November 22, 2025 • 37 mins
The narrative centers on the Bender family, a seemingly ordinary group who operated a roadside inn in Labet County, Kansas, during the tumultuous period of the early 1870s. While the Benders presented themselves as a welcoming establishment for weary travelers, they concealed a heinous reality: they were, in fact, predators who exploited the lawless environment of the American frontier. The episode meticulously unravels the chilling tale of their gruesome crimes, which were not merely the actions of a singularly monstrous family, but rather a manifestation of the broader societal chaos and moral ambiguity that characterized post-Civil War Kansas. As we delve into the story, we will explore the motivations behind their brutal acts, the profile of their victims, and the eventual unraveling of their dark secret, culminating in the discovery of a horrific burial site that has since been infamous as Hell's Half Acre. Through this examination, we aim to illuminate the disturbing juxtaposition of civilization and savagery that defined the frontier experience, challenging the romanticized narratives often associated with westward expansion.
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Takeaways:
- The Bender family, presenting themselves as a humble grocery store family, concealed a horrifying trap that preyed on vulnerable travelers.
- Post-Civil War Kansas was a chaotic landscape where lawlessness thrived and provided fertile ground for the Bender's heinous crimes.
- The Benders exploited the spiritualist movement, using Kate's charm as a façade to lure victims into their deadly trap.
- The community's response to the Bender murders reflected the necessity of informal justice systems in a lawless frontier society.
- The gruesome murders perpetrated by the Benders reveal the dark side of westward expansion, contradicting the myth of the American frontier.
- Ultimately, the Benders disappeared without a trace, embodying the terrifying reality of anonymity on the violent frontier.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:22):
Imagine you're alone.
It's late 1872, and the sun isbleeding across the Kansas prairie,
leaving the sky bruised purpleand black.
This part of the nation hasbeen United states territory since
1803, when President Jeffersonbought it from Napoleon.
But now, almost 70 yearslater, it was still a very underdeveloped
(00:42):
part of the nation.
Although railroads werebeginning to gain popularity as a
form of transportation, mostpeople who were traveling west continue
to do so, using offshoots ofthe overland trail that went to California
and to Utah and the New Mexico territories.
Travelers often went miles andmiles without seeing any signs of
(01:07):
humanity.
And many of the roads theymoved along were barely more than
gashes of mud and wheel rutscutting west.
There is a crushing sense ofemptiness to the plains.
The wind is a physical thing,a constant pressure that chills you
to the bone.
Every rustle in the grasssounds like a threat.
Every shadow seems to move.
(01:28):
This isn't the romantic westof the dime novels.
This is a place of profound,terrifying isolation.
And now, over 150 miles fromIndependence, Missouri, the last
large city in the Midwest, thelonely traveler likely felt some
relief when they saw thesingle point of a yellow light, a
(01:48):
candle in a window.
As they draw closer, a small,rough looking cabin seems to just
materialize out of the gloom.
And a crude hand painted signhangs over the door reading groceries.
It's a wayside inn.
It's civilization.
It seems like it's safety.
The traveler pulls their horseto a stop and they walk toward that
(02:11):
warm glow of the candle,completely unaware that this is not
a reprieve from the dangers ofthe Wild west, but rather, it's the
very heart of it.
This place that we're talkingabout is Libet county, tucked into
the far bottom right corner ofKansas, not far from the first part
of the Santa Fe Trail.
(02:31):
Even today, Levette county isthe collection of small towns and
cities, along with a few ghosttowns, too.
At this point, though, in1872, Kansas had only been a state
for a little over a decade,and Lebeck county itself was officially
just a few years old.
It was a chaotic, liminalspace, a society not yet fully formed.
(02:54):
The Homestead act of 1862 haddrawn a flood of settlers.
These were union veterans,immigrants, families displaced by
the Civil War, all hoping toclaim their 160 acres of promise.
But this was also thetraditional land of the Osage people,
who were being violentlypushed out, creating a landscape
(03:17):
of tension, transience anddeep seated conflict.
It was a place where peopleappeared without a past and could
vanish without a future.
Now, in 1870, the Benderfamily appeared in the county.
Four of them.
An old man, his wife, twoadult children, built a small cabin
(03:37):
and started a roadside grocerystore in it.
And to their neighbors, theywere quiet, strange, and ultimately
unremarkable.
But they were running morethan just a business.
They were running a trap.
And that's the core of ourstory today.
The Benders, they weren't justa random anomaly, a single monstrous
(03:57):
family that appeared out of nowhere.
We're going to argue that theywere a terrifying product of their
environment, the lawlessness,isolated and vulnerable American
frontier.
Their gruesome crimes weremade possible by the unique conditions
of the post Civil War Kansas,a place where the promise of a new
life was shadowed by theconstant threat of a violent death.
(04:22):
The story of the bloodyBenders is a brutal counternarrative
to the romanticized myth ofwestward expansion, revealing the
predators who thrived in thisvacuum of authority.
In today's episode, we'regoing to take you on a dark journey
down a lonely trail.
We'll meet this strange familyand follow the string of disappearances
(04:44):
that grew longer and longerwith each passing season.
And finally, we'll join thesearch party that uncovered a horrific
burial in a Kansas appleorchard, a place that would forever
be known as Hell's Half acre.
(05:19):
The story begins, as so manyfrontier stories do, with a claim
on the land.
In the fall of 1870, two, mencalling themselves John Bender and
John Bender Jr.
Filed a claim for 160 acres inLebet County.
This was part of the Homesteadact signed into law by President
Abraham Lincoln in 1862, whichoffered home ownership and huge chunks
(05:44):
of land to each American headof household who moved to the Midwest
and farmed that land for atleast five years.
This opportunity was alsoavailable to women, formerly enslaved
peoples and immigrants who hadapplied for citizenship.
Now, ultimately, the Homesteadact was incredibly successful in
(06:04):
the sense that it absolutelyencouraged western migration.
Over the next few decades, theHomestead act of 1862 resulted in
the settlement of over 270million acres, or about 10% of the
United States total area.
And those settlers often wenton to contribute to the breadbasket
(06:26):
nickname of the region byfarming wheat and corn, or they established
cattle farming and ranching businesses.
There, in the sparselypopulated Labet county, The John
Bender Sr. And Jr.
Built a small single roomcabin, only about 16 by 24ft.
(06:47):
It was a crude structure, butstrategically placed right near the
trail that took people to the west.
After the cabin was built, thewomen arrived.
Elvira, the mother, and Kate,the Daughter.
They divided the small spacewith a simple canvas wagon cover,
the kind that you'd see oncovered wagons that traversed the
(07:09):
Wild West.
And with the cabin dividedinto two, the front half becomes
the public space, a smallgeneral store selling a few supplies
like crackers and sardines,with a dining table where travelers
could get a meal.
And it also served as a placefor overnight guests to bunk.
(07:30):
Now, the back half, behindthat curtain, was the family's private
living quarters.
From the outside, it lookedlike any other struggling homestead
trying to make a go of it.
But from the inside, it was aperfectly engineered killing floor.
