The Tale of the Bloody Benders

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome 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. Yeah, Halloween

(00:22):
right around the corner. I've always liked to think of you,
me and Jerry is a kind of murder family. Uh,
as in you and in Jerry. Right. We always have
to correct that because people think you're talking about you
and your wife. Right, Okay, you me comma you comma
me comma? No, No, I mean me my wife, you,

(00:43):
me and Jerry. I've always thought about it, you know,
I'm kidding. I miss what you said though you thought
it was. Is what a murder from murder family? Yeah? Sure,
in the kindest possible way, exactly exactly. Um No, we're
in a murder family. And after everybody learned about the
Bloody Benders, they'll be like, yeah, Josh and Chuck and

(01:03):
Jerry or no murder family. Um and we wouldn't want
to be either, because it turns out murder families are
not so great. Chuck, right, And can we shout out
a listener who submitted this topic? Oh yeah, definitely that's
I feel like it's happening more and more like a lot.
As our world gets smaller, our listeners are reminding us
that it is quite large. Uh. And we got this

(01:23):
one from a Kanson that's very appropriate. Is that how
you say it? Kansa? I think it's Kansinian night, Okay,
Kanzinia nighte uh named Star White. And apparently Starr was
traveling UH with the family through Kansas and saw signs
in Montgomery County for the Benders, the Bloody Benders and

(01:46):
things commemorating this and said, I'm a Kanson, a Kansania Nite,
and I had no idea that this was a thing.
I gotta learn more about this, So we're doing one.
You know, we like to keep it spooky in October
where we can't sure for sure, and there's nothing spookier
than a serial killing family. Interestingly, to um this past,

(02:07):
I think march Um. What I'm taking to be is
one of the definitive books on the Benders came out.
It's called Hell's half Acre uh, and it is by
an author named named a drum Roll named Susan Joe Nousus.
That's how I'm going with her last name but it

(02:28):
came out in March called Hell's Health Acre, and um,
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. Huh, just driving through.
Great name too, by the way, Star White, what a
great name. It's almost like star wipe. No one, do
you like it? It's your favorite transition that I do

(02:51):
know what bender actually, but this is I don't think
there's any relation. Yeah, because it's not entirely clear that
that was even their names too, so we should talk it.
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 maybe even beyond the frontier um.
The Trail of Tears had happened by this time, so

(03:14):
the o Sage people who had lived there previously have
been 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, Did you do bad

(03:35):
things back east, right, just pick up your bags and
head west. 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 um, as we'll
find out this this family, the Bender family kind of
put up a claim or set down a claim. They
did something with the claim. I'm not not quite up
on my like, um old prospect or terminology claim something Yeah,

(03:58):
on this road that kind of kept leading west, and
they 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. That's right,
And that's probably a generous term for what they set up. Uh.
It was a pretty remote well, I guess, you know,
not to make too many Kansas jokes, but it was

(04:20):
a pretty remote part of Kansas, in southeastern Kansas invent Uh.
It was not Cherry Vell yet, but it would eventually
become Cherry Veil. And at first the two uh gentlemen
arrived John Bender, Sr. He was around sixty years old.
People called him Paw. He didn't talk a lot when

(04:41):
he did talk. It was mostly in German. Uh. And
then he was with a younger guy in his twenties.
And you know, we're gonna 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 record
keeping back then wasn't super solid. It, especially when it

(05:01):
turns out you may be using aliases and he may
be faking that you're a family or you may actually
be a family. Like no one really knows for sure, uh,
the facts of this, but John Bender Jr. Was with
him uh and he also occasionally went by an alias.
Uh put a pin in this one named John Gebhart

(05:21):
Chris get Heart. He's a comedian, he's great. But apparently
John Gebhart or John Bender Jr. Um was a bit
of a comedian's himself. But some reports he was his
own audience and no one else was. So to put
in another way, he apparently laughed at stuff like inappropriately

(05:44):
like Dr hibbert um and also at times when exactly
that was a great John Bender Junior impression by the
r but um at times where people were like this,
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. Yeah, he

(06:04):
had a German accent, but did speak fluent English. Uh.
And some people think he may have been intellectually disabled. Um,
looking at kind of some of the things that happened,
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 know, no for sure,
but from the articles of the time, That's what I'm

