kansas, which is really saying something. In
the early eighteen seventies, the Bender family surreptitious killings pree
carried out in their own home no less, resulted in
the murders of at least twenty one people which are
(00:21):
in the family, the nicknamed the Bloody Benders. This episode
will knock your socks off, assuming they're still on your
feet after the other episode so far. Welcome to Stuff
You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome
(00:43):
to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's
here too, So this is Stuff you Should Know. The
Murder Family edition.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, Halloween right around the corner.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I've always liked to think of you, me and Jerry
as a kind of murder family.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
As in, you and I and Jerry. Right. We always
have to correct that because people think you're talking about
you and your wife, right, Okay, yes, you me kamma
you kamma me kamma No.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
No, I mean me, my wife, Umi and Jerry. I've
always thought of this as just you know, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I miss what you said though.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
You thought of this as what a murder murder family?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, sure, in the kindest possible way.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Exactly, exactly. No, we're no murder family. And after everybody
learns about the Bloody Benders, they'll be like, yeah, Josh
and Chuck and Jerry are no murder family, and we
wouldn't want to be either, because it turns out murder
families are not so great.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Chuck, right, And can we shout out a listener who
submitted this topic? Oh yeah, definitely, that's I feel like
that's happening more and more like a lot.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
As our world gets smaller, our listeners are reminding us
that it is quite large. And we got this one
from a Canson.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Oh that's very appropriate.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Is that how you say it?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
I think it's Kanzinia Knight.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Okay, Kenzinia Knight named Star White. And apparently Starr was
traveling with the family through Kansas and saw signs in
Montgomery County for the Benders, the Bloody Benders and things
commemorating this and said, I'm a Kenzania Knight and I
(02:24):
had no idea that this was a thing. I got
to learn more about this, So we're doing one. You know,
we like to keep it spooky in October where we
can for sure, and there's nothing spookier than a serial
killing family.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Interestingly, too, this past I think March, what I'm taking
to be is one of the definitive books on the
Benders came out. It's called Hell's half Acre and it
is by an author.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Named named a drum roll.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Named Susan Joe Nosis. That's how I'm going with her
last name. But it came out in March called Hell'shead Figure,
and it does look pretty awesome, so I figured that
had to do with this, But no, it's just completely
off the cuff from a listener from Kansas.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Huh, just driving through.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Great name too, by the way, Star White, what a
great name. It's almost like star wipe.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
No one, do you like it? It's your favorite transition?
Speaker 1 (03:20):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I do know a bender actually, but this is I
don't think there's any relation.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, because it's not entirely clear that that was even
their names too, so we should tell a good point.
We're talking about a family that lived in Kansas in
the eighteen seventies at a time when Kansas was like
the front Tier, maybe even beyond the front Tier. The
Trail of Tears had happened by this time. So the
O Sage people who had lived there previously have been
(03:49):
forced off their land and moved further west to Oklahoma,
and the federal government said, come anybody, all you criminals,
you unsavory characters, people escaping your past, come and settle
here in Kansas. It's like Australia, but in the center
of the United States. That's right.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Did you do bad things back east? Just pick up
your bags and head west.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
That's precisely right. And so a lot of them stopped
in Kansas. Again, this was the frontier, but people were
still going west too. So as we'll find out, this family,
the Bender family, kind of put up a claim or
set down a claim. They did something with a claim.
I'm not quite up on my old prospect or terminology.
They claimed something, yeah, on this road that kind of
(04:31):
kept leading west, and they set up a tavern in
for people to stop in, which is neither here nor
there quite yet, but I just kind of wanted to
foreshadow that there's going to be a tavern coming in
the future.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
That's right, And that's probably a generous term for what
they set up. Yeah, it was a pretty remote well,
I guess, you know, not to make too many Kansas jokes,
but it was a pretty remote part of Kansas and
southeastern Kansas in eighteen seventy. It was not cherry Bell yet,
but it would eventually become cherry Vale, right. And at
first the two gentlemen arrived John benderr. He was around
(05:08):
sixty years old. People called him Pa. He didn't talk
a lot. When he did talk, it was mostly in German.
And then he was with a younger guy in his twenties.
And you know, we're going to say things like identified
as his son or you know, may or may not
have been the daughter. Like this is because of a
lot of things, partially just you know, a lot of
(05:29):
record keeping back then wasn't super solid, especially when it
turns out you may be using aliases and you may
be faking that you're a family or you may actually
be a family. Like no one really knows for sure
the facts of this, but John Bender Junior was with him,
and he also occasionally went by an alias put a
(05:50):
pin in this one named John Gebhart, Chris Gebhart. He's
a comedian, he's great.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
But apparently John Gephart or John Bender Junior, was a
bit of a comedium's himself, but from some reports, he
was his own audience and no one else was. So
to put it in another way, he apparently laughed at stuff
like inappropriately, like Doctor Hibbert, and also at times when
(06:20):
exactly that was a great John Bender Junior impression, by
the way, but at times where people were like, this
guy ain't quite right. And he also talked a lot,
so he was kind of an odd fixture as well,
as we'll find out the whole family was.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, he had a German accent, but did speak fluent English,
and some people think he may have been intellectually disabled
looking at kind of some of the things that happen,
it seems like I don't know about clear, but you know,
at a time in eighteen seventy, they wouldn't have been
categorizing people as such anyway, you.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Know, no for sure, but from the articles of the time,
that's what I'm going from now on. They nobody said
anything even remotely like that. I saw it on one,
I think a Crime Reads article, and that was about it.
