Admit it, each of us with an interest in history’s landmark crimes has that one horrific tale that fascinates above all others. For some it might be the case of Jack the Ripper, for others the murder of the Black Dahlia or maybe the assassination of President Kennedy. Notice the connection? Each remains unresolved, fodder for ageless speculation and theory. It’s what lends to their shelf life.For me, it is the long ago deeds of a family that would come to be known as the Bloody Benders…
Before Truman Capote ventured from his Manhattan playground to a small town called Holcomb, Kansas, there to research a book that would lend wings to the true crime genre, the state had already laid claim to one of the most notorious murder sprees in American crime annals. You know of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock and the homicidal evil they brought to the quiet Clutter family home in the late ‘50s. Their deeds, however dark and horrendous, pale in comparison to a series of murders that occurred on the pioneer prairie lands in the days immediately following the Civil War.
Ten travelers along the Osage Trail visited a makeshift way stop in southeast Kansas, never to again be seen. One by one, they were killed and robbed by a strange family who had earlier settled on the treeless, sweeping plains.
Little wonder that locals would ultimately refer to the scene of the crimes as The Devil’s Inn.
The terms “serial killer” and “mass murderers” were not a part of the American vernacular back then. Missing persons were rarely reported to the authorities. In the middle of nowhere, crimes could be carried out with casual ease and often go undetected forever. On the frontier, there was very little law and only the slightest hint of order.
And the Bloody Benders, as folklorists would eventually call them, took full advantage.
The story begins with a struggling nation’s new search for a more prosperous lifestyle. By governmental decree, the Osage Indian tribe had been driven from their Kansas homeland south to the newly established Indian Territory (Oklahoma), freeing parcels of land for adventuresome pioneers who wished to travel west and claim 160-acre plots on which to build a better life.
Among them were German immigrant John (Pa) Bender, Sr., a large, bushy-browed man in his late 50s, and his lanky 20-year-old son John, Jr., who punctuated virtually every sentence he spoke with a child-like giggle. They traveled to the Kansas flatlands and filed claim to acreage in an isolated portion of Labette County between the townships of Thayer and Cherryvale. Just off the well-traveled Osage Trail that connected Lawrence to Fort Scott, the locale was two miles removed from the only water supply, Big Hill Creek, and the landscape of the Benders’ new property was hardly that of a garden spot. Still, they set about building a 16x24 one-room cabin atop a rock-bottomed cellar, erected a small barn and stable, dug a water well, and planted an orchard and garden.
Then, in the fall of 1871, the elder Bender summoned his wife and stepdaughter from Michigan, where they had resided in a small lumber mill camp while their new home out west was being prepared. Kate Bender and her 25-year-old daughter (also named Kate) by a previous marriage traveled to Ottawa, Kan., by train. Before making the 100-mile wagon trip southward to their new home they purchased supplies and furniture for their new home.
The harsh region’s population had suddenly grown by four, though few neighbors would ever get to know the strange and standoffish Bender family.
Except, that is, for daughter Kate, pretty, personable and a self-proclaimed “spiritualist” who occasionally entertained visitors to neighboring community saloons with her talents as a psychic medium who claimed the ability to contact the dead and cure a variety of ailments – all for a price. Billing herself as Professor Miss Katie Bender, the young auburn-haired, hazel-eyed woman’s local popularity and notoriety quickly grew.
Ma Bender, a lumbering, overweight woman in her mid-60s, spoke little English but also had ideas about how to improve the family’s ever dire financial situation.
The constant parade of cross-country travelers along the Osage Trail, most of them weary settlers in search of land of their own to claim, offered a business opportunity that she quickly embraced. Soon a crudely lettered sign advertising “Groceries” appeared above the door to the Bender cabin. A wagon cover canvas was stretched across the one-room homestead, the front half furnished by a small dining table, a wood-burning stove and shelves upon which groceries-for-sale were displayed. Behind the canvas was the Benders’ cramped living area.
