December 13, 2022 • 49 mins
In 1873 it was discovered that a family known as the Benders had been killing travelers along the Osage Mission Trail in Labette County, Kansas. We know surprisingly little about the evil Benders. In fact, they may not have been a family at all. Their heinous acts of violence are still discussed to this day making the Bloody Benders the stuff of legend and folklore.
Special guest John M Keating joins the pod for both episodes of the Bloody Benders!
Learn more about John M Keating: https://johnmkeatingacting.com/
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©2022 Convergent Content, LLC
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Links:
https://www.amazon.com/Hells-Half-Acre-Benders-American-Frontier/dp/19848798391
https://www.amazon.com/Bender-Tragedy-Mary-York/dp/1981809171/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRidkoF_ZfM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Benders
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-benders/
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/bloody-benders-true-story-kate-bender-crimes-susan-jonusas.html
https://kansasreflector.com/2021/10/31/a-mysterious-murder-site-has-a-new-owner-hes-looking-for-answers-about-the-bloody-benders/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVkb5RAyM1w
https://www.amazon.com/Bender-James-Karen/dp/B074CT771H
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, everyone, this is Meganand this is Alanna.
And welcome to Teatime Crimes, a podcastwhere every week
you hear a refined and boldtea review from our expert, Alana.
You know, it tricksyou because it sits delicately,
but then as it goes down,you can feel the body
and it really lingers with the naturalpairing of a horrific murder.
(00:21):
She murdered at least 14 people,
you know, but they still dig in.
So join us each week
to hear the story of a womanthrough the lens of murder and mayhem.
And here, two friendshaving the time of their lives.
You know I hate true crime, right? Hmm.
Are you sure?
Yeah.
Anyway, listen,wherever you get your podcasts,
(00:43):
T.J., crime.
Oh 1873 LA County, Kansas,
a small one room home has been abandoned
and almost a dozen deadbodies are found buried nearby,
all of them victims of a family of killers
known nowadays as the bloody benders.
(01:08):
The benders have become the stuffof legend.
Their heinous acts became fodderfor newspapers
and tabloids,not just at the time, but through today.
As you can imagine,it can be tough to sift
through all the rumors, conjecturesand folklore that came about.
But even the stories that might be falsedon't hold up to what we know to be true.
(01:28):
These serial killers were pure evil,
and the worst part of their taleis that they got away.
This is a study of
strange.
(01:57):
All right.
Welcome to the show,everybody. I'm Michael May.
And joining me is the one,the only John and Keating.
I do it, John.
Hello. I'm good. I'm good. How are you?
Yeah, I didn't play the issue that way,
and that's why I have to use my middleinitials. Yes, right.
John M
John have so John, you're a an actor,an acting teacher and acting coach with G.
(02:18):
Charles Right Studios in Los Angeles.
And you.
I've told you,
I hopefully
I didn't make you feel uncomfortable,but I was like,
I want to finda good murder mystery for you.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
It's just funny that I became, like,the czar of murder mystery.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Now, John is ais a big fan of, like, Columbo
and a lot of old noir movies and stufflike I am as well.
(02:40):
So I've been waiting aroundwanting to find some sort of unsolved
murder mystery I'd have you onjust because I thought it would be fun
to kind oflook at it from a detective point of view,
this is a little different than I hoped,but I was like, I think John,
John might enjoy this one.
It's a crazy. Oh, it definitely is great.
Yeah.
So it's todaywe are talking about the bloody benders
(03:01):
who killed between 11and 23 people in southern Kansas,
depending on what sourcesyou read in the 1870s.
And this was a huge national storyline
like press was huge about thisat the time when it happened.
So it is not an uncommon story.
It is very, very popular.
There's been documentaries,there's even been some scripted movies.
(03:22):
But yeah, it's full of strangenessbecause the family disappeared.
It's a family of serial killers andthey all disappear and no one caught them.
And there's a lot of fanciful reportsabout the benders
and what happened afterwards.
And todaywe're going to talk about some of those.
And also what I think
what I think most likely happened,because there actually are more reports
(03:42):
than a lot of the articles outthere would have you believe.
So that we do knowmore facts about the benders after
they were found out to be killersthan is commonly talked about.
Before we begin, just real quick, pleasemake sure to subscribe, rate and review.
Also, I put out a new a new seriesfor my Patreon listeners
and supporters to check that outthrough a website study of strange decomp.
(04:06):
Thank you for waiting on that, John.
You did a good job as I did that.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Getting a business out of the way to getbusiness done, you got to get it done.
So let me ask for a quick John.
Had you heard of the bloody bendersbefore I asked you about it?
Not not to this extent.
I feel like I may have heard like of that
(04:28):
kind of genre of the familyserial killers, you know.
And so I
may have heard something about that,but not them specifically like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
And you mentioned like crazy. Yeah.
And right before we started rolling,
you mentioned that it's very muchlike Texas Chainsaw Massacre total.
It is. It really is.
So there might be some influenceon some of the types of stories.
(04:50):
It's a crazy one.
There's a lot to go over.
So this might be a two parter.
So I've kind of organized it.However, you never know.
It might get there a quick who knows,but it's most likely a two parter.
So one of the things I'm going to positas kind of a theory
to think about over these two episodesis that I don't think
the Benders killed people exactlythe way that all the stories describe.
(05:15):
Like there's this very famous,which you probably looked at
when you just sort oflooked it up about them
sneaking up behind somebodywith the canvas
in front of them and hitting themon the head and then cutting on the arrow.
Yeah, with the hammer.
Some of that is, I think it's partly true,but I don't think that's
actually how they killed all their victimsfor reasons that I'll get into.
Yeah.
(05:35):
And I'm going to start with a,
a certain part of the storyand then kind of go backwards.
This is like a littlea little prelude or a teaser, if you will.
So on May six,
1873, in LA County, Kansas,a group of men,
probably dozens of them, are searchingfor the missing doctor, William York.
(05:59):
And they arrive at a cabin, which is righton the main trail, the Osage
Mission Trail,which is an old Native American trail.
And it became kind of like
the main highway in the area of the timein this part of Kansas.
And Leroy Dick, a local officialwho is in charge of the search for Dr.
York, has been told that there's a cabinthat is abandoned and empty,
(06:21):
and it is home to the Bender family,what people call the Benders.
And apparently this family left itabandoned recently for reasons unknown.
And Billy Toll, a farmhand who told Leroy
about the desertion of this cabin,is there with the party to search.
And they suspectthe benders might be involved
(06:41):
with some nefarious murdering
activity in the area.
So they decide to search thisabandoned cabin.
And I'm going to quote from my main sourcetoday.
It's a book from Suzanne Jones.
It's called Half Hell's Half AcreThe Untold Story of the Benders,
The Serial Killer Familyon the American Frontier.
So here's ahere's a little quote from the story
(07:02):
inside.
A single room is divided by the canvassheet from a wagon
dick yanks the makeshift curtain asideand is engulfed in a cloud of filth.
It settles to reveal a sparsely furnishedliving space inhabited by insects
that retreat into the crevicesat the fall of heavy boots.
The cabin has been empty for some time,but it is clear that the occupants left
(07:23):
quickly, taking only the essentials neededfor travel toward the back of the room.
The scent of decay is stronger.
A Bible with a cracked spine liesdiscarded near the straw mattress,
pulled aside to reveal a trapped dooror a trapdoor.
It's the proper English of that.
Instead of trapped door graspingthe leather strap nailed to the wood
as a handle, Dick throws the door openand the smell leaks into the cabin.
(07:46):
It sticks to the throatsof the search party.
Beneath the men, a dark void opens.
Silas told Billy's older brothervolunteers to descend.
He is a rancherand used to the smell of animal carcasses.
But down in the cellarhe struggles to breathe.
The floor is a slab of sandstonereddened by unnatural stains.
When Silas crouchesto investigate further,
(08:07):
he finds the soilsurrounding the slab is damp,
hoisting himself from the pit.
He tells the group that they will haveto move the cabin to gain better access
to the cellar, that there is definitelysomething buried beneath the slab.
And thank you for bearing with mewith that long little section there, John.
But I just like I like the setupthat they find this abandoned cabin
(08:28):
and there's terrible smells and blood.
Oh, yeah. It's the opening of a movie.
I mean, it is. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And the.
We're going to have to
there's something buried underthe slab is such an ominous sentence.
Yes, indeed.
And this is a tale.
This tale is grotesque.
(08:49):
It is macabre and it's weird.
And people are still trying to understandit today, including us today.
So, yeah, let's start
at the beginning of this crazinessthat led to that moment of searching.
This goes back, I think, three years.
I think it's 1870, Kansas at the time,in 1870.
It's a rugged place.
(09:09):
And I don't just mean the landscape.
I mean culturally, too.
During the Civil War, just before this,there were the bushwhackers
primarily in Missouri,but they would fight in Kansas a lot.
They were pro-slavery.
Then there's the Jayhawks,which if you know your Kansas sports.
Everybody, you know, they're totally yeah.
And they were abolitionist
and they were primarily in Kansasand they get caught up in all the fighting
(09:31):
after the war, after all of thisbrutal, brutal fighting.
Now, these people are there.A lot of them are still around.
They're living among each other.
There's a lot of emotions.
People in America are generally moving outand migrating west at this point
through Missouri and Kansas and Oklahomaand all these kind of places.
And there's a lot of thieves and robbers
and murderers and con men,and they're all trying to survive.
(09:56):
Also, in the decades leading up to this,there is famously the Trail of Tears,
where Native Americans
were shipped out of their homesand sent to the Oklahoma territory.
And that is on the border of southernKansas, where our story takes place today.
And outlaws exploitedthe proximity of this border to escape,
whether it's like stealing stuff and thenhightail it down into Indian territory
(10:17):
to get awayfrom any potential law enforcement.
Now, all that said,homesteading is going on.
So people are there are allowed or able
to purchase for very little money,a large plot of land.
And if they cultivate it and build on it
for a certain period of time,they get to keep the land forever.
It's theirs.
This is a huge part of the westwardexpansion of the United States history.
(10:38):
So on an October morning in 1872, men
arrived at the Osage Townshipin southern Kansas.
And this is near todaywhere the town of Cherry Vale is.
I think it was set upactually during this story
and there was a little cabin herewhich was a trading post and two men
ran the trading posts and their nameswere Edward Erne and Rudolf Brockman.
(11:01):
And they're sitting outside,apparently hanging out.
And these two these two men show upon a carriage and one is in his twenties.
And he introduced himselfas John Gephardt.
And the older man was around 60and he was John Bender.
And the assumption isthat the two men were related,
but no one actually seems to have inquiredabout their relationship,
(11:24):
whether they were related by blood,by marriage.
No one knows.