I just got the impression that was really kind of
weird and almost like a Jethro Clampet type. That's who
(07:16):
he reminds me of.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Okay, so what they built on their one hundred and
sixty acres was you called it a tavern. I call
it just a big room, kind of like a bunk
of a bunk house. Maybe they called it. Or Olivia,
who helped us with this, called it a foothouse. But
it was sixteen feet wide twenty four feet long. So
what they eventually did was they would put up a
(07:39):
canvas sheet kind of splitting it into They lived in
the back, and then they called you know, they called
it an inn. You called it a tavern. It was
really just a room with some can goods and supplies
and I think a couple of beds, sort of like
a bunk house. It was not fancy at all.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
No, but I'm guessing like as you were passing through
Kansas then and maybe even today, it was pretty appealing.
You think, well, I mean it was better than sleeping
out on the open prairie with the bedroll, right. You know,
there was a hot meal. You know, they probably had tobacco,
and yeah, I mean it was better than nothing. And
I think I get the impression also one of the
(08:18):
things that made it better than nothing was the daughter
who I say, we meet right now. Her name was Kate,
and she showed up after this this tavern, this house
had been built.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
That's right. The two ladies were sent for after everything
was done, and it was Ma Bender who everyone just
sort of assumed was the wife and the matriarch of
the family. She went by Elvira sometimes. She was maybe
in her fifties and led on like she didn't speak
any if very little, if any English at all, but.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I had like a terrible temper. She was widely reputed
from anybody that met her that she was just a
terrible cuss of a person from when I gather.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, in fact, I think she may have been the
one sort of leading this whole charge that we'll get to.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
I've seen both. I've seen her or I've seen Kate
and Kate. Kate was the daughter. She was in her twenties.
But I think more than anything, she kind of attracted
passers by with flyers advertising her mediumship like she was
into spiritualism and free love apparently too.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
And who knows what that means. In eighteen seventies Kansas,
she's shown a little ankle I don't know, like, I
have no idea what free love means in that context,
but it was unusual at least and got attention. Some
people thought she may have been the daughter. Other people
thought that they presented she and John Junior as a couple.
So it was just sort of one of those things.
(09:50):
It's loose out there in eighteen seventies Kansas, right.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So one other thing I read, Chuck that Livia didn't
quite hit on was that this family, they weren't like
exactly act, you know, fading into the woodwork or the
prairie like. They were well known in their little community,
mainly because there were only like eight or ten other
settlements around them at the time, but also because I
think they were the only ones running a tavern and
(10:13):
they had an orchard That will factor in later, but
apparently their cherries and apples and peaches were like really
prized out there at the time. So they were part
of the community, but they were known to be weird
and maw in particular, which you just kind of avoided
her as best as you could.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Right. So they have this thing set up. It's on
the edge of the Great Osage Trail, which is, like
you mentioned, earlier, where a lot of people continued westward
and it was a good place to have a little
bunk house that, you know, sold a few things. What's
the word, I'm looking for.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
A general store, Ali's, bargain houses.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Rations, Oh okay, yeah, selling rations and things like that.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
They sell rations at Ali's.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
What is Ali's.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
It's like a deep discount liquid or like if you
stole a truck, you just drive it over there and
they'll buy everything and then turn around and sell it.
I don't think they actually do that, but it's the
appearance of that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, we should be clear, like, I've never heard of Ali's,
so I'm innocent of this.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
You should go wander around one. You'd be like, okay,
I gotcha. Here's an oriental rug. Here's some off brand
bleach on the next stile. Like it's just just that, yes,
oh yeah, it's like that places all over the place,
in every strip mall, in every city, in every in
every country in the world.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
It may be one of those things. It's so ubiquitous.
I've just never noticed it. Yeah, right under my nose.
It's possible, all right. So they set up an Ali's
right there on the grade o Sage Trail and maybe
this is a good place to take our first break.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Oh, I wasn't expecting that. Let me see. Okay, that
sounds good, okay, chuck. So one of the things that
(12:27):
made the Benders made us call the Benders of murder
families that they started murdering people pretty shortly after they
set up this homestead along the Osage Trail. And one
of the things about Kansas at the time was it
was really really violent, not just in the wars against
the Native Americans. There there were also pro slavery and
(12:50):
anti slavery factions that committed atrocities against one another. The
Civil War eyebrid kind of broke out thanks to Kansas
struggling which kind of state it was going to be.