Frankly, the physical layoutof the cabin was a chillingly perfect
metaphor for the duality ofthe frontier itself.
(07:53):
On the one side of the thincanvas sheet, you have a veneer of
civilization.
You have the commerce, thehospitality, a shared meal.
On the other, hidden fromview, you have the potential for
absolute savagery.
Absolutely, Michael.
It reflects the centraltension of the west that historians
(08:13):
have grappled with for over a century.
It was a place where thepromise of a new civilized society
was in constant, directcontact with what Frederick Jackson
Turner famously called the,quote, simplicity of primitive society.
The Bender's cabin wasn't justa building.
(08:34):
It was a microcosm of theentire frontier experience, where
the line between safety andslaughter was as thin and flimsy
as a piece of cloth.
And the family that livedbehind that curtain was just as unsettling
as their home.
Contemporary accounts fromneighbors at the time and the few
(08:54):
who survived an encounter withthem paint a very disturbing picture.
John Bender Sr.
The patriarch, was around 60years old, a hulking, imposing figure
who spoke very little English.
And what he did speak wasguttural and hard to understand.
One local publication latercollected descriptions of John Bender
(09:18):
Sr. And they are quite damning.
I'm reading from a compilationof accounts published after the crimes
were discovered.
It says, quote, the old manwas a repulsive, hideous brute without
a redeeming trait.
Dirty, profane and ill tempered.
His wife, Elvira, or morecommonly known as Ma Bender, was
(09:40):
just as grim.
She was somewhere around 55and so notoriously unfriendly that
some neighbors simply calledher a she devil.
Then There was John Jr.
He was about 25 years old.
He was described as handsome,but with a habit of laughing aimlessly
at nothing in particular,which led many to dismiss him as
(10:02):
a, quote, half wit.
And finally there was Kate,the 23 year old, attractive, intelligent
and charming daughter.
She spoke English perfectlyand was the public face of the family.
The one who greeted thetravelers and put them at ease.
But even with Kate's charm,the family was a source of local
(10:23):
gossip.
People were spread out in thecommunity, but they still met up
occasionally for social eventsor church meetings.
But the Bender family kept tothemselves, and more than one neighbor
noted that the relationshipbetween John Jr. And Kate seemed
unnervingly intimate, Morelike a husband and wife than siblings.
(10:45):
This strangeness, this sensethat they weren't quite what they
seemed, is key to the story.
The Benders were commonlybelieved to be German immigrants,
Although that wasn't alwayscompletely sure.
But this mysteriousness ofwhere they came from wasn't necessarily
a red flag to others in the area.
(11:05):
Many people went west to startover, to create a new life for themselves
where no one else really knew them.
And this is where the work ofhistorian Suzanne Joneses and her
book Hell's half acre is so illuminating.
She argues that the Benderfamily may not have been a biological
(11:25):
family at all, but rather aconstructed unit, you know, in a
place where the ideal of ahard working homesteading family
was the very bedrock of society.
This presented them with aperfect cover.
You know, presentingthemselves as a family made them
appear normal, trustworthy.
And that facade of family,Jonas suggests, was their most effective
(11:50):
weapon.
A weapon that they would useto exploit the most vulnerable people
traveling across the plains.
Exactly.
And the people they targetedwere vulnerable for a reason.
Post civil war Kansas was alandscape of economic extremes.
You had profound desperation,but you also had people carrying
(12:11):
their entire net worth incash, looking for a fresh start.
A man traveling alone to buy aplot of land might have hundreds
or even thousands of dollarson his person.
And in a place with no banks,no law enforcement to speak of, and
miles of empty space betweensettlements, these travelers were
(12:32):
the perfect prey.
The benders crimes, at theircore, were a form of brutal, predatory
capitalism Flourishing in anenvironment with absolutely no regulation
or oversight.
They saw a market opportunity,and they exploited it with hammers
and knives.
If the Bender family was atrap, Kate was the bait.
(12:57):
While the rest of her familyremained withdrawn and stolen, and
Kate cultivated a vibrantpublic Persona.
She billed herself asProfessor Ms. Katie Bender, a healer,
clairvoyant, and spiritualist medium.
She printed flyers and placedadvertisements in local newspapers
proclaiming her ability tocure diseases, communicate with the
(13:20):
spirits of the dead, and hold seances.
She was also a radicalthinker, or at least she played one.
She lectured on spiritualismand advocated for controversial ideas
like free love.
Her personal philosophy was achilling rejection of all conventional
morality.
(13:40):
A manuscript of one of herlectures was later Found.
And it gives us a direct lookinto her mindset.
According to those whotranscribed it, she said, quote,
she proclaimed herselfresponsible to no one save herself.
She advocated free love andpublicly declared that murder might
be a dictation for good.
(14:01):
That in what the world mightbe deeming villainy, her soul might
read bravery, nobility and humanity.
End quote.
What the world might deemvillainy, her soul might read bravery.
That line is absolutelyterrifying because it's not just
a quirky belief.
It's a philosophicaljustification for murder.
(14:23):
It's the creation of a privatemoral universe where the Benders,
and Kate specifically, are thesole arbiters of right and wrong.
This wasn't just for show.
This was likely the internalideology that allowed them to do
or feel like they could dowhatever they want.
(14:43):
By framing their actions as ahigher form of bravery or nobility,
they could rationalize thesystematic slaughter of innocent
travelers.
It transformed them in theirown minds from common thieves into
something more.
Profits of this new morality,and this Persona worked.
(15:05):
Her reputation as a beautiful,charismatic psychic became the primary
attraction for the Bender Inn.
Lonely men, in particular weredrawn to her.
They would come seeking a hotmeal, but also the thrill of a seance,
a glimpse into the spiritworld, or just a conversation with
the captivating young woman ofthe prairie.
(15:26):
And that is why most accountsand analyses of the Bender murder
suggest that Kate herself wasthe mastermind.
She was the only member of thefamily who was the least bit sociable
or intelligent.
And she often seemed to be theringleader of the whole operation,
the one who seemed to bealways calling the shots.
(15:49):
Kate would welcome them in,sit them at the dinner table and
engage them with her dazzling conversation.
And she would always seat thatchosen guest in the seat of honor,
a bench with its back pressedfirmly against the canvas curtain
that divided the room.
To understand how community inthe 1870s could be so taken in by
(16:13):
all this, we have tounderstand the spiritualist movement.
Today, we might dismiss it asfringe occultism, but in the mid
19th century, it was a massivesocial and religious phenomenon.
That's right.
The Civil War had lefthundreds of thousands of families
shattered by loss.
And images of the battlefieldproduced through the new medium of
(16:37):
photography demonstrated thattheir loved ones had not only died
in overwhelmingly hugenumbers, but but horribly as well.
Spiritualism offered whatmainstream religion at the time couldn't.
Not just faith in anafterlife, but the promise of tangible
proof.
(16:57):
Through mediums, seances, andother forms of post death communication.
Grieving parents, grievingwidows, orphans believed that they
could receive one last specialMessage from their loved ones.
That's right.