Even still to this day, no one knows.
Now, Gephardt in Common Tellings,is referred to as John Bender Junior.
And there's a lot of claimssaying that they didn't find out
his name was Gephardtuntil after the murders were discovered.
That doesn't actually seem to be true.
He actually introduced himselfas John Gephardt at the time.
(11:45):
He also seems to have introduced himselfas John Bender to some people.
So it's it's just really strange.
These this family.
Now. And there's a lot of that coming up.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
There's still it'sthere's a hole through both parts.
There's a lot of these things
when in the second part,when I get into the press
that that happened immediatelyafter the descriptions of people are all
(12:08):
over the place. Yeah.
So both these guys had German accents.
John Bender as I'll refer to him, the PAas they call him sometimes
he had a very thick German accent andapparently could not really speak English,
and he was also incredibly unfriendlyand brutish and mean
a lot of the descriptions.
Call him very hairy, like I imaginea big brute, big foot sort of creature.
(12:33):
A lot of his.
Suit, if you will.
And here you go.He definitely had a hair suit.
This guy is ahe is a walking hair suit, for sure.
And John Gephardt was kind of skinny.
He had like a narrow face.
Apparently,his eyes were like too close together.
And he had this really annoying laughwhere he would be like.
Oh, yes.
(12:53):
Except he had a German accent.
So that's a terrible impression.
But they sound like they sound likethe side characters in a Disney movie.
They totally operate like, ah,like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Do they have the two, Mackenzie, Kirkand the other guy, pirates that are like
not the main ones.
You got to have like the skinny oneand the chubby one.
The one in the 101 Dalmatians.
(13:15):
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.
They absolutely are.
And and they allegedlywere moving in from Pennsylvania,
which actually does make sense,because we don't know
if they really didmove in from Pennsylvania,
but if they're German,Pennsylvania, Dutch,
even my ancestors were Pennsylvania,Dutch.
They they immigrated into Pennsylvania.
So it actually makes sense.
They may have been from Pennsylvania.
(13:36):
And so, urn, the gentleman urn showedthese two German guys around
to the various plots that might bethey might be interested in in town.
And they picked one outthat was perfect for travelers
because it's literally right on the Osagemission trail.
So it's right on the highway of its time.
But it was sort of sunk in lowbetween some mounds and hills
(13:59):
that are still there todaywhere people can't really see the cabin.
There'sthere's some privacy in the otherwise
sort of flat, sparse Kansas terrain.
Yeah yeah. Not known for its hilly.
No no not it known more for its tornadoes
and taking people up inside of tornadoes.
Now what I didn't know
(14:20):
until researching is that John Bender,he is the one that purchased the plot.
It was 160acres of the cabin was on and Gephardt
actually purchased his own plot,which was kind of nearby.
It was a narrow strip that was a bitI think it had more trees and stuff on it.
They never he never built anything on it.
He never did anything with the land.
(14:40):
So some people suspect
that it was for more privacy in the area,which I totally buy.
Now, when the men got the land,they kind of quickly
paced out the cabin in the ground.
They literally took their feetand like drew a line.
It was like,here's the cabin where they're at.
They use sticksto kind of draw things out.
And then they built their own cabinbecause that's that's what men did back
(15:01):
then. John,what do we do with our lives now? We do.
We're podcasting.
I am I am not a master like they were.
I can't.
Yeah, I mean, I don't evenI don't know, like people make bread.
I don't know how they
I just it yeah.
Yeah. Bread is hard.I've actually tried to make bread.
It is not easy.Yeah it would doing all that.
(15:22):
So they built a 16 by 24 cabinwith nine foot ceilings.
There was a door at each end.
Some storiessay there's only a front door,
but there actually was a frontand a back door.
There was a what is alwayscalled a trapdoor to the basement.
It's not a trapdoor. It'sjust a little thing.
You lift up like that.It's like it's a hatch.
They did cover it and hide it,but it's not a trapdoor.
And they built the cabin really quicklybecause winter is coming
(15:46):
when they'rewhen they're moving in in 1870,
over the period of of months after that,they planted an orchard behind the house.
They also built sort of a stablea corral for for animals right there.
They also dug a well.
And allegedly when they first moved in,
Gebhart would make moneyby taking stolen horses across the border.
(16:06):
I don't know.
I don't know how to confirm that.
That's just one of those storiesthat comes up with tales of the time
and the men nailed a sign out frontthat said Groceries,
but they spelled groceries. gr0crys.
I mean, English may not be theirfirst language, so makes sense.
And so yeah, they plan to sell some goodsto make some money along the trail.
(16:31):
Now, apparently, John Bender, was it
when they opened up shopand they started having customers,
you know, stop on their travelsto buy things.
John Bender was
unfriendly.
There's much worse ways to describe it.
It was a very unfriendly dudeand sometimes, like, wouldn't
even help potential customers.
(16:52):
And he also didn't speak English, whichdoesn't help, but he never really tried.
In March of 1871,
the Bender Boys were joinedby the lady folk Kate Bender or Katie.
Sometimes in her early twenties.
And Ma Bender, she's sometimes referred to
as Elmira or Elvira Bender.
I will explain that in part two.
(17:13):
No one actually knows her name.
It was they just referred to her as Ma.
No one actually knows her real name.
And that is the truth.
The book I read, my main source.
This is the only place I ever saw this.
It says that they came from Ottawa.
The women, which I was like,Can I, can I get more information on that?
And there wasn't itjust so they came from Ottawa
and I was like, That's weirdbecause the guys came from Pennsylvania,
(17:36):
the women are coming from Ottawa.
I don't know.
It just it's a very interesting detailI wish I knew more about
because that might explain
some of why the vendors arethe way they are is we don't know.
We don't know whythey were as crazy as they are.
So a mob bender similar to Paul Bender.
I spoke very little English,very heavy accent.
She didn't know more English than she leton, but she didn't know it very well.
(17:58):
And she was considered a she devil iswhat a lot of people called her.
She was also just as unfriendly as the
the hair suit man known as Paul Bender
and Kate or Katie.
I'll probably be referred to as Kate,but she went by boat.
She did have a little bit of a Germanaccent, apparently,
(18:18):
but she spoke very good English,not as much of a German accent
as the other guy. Katecame with Ma, right? That's right.
Yeah.
They came togetherborn of ma and pa vendor, right?
No, people.
People assume that if they are related,
she's most likely Ma's daughter.
But again, no one knows.
No one knows if this entire familyis a real family at all.
(18:41):
No. One,we have no confirmations of any of that.
And it is interesting that they're German.
But coming through Ottawa.
Right. Right.
Is is in Ottawa primarily, I would imagineFrench speaking at the time.
I don't know enoughabout Canada, but I think so
now around the time
that the that Kate and Ma showed up,they started kind of running their
(19:01):
their business model they landed on,which is accepting guests at the cabin
not just for groceries,but also to make a warm meal,
give people a place to sleepout of the elements for the night.
Because you have all these travelers.
There are no motels at the time,so you just stop at someone's house
to stay the night.There is no like guest room.
This is all one big roomseparated by that canvas sheet.
(19:22):
So it's probably a chairor you put your saddle
on the ground with a blanketand that's that's where you sleep.
And that's primarilyhow the vendors tried to make money.
Now, the word about town
is that Ma and PA did not socialize
like they would stay at the houseand do chores around the house.
They would every now and then go into townor the township to buy supplies.
(19:45):
But they didn't really talk to people.
And again,they were really terrible at socializing.
They were not good people.
And so Kate and
John, it was up to themto kind of socialize in town.
And they did. They went to church.They went to Sunday school.
Kate worked at a hotel and eventuallya couple other jobs as well.
So they were more well knownamong the town
(20:07):
folk at the timeand they were considered much nicer.
But there are periods of timewhere their oddities, their
their eccentricities would come acrossto the locals and rape them.
The wrong way.
Like Kate
was apparently a healer and a spiritualistand would hold seances and admit to it
or not admit,but suggest that she could heal
all sorts of abner abnormalitiesand she would push people
(20:31):
a little too hardfor that kind of business.
She was an aggressive car salesmanand John again had that irritating
not you, John,but John Gephardt had the irritating laugh
that made people thinkthat he might be stupid, like
there might be some sortof mental disability at the time.
I think one of the quotes from a sourceback then is calling him a halfwit,
(20:52):
which definitelysounds like a 19th century.
That's what passes as a mental healthdiagnosis back then.
Yeah, early 19th century indeed.
So here'swhere something strange began to happen.
Urn, who is the guy that showedthe Bender boys around four claims
he was bought out of his business,out of the trading post.
(21:15):
And so he took that money that he earnedand he sent it overseas
to pay for his fianceeand her mother to move to the states.
I think from Germany.
So they're making the trek over.
And when you travel
and make big moves back,then everything you own comes with you.
That there's no.
(21:36):
There's no FedEx, there'sno storage facilities, there's no banks.
Well, there are banks,but they're not everywhere
and they're not very accessible.
So I'll just buy a couch when I get there.
Exactly. Yeah. Everything. So.
So everything's coming with themand, urn, set it up
so that they could stayat the Bender cabin
when they arrived to townfor a little bit.
So they arrive to town,they're staying with the benders.
(21:57):
And one day the entire Bender familysuggest to the fiance and her mother,
we should go on a long walk.
And they were like,Oh, that sounds lovely.
So they all go out to walk.
And the two older benders at onepoint are like,
Oh, we're not feeling well,or We're old at all.
They came up with some excuse.
They turned around and left the youngerthe younger group to keep walking.
(22:18):
And when the younger groupmade it back to the cabin,
a jewelry box was gone
as well as all their cashier's checks.
I don't know how much moneythe cashier's checks added up to,
but it had to be again,probably everything they had.
Yeah.
And they were gone
and nothing else is gone, by the way,those are the things that are gone.
(22:38):
So the family immediately blamesthe benders they think they've been had.
And they've had athey've been stolen from by the benders.
And so they're very upset about it.
And John Gephardt is like,oh, the horse thieves are states
that happens around these partsare horses. You shouldn't stay here.
It's too dangerousbecause they might still be around.
So he takes
the ladies to some other family nearbyand has them stay somewhere else.
(23:00):
Urn, of course, finds out about this.
He actually threatensthe vendor, shows up at the cabin
with a gun and holds it to the vendorsand is like,
I demand to have the jewelry boxand the checks given to me.
I know you have them.
They decline.
They play dumb and stupid and like,we don't know what you're talking about.
It's so sad.
And he realizes wiselyhe can't really do anything.
There's no evidence.
(23:21):
So he threatened them,didn't get anything out of it.
So that's all he could do.But it's going away and he's left
by 1871.
In the same year this is all happening,the the cabin became what we all know it
to be from all the talesbecause it didn't always look the same.