So it was a really violent place. And it was
with that kind of violent backdrop that a family could
just kill a bunch of travelers without anyone really taking notice.
(13:13):
Because it was also just the kind of place where
people just went missing. It just happened. It was a
really dangerous place to travel. So when it happened, it
didn't exactly like set off the media and search parties
didn't usually come out for people.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah. Absolutely, However, when they start turning up in regular
order around town, then you've got a problem. And that's
what happened. In May of eighteen seventy one, the body
of a man was found in local Drum Creek there's
the southeast of the Bender's house. And this is very
(13:48):
key here. He'd been brained, he had his skull bashed
in and had his throat cut, which, as you will see,
becomes the recurring mo of this family.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yep. Two more men were found shortly after, I think
a few months later. A few months after that, another
body was found all in the creek, and apparently they
all had that same kind of mortal wound or that
combination of injuries. And one of the bodies was identified
as a man named William Jones, and he had been
(14:20):
carrying known to have been carrying about two hundred and
fifty dollars, which at the time was like a lot
of money to today six close to it, okay, And
he was going to pay off his mortgage for his homestead,
which is something people did at that time too. It's
another thing that made it dangerous. A lot of people
were walking around with a lot of cash because they
were going to buy land payoff mortgages do god knows what,
(14:43):
and there weren't banks, so they were traveling with cash
and this guy was exactly that. And there was a
farmer whose land he was found on that was initially
accused but they were like, I don't think it was him,
so he got off but I'm sure he was like
wait what what? No, it wasn't me.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, And the way he got off to was kind
of frustrating as a like a crime enthusiast reader, because
they investigated it and they found that the wagon that
dropped him had a very distinctive track, that one of
the back wheels was off center, and I kept waiting
for that to come back as like, remember that wagon,
(15:21):
that's what eventually led to the killers. But spoiler alert,
that does not happen. So don't put a pin in it.
Take the pin out of that.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, just take throw that pin away, break in two.
So the thing about I think one of the reasons
why people started getting hot under the collar about these
murders too, is that this area got a really bad
reputation really fast. Like it was like you avoid the
spot as best you can, like maybe go out of
your way to avoid this area. On the Osage Trail
(15:50):
because people just wind up missing there and that kind
of got people aware of like the whole, the whole
problem that the area was facing, but they didn't know
who it was, and they certainly hadn't centered on the benders.
The benders just had a reputation as being odd and
possibly a little maybe violently unusual, but not murderers by
(16:14):
any stretch. They just weren't suspected for a really long time.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Violently unusual. Yeah, what a reputation.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Yeah, that's pretty serious.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Here's another story too that you do need to get
that pen out, put it back together, that you Josh
told you to break an eye. Sorry everybody, and put
a pin in this story because this was chronologically speaking.
February eighteen seventy three, a woman who didn't really have
any money apparently stopped at the home, asked to rest,
asked for some food, fell asleep on a bed in
(16:47):
the back, and then when she woke up, there was
mo bender and she pointed to a table covered in
pistols and knives and said, there, your supper's ready. So
this lady somehow apparently manages to stay composed and not
like react with alarm.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Like waking up fiddlesticks.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah exactly, and said I just need to step outside
for a minute to do something. Just apparently made a
private excuse, is what the Kansas City Time said. Yeah,
and and ran and took off, running barefoot, basically, you know,
in her sleeping clothes, ran for a couple of miles
to find help. And it's hard to parse together what
(17:32):
this sentence from the Times even means, but I'm taking
it to mean that it didn't. Really, it still didn't
set off alarm bells for this family.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
It didn't. And that, by the way, is a classic
example of being violently unusual. Right, Okay, you know, if
you're violently unusual, you have the kind of house that
people run two miles away from in their bare feet.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, where guns and knives are presented as supper.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Exactly, right. So this is just kind of going along.
The benders are homing along doing the murdering thing. People
don't really suspect them, but the area's got a bad reputation.
But there was a series of murders, actually a combo
won two punch of murders that finally led to their
discovery as a murder family. And the first thing started
(18:17):
with the guy named George Newton long Core, who left Independence, Kansas,
which was just to the west of Cherry Vale along
the O Sage Trail, and he was on his way
to Iowa, so he would have passed through Cherry Vale
along with his eighteen month old daughter, Mary Anne, and
he never made it to Iowa. And that caught the
(18:38):
attention of another man, a physician named William Yorke, who
was his neighbor and was concerned enough that he started
traveling around inquiring about him to see if he could
figure out what happened to George and his daughter mary Anne.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah. Good neighbor, Yeah, really good neighbor, like to do
such a thing to take this trip. So starts investigating,
finds out that the horror wagon team was abandoned near
Fort Scott, Kansas and in the spring. I mean, I
think that's what led him to go out there. So
he's out there in the spring, he gets to Fort Scott,
(19:13):
all that stuff is still there. Basically all of their
stuff had been abandoned. They were nowhere to be found.