Soon, a steady stream of visitors were stopping at the “inn,” some for a meal and feed and water for their horses, some to purchase provisions, others to bed down in the nearby barn for a much-needed night’s rest.
Some went on their way, satisfied customers. Others, who were thought to be carrying worthwhile amounts of cash and valuables, were murdered.
For a period of 18 months, from 1871 to 1873, the diabolical plan was carried out without notice or concern of others living in the region.
The traveling strangers, either having a meal prepared by Ma Bender or being entertained by one of Miss Kate’s seances, were always seated with their back to the canvas that divided the cabin. The elder Bender and his dim-witted son stood in wait behind the canvas, one wielding a hammer, the other a knife. Following a pre-arranged signal from Kate, Pa Bender would strike the unknowing visitor in the back of the head, rendering him unconscious if not dead. The men would then drag the body into the back of the cabin where the trap door leading to the cellar had been opened. In the cellar, the victim’s throat would be cut. Robbed of cash and valuables, the body, stripped of clothing and often dismembered, would remain in the dark underground hideaway until a grave could be dug in the Bender’s nearby orchard.
It was a grim routine played out, some estimate, as many as 21 times though remains of only 10 bodies were ever located.
And had it not been for the concern of the brother of one of the Bender’s victims, the killing spree would have doubtless continued.
In the spring of 1873, an Independence, Kan., physican, Dr. William York, had stopped in at the Bender’s inn while making a westward journey to visit relatives in Fort Scott. Fascinated by Miss Kate’s claims to have spiritual healing powers, he had promised to stop in again on his way home.
The doctor never returned to Independence.
Army Colonel Ed York had been aware that his brother planned to visit the makeshift inn and, in late May set out to re-trace the route he knew the doctor had taken. Stopping at the Benders’ inn, he told them of Dr. York’s disappearance and asked if he had, in fact, stopped there during his trip. The Benders expressed their sympathies for the Colonel’s concern, readily admitting they had briefly hosted his brother, serving him a meal while his horses were tended, and had looked forward to seeing him again on his return. They suggested the possibility that he might have encountered trouble with renegade Indians who had refused to move south to the Indian Territory. Miss Kate even offered to conduct a séance in an effort to reach the missing brother. Ma Bender served him a meal while her husband and son fed and watered his horses.
It is here that the history becomes clouded: In one version, Col. York is said to have agreed with the Benders’ suggestion that Indians might have abducted and killed his brother. In another, he was briefly left alone in the front room of the inn and, peeking beyond the canvas into the family living area, noticed a shiny object beneath the bed. It was a locket like that carried by his brother. Opening it, the colonel saw that it contained photographs of his brother’s wife and young daughter. Col. York, the story goes, immediately slipped from the inn to his buggy and rode away, convinced that his brother had been killed by the Benders.
Other families, sharing Col. York’s concern, began taking note of the fact that it was in the same region that their loved ones had vanished. Soon, inquiries reached such regularity that a town meeting was called at the nearby Harmony Grove school to discuss what most local residents viewed as nothing more than slanderous insinuations.
Among the 75 or so who attended were John Bender and his son.
To set the outrageous claims to rest, the local constable suggested that he and a team of deputies would soon visit and search every farmhouse in the county.
Due to heavy rains, it would be days before the search got underway, almost two weeks before the constable and his men reached the Bender property. There, on a late afternoon, they found the cabin abandoned, starving livestock roaming unattended. A tethered calf had died and several pigs wandered their quagmire pen in vain search of food.
The only thing left behind was a gagging stench that permeated the small cabin.
Locating a trap door in the floor, constable and township trustee Leroy Dick pulled at its leather handle and ventured down the ladder into the earthen, foul-smelling cellar. Lighting a lantern, he saw dried blood in every direction he looked. The crime scene had been discovered.
It would be Col. York, having accompanied the search party, who would make an even more gruesome discovery. Seated in his buggy, he noticed an unusual depression in the ground at the edge of the Benders nearby orchard. What he had sighted was the shallow grave in which his brother had been buried.