They obviously planted the orchard,which was growing.
(23:42):
They may not have evenhad the canvas separator right away.
That may have taken a timebefore they did that.
And very famously,there is this white canvas that hung
in the middle of the cabinto separate the living quarters
for all the vendors,all of them in one little spot.
And the front area for cooking, eating,there's a table that had two benches.
(24:03):
It's always in pictures.
They always draw chairs, but it actuallyapparently has two benches and one side.
Face the door with the canvasright behind it.
And that's very importantfor the story. Yes.
And one thing I don't knowhow important this is for the story,
but I love these kind of inconsistencieswhen you research things.
Apparently the canvas,according to one account, was not white.
(24:26):
It was a red calico curtainand not a white canvas.
And this is where I like to say on thisshow, both can be true.
It's not like, oh, we proved it right.
They might have switched it outat one point,
you know, or maybe they rotated it,maybe they cleaned them.
There are a lot of white. One gets dirty.
Oh, yes,there are report that it's like stained.
(24:48):
And I think those are reportsare from all the press articles
that came outthat are mostly making up stories
that like because some people are like,oh, stained with blood.
And I'm like,
if that would just scare away customers,I don't think they just left
blood on the garment. Yeah.
So here I have some dinner and sitright by the blood stain.
Yeah.
Put your head right there by the bloodmark.
(25:09):
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense,which is one of my theories of why
I don't think they were attacked the wayeverybody thinks they were attacked.
However, apparently they were very dirty.
Like there's a lot of comments on likedirty dishes and bugs and stuff like that.
But a lot of negative Yelp reviews.
Yes. Oh, yes.
The Yelp reviews are not good,
(25:30):
but this will be reflectedin my Yelp review and.
The vendors didn't carebecause there's no other business nearby
that does the same thing. So they're.
Like, if they.
Leave a bad review, we don't care.
Kate was also she was very interested
in her spiritualism practiceor her business of healing.
That's I think she would have much ratherjust been telling fortunes
(25:52):
and telling peopleshe can cure blindness, then kill people.
That's my own assumption.
She did market and advertiseher services all around the area.
So I actually I'm going to read onebecause it's fun.
So it says Professor Ms..
Katie Binder can heal
all sorts of diseases, can cure blindness,fits deafness and all such diseases.
(26:13):
Also deaf and dumbness residents14 miles east of independence, on the road
from Independence to Osage, missionone and one
half miles southeast of Nora head station.
Katie Bender, June 18th, 1872.
Yeah, I love that stuff like that.
I love Fitz.
Fitz. Yeah, that coversso many things. Oh, absolutely.
(26:36):
Now, spiritualism,I'm not going to go into.
But people can listen to my William
Miller seriesto learn a little bit more about it.
Spiritualism is a huge beliefslash religion
at the time where people thoughtthey could talk to dead people.
And Katie is not the only spiritualistin the area.
It was very, very prominent,including one story
(26:57):
from a woman named Julia Hessler,who was a friendly medium.
She would hold seances around the areawith Kate Bender sometimes.
And one night, Kate invitedJulia to come to the cabin for a science.
This is where our first scene comes in.
John, you excited? I'm very excited.
Okay.
So scene one,who do you care who you read?
(27:20):
Which part do you want to know?
Let me pull it up here. It's a cat.
So it's the first scene.
That I am.
I am open to whatever casting decisionslet's have.
You do.
Let's have you do.
Julia Okay, great.
(27:40):
Yeah.
And I'm not going to try to do itGerman accent because I will
I will be terrible for Kate.
All right.
So here we go.
So it's a brisk night and Julia Hesterknocks on the door of the Bender cabin.
Kate Bender opens the door and gesturesfor Julia to enter.
(28:03):
Julia notices
a small fire in a stove and two candleslit on a table in the center of the room.
A dirty canvas, things behind the table,separating the room. Two
Good evening, Kate.
Thank you for inviting me. Sit, sit.
Julia begins to sit down.
And one of the bench on one of the benchesat the table, not there.
Sit facing the door.
It's much more comfortable.
(28:25):
All right.
Julia takes a seat with her backagainst the canvas.
I'm very excited you've come.
Let's get started.
Kate blows out the candles in the room,which was already barely lit,
is now exceptionally dark,except for bits of light from the stove,
casting strange shadowsacross the walls Close your eyes.
Where's the rest of your family?
(28:46):
They don't partake in seances.
Kate reaches for Julia's hands.
Now close your eyes.
Kate closesher eyes and Julia begins to close hers.
But a swarming fly swoops across her face
and she pulls a hand away from Kate'sthe spot at it.
Come now. It's just a net.
Kate grabs Julia's hands again,and they both close their eyes.
(29:07):
Those from the spirit world.
We wish to communicate.
Spirits.
We offer ourselves as vessels.
Julia notices a creaking sound.
She tries to ignore it.
Kate beginsto make a strange humming sound hum.
Now, Julia, here's another creak
and opens her eyes behindKate lit by the faint flickers of fire.
(29:28):
From the stove, standsMa, PA and John Gephardt.
They are staring silently at Julia.
Oh. Julia pulls her hands away from Kate.
Don't worry about them. Stay focused.
Kate tries to grab Julia's hands.
I have to excuse myself.
Sorry.
The outhouse.
I have to use the when nature calls.
(29:51):
I'll be right back.
Julia stands and swiftly manages to skatearound the Bender family and exit.
As she does so, she begins to run.
PA Bender grabs a rifle and aims at it.
Julia Butshe's hard to track in The Dark Knight.
As she runs,Paul fires the gun into the air.
As Julia disappears into the fields, JohnGephardt
giggles while Kate Bender slapsPaul on the iron.
(30:11):
I'm unhappy with how the night played out.
You should probably do a John Gephardtgiggle to give your best to me.
Perfect, perfect.
Nailed it.
So, yes.
That is our that it was our first scene.
There's be another one in part two.
Yeah.
So this isthis is a story that I read in again,
(30:33):
my primary source for the eveningthat I was just a little fascinated by
is it really paints a picture of whatthe Bender family was like.
And we don't knowif they were planning to kill her
that night, but it's definitely suspectthat they grabbed a rifle.
You know? Well, yeah, exactly.
And and that they were just therestaring at her.
Yeah, yeah.
Eyes were supposed to be closed. Yes.
(30:55):
Now, one thing I will this is not a wayto defend the benders by any means,
so hopefullyit doesn't come across that way.
But this story,I don't think people knew this story
until after the benders were discoveredto have been murderers.
So it's not like she ran to townand was like,
Oh my God, that family,they were trying to shoot me.
It was really weird.They tricked me into coming.
(31:16):
It could be some sort of embellishment.
However, she was just was known to be,you know, doing as with Kate.
So it doesthere is some validity to this story.
It could have been like one of those.
One of those I was there story.
Yeah. Oh, yes, absolutely.
You know, like, oh, she's just been therefor the Saints, but oh no.
Then they tried to kill me too,but I got away.
(31:38):
Yeah, yeah.
And God,there's a lot of those even today.
So little side tangent.
But when, when I research, I, I hatecomments on videos and articles and stuff,
but I find
when I'm doing these stories, it'sactually really helpful to read through
because every now and then someonewill be like, Oh, did you see this link?
Or Oh,
(31:58):
I actually read that, you know,
like you'll find more informationthat you're not going to normally find.
And still to this dayon, I think there's some on Reddit,
there's some on some YouTube documentariesI watch about them.
There are people that's like, Oh,my grandfather told me a story
about his grandfatherthat went down and shot the binders.
And like, there's so many of those talesand it's like it's a lot of these,
(32:19):
Oh, I knew them.
And we will cover more of those in part
two, actually, because there's quitea number. It's really fascinating.
So I'm not
sure when the Bender familyactually started killing,
it could have been right awayand we just don't know.
But I do think most likely because ofwhen people started to be found
or go missing,I do think it may be late 1871
(32:42):
and we do have some detailsof victims of the benders.
Not everybody, but I will cover someof them today, starting with late 1871,
right around the holiday season,like like today when we're recording this.
Oh, that's creepy.
A gentleman named James Ferricand his wife
Mary had a young son and Mary in the sun.
(33:04):
We're going to govisit family in New York.
And James was going to stay behind
and build the family homein this area of Kansas.
And so, Mary in the Sun, they departfor New York for a number of months
because back then when you left,you've left for a long period.
So you were just going out?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so the plan was.
Yeah, build, build the home.
(33:25):
So when they return, months later,there is a home for them to live in.
So as soon as they leave, James sets off
along the Osage Mission Trail
and it's likely he was carrying most,
if not all, of the family's moneyat the time.
And Mary and her son arrive in New Yorkand they write
a letter back back to Kansas,and they never get a response.
(33:47):
Now, at some point in time,I don't know how long, but after she's
not getting any responses from James,she gets a letter from a family friend,
from the area in Kansasthat say they have not seen or heard
from James since he left along the trail.
Now, right around this
time as well, this is when Kate beginskind of working in town.
(34:07):
She's doing her spiritualism stuff.
She's doing her seances.
And people are starting
to that negative Yelp reviewthing is starting to pass around
like the Bender family has now been therefor about a year.
There's a lot of tales of them eithertreating people poorly, treating
guests poorly, maand PA being just really terrible people.
(34:30):
And Kate would be dirty.
Kate would be like very flirtatiousto men one minute and then days
or minutes later, she would be complete
180 and be really rude to themand standoffish.
And I to say thisjust because I'm trying to paint
a picture of their personalitiesbecause they are so strange.
It's a study of strange.
(34:52):
Now there are a lot of these sortof anecdotal things
about their personalities are rumors.
Again, it's the Oh, I knew them.
I saw the thing when happened.
That'swhere a lot of these come from, however,
because they're all similar,I think that we can actually be like,
Yeah, Kate was probably very flirtatiousone minute and then really rude the next.
John probably was super weird and manpower
(35:13):
probably really unfriendlybecause everybody says that.
So there's just a there's a commonalityto all these stories.
So there's also a tale from the same book
that I wanted to share just because,again, it's very interesting and scary.
A priest named Pansy Leon.
I think that's how you say it.
It was traveling in the areaand he was raising money for a mission.
(35:36):
And so he stopped at the cabinbecause that's where he was told
you can get a warm meal and stufflike that.
And Kate got really excitedwhen she asked him
what he was doing and he explained he'sraising money for a mission.
And the priest noticedafter he started telling his story
that the men who were in the cabinsuddenly disappeared.
He never heard them leave.
He didn't know where they goor where they went.
(35:58):
Excuse me.
And he asked Kate, like,oh, where where you're where are the guys?
And she gave some sort of like vagueanswer and she was making him coffee
and apparentlyshe was acting really bizarre.