So he's like, something is going on. I need to
go back to Independence. And then he disappears.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, and that really caught the attention to people because
it turned out doctor William York. And if I said
Edward the first time, please forgive me. His name was William,
and he was a doctor, and he was a York,
and there were two other Yorks. He had a brother
named Edward who was neither here nor there, but he
had a really important brother named Alexander York who was
a colonel from the Civil War and also a Kansas senator.
(19:46):
So they had murdered the brother of a Kansas senator
who was known to be out looking around the area
of Cherryvale for somebody else who had gone missing. And
that really got people's antenna.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, big time, enough to wear They got a search party,
Colonel Alexander. I think that about seventy five men set
off and they were, you know, they were scouring around.
They were They basically kind of figured out at one
point that they definitely went by the Bender's house. So
let's go by and talk to these people, see what's
going on when they do this mob Bender you know,
(20:22):
claims to not speak English, which seems like her main jam.
Her big joke besides, here's your supper of guns and knives?
Was I also don't speak English, Kate Young Kate says,
I don't know anything about this guy, and then John
Junior said, hey, listen, I was shot at when I
was out there at Drum Creek where all these bodies
(20:43):
have been found, and I can take you out there,
and like, maybe the people that shot at me killed
your friends as well.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, and again, just imagine just throw Clampet saying this
and taking people out to look at a place where
he claims to have been shot at. Right, Just that
bit so so, but he's also just kooky. You know.
Did you watch The Beverly Hillbillies? I did, like a lot.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Yeah, yeah, I watched it a lot.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
So do you remember the time or the period? I
guess it was a phase where Jethrow ended up becoming
like a movie producer in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was got a little weird later
in that show.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
It really did get weird. So it's not clear whether
this is that Hollywood producer of Jethrow or the original
mountaineer son of Jethrow. Either way, it works pretty good,
but he takes Alexander and the search party out there.
I guess he gave enough of an explanation and was
you know, pointing out different spots well enough that they're
like either they believed him or they just didn't really care,
(21:48):
and they kind of headed on basically.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, I mean he showed bullet holes in a tree,
or not holes, but bullet markings, which you know Kansas
in the eighteen seventies, about half the tree said bullets
in them. So that doesn't prove anything, but like you said,
it was enough at least to sniff him slightly off
the case, at least temporarily. But they came back a
few days later said, listen, we heard about this lady
(22:13):
over the past few days who came here and I
don't want to really start anything, but she said that
you said, here's your supper, and it.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Was guns and knis there's something about a pistol supper
or something like.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
That, and that's weird. She ran away barefoot for two miles
and no one made a big deal out of it,
But now we kind of want to know. This is
where mob Bender all of a sudden starts speaking English.
Apparently the quote is she flew into a violent passion
and went off saying, you know that that lady was
a witch and she has you know, cursed Kate's coffee
(22:52):
that she was going to drink, and if she ever
comes back here, I'm going to kill her. We got
her out of here. She was a witch.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yes, she converted Kate's coffee into that mushroom coffee, and
now Kate refuses to drink it.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
What's mushroom coffee?
Speaker 1 (23:06):
It's exactly what it sounds like, exactly doesn't actually have coffee.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
No, oh, it's made out of mushrooms.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, yeah, you should try it sometimes just to say
you tried it.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Now. That's what on those survival shows. They get like
roots and twigs and boil that stuff down. They're like,
here's my morning coffee.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Coffee.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Have fun with that.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
So they so again still like they were kind of like, Okay,
this family's really weird, but we don't really have anything
on them. But it was enough that Alexander York kind
of stuck around town and they held a meeting with
basically the whole town that Pa and John Junior even attended,
(23:47):
and they said, hey, this place has a bad reputation.
Something's going on. These two people at the very least
have been have turned up missing. We need to just
search everyone's homestead and apparently very brassly. At least one
neighbor said, I've got nothing to hide, search my homestead,
and Pa said the same thing. He said, I don't either,
You guys search my homestead. And so I guess they
(24:10):
kind of did a slow motion search, because it was
at least a week I saw, if not a couple
of weeks before they finally made it out to search
the Bender's place. And when they showed up, they realized
very quickly that the Benders weren't there and probably hadn't
been there since the night of that meeting.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, when they realized, they told people to come search
their house. You said, what my favorite part about Kate's
jam is that they asked her to do the seance
to like give some more information, like, well, if you're
so good at that, and she said, now, it's like
it's it's daytime. There's too many people around, Like, have
you ever seen a seance? She's like, why don't you
come back tomorrow night, just the two of you and
(24:49):
we'll do one. And they were like, no, thank you, right,
I think I'll take the zero in that one.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, doctor, Colonel. No, Colonel, Alexander
York was a sharp dudeasically.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, but the townspeople weren't sharp enough to go. I
don't know if they were searching other places. I know
there was a weather issue, but like you said, by
the time they got there, they were Gonzo's. They left there.