And one well known case isthat of Mary Todd Lincoln, who, grieving
(17:18):
the loss of her son, organizedseances in the White House which
were attended by her husband,President Abraham Lincoln.
So when Kate Bender offeredspiritualist services to passerbys,
she was tapping into a veryreal and widespread belief system.
She was, and she wasexploiting it brilliantly.
(17:40):
Spiritualism was also one ofthe only public platforms where women
could hold positions of authority.
In an era when women werelargely barred from public speaking,
a female medium supposedlychanneling a male spirit, could speak
with absolute authority infront of large audiences.
(18:01):
Progressive figures likeVictoria Woodhull, the first woman
to run for president, usedspiritualism to champion radical
ideas about women's suffrageand equal rights.
And leading up to the CivilWar, there are cases of female spiritualists
using their skills as a formof abolitionism against slavery.
But Kate Bender represents thedark side of this movement.
(18:24):
She co opted the language offemale empowerment and radical thought,
but then twisted it for herown predatory ends.
She used the authority of themovement granting her not for liberation,
but for luring victims totheir deaths.
While the reality of survivaloften enforced a level of social
(18:45):
equality between men andwomen, most people still held idealized
gendered roles.
Pioneer women were supposed toact as a sort of civilizing force,
the nurturer who broughtdomestic stability to the wilderness.
And, and so in that sense,Kate Bender represented a subversion
of the traditional female roleon the frontier.
(19:07):
And that's exactly it.
Kate adopted the public facingrole of the healer and spiritual
guide, the ultimate femalenurturer, and turned it into a mask
for a killer.
And she wasn't a passiveaccomplice in the family's crimes.
She turned out to be thearchitect of, of the entire deadly
(19:28):
performance.
(19:50):
So between May of 1871 and thewinter of 1870 in 1982, the disappearances
along the trail in that partof Kansas began to mount.
A man named Jones was found inDrum Creek, his skull crushed and
his throat cut.
Two more unidentified bodiesturned up the following February
(20:11):
with the same gruesome injuries.
But the victims were oftendrifters or travelers or just men
passing through.
Men with no local ties whoseabsences wouldn't be immediately
missed or noticed.
And then in the winter of1872, a man named George Longcourt
(20:32):
and his 18 month old daughternamed Marianne set out from Independence,
Kansas, to resettle in Iowa.
Now, Longcourt was a widower,recently having lost his wife after
childbirth, and.
And he was taking his onlyremaining child back to live with
family.
He was carrying his lifesavings of about $1,900.
(20:53):
But they were never seen again.
Their disappearance cast apall over the region.
You know, these, these randommale travelers might just disappear.
But a man and his baby girldon't just vanish.
Especially those who had anexpected destination and waiting
family waiting for them.
(21:14):
And this is where the Bender'sfatal mistake comes into play.
Their entire operationdepended on the anonymity of their
victims.
Much like modern day serialkillers you may be familiar with,
the Bender family preyed onthe transient, the disconnected,
the people who could disappearwithout raising significant alarm.
(21:37):
But in this case, the Benders.
Their greed eventually madethem careless and.
And they broke one of theironly rules.
That's right.
In the spring of 1873, one ofGeorge Longcourt's former neighbors
decided to retrace hisfriend's route and find out what
happened to him.
The searching friend was Dr.William York, a well known and well
(21:58):
respected physician fromIndependence, Missouri.
Dr. York's search along thetrail led him inevitably to the Bender
Inn.
He stopped for a meal andasked the family if they had seen
Loncor and his daughter.
The benders admitted that Dr.York himself had stayed with them,
but claimed that he continuedon his way.
(22:20):
But then Dr. York vanished too.
But unlike the others who haddisappeared before him, Dr. York
had powerful connections.
His brother was ColonelAlexander York, a former state senator
and a man of considerableinfluence and determination.
And when Colonel York'sbrother didn't return, he went looking
(22:41):
for him.
And he started his search atthe last place Dr. York had been
seen alive.
The Bender place.
The arrival of Colonel Yorkchanged everything.
In a society with weak formalinstitutions, Social capital and
reputation are paramount.
(23:02):
Dr. York was not an anonymous drifter.
He was a pillar of his community.
By killing him, the Bendershad for the first time attacked the
established social fabric ofthe region.
This act mobilized thecommunity's informal power structures.
The posse, the town meeting ina way none of the previous murders
(23:22):
had.
They had finally chosen avictim who would be missed.
And more importantly, a victimwho would be avenged.
Colonel York led a searchparty to the bender Inn on March
28, 1873.
He questioned the family directly.
They were very evasive.
Kate offered to use herpsychic powers to help find the missing
(23:43):
doctor.
A brazen act of misdirection.
York left this and he leftdeeply suspicious.
A few days later, the colonelheard a story from a woman who had
recently fled the Bender Innin terror.
She claimed that Ma Bender hadactually threatened her with Knives.
And based on this new insightof the family, the Colonel returned
(24:06):
with a group of men as backup.
It was during the secondconfrontation between the Colonel
and the Bender family that MaBender, Elvira, who normally pretended
to speak no English, flew intoa rage and revealed her fluency.
That certainly confirmed toColonel York that the family was
hiding something.
(24:26):
On April 3rd, the communityorganized a meeting at the local
schoolhouse and to formalize asearch of every homestead along the
trail.
And in a moment of stunningaudacity, Both John Bender Sr. And
John Jr.
Attended that meeting.
They sat there, stone facedamong the very men who were voting
(24:47):
to search their property forthe bodies of the people that they
were accused of murdering.
That town meeting is a perfectillustration of what the historian
Frederick Jackson Turnercalled the frontier thesis.
Turner argued that theAmerican frontier was the crucible
of American democracy and character.
He wrote that as people movedwest, the old institutions and social
(25:10):
structures of Europe and theeast coast were stripped away by
the wilderness.
And in their place, pioneerswere forced to create their own forms
of social order, their ownsystems of justice to deal effectively
with their problems.
And that's exactly what washappening in that schoolhouse.
There was no effectivesheriff's department to call, no
(25:32):
state police to investigate.
As we had already discussed,in the early 1870s, the area that
we're talking about was littlemore than a collection of homesteads,
often spaced miles apart.
While Colonel York stronglysuspected the Benders, there were
also rumors that NativeAmericans were.
Were responsible for all ofthe disappearances.
(25:54):
And that was possible.
As more Americans and would beAmericans pushed west, they often
came into conflict with NativeAmerican tribes who resided there.
In the 1830s, President AndrewJackson ordered the Indian Removal
act and the subsequent Trailof Tears, which forced most Native
Americans west of theMississippi River.
(26:14):
And now, a few decades later,settlers were again moving into the
area, pushing them fartherwest, creating a new layer of tension.
The Lebeck county communitythus decided to form a posse, a vigilante
committee, if you will, toimpose order and investigate the
true cause of all of thedisappearances in the region.
(26:37):
This sort of ad hoc communityform of justice was the law on the
frontier.
And watching all of this takeplace, the Benders knew that their
time was up.