She's like glancing around the room.Her eyes are darting around.
She's putting a lot of focusonto the second half of the room
behind the canvas,and it just rubs the priest the wrong way.
(36:20):
And when she sat down with his coffee,he jumped up and made an excuse and left.
And part of what makes thisreally dramatic is there was a huge storm.
That's why he stoppedthere was to get out of this huge storm.
And now he ran off into the stormto get away from the vineyards.
So that's another interesting story.
In October of 1872,
(36:41):
a dead body was found by two kids
in a river called Drum Creek.
And the body had a blunt force
trauma to the headand also a neck wound like a cut.
And it was assumed by authoritiesthat the body was there about six days
and the body was lateridentified as a man named William Jones.
And he was traveling the OsageMission Trail for work.
(37:03):
And his wife claimsthat he had hundreds of dollars on him.
Locals thought that the guy that own
the land that his body was found onmust have done it.
This is very like investigating the 1870s.
Oh, it's your land. You did it. Yeah.
And this guy was named Rambo on it,
and he was actually arrestedfor this murder.
(37:25):
And he noticed he was Colombo himself,that there is this interesting
track left
by a wagon
that went that was near where the bodywould have been dumped in the creek.
And the track of the wagon,like one of the wheels was, jutted out
and he was like, Look at all my wagons.
I don't know how many
had maybe only had one, but it was like,look at my wagon or more.
(37:47):
I don't have any wagonsthat have wheels like that
and so they looked at him and were like,Okay, yeah, you're right.
And we have no other evidence,so you're free to go.
So luckily he was not.
It's kind of like the early versionof like the tire treads.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's the exact same thing. Yes.
The binders,I will point out, were not suspects.
(38:09):
They were not suspectsany of these murders or disappearances
for quite a while.
And that is becauselife was tough like that.
It's a place where a lot of peopleare going missing for sometimes
just very natural reasons.
But again, there's other thievesand robbers and murderers and con men.
There's also rightacross the border into Oklahoma territory.
(38:30):
It's all where the Native American tribesare, and they rightly so, don't always
get along with the westward expansionof white people moving through the area.
So there are, you know, somesome violent interactions that can happen.
So a man named BenjaminBrown came through the area
and he traded horses with somebody.
The door,another nearby town or settlement.
(38:53):
And then he disappeared.
His wife actually went looking for him,knowing
no one else is going to look for the guys.I've got to go do it, too.
And she actually stayed the nightat the Bender cabin along her search
for her husband, which is just super scarynow that we know that didn't know.
You know. Yeah, exactly.
And a man named William McRaney,who was a war veteran, disappeared
(39:15):
on his way to a land office.
He stopped at the Bender cabin.
It's assumedbecause right before he disappeared,
he talked to a guy and said,Where can I stop to get some food?
And they said, Oh, go to the Bender cabin.
That was the last personto ever see him alive
around Christmas.
This would be of 1872.
A man's body was found which had beenpractically eaten by wild hogs.
(39:40):
He was able to be identifiedbecause of his clothing.
He was a guy named John Phippsand his family said
he also was traveling with a lot of money.
So you'll notice herethat some people had been found dumped
there, a guy in the creek now Phippsand this is all about to change.
And I think it's about to change
because word is getting aroundthat there's dead bodies being found
(40:03):
and that makes people suspiciousof a lot of things.
So especially since thatand the last people to see them.
Yeah. Yeah.
BenderCabin have been there. Yeah, exactly.
So I think the benders,they are both incredibly stupid
and try to do something a little smarter,which is we're not going to dump bodies.
We should bury everybodyfor a little more privacy.
(40:26):
I mean, they got 168 acres.
You might as well.
Yes, you got it.
You got the land. Use some of it. Yeah.
So the the saddest storyis the one that happens next.
And that's a gentleman named GeorgeLong called his name is misspelled
or spelled different waysand different articles and things.
But I think that'sjust the product of the time.
And not everybody knew how to spell it.
(40:47):
He was traveling to Iowain December of 1872.
Now he and his wife, Mary Jane,they had a daughter
who was 18 months oldat the time named Mary Ann,
and the mother had actually passed awaydue to complications with childbirth.
So George long for unsure
of how to raise a daughter on his own.
(41:09):
The friends, a doctor William York
and Doctor William York has a family.
Mary and his daughtergets along with the family.
So the York family actually helpstake care of this little girl.
Until one day the the step,
not step in-laws, George Locklear'sin-laws
actually write to him are like, look, MaryAnn should come live with us.
(41:32):
We're family.
If we need if you need help with her,send her up to us.
And he agrees to do that.
So he actually buys a carriage from Dr.
York and travels through Kansas,
where he lives along the Osage MissionTrail with his 18 month old daughter.
And they never make it to Iowa.
(41:56):
Now, a couple of days after Lancashireleft, a man named John Hanley
stopped by the Bender cabinwith a colleague.
They were just looking to warm up.
I don't think they were planningto stay the night
and the Benders seemed uninterestedin having a guest at the time,
like they were really standoffish.
And he wanted to light a fireand they were like, No.
And he's like, Well,I'll buy the firewood.
And they're like, No.
(42:16):
And so it's suggested that they were being
reallykind of rude and wanting him to leave,
probably because they still had Georgelong core in his daughter's body,
maybe even in the cabin,maybe in the cellar. Sure.
So that's different.You know what to do with it.
Mm hmm.
This is the first steptowards the benders being found out.
(42:37):
So they they should not have
they should not have donewhat they should have done,
which is just a terrible comic becausethey shouldn't have done any of this job.
What am I saying?
They should not have done any of this.
So months later, after a courtgoes missing, a doctor, William
York, his buddy, the person who helpedraise his daughter for a period of time.
(42:58):
He had been a civil war vet.
He was a bit of a hero in the Civil War.
He had also been a prisoner of warduring the Civil War,
which is just the stories I've heard aboutthat are just pure hell.
And he went to visit his brother,Alexander York,
because George Longmore is missing and Dr.
William York wasn't surewhat to do and wanted some help.
(43:18):
And not only
had York not received word that long warhad made it to his family in Iowa,
but there was a wagon was also found
and that was crashedand something obviously
it had been abandoned or somethingand it had a wardrobe,
clothing from a manand a probably an 18 month old girl.
(43:39):
So William York went to see the wagonwherever it was
found, and was like,Oh, shit, that's my wagon.
That's the one he sold Long Horse.
So he knew something happened to him.
So he went to his brother.
Like I said, Alexander.
Alexander is a former Kansasstate senator,
very recently a Kansas state senator.
(43:59):
At the time,
he was very well-respected, very powerful,very interesting guy in Kansas,
knew how to push a lot of buttons,get a lot of things done.
And there's a story about himthat I have to share
just because it kind of showshow kind of interesting and cool it is.
So he was no longer a state senatorbecause he accepted a bribe,
(44:21):
but he accepted a bribe to provethat another senator was paying bribes.
So he kind of like threw awayhis own career
as a senator just to get the other guyout of the Senate.
So, yeah, he trickedhe tricked a guy by accepting a bribe.
And he actually went to the Senate floorand showed proof that he accepted a bribe.
He's like,I accepted a bribe. Here's the proof.
(44:41):
It came from that man,
that senator there, that scumbagwho we all know is a scumbag.
So they had to kick themboth out of the Senate.
And it actually was pretty amazing.
Like, Yeah, stand up for your principles.
Yeah, it's like,I'm really running where your mouth is.
Absolutely.
So I want to
I want to read part of his speechon the Senate floor because it's so cool.
And also, I just love the language backthen that people use.
(45:03):
Sure.
So here he goes.
This is AlexanderYork on the state Senate floor.
I know that there are many presentwho may feel disposed to impugn my motives
in this matter and decry the mannermy unearthing the deep
and damning rascalitywhich has eaten like a plague spot
into the fairname of this glorious young state.
(45:25):
I am conscious that standing hereas I do a self convicted bribe taker,
I take upon myself vicariouslythe odium that has made the name of Kansas
and Kansas politicsa hissing and byword throughout the land.
Yes. So he is
he's not a senator anymore,but people love him for what he did.
(45:45):
He is, of course,he is both feared and respected.
And William tells tells his brotherAlexander
that he's going to actually go searchfor for George Long for himself.
And he's going to start by travelingthe same path that Longhorn traveled.
And so he gets in his
probably horse and buggy or carriageof some kind, and he heads on down
(46:08):
the Osage mission trail and he soon,
too, went missing.
And his brotherAlexander gets worried that that now Dr.
William York, his brother is missing.He never showed up.
So Alexander is like,something's going on in that area,
so I need to figure this out.
(46:28):
And there's somebody I trust.
My other brother,their youngest brother, Edward York,
he calls in ADD and says, Get a detective,get a team together.
We got to go find out what happened to ourbrother, Dr.
William York,
and In
certain respects,they did find out what happened to Dr.
William York.
He too met the bloody benders.
(46:52):
And that is where we're going to end.
Part one, John, is with thethe hunt for whatever happened to Dr.
William York.
And next week, we're going to concludethe story of the bloody benders,
what investigators found,what they didn't, and the details
of the benders escape from Kansasand into the i don't know, infamy.
(47:13):
Are they in.
The same much?
Yeah,they're like it's like folklore legends.
Yeah, absolutely.
It definitely is.
And out now I'm thinking about infamousand the three amigos in Famous.
In these insane obits.
Yeah. So, yeah.
Dr. William York, too,to surmise his disappearance leads
to the downfall of the Benders directlybecause the York New York
(47:36):
bro's are on the caseand it is not pretty.
And we're goingto get kind of more macabre in part two
as we find out all the detailsof the crazy bloody benders.
John, since we are breaking this up intodo you want to plug anything here
at the end of this?
And we'll do it again at part two.
That'swhere can people find you or what you do.
You can. Find me.
My website is John M Keating acting aecom.
(48:01):
I also I do acting, I do audition classes
and I do audition coaching as well.
You can book an audition coaching with methrough there or find out more
information on the classes.
I'll plug my movie
Concussion Die,which is available on iTunes and Amazon.
I believe it's on Plex now as well.Oh, cool.
(48:23):
Possibly to be on TV for a while.
It's it's a comedy that I co-wroteand that I'm in.
Stan Lee is in it
and Dan Lauria from Wonder Years.
It's about the last daysof a single screen movie theater.
So yeah.
Yeah, it is. It is. Very good.
Everybody, please check that out.
And yeah, I look forwardto seeing everybody back for part two.
(48:47):
But thank you for listeningto Part one of Bloody Benders.
Visit our website a study of strange ICOM.
You'll find informationabout our patriarch on.
We would love to have you on there
to listen to the contenton patriotic support the show.