They took a train because they found their horse and
wagon and even their dog just on a public street
near the train station. And they got the heck out
(25:23):
of Dodge, well not out of Dodge, out of what
would become Cherryvale.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Very close, very close. So the volunteers were like, well,
I guess since they left, we can just go ahead
and go on in. And apparently they found very quickly
that there was a trap door in the floor. And
when they opened the trap door, I guess a lot
of them gagged because it smelled like decaying human remains.
And even though they looked in there and there weren't
(25:48):
actual bodies, there was so much blood and gore in
this cellar rotting that it was enough to make a
person gag even without a full body decomposing. There.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
It's a great place for our second break. Oh okay,
the height of suspense.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
We'll be back and talk about what was making that
smell right after this. All right, So they have a
(26:39):
stone cellar under the house covered in blood and stinks
like dead bodies even though there's no dead bodies. And
we said we were going to get to the bottom
of the smell. The bottom of it is there were
dead bodies in there previously. Yeah, so they had this
pretty easy.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
They had the trap set up, the trap door set up,
so it led to a hole in the cellar, and
then there was a like a way outer I guess,
a way in from the foundation and they would kill people,
put them in the trap door through the trap door
to the cellar, and they'd retrieved them at night when
there weren't prying eyes around.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, pretty good system they had going. They started searching around.
They did eventually find bodies. They found William Yorke's body
buried in the orchard. They found a Lonker's body buried
along with young Mary Anne, who the two gentlemen had
the head wounds in the throat wounds. Maryanne, I've seen
(27:36):
variously was either suffocated or suffocated from being buried alive
man but not brained in throat slit at least tragic
either way, of course, sure, but very very sad case.
Eventually they would go on to find about a dozen
bodies and were eventually implicated in as many as twenty
(27:59):
one murders.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Yeah, they found it. Yeah, I saw eleven I think,
including Mary Anne. A bunch of them were in the orchard.
They looked around the property and realized that there were
a bunch of depressions in the orchard, and they're like,
I wonder if those are graves, And they turned up
people in the graves. They found somebody in the well,
and then yeah, when you add them together with all
(28:21):
the people dumped in Drum Creek, I guess it comes
to about twenty one. And they developed this theory of
what had happened, in part based on some people who
had narrowly escaped with their lives and hadn't realized it
until after the Benders became national news. But that curtain
that they had dividing the tavern, the Olie's bargain bin
(28:45):
from the rest of the house was right behind the
seat where they would have travelers and guests sit when
they were eating a meal.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Right, Yeah, And they would have them sit there, and
you know, from the other side it would you know.
They would be silhouetted by the candlelight so they could
see clearly where they were, and then Paw or John
Junior would either use like the butt of an axe
or a hammer to brain them. They would put them
(29:14):
in the cellar and rob them and then slit their throat.
And that's how it was sort of a I don't
know the fact, like, all right, let's go ahead and
tell the stories about the other guys. Because after this
came out, people started coming forward, like you said, a
guy named mister Wetzel said, hey, wait a minute. They
tried to get me to sit right by that curtain
(29:35):
and I wouldn't sit by the curtain, and mob Bender
got really mad about that, and so we got the
heck out of there. And then another guy named William
Pickering said, yeah, I didn't want to sit by that
curtain because it was dirty and gross, and I took
a different seat and they got in a big fight
and Kate came at me with a knife. So I
don't know why they just didn't come up behind them
(29:58):
and brain them like the Maybe the felt the curtain
offered some sort of cover. It just seems very like stubborn.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Oh, like they had to follow procedure or else the person.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, like allowed you have to sit there. I'm like, well,
you can't murder a guy in another chair.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Well I don't. Yeah, I don't think it would have
been as easy to come up behind him from the
from the curtain, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Maybe it sounds a little I mean, I guess they
got away with it for a little while, so but
I don't know, it sounds a little amateurish.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Sure, or they were such professionals they just stuck to
the script and if the script deviated it, they didn't
take chances. And there's there's actually a good suggestion of
why they didn't take chances, because there were later discovered
in the house bullet holes in the walls and in
the door frames, and that was taken to be from
people who had tried to fight back when they realized
what was going on. But I guess they had ultimately
(30:51):
been unsuccessful, because nobody escaped that house saying they had
shot at everyone because they tried to brain them, you know.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Or maybe it was just supper.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I guess sol pistol suffer, You're right.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Who knows? So the story gets out becomes, you know,
for the eighteen seventies, becomes a pretty big media storm
whatever that looked like back then, and that people, you know,
it became like a bit of a tourist stop. Like people.