A few days after that townmeeting, a neighbor named Billy Toll
was driving cattle past theirproperty when he noticed something
was wrong.
The inn was silent.
(26:58):
The farm animals were kind ofjust wandering about, unfed, distressed.
The Benders were gone.
The township trustee was alerted.
The party of several hundredvolunteers was quickly formed, with
Colonel York at the head whenthey investigated the Bender cabin,
it was empty of food, clothingand most of their personal possessions.
(27:20):
But something else was there.
A terrible smell.
The searchers traced the odorto a trap door under one of the beds.
It had been nailed shut, sothey pried it open with a crowbar.
They peered down into the darkness.
It was a stone lined cellarabout six feet deep.
There were no bodies, but thefloor and the packed earth beneath
(27:42):
it were black with clotted,decaying blood.
And the stench was overpowering.
Colonel York and the othersearchers would later surmise that
when a guest stayed over atthe Benders Inn, the family would
give their guests the seat ofhonor at the table that was positioned
over a trapdoor into the cellar.
(28:04):
When the victim's back was tothe curtain, Kate would distract
the guest While John BenderSr. And Jr.
Came from behind the curtainand struck the guest on the right
side of the skull with a hammer.
After that, one of the womenwould cut the victim's throat to
ensure the death.
And then the body was droppedthrough the trap door.
(28:25):
Once in the cellar, the bodywould be stripped and later buried
somewhere on the property.
So the search party movedoutside to the soft tilled earth
of the vegetable garden andthe small apple orchard behind the
cab.
They brought long iron rods toprobe the ground and it didn't take
long.
In a spot that looked slightlysunken, a man pushed his rod into
(28:49):
the soil and sure enough, itstruck something solid a few feet
down.
When they started to dig, theyfound the body of Dr. William York,
buried face down in a shallowgrave, his skull smashed in and his
throat cut.
Colonel York had found hisbrother and.
The horror had just begun.
The men kept probing, keptdigging, and they found another body
(29:12):
and another.
And they unearthed the remainsof George Longcourt and in the same
grave, the tiny body of his 18month old daughter, Mary Ann.
One by one, the Bender'svictims came out of the ground.
When the digging was finallydone, at least 11 bodies had been
recovered from the orchard andthe property.
Well, all murdered in the same way.
(29:34):
A hammer blow to the headfollowed by a slash of the knife.
And the presumed executionmethod of the Benders was also supported
by testimony from people whohad stayed at the inn and managed
to escape before they could be killed.
One William Pickering latersaid that when he had refused to
sit near that wagon clothbecause of the stains on it, Kate
(29:55):
Bender had threatened him witha knife, whereupon he had fled the
premises.
A Catholic priest, Father PaulPonzigloni, claimed to have seen
one of the Bender menconcealing a large hammer.
That understandably made thepriest feel uncomfortable.
And he quickly departed,making the excuse that he needed
to tend to his horse.
(30:16):
Yeah, I bet that made him nervous.
And in yet a third instance, awoman named Mrs. Fitz claimed that
while sitting at dinner withthe Benders, she became uneasy.
She sensed a muffled movementbehind the canvas.
Kate issued a command, butbefore anything could happen, the
terrified Mrs. Fitz fled.
(30:36):
We should note, however, thatall of these claims were only made
after the Benders crimes wererevealed, Making their accounts more
than a little unreliable.
However, the legitimateevidence does suggest a mixture of
reasons behind the murders.
Some of the victims werewealthy, and following their disappearances,
the Bender family sold some ofthe victims goods, like their horses,
(31:01):
saddles, clothes, any other possessions.
And their explanation at thetime was that the items had come
from people who paid withgoods rather than cash.
Which wasn't hard to believeat that time.
But other victims found buriedon the Bender's property were apparently
quite poor.
And Colonel York and his possecould only conclude that they had
(31:23):
killed them for the sheerthrill of it.
Regardless of what was trueand what was not, the story was so
shocking that it spread acrossthe country like a prairie fire.
Newspapers from Kansas to NewYork ran breathless, sensationalized
accounts.
The Wichita City Eaglecaptured the mood of the Nation on
(31:44):
May 22, 1873, when it said,quote, now the curtain of mystery
which has so long enshroudedthe damnable deeds of the Bender
family has been drawn aside,revealing to the public gaze the
existence in our very midst ofa system of cold blooded murdering
almost unparalleled in theannals of crime.
(32:07):
The press nicknamed theproperty Hell's half acre and the
Devil's end.
And these names stuck.
And this is where we see thebirth of a phenomenon that feels
incredibly modern.
True crime tourism.
As mentioned before, it wasaround this time that railroads and
trains began to pick up someliteral steam across the nation.
(32:28):
It was only a few years priorto the benders Murders in 1869 when
the Transcontinental railroadwas completed.
But even by that time, Kansashad quite a few established train
lines.
Following the discovery at theBender Inn, railroad companies began
to run special excursiontrains out to the site.
(32:49):
Thousands of people flocked tothe remote cabin to gawk at the graves
and the blood stained cellar.
They treated it like a touristattraction, tearing the cabin apart
piece by piece for gruesomesouvenirs, even as bodies were still
being pulled from the ground.
It's an astonishing reaction,A mixture of horror and morbid fascination.
(33:10):
It is.
And it reveals a deep seatedanxiety about the frontier.
The myth of the west was oneof pastoral virtue and boundless
opportunity.
The Benders, though, presenteda horrifying counter image.
A family of monsters hiding inplain sight, using the very symbols
of the homesteading andhospitality as a lure.
(33:53):
So what happened to theBenders, Michael?
In the end, the Benders got away.
A massive manhunt was launched.
The governor of Kansas offereda $2,000 reward for their capture,
which was a small fortune atthe time, but it was never claimed.
Investigators found theirabandoned wagon near the town of
Thayer, Missouri, near theArkansas border.
(34:14):
The family had apparentlybought train tickets and simply vanished
into the vastness of the country.
And their escape is a crucialpart of their legend.
Over the years, stories andtheories multiplied.
Some claimed a secretvigilante posse caught the family
in Oklahoma and deliveredtheir own brutal form of justice,
(34:36):
lynching them and throwingtheir bodies in the Verdigris River.
Others believed that theyescaped to the lawless borderlands
of Texas or the New Mexicoterritory, which wouldn't officially
become the states of NewMexico and Arizona until the early
1900s.
It's thought that perhaps theBenders changed their names and may
(34:56):
have even continued theircrimes, but no theory has ever been
proven.
They just simply disappeared.
And that's the so what of thisentire story.
The Benders became afoundational myth of American true
crime because they representthe dark shadow of manifest destiny.
(35:17):
The romantic vision of thewest was one of heroic pioneers taming
a wilderness and bringing withthem democracy and American values.
The Benders offered aterrifying alternative.
A wilderness that couldproduce its own unique monsters.
Predators who use the tools ofcivilization, the home, a store,
(35:38):
a welcoming smile to practiceutter savagery.
Their story is a brutalcollective to the sanitized Wild
west of popular culture.