Find us on Instagramat a study of strange.
You can also message meat a study of strange at gmail.com
(49:09):
and on the email note.
I am.
Compiling personal UFO.
Stories for an upcoming future. Episode,
so if you have any UFO experiences,I would love to have you on the show.
Email me a study of strange at gmail.com.
We'd love to hear about it.
Trying to rememberif I have any other announcements.
I don't think so.
Not that I can think of.
(49:30):
Make sure to subscribe, rate and review.
And I look forward to concludingbloody benders with you next week.
Thank you.
And good night.
Hello, everyone, this is Meganand this is Alanna.
And welcome to Teatime Crimes, a podcastwhere every week
you hear a refined and boldtea review from our expert, Alana.
You know, it tricksyou because it sits delicately,
but then as it goes down,you can feel the body
and it really lingers with the naturalpairing of a horrific murder.
(00:21):
She murdered at least 14 people,
you know, but they still dig in.
So join us each week
to hear the story of a womanthrough the lens of murder and mayhem.
And here, two friendshaving the time of their lives.
You know I hate true crime, right? Hmm.
Are you sure?
Yeah.
Anyway, listen,wherever you get your podcasts,
(00:43):
T.J., crime.
Oh 1873 LA County, Kansas,
a small one room home has been abandoned
and almost a dozen deadbodies are found buried nearby,
all of them victims of a family of killers
known nowadays as the bloody benders.
(01:08):
The benders have become the stuffof legend.
Their heinous acts became fodderfor newspapers
and tabloids,not just at the time, but through today.
As you can imagine,it can be tough to sift
through all the rumors, conjecturesand folklore that came about.
But even the stories that might be falsedon't hold up to what we know to be true.
(01:28):
These serial killers were pure evil,
and the worst part of their taleis that they got away.
This is a study of
strange.
(01:57):
All right.
Welcome to the show,everybody. I'm Michael May.
And joining me is the one,the only John and Keating.
I do it, John.
Hello. I'm good. I'm good. How are you?
Yeah, I didn't play the issue that way,
and that's why I have to use my middleinitials. Yes, right.
John M
John have so John, you're a an actor,an acting teacher and acting coach with G.
(02:18):
Charles Right Studios in Los Angeles.
And you.
I've told you,
I hopefully
I didn't make you feel uncomfortable,but I was like,
I want to finda good murder mystery for you.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
It's just funny that I became, like,the czar of murder mystery.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Now, John is ais a big fan of, like, Columbo
and a lot of old noir movies and stufflike I am as well.
(02:40):
So I've been waiting aroundwanting to find some sort of unsolved
murder mystery I'd have you onjust because I thought it would be fun
to kind oflook at it from a detective point of view,
this is a little different than I hoped,but I was like, I think John,
John might enjoy this one.
It's a crazy. Oh, it definitely is great.
Yeah.
So it's todaywe are talking about the bloody benders
(03:01):
who killed between 11and 23 people in southern Kansas,
depending on what sourcesyou read in the 1870s.
And this was a huge national storyline
like press was huge about thisat the time when it happened.
So it is not an uncommon story.
It is very, very popular.
There's been documentaries,there's even been some scripted movies.
(03:22):
But yeah, it's full of strangenessbecause the family disappeared.
It's a family of serial killers andthey all disappear and no one caught them.
And there's a lot of fanciful reportsabout the benders
and what happened afterwards.
And todaywe're going to talk about some of those.
And also what I think
what I think most likely happened,because there actually are more reports
(03:42):
than a lot of the articles outthere would have you believe.
So that we do knowmore facts about the benders after
they were found out to be killersthan is commonly talked about.
Before we begin, just real quick, pleasemake sure to subscribe, rate and review.
Also, I put out a new a new seriesfor my Patreon listeners
and supporters to check that outthrough a website study of strange decomp.
(04:06):
Thank you for waiting on that, John.
You did a good job as I did that.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Getting a business out of the way to getbusiness done, you got to get it done.
So let me ask for a quick John.
Had you heard of the bloody bendersbefore I asked you about it?
Not not to this extent.
I feel like I may have heard like of that
(04:28):
kind of genre of the familyserial killers, you know.
And so I
may have heard something about that,but not them specifically like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
And you mentioned like crazy. Yeah.
And right before we started rolling,
you mentioned that it's very muchlike Texas Chainsaw Massacre total.
It is. It really is.
So there might be some influenceon some of the types of stories.
(04:50):
It's a crazy one.
There's a lot to go over.
So this might be a two parter.
So I've kind of organized it.However, you never know.
It might get there a quick who knows,but it's most likely a two parter.
So one of the things I'm going to positas kind of a theory
to think about over these two episodesis that I don't think
the Benders killed people exactlythe way that all the stories describe.
(05:15):
Like there's this very famous,which you probably looked at
when you just sort oflooked it up about them
sneaking up behind somebodywith the canvas
in front of them and hitting themon the head and then cutting on the arrow.
Yeah, with the hammer.
Some of that is, I think it's partly true,but I don't think that's
actually how they killed all their victimsfor reasons that I'll get into.
Yeah.
(05:35):
And I'm going to start with a,
a certain part of the storyand then kind of go backwards.
This is like a littlea little prelude or a teaser, if you will.
So on May six,
1873, in LA County, Kansas,a group of men,
probably dozens of them, are searchingfor the missing doctor, William York.
(05:59):
And they arrive at a cabin, which is righton the main trail, the Osage
Mission Trail,which is an old Native American trail.
And it became kind of like
the main highway in the area of the timein this part of Kansas.
And Leroy Dick, a local officialwho is in charge of the search for Dr.
York, has been told that there's a cabinthat is abandoned and empty,
(06:21):
and it is home to the Bender family,what people call the Benders.
And apparently this family left itabandoned recently for reasons unknown.
And Billy Toll, a farmhand who told Leroy
about the desertion of this cabin,is there with the party to search.
And they suspectthe benders might be involved
(06:41):
with some nefarious murdering
activity in the area.
So they decide to search thisabandoned cabin.
And I'm going to quote from my main sourcetoday.
It's a book from Suzanne Jones.
It's called Half Hell's Half AcreThe Untold Story of the Benders,
The Serial Killer Familyon the American Frontier.
So here's ahere's a little quote from the story
(07:02):
inside.
A single room is divided by the canvassheet from a wagon
dick yanks the makeshift curtain asideand is engulfed in a cloud of filth.
It settles to reveal a sparsely furnishedliving space inhabited by insects
that retreat into the crevicesat the fall of heavy boots.
The cabin has been empty for some time,but it is clear that the occupants left
(07:23):
quickly, taking only the essentials neededfor travel toward the back of the room.
The scent of decay is stronger.
A Bible with a cracked spine liesdiscarded near the straw mattress,
pulled aside to reveal a trapped dooror a trapdoor.
It's the proper English of that.
Instead of trapped door graspingthe leather strap nailed to the wood
as a handle, Dick throws the door openand the smell leaks into the cabin.
(07:46):
It sticks to the throatsof the search party.
Beneath the men, a dark void opens.
Silas told Billy's older brothervolunteers to descend.
He is a rancherand used to the smell of animal carcasses.
But down in the cellarhe struggles to breathe.
The floor is a slab of sandstonereddened by unnatural stains.
When Silas crouchesto investigate further,
(08:07):
he finds the soilsurrounding the slab is damp,
hoisting himself from the pit.
He tells the group that they will haveto move the cabin to gain better access
to the cellar, that there is definitelysomething buried beneath the slab.
And thank you for bearing with mewith that long little section there, John.
But I just like I like the setupthat they find this abandoned cabin
(08:28):
and there's terrible smells and blood.
Oh, yeah. It's the opening of a movie.
I mean, it is. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And the.
We're going to have to
there's something buried underthe slab is such an ominous sentence.
Yes, indeed.
And this is a tale.
This tale is grotesque.
(08:49):
It is macabre and it's weird.
And people are still trying to understandit today, including us today.
So, yeah, let's start
at the beginning of this crazinessthat led to that moment of searching.
This goes back, I think, three years.
I think it's 1870, Kansas at the time,in 1870.
It's a rugged place.
(09:09):
And I don't just mean the landscape.
I mean culturally, too.
During the Civil War, just before this,there were the bushwhackers
primarily in Missouri,but they would fight in Kansas a lot.
They were pro-slavery.
Then there's the Jayhawks,which if you know your Kansas sports.
Everybody, you know, they're totally yeah.
And they were abolitionist
and they were primarily in Kansasand they get caught up in all the fighting
(09:31):
after the war, after all of thisbrutal, brutal fighting.
Now, these people are there.A lot of them are still around.
They're living among each other.
There's a lot of emotions.
People in America are generally moving outand migrating west at this point
through Missouri and Kansas and Oklahomaand all these kind of places.
And there's a lot of thieves and robbers
and murderers and con men,and they're all trying to survive.
(09:56):
Also, in the decades leading up to this,there is famously the Trail of Tears,
where Native Americans
were shipped out of their homesand sent to the Oklahoma territory.
And that is on the border of southernKansas, where our story takes place today.
And outlaws exploitedthe proximity of this border to escape,
whether it's like stealing stuff and thenhightail it down into Indian territory
(10:17):
to get awayfrom any potential law enforcement.
Now, all that said,homesteading is going on.
So people are there are allowed or able
to purchase for very little money,a large plot of land.
And if they cultivate it and build on it
for a certain period of time,they get to keep the land forever.
It's theirs.
This is a huge part of the westwardexpansion of the United States history.
(10:38):
So on an October morning in 1872, men
arrived at the Osage Townshipin southern Kansas.
And this is near todaywhere the town of Cherry Vale is.
I think it was set upactually during this story
and there was a little cabin herewhich was a trading post and two men
ran the trading posts and their nameswere Edward Erne and Rudolf Brockman.
(11:01):
And they're sitting outside,apparently hanging out.
And these two these two men show upon a carriage and one is in his twenties.
And he introduced himselfas John Gephardt.
And the older man was around 60and he was John Bender.
And the assumption isthat the two men were related,
but no one actually seems to have inquiredabout their relationship,
(11:24):
whether they were related by blood,by marriage.
No one knows.
Even still to this day, no one knows.
Now, Gephardt in Common Tellings,is referred to as John Bender Junior.
And there's a lot of claimssaying that they didn't find out
his name was Gephardtuntil after the murders were discovered.
That doesn't actually seem to be true.
He actually introduced himselfas John Gephardt at the time.
(11:45):
He also seems to have introduced himselfas John Bender to some people.
So it's it's just really strange.
These this family.
Now. And there's a lot of that coming up.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
There's still it'sthere's a hole through both parts.