It sounds like people essentially showed up there and kind
of looted the place. Over time, we're just kind of,
(31:24):
you know, breaking up pieces of the cellar and breaking
up the bed frame and kind of just taking whatever
they wanted with them.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah. And one of the reasons it became such a
media frenzy is they were the first serial killers in
America that America ever produced, at least as far as
the media could tell. A decade later, Austin would have
what's frequently referred to as the first serial killer in
America with the Servant Girl Annihilator, which is pre uh.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
I don't even know if I want to do a
podcast on that.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
No, I don't know that name alone. It's like, yeah,
that's all right.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
That stopped me called. I mean, this was ten years
before Jack the Ripper even right exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And HH Holmes, who's also often referred to as America's
first serial killer, he wasn't until the eighteen thirties or
eighteen nineties, so he was like a good twenty years on.
So it was a big deal. So not only do
we have America's first serial killer, we had America's first
dark tourists show up at their house and take everything
they possibly could as a memento. But one of the
(32:25):
things that happened about this being such a huge media
sensation is that, like the country was following this and
everyone was basically looking for the Benders because don't forget,
they'd vanished. No one knew which way they went. All
they knew was that somewhere not too far off, they'd
ridden their wagon to that train station, and the train
(32:45):
ticket person had said, yeah, those four people definitely bought tickets,
but I can't tell you where. Yeah, And they said,
they said, you can tell us, so I'm a doctor. Right.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
They did arrest twelve men. This sounds a little bit like, hey,
we've got to kind of do something. So they arrest
these guys who they alleged maybe were involved as far
as receiving stolen goods, because they never really found a
super clear motive. I mean, it seemed like a lot
of them may have had like traveling money, or like
(33:18):
the guy who had the two hundred and fifty bucks,
which was a lot of money at the time, but
it was never like one hundred percent established, like their
motive was just to rob people. But they implicated these
twelve guys as guys who may have helped them move
stolen items and money and stuff like that. And apparently
one of the guys was a member of a vigilanti
(33:40):
committee who tried to get on to help lead the
investigation with Colonel Yorke, but was denied and rejected, and
I think that kind of hurt his feelings. And I
think what it came down to was these guys, they
were known as the regulators, these vigilanties. They were throat cutters.
They would cut people's throat instead of like bringing them
back to face trial. And then they just sort of
(34:02):
tied it to these people because of the throat cutting.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah, and a lot of pretty innocent a lot of
well a lot of innocent people died as a result.
So these people were bad dudes. But I saw that
it was more than just the throat cutting, that there
was a way that they would particularly leave bodies like you.
They would put the right hand against the right breast
and the left hand down like just by their side.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Like a pledge of allegiance.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Almost, but you're you're like as if you don't know
which side of your chest to put your hand and
you got it wrong, kind of like that. And apparently
they found a lot of the bodies in the orchard
at the Bender's place posed like this basically almost like
this was this is the sign, like this is what
this gang did. So I don't think they were like
(34:48):
in the gang, but it's possible that gang of vigilantes
were fencing this stuff for them, and that they were
at least tangentially related.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
You know, sure, it's possible. Sure, when it comes down
to who these people really were, we're not exactly sure.
There's been a lot of modern investigation about who they were,
and they think that Ma was a woman named Almira
Meek and was from upstate New York near the Adirondack Mountains,
(35:18):
so not German at all. There were some pretty sketchy accounts,
not super well researched, that said she had been married
before and that her husbands had all met violent deaths
from head wounds. So, you know, I don't know if
that's just the internet running with something, or if that's true.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Apparently, out of all of the four, the Ma and
Kate seemed to have actually been related, although I don't
know how. I didn't see how did.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
You like how they were related?
Speaker 1 (35:52):
No? No, no, like they were supposed to be mother
and daughter. But how did how did that ever get
turned up? Like? Where was that? How was that ever defined?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
I think just people doing like modern research on lineage
and stuff like that. Okay, because they think they turned
up her original name too, that Ma was married to
a man named Griffith, and that Kate was really Eliza Griffith.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
John Senior apparently was John Flickinger and was either from
Germany or the Netherlands. And then John Junior apparently israel
name was the alias that he was using that I
said to put up in in John Gerhart.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
And now you can take that pin out and break
in half and throw it away.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah. So if he was using his real name as
an alias, then I'm not sure what was going on
with John Jr.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
No, No, he's a Jettro type, don't forget. So there
were people who are like, oh, we've seen the benders.