(06:28):
going with from now on. Um, they they they nobody
said anything even remotely like that. I saw it on
one I think the Crime Reads article, and that was
about it. I just got the impression that was really
kind of weird and almost like a Jethro clamp It type.
That's who he reminds me of. Okay. Uh So what
they built on their hundred and sixty acres was uh

(06:52):
you called it a tavern. I call it just a
big room kind of like a bunk a bunk house.
And maybe they called it or Olivia, who helped us
with this, called it a foothouse. But it was sixt
ft wide, twenty four ft long. So what they eventually
did was they would put up a canvas sheet kind
of splitting it into They lived in the back and

(07:12):
then they called you know, they called it an inn,
you called it the tavern. It was really just a
room with some canned goods and supplies and I think
a couple of beds, sort of like a bunk house.
It was not fancy at all. No, but I'm guessing
like as you were passing through Kansas back then and
maybe even today, it was pretty appealing. Do you think, Well,

(07:36):
I mean it was better than sleeping out on the
open prairie with the bedroll, right, you know, there's 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 things that
made it better than nothing was um 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. That's right. The two ladies were sent

(07:59):
for after everything was done, and it was Ma Bender,
who everyone just sort of assumed was the wife and
the the matriarch of the family. She went by Elvira
sometimes she was maybe in her fifties and let on
like she didn't speak any if very little, if any
English at all, but I had like a terrible temper.

(08:22):
She was widely reputed about from anybody that met her
that she was just a terrible cuss of a person
from what I gather. Yeah, in fact, I think she
may have been the one sort of leading this whole charge.
I've seen both. I've seen her or I've seen Kate,
and Kate Kate was the daughter. She was UM in
her twenties. But I think more than anything, Um she

(08:44):
uh kind of attracted passers by with flyers um advertising
her mediumship like she was into spiritualism and free love
apparently too, and who knows what that means. In eighteen
seventies Kansas, she was 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. Um.

(09:08):
Some people thought she may have been the daughter. Other
people thought that they presented she and John Jr. As
Um a couple. So it's just sort of one of
those things. It's it's it's loose out there in eighteen seventies, Kansas. Right.
So one other thing I read Chuck that Levy didn't
quite hit on, um was that this family, they weren't
like exactly you know, fading into the woodwork or the

(09:31):
prairie like. They were well known in their little community,
mainly because they 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
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

(09:51):
of the community, but they were known to be weird.
In Ma in particular. You just kind of avoided her
as best as you could. Right. So they have of
things set up. It's on the edge of the Great
oh Sage 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 that
you know, sold a few things. Uh, what's the word,

(10:13):
I'm looking for a general store? No? Um, all these
bargain house rations okay, yeah, selling rations and things like that.
They sell rations at Ali's. What is allis it's like
a deep discount liquidary. Like if you stole a truck,
you just drive it over there and they'll buy everything

(10:34):
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. Uh. Yeah, we should be clear. I
think I've never heard of ALI, so I'm I'm innocent
of this. You should go wander around one and you'd
be like, Okay, I got you. Here's an oriental rug,
here's um some off brand bleach on the next stile.
Like it's just just that yeah, oh yeah. It's like

(10:57):
all over the place, in every strip mall, in every city,
in every in every country in the world. It may
be one of those things that's so ubiquitous. I've just
never noticed it right under my nose. All right. So
they set up in Allies right there on the great
out stage trail, and maybe this is a good place
to take our first break. Oh I wasn't expecting that.

(11:20):
Let me see. Okay, that sounds good, okay, chuck so um.

(11:53):
One of the things that Um made the Benders made
us call the Benders and murder families that they started
murdering people pretty shortly after they set up this homestead
along the O s Age Trail. And one of the
things about Kansas at the time was it was really
really violent. Um. Not just in the wars against the

(12:14):
Native Americans there. UM, there were also um pro slavery
and anti slavery factions that committed atrocities against one another. Um.
The Civil War by bread kind of broke out thanks
to Kansas. I'm struggling which kind of state it was
going to be. UM. So it was a really violent place.
And it was with that kind of violent backdrop that

(12:36):
a family could just kill a bunch of travelers with
without anyone really taking notice. 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. Yeah,
absolute um. However, when they start turning up in regular