There's a lot of these things
when in the second part,when I get into the press
that that happened immediatelyafter the descriptions of people are all
(12:08):
over the place. Yeah.
So both these guys had German accents.
John Bender as I'll refer to him, the PAas they call him sometimes
he had a very thick German accent andapparently could not really speak English,
and he was also incredibly unfriendlyand brutish and mean
a lot of the descriptions.
Call him very hairy, like I imaginea big brute, big foot sort of creature.
(12:33):
A lot of his.
Suit, if you will.
And here you go.He definitely had a hair suit.
This guy is ahe is a walking hair suit, for sure.
And John Gephardt was kind of skinny.
He had like a narrow face.
Apparently,his eyes were like too close together.
And he had this really annoying laughwhere he would be like.
Oh, yes.
(12:53):
Except he had a German accent.
So that's a terrible impression.
But they sound like they sound likethe side characters in a Disney movie.
They totally operate like, ah,like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Do they have the two, Mackenzie, Kirkand the other guy, pirates that are like
not the main ones.
You got to have like the skinny oneand the chubby one.
The one in the 101 Dalmatians.
(13:15):
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.
They absolutely are.
And and they allegedlywere moving in from Pennsylvania,
which actually does make sense,because we don't know
if they really didmove in from Pennsylvania,
but if they're German,Pennsylvania, Dutch,
even my ancestors were Pennsylvania,Dutch.
They they immigrated into Pennsylvania.
So it actually makes sense.
They may have been from Pennsylvania.
(13:36):
And so, urn, the gentleman urn showedthese two German guys around
to the various plots that might bethey might be interested in in town.
And they picked one outthat was perfect for travelers
because it's literally right on the Osagemission trail.
So it's right on the highway of its time.
But it was sort of sunk in lowbetween some mounds and hills
(13:59):
that are still there todaywhere people can't really see the cabin.
There'sthere's some privacy in the otherwise
sort of flat, sparse Kansas terrain.
Yeah yeah. Not known for its hilly.
No no not it known more for its tornadoes
and taking people up inside of tornadoes.
Now what I didn't know
(14:20):
until researching is that John Bender,he is the one that purchased the plot.
It was 160acres of the cabin was on and Gephardt
actually purchased his own plot,which was kind of nearby.
It was a narrow strip that was a bitI think it had more trees and stuff on it.
They never he never built anything on it.
He never did anything with the land.
(14:40):
So some people suspect
that it was for more privacy in the area,which I totally buy.
Now, when the men got the land,they kind of quickly
paced out the cabin in the ground.
They literally took their feetand like drew a line.
It was like,here's the cabin where they're at.
They use sticksto kind of draw things out.
And then they built their own cabinbecause that's that's what men did back
(15:01):
then. John,what do we do with our lives now? We do.
We're podcasting.
I am I am not a master like they were.
I can't.
Yeah, I mean, I don't evenI don't know, like people make bread.
I don't know how they
I just it yeah.
Yeah. Bread is hard.I've actually tried to make bread.
It is not easy.Yeah it would doing all that.
(15:22):
So they built a 16 by 24 cabinwith nine foot ceilings.
There was a door at each end.
Some storiessay there's only a front door,
but there actually was a frontand a back door.
There was a what is alwayscalled a trapdoor to the basement.
It's not a trapdoor. It'sjust a little thing.
You lift up like that.It's like it's a hatch.
They did cover it and hide it,but it's not a trapdoor.
And they built the cabin really quicklybecause winter is coming
(15:46):
when they'rewhen they're moving in in 1870,
over the period of of months after that,they planted an orchard behind the house.
They also built sort of a stablea corral for for animals right there.
They also dug a well.
And allegedly when they first moved in,
Gebhart would make moneyby taking stolen horses across the border.
(16:06):
I don't know.
I don't know how to confirm that.
That's just one of those storiesthat comes up with tales of the time
and the men nailed a sign out frontthat said Groceries,
but they spelled groceries. gr0crys.
I mean, English may not be theirfirst language, so makes sense.
And so yeah, they plan to sell some goodsto make some money along the trail.
(16:31):
Now, apparently, John Bender, was it
when they opened up shopand they started having customers,
you know, stop on their travelsto buy things.
John Bender was
unfriendly.
There's much worse ways to describe it.
It was a very unfriendly dudeand sometimes, like, wouldn't
even help potential customers.
(16:52):
And he also didn't speak English, whichdoesn't help, but he never really tried.
In March of 1871,
the Bender Boys were joinedby the lady folk Kate Bender or Katie.
Sometimes in her early twenties.
And Ma Bender, she's sometimes referred to
as Elmira or Elvira Bender.
I will explain that in part two.
(17:13):
No one actually knows her name.
It was they just referred to her as Ma.
No one actually knows her real name.
And that is the truth.
The book I read, my main source.
This is the only place I ever saw this.
It says that they came from Ottawa.
The women, which I was like,Can I, can I get more information on that?
And there wasn't itjust so they came from Ottawa
and I was like, That's weirdbecause the guys came from Pennsylvania,
(17:36):
the women are coming from Ottawa.
I don't know.
It just it's a very interesting detailI wish I knew more about
because that might explain
some of why the vendors arethe way they are is we don't know.
We don't know whythey were as crazy as they are.
So a mob bender similar to Paul Bender.
I spoke very little English,very heavy accent.
She didn't know more English than she leton, but she didn't know it very well.
(17:58):
And she was considered a she devil iswhat a lot of people called her.
She was also just as unfriendly as the
the hair suit man known as Paul Bender
and Kate or Katie.
I'll probably be referred to as Kate,but she went by boat.
She did have a little bit of a Germanaccent, apparently,
(18:18):
but she spoke very good English,not as much of a German accent
as the other guy. Katecame with Ma, right? That's right.
Yeah.
They came togetherborn of ma and pa vendor, right?
No, people.
People assume that if they are related,
she's most likely Ma's daughter.
But again, no one knows.
No one knows if this entire familyis a real family at all.
(18:41):
No. One,we have no confirmations of any of that.
And it is interesting that they're German.
But coming through Ottawa.
Right. Right.
Is is in Ottawa primarily, I would imagineFrench speaking at the time.
I don't know enoughabout Canada, but I think so
now around the time
that the that Kate and Ma showed up,they started kind of running their
(19:01):
their business model they landed on,which is accepting guests at the cabin
not just for groceries,but also to make a warm meal,
give people a place to sleepout of the elements for the night.
Because you have all these travelers.
There are no motels at the time,so you just stop at someone's house
to stay the night.There is no like guest room.
This is all one big roomseparated by that canvas sheet.
(19:22):
So it's probably a chairor you put your saddle
on the ground with a blanketand that's that's where you sleep.
And that's primarilyhow the vendors tried to make money.
Now, the word about town
is that Ma and PA did not socialize
like they would stay at the houseand do chores around the house.
They would every now and then go into townor the township to buy supplies.
(19:45):
But they didn't really talk to people.
And again,they were really terrible at socializing.
They were not good people.
And so Kate and
John, it was up to themto kind of socialize in town.
And they did. They went to church.They went to Sunday school.
Kate worked at a hotel and eventuallya couple other jobs as well.
So they were more well knownamong the town
(20:07):
folk at the timeand they were considered much nicer.
But there are periods of timewhere their oddities, their
their eccentricities would come acrossto the locals and rape them.
The wrong way.
Like Kate
was apparently a healer and a spiritualistand would hold seances and admit to it
or not admit,but suggest that she could heal
all sorts of abner abnormalitiesand she would push people
(20:31):
a little too hardfor that kind of business.
She was an aggressive car salesmanand John again had that irritating
not you, John,but John Gephardt had the irritating laugh
that made people thinkthat he might be stupid, like
there might be some sortof mental disability at the time.
I think one of the quotes from a sourceback then is calling him a halfwit,
(20:52):
which definitelysounds like a 19th century.
That's what passes as a mental healthdiagnosis back then.
Yeah, early 19th century indeed.
So here'swhere something strange began to happen.
Urn, who is the guy that showedthe Bender boys around four claims
he was bought out of his business,out of the trading post.
(21:15):
And so he took that money that he earnedand he sent it overseas
to pay for his fianceeand her mother to move to the states.
I think from Germany.
So they're making the trek over.
And when you travel
and make big moves back,then everything you own comes with you.
That there's no.
(21:36):
There's no FedEx, there'sno storage facilities, there's no banks.
Well, there are banks,but they're not everywhere
and they're not very accessible.
So I'll just buy a couch when I get there.
Exactly. Yeah. Everything. So.
So everything's coming with themand, urn, set it up
so that they could stayat the Bender cabin
when they arrived to townfor a little bit.
So they arrive to town,they're staying with the benders.
(21:57):
And one day the entire Bender familysuggest to the fiance and her mother,
we should go on a long walk.
And they were like,Oh, that sounds lovely.
So they all go out to walk.
And the two older benders at onepoint are like,
Oh, we're not feeling well,or We're old at all.
They came up with some excuse.
They turned around and left the youngerthe younger group to keep walking.
(22:18):
And when the younger groupmade it back to the cabin,
a jewelry box was gone
as well as all their cashier's checks.
I don't know how much moneythe cashier's checks added up to,
but it had to be again,probably everything they had.
Yeah.
And they were gone
and nothing else is gone, by the way,those are the things that are gone.
(22:38):
So the family immediately blamesthe benders they think they've been had.
And they've had athey've been stolen from by the benders.
And so they're very upset about it.
And John Gephardt is like,oh, the horse thieves are states
that happens around these partsare horses. You shouldn't stay here.
It's too dangerousbecause they might still be around.
So he takes
the ladies to some other family nearbyand has them stay somewhere else.
(23:00):
Urn, of course, finds out about this.
He actually threatensthe vendor, shows up at the cabin
with a gun and holds it to the vendorsand is like,
I demand to have the jewelry boxand the checks given to me.
I know you have them.
They decline.
They play dumb and stupid and like,we don't know what you're talking about.
It's so sad.
And he realizes wiselyhe can't really do anything.
There's no evidence.
(23:21):
So he threatened them,didn't get anything out of it.
So that's all he could do.But it's going away and he's left
by 1871.
In the same year this is all happening,the the cabin became what we all know it
to be from all the talesbecause it didn't always look the same.
They obviously planted the orchard,which was growing.
(23:42):
They may not have evenhad the canvas separator right away.
That may have taken a timebefore they did that.
And very famously,there is this white canvas that hung
in the middle of the cabinto separate the living quarters
for all the vendors,all of them in one little spot.
And the front area for cooking, eating,there's a table that had two benches.
(24:03):
It's always in pictures.
They always draw chairs, but it actuallyapparently has two benches and one side.
Face the door with the canvasright behind it.
And that's very importantfor the story. Yes.