It reminds us that thefrontier, as many historians now
argue, was not just a place ofopportunity and heroism, but also
one of profound violence,terror and moral ambiguity.
(36:03):
The final haunting question ishow they.
Could just vanish, because thevery environment that created them
was also the perfect place to disappear.
The vast, anonymous andlawless expanse of the American frontier
that allowed them to kill withimpunity also provided them with
(36:24):
the perfect escape.
In the end, they simplydissolved back into the wilderness
that had spawned them.
As the historian David Derryso perfectly put it, the end of the
Benders is not known.
The earth seemed to swallowthem as it had their victims.
They left nothing but theirdead in a ghost story that to this
(36:46):
day continues to haunt theAmerican prairie.
Thanks for listening tohistory's greatest crimes.
I'm Michael.
And I'm Alaina.
And until next time, stay curious.
(37:14):
Sa.
Imagine you're alone.
It's late 1872, and the sun isbleeding across the Kansas prairie,
leaving the sky bruised purpleand black.
This part of the nation hasbeen United states territory since
1803, when President Jeffersonbought it from Napoleon.
But now, almost 70 yearslater, it was still a very underdeveloped
(00:42):
part of the nation.
Although railroads werebeginning to gain popularity as a
form of transportation, mostpeople who were traveling west continue
to do so, using offshoots ofthe overland trail that went to California
and to Utah and the New Mexico territories.
Travelers often went miles andmiles without seeing any signs of
(01:07):
humanity.
And many of the roads theymoved along were barely more than
gashes of mud and wheel rutscutting west.
There is a crushing sense ofemptiness to the plains.
The wind is a physical thing,a constant pressure that chills you
to the bone.
Every rustle in the grasssounds like a threat.
Every shadow seems to move.
(01:28):
This isn't the romantic westof the dime novels.
This is a place of profound,terrifying isolation.
And now, over 150 miles fromIndependence, Missouri, the last
large city in the Midwest, thelonely traveler likely felt some
relief when they saw thesingle point of a yellow light, a
(01:48):
candle in a window.
As they draw closer, a small,rough looking cabin seems to just
materialize out of the gloom.
And a crude hand painted signhangs over the door reading groceries.
It's a wayside inn.
It's civilization.
It seems like it's safety.
The traveler pulls their horseto a stop and they walk toward that
(02:11):
warm glow of the candle,completely unaware that this is not
a reprieve from the dangers ofthe Wild west, but rather, it's the
very heart of it.
This place that we're talkingabout is Libet county, tucked into
the far bottom right corner ofKansas, not far from the first part
of the Santa Fe Trail.
(02:31):
Even today, Levette county isthe collection of small towns and
cities, along with a few ghosttowns, too.
At this point, though, in1872, Kansas had only been a state
for a little over a decade,and Lebeck county itself was officially
just a few years old.
It was a chaotic, liminalspace, a society not yet fully formed.
(02:54):
The Homestead act of 1862 haddrawn a flood of settlers.
These were union veterans,immigrants, families displaced by
the Civil War, all hoping toclaim their 160 acres of promise.
But this was also thetraditional land of the Osage people,
who were being violentlypushed out, creating a landscape
(03:17):
of tension, transience anddeep seated conflict.
It was a place where peopleappeared without a past and could
vanish without a future.
Now, in 1870, the Benderfamily appeared in the county.
Four of them.
An old man, his wife, twoadult children, built a small cabin
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and started a roadside grocerystore in it.
And to their neighbors, theywere quiet, strange, and ultimately
unremarkable.
But they were running morethan just a business.
They were running a trap.
And that's the core of ourstory today.
The Benders, they weren't justa random anomaly, a single monstrous
(03:57):
family that appeared out of nowhere.
We're going to argue that theywere a terrifying product of their
environment, the lawlessness,isolated and vulnerable American
frontier.
Their gruesome crimes weremade possible by the unique conditions
of the post Civil War Kansas,a place where the promise of a new
life was shadowed by theconstant threat of a violent death.
(04:22):
The story of the bloodyBenders is a brutal counternarrative
to the romanticized myth ofwestward expansion, revealing the
predators who thrived in thisvacuum of authority.
In today's episode, we'regoing to take you on a dark journey
down a lonely trail.
We'll meet this strange familyand follow the string of disappearances
(04:44):
that grew longer and longerwith each passing season.
And finally, we'll join thesearch party that uncovered a horrific
burial in a Kansas appleorchard, a place that would forever
be known as Hell's Half acre.
(05:19):
The story begins, as so manyfrontier stories do, with a claim
on the land.
In the fall of 1870, two, mencalling themselves John Bender and
John Bender Jr.
Filed a claim for 160 acres inLebet County.
This was part of the Homesteadact signed into law by President
Abraham Lincoln in 1862, whichoffered home ownership and huge chunks
(05:44):
of land to each American headof household who moved to the Midwest
and farmed that land for atleast five years.
This opportunity was alsoavailable to women, formerly enslaved
peoples and immigrants who hadapplied for citizenship.
Now, ultimately, the Homesteadact was incredibly successful in
(06:04):
the sense that it absolutelyencouraged western migration.
Over the next few decades, theHomestead act of 1862 resulted in
the settlement of over 270million acres, or about 10% of the
United States total area.
And those settlers often wenton to contribute to the breadbasket
(06:26):
nickname of the region byfarming wheat and corn, or they established
cattle farming and ranching businesses.
There, in the sparselypopulated Labet county, The John
Bender Sr. And Jr.
Built a small single roomcabin, only about 16 by 24ft.
(06:47):
It was a crude structure, butstrategically placed right near the
trail that took people to the west.
After the cabin was built, thewomen arrived.
Elvira, the mother, and Kate,the Daughter.
They divided the small spacewith a simple canvas wagon cover,
the kind that you'd see oncovered wagons that traversed the
(07:09):
Wild West.
And with the cabin dividedinto two, the front half becomes
the public space, a smallgeneral store selling a few supplies
like crackers and sardines,with a dining table where travelers
could get a meal.
And it also served as a placefor overnight guests to bunk.
(07:30):
Now, the back half, behindthat curtain, was the family's private
living quarters.
From the outside, it lookedlike any other struggling homestead
trying to make a go of it.
But from the inside, it was aperfectly engineered killing floor.
Frankly, the physical layoutof the cabin was a chillingly perfect
metaphor for the duality ofthe frontier itself.
(07:53):
On the one side of the thincanvas sheet, you have a veneer of
civilization.
You have the commerce, thehospitality, a shared meal.
On the other, hidden fromview, you have the potential for
absolute savagery.
Absolutely, Michael.
It reflects the centraltension of the west that historians
(08:13):
have grappled with for over a century.
It was a place where thepromise of a new civilized society
was in constant, directcontact with what Frederick Jackson
Turner famously called the,quote, simplicity of primitive society.
The Bender's cabin wasn't justa building.
(08:34):
It was a microcosm of theentire frontier experience, where
the line between safety andslaughter was as thin and flimsy
as a piece of cloth.
And the family that livedbehind that curtain was just as unsettling
as their home.