Who saw the benders here, they went this way, they
went that away for years and years and years. It
was like like people would would report on their whereabouts,
and it's unclear to this day whether people did or
(37:00):
didn't know where they went. I saw there was one
kind of article I guess from the time that was
basically like, yeah, everybody knows where they are and there's
just nothing anyone can do. They made it to another
state and everybody just kind of leaves everybody else alone
out there. Other people have always reported like, no, they
have no idea where they went. They just kind of
(37:21):
vanished in the thin air. And then there were reports
that were usually incorrect, that they'd either been captured or
that they'd been killed, or there was one report that
Pod died by suicide in Lake Michigan in eighteen eighty four.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Right Another one said John Junior and Kate went to
New Mexico like sort of Texas New Mexico border and
John died of a stroke. Some people said that vigilantes
got them and they burned Kate alive and shot and
killed the other ones and buried him in the prairies,
(37:57):
but no one ever claimed the substantial reward, you know,
close to seventy grand today, So it seems like none
of these stories were probably true, or maybe who knows,
maybe one of them was. It's just no way to know.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
So Laura Ingalls Wilder actually had a family story that
I read that her daughter basically said, hey, you should
weave this into our family story. So it's almost certainly
not true. That she and her family, on their way
to homestead passed by the Bender's tavern, but they didn't
have enough money to go in for food or to
(38:31):
stay there, but they settled in a close enough area
that after the Benders were found out her father, there
was a knock on her family's door and her father
was summoned outside with his gun and he didn't come
back till morning. But that anytime you ever asked him
about the Benders, he would say, they'll never be found again.
Right again, this isn't true. And one of the other
(38:53):
things that really undermines the Vigilanti theories again, seventy thousand
and today's dollars was offered as a reward. Somebody from
that group of Vigilanes would have stepped up and taken it,
or even if they didn't, how could a group of
vigilanes keep that secret for all that time? That it's
still to this day, never came out because that would
be something to boast about that you were among the
(39:15):
group of vigilanes that caught and killed the bloody benders,
you know. Sure, So I think the vigilane thing is get.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
A book deal at the very least for sure these days.
I think it's the kind of thing where a lot
of Kansas Citianites know about it. You know, they celebrated
Bender Days for a while. They had a replica at
Cherry Vale at one point of the Bendor House. More recently,
(39:44):
in fact, just a couple of years ago, a gentleman
named Bob Miller, who was a financial advisor from Independence
and a historian and who knows maybe a bit of
a murder junkie, bought the land and basically said, like, Hey,
the people that own this land never did anything with it.
They never searched for the location of the murder sites
(40:06):
or the house, and I want to do that. I
want to like have like professional expert investigations done on
the property. I don't know if he plans to put
up like a Lizzie boardenhouse or something, but he wants
to get to the bottom of what he can, at.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Least right Yeah, he said he's going to try to
get with UK or K state. I don't remember which
one to do, like ground penetrating surveys, But I don't
know what his endgame is either. But it's pretty neat
that he bought it, And one of the reasons why
he's feeling good about finding something is the family that
he bought it from owned the land for like the
last sixty five previous years, and they showed zero interest
(40:44):
whatsoever in finding the actual site, and they just turned
it all into crop land. So there's a good chance
that there's something like the foundation, maybe even that gastro
seller the well that the one guy was found in
remnants of the orchard. Who knows, there could be plenty
of stuff left there. I don't know if they're gonna
I believe they exhumed all of the bodies that they found,
(41:06):
but that's not to say that they found everybody.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
You know, Yeah, absolutely. There was a movie made in
twenty sixteen called Bender that does not look great. Did
you see the trailer?
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I know, I didn't. I just saw. Livia quoted a
user from IMDb that said it had some of the
worst acting I've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
What was the trailer like uh not, I mean, it
didn't look great. I read some other reviews that said
it was okay, but it wasn't like U super murdery
or super scary, so it kind of fell too much
toward like historical drama.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
They talked a lot about like raising in harvesting grain.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Maybe I don't know, but there was a thing that
in Red Dead Redemption two that is funny because I
kind of forgot about this. I played that game a
couple of years ago, and there's a pig farm where
your character shows up and there's a creepy old lady
and a creepy old man and they're like trying to
(42:10):
get you to stay for dinner. And apparently it's modeled
after this, and you don't really know, and you know,
when you're in those games, you don't know quite what
to do, Like I feel like I should leave. It's
kind of like real life. But they offer you libations,
and you need libations. So if you just I don't
all right, If you want to play this game and
(42:30):
you haven't, it's pretty old, don't listen to this part.
But if you don't care, like most people, don't drink
the drink because as soon as you drink the drink,
the screen goes woozy, and you wake up the next day,
and I'm not sure that good things happened overnight.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Okay, but you're not dead.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Huh, you're not dead.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
That's not very bendery, No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
I think they were inspired by the Vendors a little bit,
but I don't know supposedly.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Also, I've never read American Gods, the Neil game and book.
Have you? Have you read any of his stuff?