And one thing I don't knowhow important this is for the story,
but I love these kind of inconsistencieswhen you research things.
Apparently the canvas,according to one account, was not white.
(24:26):
It was a red calico curtainand not a white canvas.
And this is where I like to say on thisshow, both can be true.
It's not like, oh, we proved it right.
They might have switched it outat one point,
you know, or maybe they rotated it,maybe they cleaned them.
There are a lot of white. One gets dirty.
Oh, yes,there are report that it's like stained.
(24:48):
And I think those are reportsare from all the press articles
that came outthat are mostly making up stories
that like because some people are like,oh, stained with blood.
And I'm like,
if that would just scare away customers,I don't think they just left
blood on the garment. Yeah.
So here I have some dinner and sitright by the blood stain.
Yeah.
Put your head right there by the bloodmark.
(25:09):
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense,which is one of my theories of why
I don't think they were attacked the wayeverybody thinks they were attacked.
However, apparently they were very dirty.
Like there's a lot of comments on likedirty dishes and bugs and stuff like that.
But a lot of negative Yelp reviews.
Yes. Oh, yes.
The Yelp reviews are not good,
(25:30):
but this will be reflectedin my Yelp review and.
The vendors didn't carebecause there's no other business nearby
that does the same thing. So they're.
Like, if they.
Leave a bad review, we don't care.
Kate was also she was very interested
in her spiritualism practiceor her business of healing.
That's I think she would have much ratherjust been telling fortunes
(25:52):
and telling peopleshe can cure blindness, then kill people.
That's my own assumption.
She did market and advertiseher services all around the area.
So I actually I'm going to read onebecause it's fun.
So it says Professor Ms..
Katie Binder can heal
all sorts of diseases, can cure blindness,fits deafness and all such diseases.
(26:13):
Also deaf and dumbness residents14 miles east of independence, on the road
from Independence to Osage, missionone and one
half miles southeast of Nora head station.
Katie Bender, June 18th, 1872.
Yeah, I love that stuff like that.
I love Fitz.
Fitz. Yeah, that coversso many things. Oh, absolutely.
(26:36):
Now, spiritualism,I'm not going to go into.
But people can listen to my William
Miller seriesto learn a little bit more about it.
Spiritualism is a huge beliefslash religion
at the time where people thoughtthey could talk to dead people.
And Katie is not the only spiritualistin the area.
It was very, very prominent,including one story
(26:57):
from a woman named Julia Hessler,who was a friendly medium.
She would hold seances around the areawith Kate Bender sometimes.
And one night, Kate invitedJulia to come to the cabin for a science.
This is where our first scene comes in.
John, you excited? I'm very excited.
Okay.
So scene one,who do you care who you read?
(27:20):
Which part do you want to know?
Let me pull it up here. It's a cat.
So it's the first scene.
That I am.
I am open to whatever casting decisionslet's have.
You do.
Let's have you do.
Julia Okay, great.
(27:40):
Yeah.
And I'm not going to try to do itGerman accent because I will
I will be terrible for Kate.
All right.
So here we go.
So it's a brisk night and Julia Hesterknocks on the door of the Bender cabin.
Kate Bender opens the door and gesturesfor Julia to enter.
(28:03):
Julia notices
a small fire in a stove and two candleslit on a table in the center of the room.
A dirty canvas, things behind the table,separating the room. Two
Good evening, Kate.
Thank you for inviting me. Sit, sit.
Julia begins to sit down.
And one of the bench on one of the benchesat the table, not there.
Sit facing the door.
It's much more comfortable.
(28:25):
All right.
Julia takes a seat with her backagainst the canvas.
I'm very excited you've come.
Let's get started.
Kate blows out the candles in the room,which was already barely lit,
is now exceptionally dark,except for bits of light from the stove,
casting strange shadowsacross the walls Close your eyes.
Where's the rest of your family?
(28:46):
They don't partake in seances.
Kate reaches for Julia's hands.
Now close your eyes.
Kate closesher eyes and Julia begins to close hers.
But a swarming fly swoops across her face
and she pulls a hand away from Kate'sthe spot at it.
Come now. It's just a net.
Kate grabs Julia's hands again,and they both close their eyes.
(29:07):
Those from the spirit world.
We wish to communicate.
Spirits.
We offer ourselves as vessels.
Julia notices a creaking sound.
She tries to ignore it.
Kate beginsto make a strange humming sound hum.
Now, Julia, here's another creak
and opens her eyes behindKate lit by the faint flickers of fire.
(29:28):
From the stove, standsMa, PA and John Gephardt.
They are staring silently at Julia.
Oh. Julia pulls her hands away from Kate.
Don't worry about them. Stay focused.
Kate tries to grab Julia's hands.
I have to excuse myself.
Sorry.
The outhouse.
I have to use the when nature calls.
(29:51):
I'll be right back.
Julia stands and swiftly manages to skatearound the Bender family and exit.
As she does so, she begins to run.
PA Bender grabs a rifle and aims at it.
Julia Butshe's hard to track in The Dark Knight.
As she runs,Paul fires the gun into the air.
As Julia disappears into the fields, JohnGephardt
giggles while Kate Bender slapsPaul on the iron.
(30:11):
I'm unhappy with how the night played out.
You should probably do a John Gephardtgiggle to give your best to me.
Perfect, perfect.
Nailed it.
So, yes.
That is our that it was our first scene.
There's be another one in part two.
Yeah.
So this isthis is a story that I read in again,
(30:33):
my primary source for the eveningthat I was just a little fascinated by
is it really paints a picture of whatthe Bender family was like.
And we don't knowif they were planning to kill her
that night, but it's definitely suspectthat they grabbed a rifle.
You know? Well, yeah, exactly.
And and that they were just therestaring at her.
Yeah, yeah.
Eyes were supposed to be closed. Yes.
(30:55):
Now, one thing I will this is not a wayto defend the benders by any means,
so hopefullyit doesn't come across that way.
But this story,I don't think people knew this story
until after the benders were discoveredto have been murderers.
So it's not like she ran to townand was like,
Oh my God, that family,they were trying to shoot me.
It was really weird.They tricked me into coming.
(31:16):
It could be some sort of embellishment.
However, she was just was known to be,you know, doing as with Kate.
So it doesthere is some validity to this story.
It could have been like one of those.
One of those I was there story.
Yeah. Oh, yes, absolutely.
You know, like, oh, she's just been therefor the Saints, but oh no.
Then they tried to kill me too,but I got away.
(31:38):
Yeah, yeah.
And God,there's a lot of those even today.
So little side tangent.
But when, when I research, I, I hatecomments on videos and articles and stuff,
but I find
when I'm doing these stories, it'sactually really helpful to read through
because every now and then someonewill be like, Oh, did you see this link?
Or Oh,
(31:58):
I actually read that, you know,
like you'll find more informationthat you're not going to normally find.
And still to this dayon, I think there's some on Reddit,
there's some on some YouTube documentariesI watch about them.
There are people that's like, Oh,my grandfather told me a story
about his grandfatherthat went down and shot the binders.
And like, there's so many of those talesand it's like it's a lot of these,
(32:19):
Oh, I knew them.
And we will cover more of those in part
two, actually, because there's quitea number. It's really fascinating.
So I'm not
sure when the Bender familyactually started killing,
it could have been right awayand we just don't know.
But I do think most likely because ofwhen people started to be found
or go missing,I do think it may be late 1871
(32:42):
and we do have some detailsof victims of the benders.
Not everybody, but I will cover someof them today, starting with late 1871,
right around the holiday season,like like today when we're recording this.
Oh, that's creepy.
A gentleman named James Ferricand his wife
Mary had a young son and Mary in the sun.
(33:04):
We're going to govisit family in New York.
And James was going to stay behind
and build the family homein this area of Kansas.
And so, Mary in the Sun, they departfor New York for a number of months
because back then when you left,you've left for a long period.
So you were just going out?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so the plan was.
Yeah, build, build the home.
(33:25):
So when they return, months later,there is a home for them to live in.
So as soon as they leave, James sets off
along the Osage Mission Trail
and it's likely he was carrying most,
if not all, of the family's moneyat the time.
And Mary and her son arrive in New Yorkand they write
a letter back back to Kansas,and they never get a response.
(33:47):
Now, at some point in time,I don't know how long, but after she's
not getting any responses from James,she gets a letter from a family friend,
from the area in Kansasthat say they have not seen or heard
from James since he left along the trail.
Now, right around this
time as well, this is when Kate beginskind of working in town.
(34:07):
She's doing her spiritualism stuff.
She's doing her seances.
And people are starting
to that negative Yelp reviewthing is starting to pass around
like the Bender family has now been therefor about a year.
There's a lot of tales of them eithertreating people poorly, treating
guests poorly, maand PA being just really terrible people.
(34:30):
And Kate would be dirty.
Kate would be like very flirtatiousto men one minute and then days
or minutes later, she would be complete
180 and be really rude to themand standoffish.
And I to say thisjust because I'm trying to paint
a picture of their personalitiesbecause they are so strange.
It's a study of strange.
(34:52):
Now there are a lot of these sortof anecdotal things
about their personalities are rumors.
Again, it's the Oh, I knew them.
I saw the thing when happened.
That'swhere a lot of these come from, however,
because they're all similar,I think that we can actually be like,
Yeah, Kate was probably very flirtatiousone minute and then really rude the next.
John probably was super weird and manpower
(35:13):
probably really unfriendlybecause everybody says that.
So there's just a there's a commonalityto all these stories.
So there's also a tale from the same book
that I wanted to share just because,again, it's very interesting and scary.
A priest named Pansy Leon.
I think that's how you say it.
It was traveling in the areaand he was raising money for a mission.
(35:36):
And so he stopped at the cabinbecause that's where he was told
you can get a warm meal and stufflike that.
And Kate got really excitedwhen she asked him
what he was doing and he explained he'sraising money for a mission.
And the priest noticedafter he started telling his story
that the men who were in the cabinsuddenly disappeared.
He never heard them leave.
He didn't know where they goor where they went.
(35:58):
Excuse me.
And he asked Kate, like,oh, where where you're where are the guys?
And she gave some sort of like vagueanswer and she was making him coffee
and apparentlyshe was acting really bizarre.
She's like glancing around the room.Her eyes are darting around.
She's putting a lot of focusonto the second half of the room
behind the canvas,and it just rubs the priest the wrong way.
(36:20):
And when she sat down with his coffee,he jumped up and made an excuse and left.
And part of what makes thisreally dramatic is there was a huge storm.
That's why he stoppedthere was to get out of this huge storm.
And now he ran off into the stormto get away from the vineyards.
So that's another interesting story.
In October of 1872,
(36:41):
a dead body was found by two kids
in a river called Drum Creek.