Contemporary accounts fromneighbors at the time and the few
(08:54):
who survived an encounter withthem paint a very disturbing picture.
John Bender Sr.
The patriarch, was around 60years old, a hulking, imposing figure
who spoke very little English.
And what he did speak wasguttural and hard to understand.
One local publication latercollected descriptions of John Bender
(09:18):
Sr. And they are quite damning.
I'm reading from a compilationof accounts published after the crimes
were discovered.
It says, quote, the old manwas a repulsive, hideous brute without
a redeeming trait.
Dirty, profane and ill tempered.
His wife, Elvira, or morecommonly known as Ma Bender, was
(09:40):
just as grim.
She was somewhere around 55and so notoriously unfriendly that
some neighbors simply calledher a she devil.
Then There was John Jr.
He was about 25 years old.
He was described as handsome,but with a habit of laughing aimlessly
at nothing in particular,which led many to dismiss him as
(10:02):
a, quote, half wit.
And finally there was Kate,the 23 year old, attractive, intelligent
and charming daughter.
She spoke English perfectlyand was the public face of the family.
The one who greeted thetravelers and put them at ease.
But even with Kate's charm,the family was a source of local
(10:23):
gossip.
People were spread out in thecommunity, but they still met up
occasionally for social eventsor church meetings.
But the Bender family kept tothemselves, and more than one neighbor
noted that the relationshipbetween John Jr. And Kate seemed
unnervingly intimate, Morelike a husband and wife than siblings.
(10:45):
This strangeness, this sensethat they weren't quite what they
seemed, is key to the story.
The Benders were commonlybelieved to be German immigrants,
Although that wasn't alwayscompletely sure.
But this mysteriousness ofwhere they came from wasn't necessarily
a red flag to others in the area.
(11:05):
Many people went west to startover, to create a new life for themselves
where no one else really knew them.
And this is where the work ofhistorian Suzanne Joneses and her
book Hell's half acre is so illuminating.
She argues that the Benderfamily may not have been a biological
(11:25):
family at all, but rather aconstructed unit, you know, in a
place where the ideal of ahard working homesteading family
was the very bedrock of society.
This presented them with aperfect cover.
You know, presentingthemselves as a family made them
appear normal, trustworthy.
And that facade of family,Jonas suggests, was their most effective
(11:50):
weapon.
A weapon that they would useto exploit the most vulnerable people
traveling across the plains.
Exactly.
And the people they targetedwere vulnerable for a reason.
Post civil war Kansas was alandscape of economic extremes.
You had profound desperation,but you also had people carrying
(12:11):
their entire net worth incash, looking for a fresh start.
A man traveling alone to buy aplot of land might have hundreds
or even thousands of dollarson his person.
And in a place with no banks,no law enforcement to speak of, and
miles of empty space betweensettlements, these travelers were
(12:32):
the perfect prey.
The benders crimes, at theircore, were a form of brutal, predatory
capitalism Flourishing in anenvironment with absolutely no regulation
or oversight.
They saw a market opportunity,and they exploited it with hammers
and knives.
If the Bender family was atrap, Kate was the bait.
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While the rest of her familyremained withdrawn and stolen, and
Kate cultivated a vibrantpublic Persona.
She billed herself asProfessor Ms. Katie Bender, a healer,
clairvoyant, and spiritualist medium.
She printed flyers and placedadvertisements in local newspapers
proclaiming her ability tocure diseases, communicate with the
(13:20):
spirits of the dead, and hold seances.
She was also a radicalthinker, or at least she played one.
She lectured on spiritualismand advocated for controversial ideas
like free love.
Her personal philosophy was achilling rejection of all conventional
morality.
(13:40):
A manuscript of one of herlectures was later Found.
And it gives us a direct lookinto her mindset.
According to those whotranscribed it, she said, quote,
she proclaimed herselfresponsible to no one save herself.
She advocated free love andpublicly declared that murder might
be a dictation for good.
(14:01):
That in what the world mightbe deeming villainy, her soul might
read bravery, nobility and humanity.
End quote.
What the world might deemvillainy, her soul might read bravery.
That line is absolutelyterrifying because it's not just
a quirky belief.
It's a philosophicaljustification for murder.
(14:23):
It's the creation of a privatemoral universe where the Benders,
and Kate specifically, are thesole arbiters of right and wrong.
This wasn't just for show.
This was likely the internalideology that allowed them to do
or feel like they could dowhatever they want.
(14:43):
By framing their actions as ahigher form of bravery or nobility,
they could rationalize thesystematic slaughter of innocent
travelers.
It transformed them in theirown minds from common thieves into
something more.
Profits of this new morality,and this Persona worked.
(15:05):
Her reputation as a beautiful,charismatic psychic became the primary
attraction for the Bender Inn.
Lonely men, in particular weredrawn to her.
They would come seeking a hotmeal, but also the thrill of a seance,
a glimpse into the spiritworld, or just a conversation with
the captivating young woman ofthe prairie.
(15:26):
And that is why most accountsand analyses of the Bender murder
suggest that Kate herself wasthe mastermind.
She was the only member of thefamily who was the least bit sociable
or intelligent.
And she often seemed to be theringleader of the whole operation,
the one who seemed to bealways calling the shots.
(15:49):
Kate would welcome them in,sit them at the dinner table and
engage them with her dazzling conversation.
And she would always seat thatchosen guest in the seat of honor,
a bench with its back pressedfirmly against the canvas curtain
that divided the room.
To understand how community inthe 1870s could be so taken in by
(16:13):
all this, we have tounderstand the spiritualist movement.
Today, we might dismiss it asfringe occultism, but in the mid
19th century, it was a massivesocial and religious phenomenon.
That's right.
The Civil War had lefthundreds of thousands of families
shattered by loss.
And images of the battlefieldproduced through the new medium of
(16:37):
photography demonstrated thattheir loved ones had not only died
in overwhelmingly hugenumbers, but but horribly as well.
Spiritualism offered whatmainstream religion at the time couldn't.
Not just faith in anafterlife, but the promise of tangible
proof.
(16:57):
Through mediums, seances, andother forms of post death communication.
Grieving parents, grievingwidows, orphans believed that they
could receive one last specialMessage from their loved ones.
That's right.
And one well known case isthat of Mary Todd Lincoln, who, grieving
(17:18):
the loss of her son, organizedseances in the White House which
were attended by her husband,President Abraham Lincoln.
So when Kate Bender offeredspiritualist services to passerbys,
she was tapping into a veryreal and widespread belief system.
She was, and she wasexploiting it brilliantly.
(17:40):
Spiritualism was also one ofthe only public platforms where women
could hold positions of authority.
In an era when women werelargely barred from public speaking,
a female medium supposedlychanneling a male spirit, could speak
with absolute authority infront of large audiences.
(18:01):
Progressive figures likeVictoria Woodhull, the first woman
to run for president, usedspiritualism to champion radical
ideas about women's suffrageand equal rights.
And leading up to the CivilWar, there are cases of female spiritualists
using their skills as a formof abolitionism against slavery.