(13:00):
order around town, then you've got a problem. And that's
what happened. Uh. In May of eight seventy one, the
body of a man was found in local Drum Creek. UH.
This is southeast of the Benders House. And this is
very key here, he had his he had been brained,
he had his skull bashed in and had his throat cut, which,

(13:22):
as you will see, becomes the recurring m O of
this family. Yep uh. Two more men were found shortly after,
I think a few months later. A few months after that, um,
another body was found all in the creek and apparently
they all um had that same kind of a mortal
wound or that combination of injuries. And one of the

(13:44):
bodies was identified as a man named William Jones, and
he had been carrying known to have been carrying about
two fifty dollars, which at the time was like a
lot of money to today, 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

(14:06):
were walking around with a lot of cash because they
were going to buy land, pay off mortgages, do god
knows what, 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. Yeah.

(14:28):
And the way he got off too, was kind of
frustrating as a uh like a crime enthusiast reader, because
they investigated it and they found that, uh, 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,

(14:49):
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, Yeah, just take throw
that pin away, break into so. Um. 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

(15:11):
it was like you avoid the spot as best you can,
like maybe go out of your way to avoid this
area on the O Sage Trail because people just wind
up missing there. Um. 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

(15:33):
just had a reputation as being odd and um, possibly
a little um maybe violently unusual, but not murderers by
any stretch. They just weren't suspected for a really long time.
Violently unusual. Yeah, what a reputation. Yeah, that's pretty serious. Uh.

(15:53):
Here's another story too that you do need to get
that pin out put it back together, that you Josh
told you to break in and put a pin in
this story because this was chronologically speaking, February seventy three,
a woman who didn't really have any money apparently stopped
at the home, asked to rest, asked for some food,

(16:14):
fell asleep on a bed in the back, and then
when she woke up there was mob bender and she
pointed to a table covered in pistols and knives and said,
there your suppers ready. So this lady somehow apparently manages
to stay composed and not like react with alarm after

(16:37):
like waiting up fiddle, yeah exactly, and said I just
need to step outside for a minute to to do something.
Just apparently made a private excuse, is what the Kansas
City Time said, and um 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

(16:59):
hard to parse together what 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.
It didn't. And that, by the way, is a classic
example of being violently unusual. Okay, you know they were
just like, if you're violently unusual, you have the kind
of house that people run two miles away from in

(17:21):
their bare feet wee, where guns and knives are presented
his supper exactly right. So this is just kind of
going along. The benders are homing along do and there
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 one two punch of murders that finally

(17:41):
led to their discovery as a murder family. And the
first thing started with a guy named George Newton long Core,
who um left Independence, Kansas, which was just to the
west of Cherry Veil along the O Sage Trail, and
he was on his way to Iowa, so we would
have passed through Cherry veil Um along with his eighteen

(18:01):
month old daughter, mary Anne, and he never made it
to Iowa. And that caught the attention another man, a
physician named William York, 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. Yeah. Good neighbor, Yeah,
really good neighbor, like to do such a thing to

(18:23):
take this trip. So starts investigating, finds out that the
the horse and wagon team was abandoned near Fort Scott,
Kansas and in the spring. Um, 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,
all that stuff is still there. Basically all other stuff

(18:44):
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. Yeah, and that
really caught the attention of people because it turned out
Dr William York And if I said Edward the first time,
he's forgive me. His name was William and he was
a doctor, and he was a York and there were

(19:04):
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. So they
had murdered the brother of a Kansas senator who was
known to be out looking around the area of Cherry
Vale for somebody else who had gone missing. And that
really got people's antenta up, Yeah, big time, enough to

(19:28):
where they got a search party. Colonel Alexander I think
about seventy five men set off and they were, you know,
they were scouring around. They were, uh, 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 um, you know, claims to not speak English,

(19:52):
which seems like her Her main jam, her big joke
besides here's her supper of guns and knives, was I
also don't speak English. Uh, Kate Young Kate says, I
don't know anything about this guy, and then John Jr. Said, Hey, listen,
I was shot at when I was out there at
Drum Creek where all these like bodies have been found,