The following day, armed with spades and shovels, authorities discovered nine other graves. The skulls of those buried had been so badly damaged that for some facial identification was all but impossible. Their throats had also been cut. In one grave, a man named George Loncher and his young daughter had been buried together. The child’s body showed no evidence of violence, leading the investigators to assume she had either been strangled to death or buried alive. Another body was later found at the bottom of the Benders’ water well. Skeletal remains of two others were eventually located in an isolated area a few miles removed from the Bender cabin.
Adding to the gruesome nature of the discovery were body parts of other unknown victims.
Outrage over the atrocities spread quickly. In Independence, another of Dr. York’s brothers, state Senator Alexander York offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the Bender family. Kansas Governor Thomas Osborn established an additional $2,000 reward.
Journalists from as far away as Chicago and New York arrived to report the ghastly story, one account estimating that as many as 3,000 people had traveled to visit the scene of the mass murders within weeks of the discovery. The media quickly gave the Bender property a new name: Hell’s Acre.
And what of the suddenly vanished Benders?
Immediately after discovery of the bodies, posses were dispatched throughout the state in search of the murderous family. More than one group claimed to have found and killed them. One story had the Benders killed in a gunfight, then buried in unmarked graves on the Kansas prairie. Still another posse leader said that he and his men had happened on the fleeing Benders’ campsite late one night, killed them, then burned their bodies.
A member of a four-man vigilante posse, hired and led by Col. York, told of slipping quietly out to the Bender cabin just days after the colonel’s initial visit, forcing a confession from the family at gunpoint, then lynching all four before tossing their bodies into the Verdigris River. That done, he told of taking the Benders’ abandoned wagon to nearby Thayer where they tethered it on the township’s outskirts. Indeed, a state detective assigned to the case later reported locating the Benders’ wagon and tied-up team of lame and starving horses. In the wagon was the hand-painted wooden sign advertising “Groceries” that had once hung above the Benders’ front door.
Those who argue that this scenario is the most likely suggest that a reward, later offered by Col. York’s brother, was done so only to divert attention from the colonel’s involvement in the revenge killings. A huge sum of money at the time, the $1,000 would, the colonel knew, never be paid.
However, the detective who traveled to Thayer to investigate found evidence the Benders had, in fact, arrived there alive and well and boarded a north-bound train. A ticket agent verified descriptions of the two men and women who had purchased fares to Humboldt. Investigators would later determine that the two younger Benders had switched to a train bound southward to either Texas or New Mexico. Meanwhile, the elder Benders reportedly continued on to St. Louis.
There they appeared unannounced at the home of John Bender’s sister who had not seen her brother in two decades. During a brief stay, they told the sister little of where they had been or where they might be headed and then, one day while their host was away from the house, they and the lone trunk they had brought with them simply vanished.
Then, there is an account by deputy sheriff John Snook, that the Bender men made their way to the small mining community of Salmon, Idaho, where they briefly resided until a local Indian reported the discovery of a body floating in a nearby river. Investigating, the deputy determined that the body was that of the younger of the two unknown men with German accents who had recently arrived in the community. The victim, it appeared, had died of an ax blow to the top of his head.
And the elder companion he’d been seen with had retrieved his horse from a local feed lot corral and disappeared. The deputy had a suspect and learned that the mare which the man was riding had been recently shod, making tracking far easier. Snook and two volunteers were soon on a trail that led toward the Montana Territory.
After two days and 90 miles, they caught up with and captured their murder suspect near the community of Dillon at a place known as Point of the Rocks. It was on the return to Idaho that it occurred to deputy Snook that his prisoner matched the description of the infamous John Bender, Sr.
On the late evening of July 4, 1884, Snook returned to Salmon with his prisoner, shackled him and placed him in the back room of a local store since the tiny community had no jail. Snook then contacted the Kansas authorities to alert them to the fact he believed he had John Bender, Sr., in custody, charged with the murder of his own son.