But Kate Bender represents thedark side of this movement.
(18:24):
She co opted the language offemale empowerment and radical thought,
but then twisted it for herown predatory ends.
She used the authority of themovement granting her not for liberation,
but for luring victims totheir deaths.
While the reality of survivaloften enforced a level of social
(18:45):
equality between men andwomen, most people still held idealized
gendered roles.
Pioneer women were supposed toact as a sort of civilizing force,
the nurturer who broughtdomestic stability to the wilderness.
And, and so in that sense,Kate Bender represented a subversion
of the traditional female roleon the frontier.
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And that's exactly it.
Kate adopted the public facingrole of the healer and spiritual
guide, the ultimate femalenurturer, and turned it into a mask
for a killer.
And she wasn't a passiveaccomplice in the family's crimes.
She turned out to be thearchitect of, of the entire deadly
(19:28):
performance.
(19:50):
So between May of 1871 and thewinter of 1870 in 1982, the disappearances
along the trail in that partof Kansas began to mount.
A man named Jones was found inDrum Creek, his skull crushed and
his throat cut.
Two more unidentified bodiesturned up the following February
(20:11):
with the same gruesome injuries.
But the victims were oftendrifters or travelers or just men
passing through.
Men with no local ties whoseabsences wouldn't be immediately
missed or noticed.
And then in the winter of1872, a man named George Longcourt
(20:32):
and his 18 month old daughternamed Marianne set out from Independence,
Kansas, to resettle in Iowa.
Now, Longcourt was a widower,recently having lost his wife after
childbirth, and.
And he was taking his onlyremaining child back to live with
family.
He was carrying his lifesavings of about $1,900.
(20:53):
But they were never seen again.
Their disappearance cast apall over the region.
You know, these, these randommale travelers might just disappear.
But a man and his baby girldon't just vanish.
Especially those who had anexpected destination and waiting
family waiting for them.
(21:14):
And this is where the Bender'sfatal mistake comes into play.
Their entire operationdepended on the anonymity of their
victims.
Much like modern day serialkillers you may be familiar with,
the Bender family preyed onthe transient, the disconnected,
the people who could disappearwithout raising significant alarm.
(21:37):
But in this case, the Benders.
Their greed eventually madethem careless and.
And they broke one of theironly rules.
That's right.
In the spring of 1873, one ofGeorge Longcourt's former neighbors
decided to retrace hisfriend's route and find out what
happened to him.
The searching friend was Dr.William York, a well known and well
(21:58):
respected physician fromIndependence, Missouri.
Dr. York's search along thetrail led him inevitably to the Bender
Inn.
He stopped for a meal andasked the family if they had seen
Loncor and his daughter.
The benders admitted that Dr.York himself had stayed with them,
but claimed that he continuedon his way.
(22:20):
But then Dr. York vanished too.
But unlike the others who haddisappeared before him, Dr. York
had powerful connections.
His brother was ColonelAlexander York, a former state senator
and a man of considerableinfluence and determination.
And when Colonel York'sbrother didn't return, he went looking
(22:41):
for him.
And he started his search atthe last place Dr. York had been
seen alive.
The Bender place.
The arrival of Colonel Yorkchanged everything.
In a society with weak formalinstitutions, Social capital and
reputation are paramount.
(23:02):
Dr. York was not an anonymous drifter.
He was a pillar of his community.
By killing him, the Bendershad for the first time attacked the
established social fabric ofthe region.
This act mobilized thecommunity's informal power structures.
The posse, the town meeting ina way none of the previous murders
(23:22):
had.
They had finally chosen avictim who would be missed.
And more importantly, a victimwho would be avenged.
Colonel York led a searchparty to the bender Inn on March
28, 1873.
He questioned the family directly.
They were very evasive.
Kate offered to use herpsychic powers to help find the missing
(23:43):
doctor.
A brazen act of misdirection.
York left this and he leftdeeply suspicious.
A few days later, the colonelheard a story from a woman who had
recently fled the Bender Innin terror.
She claimed that Ma Bender hadactually threatened her with Knives.
And based on this new insightof the family, the Colonel returned
(24:06):
with a group of men as backup.
It was during the secondconfrontation between the Colonel
and the Bender family that MaBender, Elvira, who normally pretended
to speak no English, flew intoa rage and revealed her fluency.
That certainly confirmed toColonel York that the family was
hiding something.
(24:26):
On April 3rd, the communityorganized a meeting at the local
schoolhouse and to formalize asearch of every homestead along the
trail.
And in a moment of stunningaudacity, Both John Bender Sr. And
John Jr.
Attended that meeting.
They sat there, stone facedamong the very men who were voting
(24:47):
to search their property forthe bodies of the people that they
were accused of murdering.
That town meeting is a perfectillustration of what the historian
Frederick Jackson Turnercalled the frontier thesis.
Turner argued that theAmerican frontier was the crucible
of American democracy and character.
He wrote that as people movedwest, the old institutions and social
(25:10):
structures of Europe and theeast coast were stripped away by
the wilderness.
And in their place, pioneerswere forced to create their own forms
of social order, their ownsystems of justice to deal effectively
with their problems.
And that's exactly what washappening in that schoolhouse.
There was no effectivesheriff's department to call, no
(25:32):
state police to investigate.
As we had already discussed,in the early 1870s, the area that
we're talking about was littlemore than a collection of homesteads,
often spaced miles apart.
While Colonel York stronglysuspected the Benders, there were
also rumors that NativeAmericans were.
Were responsible for all ofthe disappearances.
(25:54):
And that was possible.
As more Americans and would beAmericans pushed west, they often
came into conflict with NativeAmerican tribes who resided there.
In the 1830s, President AndrewJackson ordered the Indian Removal
act and the subsequent Trailof Tears, which forced most Native
Americans west of theMississippi River.
(26:14):
And now, a few decades later,settlers were again moving into the
area, pushing them fartherwest, creating a new layer of tension.
The Lebeck county communitythus decided to form a posse, a vigilante
committee, if you will, toimpose order and investigate the
true cause of all of thedisappearances in the region.
(26:37):
This sort of ad hoc communityform of justice was the law on the
frontier.
And watching all of this takeplace, the Benders knew that their
time was up.
A few days after that townmeeting, a neighbor named Billy Toll
was driving cattle past theirproperty when he noticed something
was wrong.
The inn was silent.
(26:58):
The farm animals were kind ofjust wandering about, unfed, distressed.
The Benders were gone.
The township trustee was alerted.
The party of several hundredvolunteers was quickly formed, with
Colonel York at the head whenthey investigated the Bender cabin,
it was empty of food, clothingand most of their personal possessions.
(27:20):
But something else was there.
A terrible smell.
The searchers traced the odorto a trap door under one of the beds.
It had been nailed shut, sothey pried it open with a crowbar.
They peered down into the darkness.
It was a stone lined cellarabout six feet deep.
There were no bodies, but thefloor and the packed earth beneath
(27:42):
it were black with clotted,decaying blood.
And the stench was overpowering.