(20:12):
and I can take you out there and like maybe
the people that shot at me killed your friends as well. Yeah,
and again, just imagine jeth throw Clampitt saying this and
taking people out to look at a place where he
claims to have been shot at. Right. I just I
love that bit so um so. But he's also just cookie,

(20:33):
you know, Um, did you watch The Beverly hill Billies?
I did, like a lot. Uh, yeah, yeah, I watched
it a lot. 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. Yeah,
it was got a little weird later in that show,
it really didn't get weird. So it's not clear whether

(20:55):
this is that Hollywood producer of Jethrow or the original
uh mountaineer son of Jethro. 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,

(21:16):
and they kind of headed on Basically, Yeah, I mean
he showed bullet holes in a tree, or not holes
but bullet markings, uh, which you know Kansas in the
eighteen seventies, about half the tree said bullets in him.
So that doesn't prove anything, but like you said, it
was enough at least sniff them slightly off the case,
at least temporarily. Um. But they came back a few

(21:38):
days later. Said, listen, we heard about this lady 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 was guns and n eyes.
There's something about a pistol supper or something like That's
that's weird. She ran away barefoot for two miles and

(22:01):
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 patch and
and went off saying, you know that that lady was
a witch and she has uh you know, cursed Kate's
coffee and that she was gonna drink and if she

(22:23):
ever comes back here, I'm gonna kill her. We got
her out of here. She was a witch. Yeah, she
converted Kate's coffee into that mushroom coffee, and now Kate
refuses to drink it. What's mushroom coffee? It's exactly what
it sounds like. Don't actually have coffee. Oh, it's made
out of mushrooms. Yeah, uh yeah, you should try it sometime,

(22:43):
just to say you tried it. 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.
Have fun with that. So um 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 Um Alexander Yorke kind of

(23:05):
stuck around town and they held a meeting um with
for basically the whole town that Pa and John Jr.
Even attended, 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 brassily, uh,

(23:29):
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 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 Benders place. And when they showed up,
they realized very quickly that the Benders weren't there and

(23:52):
probably hadn't been there since the night of that meeting. Yeah,
when they realized, they told people to come and search
their house. You said, my favorite part about Kid's jam
is that they asked her to do the seance to
like give some more information, like people 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

(24:13):
ever seen the seance? She's like, why don't you come
back tomorrow night, just the two of you and we'll
do one. And they were like, no, thank you, right,
I think I'll take the zero in that one. Yeah,
that's what I'm saying, doctor, Colonel. No. Colonel Alexander York
was a sharp dude, basically, Yeah, but the townspeople weren't
sharp enough to go. I don't know if they were

(24:33):
searching other places. I know there was a weather issue,
but like you said, by the time they got there,
they were Gonzo's um. 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. Uh.
And they got the heck out of Dodge, well not
out of Dodge, out of what would become Cherry Veil,

(24:55):
very close, very close. So the volunteers were like, well,
I guess since they left, we and 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

(25:17):
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. I
think it's a great place for our second break. Okay, great,
the height of suspense. Let's do it. We'll be back
and talk about what was making that smell right after this,

(25:53):
all right, So they have a 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

(26:15):
going to get to the bottom of the smell. The
bottom of it is, Uh, there were dead bodies in
there previously. Yeah. Yeah, So they had this pretty easy.
They had the um, 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

(26:36):
they would kill people, put them in the trap door
through the trap door to the cellar, and then retrieved
them at night when they weren't prying eyes around. Yeah.
Pretty good system they had going. Uh. They started searching around.
They did eventually find bodies. Uh. They found William York's
body buried in the orchard. They found Lanker's body buried

(26:58):
along with young mary Anne who uh the two gentlemen
had the head wounds in the in the throat wounds.
Mary Anne, I've seen variously was either suffocated or suffocated
from being buried alive but not brained in throat slit
at least tragic either way, of course, but very very

(27:20):
sad case. Uh. Eventually they would go on to find
about a dozen bodies and were eventually implicated in as
many as twenty one murders. Yeah, Um they found it. Yeah,
it saw eleven I think, including um Mary Anne. Um.
A bunch of them were in the orchard. They looked
around the property and realized that there were a bunch

(27:40):
of depressions in the orchard. And they're like, I wonder
if those are graves, and Um, they turned up people
in the graves. They found somebody in the well, and
then yeah, when you add them together with all the
people dumped in Drum Creek, I guess it comes to
about 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

(28:03):
benders um became national news. But that that curtain that
they had dividing the tavern, the olive's bargain bin from
the rest of the house, Um was right behind the
seat where they would have travelers and guests sit when
they were eating a meal, right, Yeah, And they would

(28:25):
have them sit there and you know, from the other
side it would you know, they would be silhouetted, silhouetted
by the candle light so they could see clearly where
they were, and then Paw or John Jr. Would either
use like the butt of an axe or a hammer
to brain them. Uh. They would put them in the
cellar and rob them and then slit their throat. And uh.