While preparations were being made for a trial, the man who Snook had become convinced was Bender, was kept in the darkened, dirt-floored room, chained by the ankle to a large pillar. Then, one night as a local Chinese cook arrived to deliver dinner he made a horrifying discovery.
The prisoner had found a buried knife, left behind by some forgotten law-breaker, and had freed himself by cutting his foot away so that he might slip from the heavy metal cuff. All that remained of the murder suspect was his bloody, severed foot.
And once again, John Bender vanished.
An even more outrageous claim came four years after the Benders’ disappearance. During a visit to relatives in Topeka, Captain Don Pieppo walked into the office of the Topeka Commonwealth and announced that he knew what had happened to the vanished Benders.
He told a reporter that he had been the commander of a small ship sailing from Mexico to Galveston, Tex., in April of 1873 when a sudden storm blew across the Gulf of Mexico. In the midst of the gale his ship was suddenly jolted when something became tangled in its mast. Seconds later a gondola from a large balloon fell to the deck. In it were two men and two women, three of whom had been killed by the fall. The only survivor was the younger of the men.
Quickly taken below deck, the man identified himself as John Bender, Jr., and told how his family had fled Kansas in the hot air balloon. His sister, he went on to explain, had discovered a boiling spring of gas near their prairie home and his ingenious father had built the balloon. They had planned to travel to Mexico but had lost control of the balloon somewhere over the Indian Territory and drifted across Texas and out to sea.
Two hours after telling his story, the youngest Bender died.
Soon thereafter, Pieppo said, his ship sank, taking with it the bodies of the Bender family.
Meanwhile, the owner of a Denison, Tex., boarding house, traveled to Labette County, Kansas, to tell constable Leroy Dick that the young Benders had been recent residents there, the man working as a member of a construction crew. The informant explained that the man and woman, who he’d initially thought to be man and wife, had repeatedly expressed interest in the location of outlaw colonies that were reported to be thriving in the southwest parts of the state.
Though having become leery of “Bender sightings,” Dick contacted Texas authorities to ask that the boardinghouse owner’s story be investigated.
Soon Dick was told that investigators were on a trail leading south toward El Paso. They also reported that an elderly man and woman had joined the young couple on the trip that appeared to be leading either toward the Mexico border or an outlaw hideaway in the Big Bend region.
Only when the trail did, in fact, lead toward the outlaw colony – a region where great danger awaited any law officer – did the Texas officials contact Dick to advise him they were giving up on their pursuit.
How long the Benders remained among the other outlaws is the subject of considerable debate. As is what occurred when, believing interest in the Kansas murders had subsided, they opted to leave. Stories are told that the elder Benders, short of money and weary of the isolation, left after only a short stay. And soon, Pa Bender, following a dispute with his wife, deserted her to go his own way. Reports have him finally returning to Michigan in poor health where, in 1988, he drowned in a creek near a lumber camp. Meanwhile, it has been suggested that young John Bender chose stay in the Southwest, living out his remaining days near El Paso. Miss Kate is said to have become romantically involved with a member of one of the outlaw gangs hiding at the colony and remained for some time after others in her family had left.
Finally, however, Miss Kate also packed her bags and left, saying that she was “headed to Michigan to see if she could find her mother.”
Whether dead or alive, hither or yon, the Benders had become little more than mythical ghosts. Yet whatever the truth, their ghastly deeds and disappearance remained constant grist for pulp detective magazines. So ingrained was the Bender legend in the consciousness of much of the American public that the family even became the subject of occasional mean-spirited joking. On city streets or in rural areas of the mid- and southwest, wherever a disheveled and ominous-looking drifter appeared, someone was certain to laugh, point and say, “Hey, look, there goes Old Man Bender.”
And, despite cold trails and hard-to-believe claims of sightings from a half dozen states, the search sporadically continued for well over a decade. Routinely, publicity-seekers and mental cases would come forward to “confess” to the Kansas crimes. On several occasions women would be identified as Ma and Kate Bender, investigated, then quickly dismissed.