Colonel York and the othersearchers would later surmise that
when a guest stayed over atthe Benders Inn, the family would
give their guests the seat ofhonor at the table that was positioned
over a trapdoor into the cellar.
(28:04):
When the victim's back was tothe curtain, Kate would distract
the guest While John BenderSr. And Jr.
Came from behind the curtainand struck the guest on the right
side of the skull with a hammer.
After that, one of the womenwould cut the victim's throat to
ensure the death.
And then the body was droppedthrough the trap door.
(28:25):
Once in the cellar, the bodywould be stripped and later buried
somewhere on the property.
So the search party movedoutside to the soft tilled earth
of the vegetable garden andthe small apple orchard behind the
cab.
They brought long iron rods toprobe the ground and it didn't take
long.
In a spot that looked slightlysunken, a man pushed his rod into
(28:49):
the soil and sure enough, itstruck something solid a few feet
down.
When they started to dig, theyfound the body of Dr. William York,
buried face down in a shallowgrave, his skull smashed in and his
throat cut.
Colonel York had found hisbrother and.
The horror had just begun.
The men kept probing, keptdigging, and they found another body
(29:12):
and another.
And they unearthed the remainsof George Longcourt and in the same
grave, the tiny body of his 18month old daughter, Mary Ann.
One by one, the Bender'svictims came out of the ground.
When the digging was finallydone, at least 11 bodies had been
recovered from the orchard andthe property.
Well, all murdered in the same way.
(29:34):
A hammer blow to the headfollowed by a slash of the knife.
And the presumed executionmethod of the Benders was also supported
by testimony from people whohad stayed at the inn and managed
to escape before they could be killed.
One William Pickering latersaid that when he had refused to
sit near that wagon clothbecause of the stains on it, Kate
(29:55):
Bender had threatened him witha knife, whereupon he had fled the
premises.
A Catholic priest, Father PaulPonzigloni, claimed to have seen
one of the Bender menconcealing a large hammer.
That understandably made thepriest feel uncomfortable.
And he quickly departed,making the excuse that he needed
to tend to his horse.
(30:16):
Yeah, I bet that made him nervous.
And in yet a third instance, awoman named Mrs. Fitz claimed that
while sitting at dinner withthe Benders, she became uneasy.
She sensed a muffled movementbehind the canvas.
Kate issued a command, butbefore anything could happen, the
terrified Mrs. Fitz fled.
(30:36):
We should note, however, thatall of these claims were only made
after the Benders crimes wererevealed, Making their accounts more
than a little unreliable.
However, the legitimateevidence does suggest a mixture of
reasons behind the murders.
Some of the victims werewealthy, and following their disappearances,
the Bender family sold some ofthe victims goods, like their horses,
(31:01):
saddles, clothes, any other possessions.
And their explanation at thetime was that the items had come
from people who paid withgoods rather than cash.
Which wasn't hard to believeat that time.
But other victims found buriedon the Bender's property were apparently
quite poor.
And Colonel York and his possecould only conclude that they had
(31:23):
killed them for the sheerthrill of it.
Regardless of what was trueand what was not, the story was so
shocking that it spread acrossthe country like a prairie fire.
Newspapers from Kansas to NewYork ran breathless, sensationalized
accounts.
The Wichita City Eaglecaptured the mood of the Nation on
(31:44):
May 22, 1873, when it said,quote, now the curtain of mystery
which has so long enshroudedthe damnable deeds of the Bender
family has been drawn aside,revealing to the public gaze the
existence in our very midst ofa system of cold blooded murdering
almost unparalleled in theannals of crime.
(32:07):
The press nicknamed theproperty Hell's half acre and the
Devil's end.
And these names stuck.
And this is where we see thebirth of a phenomenon that feels
incredibly modern.
True crime tourism.
As mentioned before, it wasaround this time that railroads and
trains began to pick up someliteral steam across the nation.
(32:28):
It was only a few years priorto the benders Murders in 1869 when
the Transcontinental railroadwas completed.
But even by that time, Kansashad quite a few established train
lines.
Following the discovery at theBender Inn, railroad companies began
to run special excursiontrains out to the site.
(32:49):
Thousands of people flocked tothe remote cabin to gawk at the graves
and the blood stained cellar.
They treated it like a touristattraction, tearing the cabin apart
piece by piece for gruesomesouvenirs, even as bodies were still
being pulled from the ground.
It's an astonishing reaction,A mixture of horror and morbid fascination.
(33:10):
It is.
And it reveals a deep seatedanxiety about the frontier.
The myth of the west was oneof pastoral virtue and boundless
opportunity.
The Benders, though, presenteda horrifying counter image.
A family of monsters hiding inplain sight, using the very symbols
of the homesteading andhospitality as a lure.
(33:53):
So what happened to theBenders, Michael?
In the end, the Benders got away.
A massive manhunt was launched.
The governor of Kansas offereda $2,000 reward for their capture,
which was a small fortune atthe time, but it was never claimed.
Investigators found theirabandoned wagon near the town of
Thayer, Missouri, near theArkansas border.
(34:14):
The family had apparentlybought train tickets and simply vanished
into the vastness of the country.
And their escape is a crucialpart of their legend.
Over the years, stories andtheories multiplied.
Some claimed a secretvigilante posse caught the family
in Oklahoma and deliveredtheir own brutal form of justice,
(34:36):
lynching them and throwingtheir bodies in the Verdigris River.
Others believed that theyescaped to the lawless borderlands
of Texas or the New Mexicoterritory, which wouldn't officially
become the states of NewMexico and Arizona until the early
1900s.
It's thought that perhaps theBenders changed their names and may
(34:56):
have even continued theircrimes, but no theory has ever been
proven.
They just simply disappeared.
And that's the so what of thisentire story.
The Benders became afoundational myth of American true
crime because they representthe dark shadow of manifest destiny.
(35:17):
The romantic vision of thewest was one of heroic pioneers taming
a wilderness and bringing withthem democracy and American values.
The Benders offered aterrifying alternative.
A wilderness that couldproduce its own unique monsters.
Predators who use the tools ofcivilization, the home, a store,
(35:38):
a welcoming smile to practiceutter savagery.
Their story is a brutalcollective to the sanitized Wild
west of popular culture.
It reminds us that thefrontier, as many historians now
argue, was not just a place ofopportunity and heroism, but also
one of profound violence,terror and moral ambiguity.
(36:03):
The final haunting question ishow they.
Could just vanish, because thevery environment that created them
was also the perfect place to disappear.
The vast, anonymous andlawless expanse of the American frontier
that allowed them to kill withimpunity also provided them with
(36:24):
the perfect escape.
In the end, they simplydissolved back into the wilderness
that had spawned them.
As the historian David Derryso perfectly put it, the end of the
Benders is not known.
The earth seemed to swallowthem as it had their victims.
They left nothing but theirdead in a ghost story that to this
(36:46):
day continues to haunt theAmerican prairie.
Thanks for listening tohistory's greatest crimes.
I'm Michael.
And I'm Alaina.
And until next time, stay curious.
(37:14):
Sa.
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