(28:48):
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
Mr Wetzel said, hey, wait a minute. They tried to
get me to sit right by that curtain and I
wouldn't sit by the curtain, and mob Bender got really
mad about that, and so we got the heck out

(29:09):
of there. Uh. 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 the membrane them like
the Maybe they felt the curtain offered some sort of cover.

(29:31):
It just seems very like stubborn, like they had to
follow a procedure or else the person. Yeah, you have
to sit there. I'm like, well, you can't murder a
guy in another chair. Well, I 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. Maybe it sounds a little I mean,

(29:51):
I guess they got away with it for a little while,
so but I don't know, it sounds a little uh amateurish, sure,
or they were such professionals they just stuck to the script.
If the scriptivated, they didn't take chances. And there's there's
actually a good suggestion of why they didn't take chances,
because there were um later discovered in the house bullet
holes um in the walls and in the door frames.

(30:12):
And that was taken to be from people who had
tried to fight back when they realized what was going on. Um.
But I guess they had ultimately been unsuccessful, because nobody
escaped that house saying they had shot at everyone because
they tried to brain them, you know. Or maybe it's
just supper. Yes, so pistol pistol suffer, You're right, who knows? Uh?

(30:33):
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 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, you know,

(30:53):
breaking up pieces of the seller and breaking up the
bed frame and kind of just taking whatever they wanted with. 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 um. A decade later, Austin would have
what's frequently referred to as the first serial killer in

(31:15):
America with the Servant Girl Annihilator, which is I don't
even know if I want to do a podcast on that. No,
I don't know that name alone. It's like, that's all right,
that stopped me cold. I mean, this was ten years
before Jack the Ripper even right exactly in H. H. Holmes,
who's also often referred to as America's first serial killer,

(31:36):
he wasn't until the um 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 things
that happened about this being such a huge media sensation

(31:57):
is that, like the country was following this and everyone
was basically looking for the vendors because don't forget, they 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 ticket person
and said, yeah, those four people definitely bought tickets, but

(32:18):
I can't tell you where. Yeah exactly, they said, you
can tell us. I'm a doctor. Uh. They did arrest
twelve men. Um, 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

(32:38):
as receiving stolen goods, because they never really found a
super clear motive. I mean, it seems like a lot
of them may have had like traveling money, or like
the guy who had the two fifty bucks, which was
a lot of money at the time, um, but it
was never liked percent established, like their motive was just
to rob people. But they implicated these twelve guys, those

(32:59):
guys who may have up them move uh stolen items
and money and stuff like that. And apparently one of
the guys was a member of a vigilante committee who
tried to get on to help lead the investigation with
Colonel York. But I was denied and rejected, and I
think that kind of hurt his feelings. And I think

(33:20):
what it came down to was these guys, they were
known as the regulators, these vigilantees. 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
tied it to these people because of the throat cutting. 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

(33:41):
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,
like a pledge of allegiance. Almost but you're you're like
as if you don't know which side of your chest
to put your hand in, you you've got it wrong,

(34:01):
kind of like that. And apparently they found a lot
of the bodies in the orchard, um at the 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 in
the gang, but it's possible that gang of vigilantes were
fencing this stuff for them, and that they were at

(34:22):
least tangentially related. You know, sure, it's possible. Um, 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 Um and was from upstate

(34:44):
New York near the Adirondack Mountains, so not German at all. Um.
There were some pretty sketchy accounts, not super well researched,
that said she had been married before and that her
husband's 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. Apparently, out of

(35:07):
all of the four, the um Ma and Kate seemed
to have actually been related, although I don't know how.
I didn't see how did you like how they were related? No? No, no,
like they were supposed to be mother and daughter. But
how did how did that ever get turned up? Like?
Where where was that? How was that ever defined? Or

(35:28):
I think just people doing like modern research on lineage
and stuff like that, because they think they turned up
her original name to that Ma was married to a
man named Griffith, and that Kate was really Eliza Griffith. Uh.
John Sr. Apparently was John flicking Er uh and was
either from Germany or the Netherlands. And then John Jr.