In 1889 – 16 years after the discovery of the bodies on the old Bender place -- two women were actually extradited from Michigan to Kansas after being named as suspects in the murder of Dr. York. In Labette County, 13 residents who had lived in the region from 1871 to ‘73 and knew the Benders on sight, were summoned to the courthouse to see if they could identify the two women. Seven made positive ID’s; six would only say the women closely resembled Ma and Kate Bender. Still, the prosecution believed it had a strong case, one that would finally bring some resolve to the Kansas killing spree – until defense attorney John T. James produced surprising documentation showing that the elder of the two women had, in fact, been married to a man other than John Bender in the early ‘70s and had been in a Michigan prison, serving the first years of a 16-year term for another murder, at the time of the Kansas killing spree.
As the local prosecutor’s case collapsed, he realized that a conviction was all but impossible and petitioned the judge to dismiss the case. The two women, who had sworn their names were Almira and Sarah Eliza Davis, were set free.
Distraught at the turn of events, constable Leroy Dick would go to his grave believing they were actually the Bender mother and daughter. The last time he would see them, they were walking away from the courthouse, both smiling, Miss Kate pulling her young son behind her in a red wagon. Several members of the community had raised a fund to help the women make their trip back to Michigan.
By the time she met Flickenger, Almira was already the mother of 12 children, three who had died in infancy, a son who was an epileptic, a daughter she had been unsuccessfully tried for murdering and a son she had allegedly poisoned so that he might not testify that he had helped her dispose of his sister’s body. She had finally gone to prison after being found guilty of striking her pregnant daughter-in-law in the stomach with a club in a fit of anger. The act resulted in the death of the unborn child. She was also the primary suspect in the murder of a young black girl who had been a playmate of her children. Then, a local farmer who she claimed to be married to was also a murder victim, his body discovered at the bottom of the family well. Almira had mourned briefly, sold the farm, and then did her disappearing act.
Soon she teamed up with Flickenger. It was he who would eventually suggest that they consider a new start, a new locale where their reputation did not precede them. Perhaps, he said, they should think of settling somewhere out west.
Constable Dick learned all this when he had been greeted by the Berrien Springs (Mich.) sheriff who had arrested two women calling themselves Davis on charges of theft and larceny. The sheriff explained that he had known the older woman when her name was Griffith; in all likelihood the name Davis was an alias. He’d known her to use several others over the years. One of them, he suggested, was most likely “Bender.”
The following morning the sheriff took Dick to the jail and positioned him where he might watch the two women without their seeing him. He immediately recognized the younger woman who was holding a young child. Time had not treated Miss Kate kindly. Though much of her girlish beauty was gone, her posture slumped rather than upright as he’d remembered it, she was still the same woman who had, on occasion, sung in the choir that he had led so long ago back at the Harmony Grove schoolhouse. The older woman, her hair now white, still heavy and with the same lumbering walk and mannerisms, was the Kate Bender he’d known years earlier.
Neither, however, would admit to him that they had ever been in Kansas.
When he interviewed them separately, however, each was quick to point an accusing finger at the other. The elderly woman insisted that her daughter was the person who had been responsible for “that mess back in Kansas.” Meanwhile, Eliza told Dick that she was fearful that her mother was planning to poison her and her child, murdering them just as she had so many others, including “those poor people in Kansas.”
The local sheriff only shook his head as Dick described his strange conversations with the two prisoners. “Like I told you,” he said, “these Griffith women are strange folks.”
“To me,” Dick replied, “their name is Bender.” A name destined to live in infamy.
Sources:
Kansas State Historical Society and article by Edith Ross, 1928;
Frontier Times (Sept. 1929);
True West articles by Warren Kuhn, Don Martin (1954, 1959), Wikipedia;
Western Folklore (Robert Scott), 1950;
Tales of the Western Heartland, Harry Chapman, Ohio University Press, 1984;
True Tales of Old-Time Kansas, David Dary, University of Kansas Press, 1984;
Kansas Historical Quarterly, 1957.