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Never have.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
I've read some of his short stories and they're amazing,
so I'm surprised I've never read his novels. But in
American Gods, one of the characters is a Slavic god
named Zunborg, so that I'm going with. And every time
the Benders killed somebody, he gained strength from their sacrifice,
which is a pretty neat little take on the whole thing.
(43:22):
You know, because we're so like we have the blinders
on here on Earth, we don't even realize this murder
family is actually contributing to the well being of a
Slavic god.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
I thought you were going to say, whenever they killed someone,
they would yell Zunberg.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Well they did that. Too, but that was never captured
in the articles from the time, Chuck, which, by the way,
if you're like I need to know more about the
bloody Benders, and I will not have it filtered through history.
I need the original stuff. There's a website called Genealogytrails
dot com and if you search that and Bender Family
and your favorite search engine, it will bring up the
(43:57):
crime related news articles from the time about the Bender family.
And it's awesome because it has a bunch of other details.
But also it's got like that old timey nineteenth century
you know, crime reporting too write It's just worth reading,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
It's always fun.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
You got anything else about the Benders?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Well, that said about the Benders for now everybody. And
since Chuck said nothing else, that means it's time for
a listener. Man.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Hey, guys, stumbled across you in the summer of twenty
twenty when I was employed as a USPS Rural Carrier associate,
not a rural juror. I heard it.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Wait wait, now, I need to know what was that.
I can't remember what that's.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
From thirty Rock.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
I still can't place it, but I'll think about it
and I'll say Eureka later.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Okay, well, what's funny is after we talked a little
bit about thirty Rock on our Sitcoms episode and Emily
went out of town for a week and I barreled
through season one of thirty Rock while she was gone,
and it was so good.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah, just really do it again.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
What a show god. Alec Baldwin Yeah, and Tracy Morgan Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
And don't forget Liz Lemon.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
She was great. But uh oh boy, Baldwin and Tracy
Morgan just slavey on the show. I mean, everyone on
that show was really funny.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah. Tracy Morgan's best quote was somebody offered him cash
who's and he said, I'm glad you said that, because
I thought it was a bowl of baby penises.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
His other a good one that I got was you're
talking about how they go together, like peanut butter, and
he said, or like chicken and the chicken container.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
That's pretty good. So.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Rural Juror though, was the movie that Jane Krakowski was in,
and the joke is she goes Rure Duror and like,
no one knows what the title of the movie. He is,
but it had gone so long they couldn't really ask her, uh,
what the name of the movie was.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
I mean, I'm gonna keep watching it. She's so funny too, however, okay,
all right, back to the email. I have heard a
podcasts before, but never gave it much thought until a
friend insisted started to listen to some and they got
to the point of stuff you should Know, where I'd
talk to some much about y'all. My husband finally came
and said, who the Hecker Josh and Chuck, and when
you're going to introduce me to your new friends? But
(46:19):
now the show is our go to for family road trips.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Awesome.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
One neat thing I wanted to write about, though, was
my last dental appointment in February. I decided to bring
along earbuds so I could listen to y'all while getting
some feelings done. I asked the dentist and the assistant
if it would be okay to listen to the podcast
while they work, and the dentist said it was okay,
but asked me what I was going to listen to first.
I told her it was stuff you should Know and
how much I enjoyed it. And I was listening to
(46:44):
the Chowchilla Bus kidnapping episode. My dentist lit up and
told me how awesome that episode was. Her assistant had
never heard of the show, but the dentist was happily
talking about your show so much that my entire visit
I didn't get to listen to the episode because I
was half chatting to my dentist about stuff. You should know.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Thank you for saving me while I was delivering people's mail,
and for keeping company during my commutes with love from
the Land of ten Thousand Lakes. That is Tanya Vanderpool
from Texas. Ten thousand Lakes, Texas has like two lakes.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
What is that Minnesota? Minnesota?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, right, a thousand lakes.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
Yeah, it's gotta be Michigan. No, Minnesota, Yeah, it's Minnesota
for sure. She really didn't say, you're not toying with me.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
I don't know. I mean, I'm saying I'm not toying
with you, but I'm also on the verge of saying
so many things that are wrong about lakes and states
that I'm just stopping.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
That's fine, that's fine, But can you imagine the audacity
of just signing off with the Land of ten Thousand
Lakes and not putting in parentheses. What state you're talking about?
Speaker 2 (47:59):
I mean, I like my email's Chuck of the Peach State.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Okay, well that is pretty audacious. Chuck, it's violently unusual.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
What was the person's name again, Minnesota?
Speaker 1 (48:14):
You're in fine form today, aren't you. You're being playful.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
I'm kidding. It was Tanya Vanderpool.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Okay, thanks a lot, Tanya. We appreciate that, and we're
glad we can keep you company and that we made
your dentist's appointment so special. If you want to get
in touch with us like Tanya did and tell us
about your dental visits, why not, You can send it
in an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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