(35:52):
Apparently his real name was the alias that he was using.
That I said to put up in John Gerhard and
now you can take that pin out, break in half
and throw it away. So if he was using his
real name as an alias, then I'm not sure what
was going on with John Jr. No, No, he was
a jet throw type, don't forget so. Um. The there

(36:14):
were people who were like, oh, we've seen the vendors.
Who saw the vendors here, they went this way, they
went that away. Um. For years and years and years
it was um like like people would would report on
their whereabouts, and it's uncleared to this day whether people
did or didn't know where they went. UM. I saw
there was one like kind of article I guess from

(36:35):
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 vanished in the thin air. And
then there were reports that were usually incorrect, that they've
either been captured or that they've been killed um or.

(36:58):
There was one report that Pod died by suicide in
Lake Michigan in right Another one said John Jr. And
Kate went to uh New Mexico like sort of Texas
New Mexico border and John died of a stroke. Uh.
Some people said that vigilantes got them and they burned

(37:20):
Kate alive and shot and killed the other ones buried
him in the prairies, but no one ever claimed the
pretty 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. There's
just no way to know. So, Um, Laura Ingalls Wilder

(37:41):
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. Um.
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 stay there. But
they settled in a close enough area that after the

(38:03):
Benders were found out, Um, 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 until morning.
But at any time you ever asked him about the Benders,
he would say, there they'll never be found again. Um. Again,
this isn't true. And one of the other things that
really undermines the vigilante theories again, seventy thousand and today's

(38:26):
dollars was offered as a reward. Somebody from that group
of vigilantes would have stepped up and taken it, or
even if they didn't, how could a group of vigilantes
keep that secret for all that time that it's still
to this day never came up, because that would be
something to boast about that you were among the group
of vigilantes that caught and killed the bloody benders. You know.

(38:48):
So I think the vigilante thing is get a book
deal at the very least for sure. Uh. These days,
I think it's the kind of thing where a lot
of Kansas Indian nights know about it. Um. You know
that there they celebrated bender Days for a while. Uh.
They had a replica at Cherry Vale at one point

(39:09):
of the Bendor House. UM. More recently. Uh. In fact,
just a couple of years ago, a gentleman named Bob Miller,
who was as a financial advisor from Independence and a
historian and who knows maybe a bit of a murder junkie,
bought the land uh and basically said, like, Hey, the
people that own this land never did anything with it.

(39:31):
They never searched for the location of the murder sites
or the house, and and I want to do that.
I want to like have like professional expert investigations done
on the property. Uh. I don't know if he plans
to like put up like a Lizzie boarding house or something, um,
but he wants to get to the bottom of what
he can at least, right. Yeah, he's good. He's said

(39:53):
he's gonna 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 is send game as either.
But it's pretty neat that he bought it. And one
of the reasons why he's feeling good about finding something
is there. The family that he bought it from own
the land for like the last sixty five previous years,
and they showed zero interests whatsoever in finding the actual

(40:15):
site and they just turned it all into crop lands.
So there's a good chance that there's something like the foundation,
maybe even that gas reseller, the well that the one
guy was found in remnants of the orchard. Who knows
there there could be plenty of stuff left there. Um,
I don't know if they're gonna I believe they exhumed
all of the bodies that they found, but that's not
to say that they found everybody. You know, Yeah, absolutely, Um.