And the body had a blunt force
trauma to the headand also a neck wound like a cut.
And it was assumed by authoritiesthat the body was there about six days
and the body was lateridentified as a man named William Jones.
And he was traveling the OsageMission Trail for work.
(37:03):
And his wife claimsthat he had hundreds of dollars on him.
Locals thought that the guy that own
the land that his body was found onmust have done it.
This is very like investigating the 1870s.
Oh, it's your land. You did it. Yeah.
And this guy was named Rambo on it,
and he was actually arrestedfor this murder.
(37:25):
And he noticed he was Colombo himself,that there is this interesting
track left
by a wagon
that went that was near where the bodywould have been dumped in the creek.
And the track of the wagon,like one of the wheels was, jutted out
and he was like, Look at all my wagons.
I don't know how many
had maybe only had one, but it was like,look at my wagon or more.
(37:47):
I don't have any wagonsthat have wheels like that
and so they looked at him and were like,Okay, yeah, you're right.
And we have no other evidence,so you're free to go.
So luckily he was not.
It's kind of like the early versionof like the tire treads.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's the exact same thing. Yes.
The binders,I will point out, were not suspects.
(38:09):
They were not suspectsany of these murders or disappearances
for quite a while.
And that is becauselife was tough like that.
It's a place where a lot of peopleare going missing for sometimes
just very natural reasons.
But again, there's other thievesand robbers and murderers and con men.
There's also rightacross the border into Oklahoma territory.
(38:30):
It's all where the Native American tribesare, and they rightly so, don't always
get along with the westward expansionof white people moving through the area.
So there are, you know, somesome violent interactions that can happen.
So a man named BenjaminBrown came through the area
and he traded horses with somebody.
The door,another nearby town or settlement.
(38:53):
And then he disappeared.
His wife actually went looking for him,knowing
no one else is going to look for the guys.I've got to go do it, too.
And she actually stayed the nightat the Bender cabin along her search
for her husband, which is just super scarynow that we know that didn't know.
You know. Yeah, exactly.
And a man named William McRaney,who was a war veteran, disappeared
(39:15):
on his way to a land office.
He stopped at the Bender cabin.
It's assumedbecause right before he disappeared,
he talked to a guy and said,Where can I stop to get some food?
And they said, Oh, go to the Bender cabin.
That was the last personto ever see him alive
around Christmas.
This would be of 1872.
A man's body was found which had beenpractically eaten by wild hogs.
(39:40):
He was able to be identifiedbecause of his clothing.
He was a guy named John Phippsand his family said
he also was traveling with a lot of money.
So you'll notice herethat some people had been found dumped
there, a guy in the creek now Phippsand this is all about to change.
And I think it's about to change
because word is getting aroundthat there's dead bodies being found
(40:03):
and that makes people suspiciousof a lot of things.
So especially since thatand the last people to see them.
Yeah. Yeah.
BenderCabin have been there. Yeah, exactly.
So I think the benders,they are both incredibly stupid
and try to do something a little smarter,which is we're not going to dump bodies.
We should bury everybodyfor a little more privacy.
(40:26):
I mean, they got 168 acres.
You might as well.
Yes, you got it.
You got the land. Use some of it. Yeah.
So the the saddest storyis the one that happens next.
And that's a gentleman named GeorgeLong called his name is misspelled
or spelled different waysand different articles and things.
But I think that'sjust the product of the time.
And not everybody knew how to spell it.
(40:47):
He was traveling to Iowain December of 1872.
Now he and his wife, Mary Jane,they had a daughter
who was 18 months oldat the time named Mary Ann,
and the mother had actually passed awaydue to complications with childbirth.
So George long for unsure
of how to raise a daughter on his own.
(41:09):
The friends, a doctor William York
and Doctor William York has a family.
Mary and his daughtergets along with the family.
So the York family actually helpstake care of this little girl.
Until one day the the step,
not step in-laws, George Locklear'sin-laws
actually write to him are like, look, MaryAnn should come live with us.
(41:32):
We're family.
If we need if you need help with her,send her up to us.
And he agrees to do that.
So he actually buys a carriage from Dr.
York and travels through Kansas,
where he lives along the Osage MissionTrail with his 18 month old daughter.
And they never make it to Iowa.
(41:56):
Now, a couple of days after Lancashireleft, a man named John Hanley
stopped by the Bender cabinwith a colleague.
They were just looking to warm up.
I don't think they were planningto stay the night
and the Benders seemed uninterestedin having a guest at the time,
like they were really standoffish.
And he wanted to light a fireand they were like, No.
And he's like, Well,I'll buy the firewood.
And they're like, No.
(42:16):
And so it's suggested that they were being
reallykind of rude and wanting him to leave,
probably because they still had Georgelong core in his daughter's body,
maybe even in the cabin,maybe in the cellar. Sure.
So that's different.You know what to do with it.
Mm hmm.
This is the first steptowards the benders being found out.
(42:37):
So they they should not have
they should not have donewhat they should have done,
which is just a terrible comic becausethey shouldn't have done any of this job.
What am I saying?
They should not have done any of this.
So months later, after a courtgoes missing, a doctor, William
York, his buddy, the person who helpedraise his daughter for a period of time.
(42:58):
He had been a civil war vet.
He was a bit of a hero in the Civil War.
He had also been a prisoner of warduring the Civil War,
which is just the stories I've heard aboutthat are just pure hell.
And he went to visit his brother,Alexander York,
because George Longmore is missing and Dr.
William York wasn't surewhat to do and wanted some help.
(43:18):
And not only
had York not received word that long warhad made it to his family in Iowa,
but there was a wagon was also found
and that was crashedand something obviously
it had been abandoned or somethingand it had a wardrobe,
clothing from a manand a probably an 18 month old girl.
(43:39):
So William York went to see the wagonwherever it was
found, and was like,Oh, shit, that's my wagon.
That's the one he sold Long Horse.
So he knew something happened to him.
So he went to his brother.
Like I said, Alexander.
Alexander is a former Kansasstate senator,
very recently a Kansas state senator.
(43:59):
At the time,
he was very well-respected, very powerful,very interesting guy in Kansas,
knew how to push a lot of buttons,get a lot of things done.
And there's a story about himthat I have to share
just because it kind of showshow kind of interesting and cool it is.
So he was no longer a state senatorbecause he accepted a bribe,
(44:21):
but he accepted a bribe to provethat another senator was paying bribes.
So he kind of like threw awayhis own career
as a senator just to get the other guyout of the Senate.
So, yeah, he trickedhe tricked a guy by accepting a bribe.
And he actually went to the Senate floorand showed proof that he accepted a bribe.
He's like,I accepted a bribe. Here's the proof.
(44:41):
It came from that man,
that senator there, that scumbagwho we all know is a scumbag.
So they had to kick themboth out of the Senate.
And it actually was pretty amazing.
Like, Yeah, stand up for your principles.
Yeah, it's like,I'm really running where your mouth is.
Absolutely.
So I want to
I want to read part of his speechon the Senate floor because it's so cool.
And also, I just love the language backthen that people use.
(45:03):
Sure.
So here he goes.
This is AlexanderYork on the state Senate floor.
I know that there are many presentwho may feel disposed to impugn my motives
in this matter and decry the mannermy unearthing the deep
and damning rascalitywhich has eaten like a plague spot
into the fairname of this glorious young state.
(45:25):
I am conscious that standing hereas I do a self convicted bribe taker,
I take upon myself vicariouslythe odium that has made the name of Kansas
and Kansas politicsa hissing and byword throughout the land.
Yes. So he is
he's not a senator anymore,but people love him for what he did.
(45:45):
He is, of course,he is both feared and respected.
And William tells tells his brotherAlexander
that he's going to actually go searchfor for George Long for himself.
And he's going to start by travelingthe same path that Longhorn traveled.
And so he gets in his
probably horse and buggy or carriageof some kind, and he heads on down
(46:08):
the Osage mission trail and he soon,
too, went missing.
And his brotherAlexander gets worried that that now Dr.
William York, his brother is missing.He never showed up.
So Alexander is like,something's going on in that area,
so I need to figure this out.
(46:28):
And there's somebody I trust.
My other brother,their youngest brother, Edward York,
he calls in ADD and says, Get a detective,get a team together.
We got to go find out what happened to ourbrother, Dr.
William York,
and In
certain respects,they did find out what happened to Dr.
William York.
He too met the bloody benders.
(46:52):
And that is where we're going to end.
Part one, John, is with thethe hunt for whatever happened to Dr.
William York.
And next week, we're going to concludethe story of the bloody benders,
what investigators found,what they didn't, and the details
of the benders escape from Kansasand into the i don't know, infamy.
(47:13):
Are they in.
The same much?
Yeah,they're like it's like folklore legends.
Yeah, absolutely.
It definitely is.
And out now I'm thinking about infamousand the three amigos in Famous.
In these insane obits.
Yeah. So, yeah.
Dr. William York, too,to surmise his disappearance leads
to the downfall of the Benders directlybecause the York New York
(47:36):
bro's are on the caseand it is not pretty.
And we're goingto get kind of more macabre in part two
as we find out all the detailsof the crazy bloody benders.
John, since we are breaking this up intodo you want to plug anything here
at the end of this?
And we'll do it again at part two.
That'swhere can people find you or what you do.
You can. Find me.
My website is John M Keating acting aecom.
(48:01):
I also I do acting, I do audition classes
and I do audition coaching as well.
You can book an audition coaching with methrough there or find out more
information on the classes.
I'll plug my movie
Concussion Die,which is available on iTunes and Amazon.
I believe it's on Plex now as well.Oh, cool.
(48:23):
Possibly to be on TV for a while.
It's it's a comedy that I co-wroteand that I'm in.
Stan Lee is in it
and Dan Lauria from Wonder Years.
It's about the last daysof a single screen movie theater.
So yeah.
Yeah, it is. It is. Very good.
Everybody, please check that out.
And yeah, I look forwardto seeing everybody back for part two.
(48:47):
But thank you for listeningto Part one of Bloody Benders.
Visit our website a study of strange ICOM.
You'll find informationabout our patriarch on.
We would love to have you on there
to listen to the contenton patriotic support the show.
Find us on Instagramat a study of strange.
You can also message meat a study of strange at gmail.com
(49:09):
and on the email note.
I am.
Compiling personal UFO.
Stories for an upcoming future. Episode,
so if you have any UFO experiences,I would love to have you on the show.
Email me a study of strange at gmail.com.
We'd love to hear about it.
Trying to rememberif I have any other announcements.
I don't think so.
Not that I can think of.
(49:30):
Make sure to subscribe, rate and review.
And I look forward to concludingbloody benders with you next week.
Thank you.
And good night.
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