(40:39):
There was a movie made called Bender that does not
look great. Did you see the trailer? I know I didn't,
I just saw. Olivia quoted a user from IMDb that
said it had some of the worst acting I've ever seen.
What was the trailer like, uh not? I mean, it

(41:00):
didn't look great. I read some other reviews that said
it was okay, but it wasn't like, uh, super murdery
or super scary, so it kind of fell too much
toward like historical drama. They talked a lot about like
raising and harvesting green. Maybe I don't know, but um,
there was a thing that uh in Red Dead Redemption

(41:22):
too that it is funny because I kind of forgot
about this. I played that game a couple of years ago,
and um, 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 get you to
stay for dinner. And apparently it's modeled after this, and

(41:43):
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 don't, all right, if you if
you want to play this game and you haven't, it's
pretty old, don't listen to this part but if you
don't care like most people, uh, don't drink the drink,

(42:05):
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. Okay, but
you're not dead. Huh, you're not dead. That's not very
bend Ery, now, it's not. I think they were inspired
by the Benders a little bit, but I don't know supposedly. Also, um,
i've never read American Gods, the Neil game and book.

(42:27):
Have you? Have you read any of his stuff? Never have.
I've read some of the short stories and they're amazing,
so I'm surprised I've never read his novels. But in
American Gods, um, one of the characters is a Slavic
god named Zernborg, so I'm going with And every time
the Benders killed somebody, he gained strength from their sacrifice,

(42:48):
which is a pretty neat little take on the whole thing,
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. I thought you were gonna say whenever they
killed someone, they would yell zoomberg. Right, Well they did
that too, but um, that was never captured in the

(43:09):
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 genealogy Trails
dot com and if you search that and Bender Family
and your favorite search engine, it will bring up the
crime related news articles from the time about the Bender family.

(43:29):
And it's awesome because it has a bunch of other details.
But also it's got like the old timey nineteenth century,
you know, crime reporting to It's just worth reading, for sure.
It's always fun. Do you anything else about the Benders?
Nothing else? Well, let's say about the Benders for now, everybody.
And since Chuck said nothing else, that means it's time

(43:50):
for a listener. Man. Hey, guys, stumbled across you in
the summer when I was employed as a USPS role
carrier associate. Uh not a rural juror wait wait, no,
I need to know what was that. I can't remember
what this is from thirty Rock. I still can't place it,

(44:13):
but I'll think about it and I'll say eureka later. 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. Yeah, it was really do it again.
What a show. God, Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan. Yeah,

(44:37):
and don't forget Liz Lemon. She was great, but uh boy,
Baldwin and Tracy Morgan just slay me on the show.
I mean everyone on that show was really funny. Yeah.
Tracy Morgan's best quote was somebody offered him cash whose
and he said, I'm glad you said that because I
thought it was a bowl of baby penises. His other
a good one that I got was he's talking about

(44:59):
how they go together like peanut butter, and he said,
or like chicken and the chicken container. That's pretty good.
So Rural Juror though, was the movie that Jane Krakowski
was in, and the joke is she goes ru Dur
and like no one knows what the title of the
movie he is, but it had gone so long they

(45:21):
couldn't really ask her what the name of the movie was.
I mean, I'm gonna keep watching it. She's so funny too, however,
all right back to the email. I've heard a podcast before,
but never gave a much thought until a friend insisted.
I started to listen to some and they got to
the point of Stuff you Should Know, where I talked
to some much about y'all. My husband finally came and said,

(45:42):
who the Hecker, Josh and Chuck, and when you're going
to introduce me to your new friends? But now the
show was our go to for family road trips. 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. Asked a dentist and the assistant if it
would be okay to listen to the podcast while they work,

(46:05):
and the dentist said it was okay, but asked me
what I was gonna listen to first. I told her
it was Stuff you Should Know and how much I
enjoyed it. And I was listening to the chow Chilla
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

(46:25):
your show, Uh 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.
That's awesome. 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

(46:46):
is Tanya Vanderpool from Texas. Ten dousan mikes, Texas has
like two lates. What is that Minnesota, Minnesota? Yeah, right,
thousand Lakes. Yeah, it's gotta be Michigan. No, Minnesota. Yeah,
it's Minnesota for sure. She really didn't say, you're not

(47:06):
toying with me. 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. 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? I mean, I

(47:28):
like all my emails, Chuck of the Peach State. Okay,
well that is pretty audacious, Chuck, it's violently unusual. Um,
what was the person's name again? Minnesota? You're in fine
form today, aren't you. You're being playful. I'm kidding. It
was Tanya Vanderpool. Okay, thanks a lot, Tanya. We appreciate that,

(47:49):
and we're glad we can keep your 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 i
heart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,

(48:12):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H