The year is 1871 and a lonesome traveler is making his way on horseback through the state of Kansas,
hoping to head West where he’s heard there’s money to be made.
As he’s passing through the Great Osage Trail, drained after days navigating wind-swept plains,
he comes across what looks like a quiet homestead. There he meets the Bender family, an odd-looking
group of people if ever there was one. Unbeknownst to our weary traveler,
old man Bender has quite the reputation among the few families that live in this remote area.
What do people say about him? They call him a hideous brute, ill-tempered,
repulsive. As for Mrs. Bender, she is called a “midnight hag” with “murderous ambition.”
Indeed, after his belly was full of stew and his head had hit the pillow,
the traveler’s life came to an abrupt end. He was found some days later dumped near a creek
with his throat slashed and his skull crushed. This is the story of the Bloody Benders,
America's First Serial Killer Family. Ok, so let’s go back to the beginning.
This was a time in U.S history when European settlers were trying to make a go of it
in sometimes quite remote and unforgiving parts of America.
The Bender family was no exception. They arrived in Osage in northwestern Labette
County in the year 1870, along with a handful of other families. The locals didn’t exactly
welcome them with open arms, but neither did they turn their backs to them. They were just another
bunch of folks that were going to see just how hard it was settling in such a harsh environment.
It was just too much for some of the new families and they packed up and left quickly,
but the Benders, the Benders were made of tough stuff. They weren’t going anywhere.
John Bender, Sr. made a claim on some land adjacent to the Great Osage Trail, which
would later become known as the Santa Fe Trail. It was Native Americans who forged the trail, but it
was Europeans who would name it the Osage Trail. If a person back then wanted to move West along
an open road, then they had to pass through this trail, and at some point come close to
the warped homestead of the Bender family. The Benders soon got their hands dirty and
built a barn, a corral, and a cabin. That cabin had two rooms, only separated by the cloth of
a wagon cover. They made a kitchen, and they converted part of their cabin into a general store
and a place a traveler could have a bite to eat. On top of that, they made a small
compartment where someone could rest their head for the night. You could call it a bed,
but it deserved to be called a butcher’s block. So, who were the Benders exactly?
Well, we know that John Bender Sr., aka, “Pa”, could barely speak a word of English. We know
that he grunted a lot and to those who met him he was seen as something of a brute.
They were right. Mrs. Bender, Elvira, aka,
“Ma”, was said to be equally unfriendly, and while better than her husband, her English
wasn’t perfect. Both her and John communicated most of the time in German. She was sometimes
called a “she-devil”, but not because of her appearance, but because along with her daughter
she told anyone in the area that she had psychic powers and could even communicate with the dead.
That daughter, Kate Bender, was the only family member who was fluent in English,
and so she was very useful when it came to writing and distributing flyers that
explained that she and her mother were advocates of spiritualism and could
heal the sick with their supernatural powers. As for the son, John Jr., word on the street,
or should we say the trail, was that he was a halfwit, a young man prone to sudden outbreaks
of laughter for no apparent reason. Some sources state that the brother and sister
were not actually related, but a married couple. This is the problem with the story of the Benders,
the family was something of a mystery. There has never been any documentation stating that
they were German immigrants, this was just taken for granted. It may or may not have been true,
just as the rumor that Mrs. Bender had actually come from the Adirondack Mountains in New York
state and that she’d killed previous husbands, might not have been true.
They were a weird bunch, a family that promoted free love and who claimed they could talk to dead
spirits. For that reason they were gossiped about a lot. It didn’t help their reputation
when Kate Bender gave lectures on spiritualism and during those lectures she would sometimes
say that murder might not be such a bad thing, and might actually be a brave and noble act.
She also advocated free love, saying that staying with one partner alone was just
the “miserable requirements of self-constituted society.” Notably, she also once said in one of
her lectures, “Shall we confine ourselves to a single love, and deny our natures their proper
sway?...Even though it be a brother's passion for his own sister, I say it should not be smothered.”
As you can imagine, folks that lived near the Benders were somewhat apprehensive about making
friends with them. You had the brute of a father, his wicked wife; an idiot son and a daughter that
claimed she was in contact with the dead and didn’t believe in any kind of sexual propriety.
They were outcasts, strange-sounding pariahs living in the middle of nowhere,
and so people kept their distance. But travelers, people looking for
a new life in the American West, they knew nothing about the Bender family. They just
wanted a place to rest their head for a night or two and a good meal to restore their energy.
The Bender homestead was like an oasis to these travelers, and they were only too
happy to have a place to stay, to be able to fill their wagons with food, water, gunpowder,
booze and tobacco. Not only that, they were reportedly entranced by Kate’s good looks
and her way with words. “Come rest,” she told them, “I will heal you with my psychic powers.”
Healing was far from the truth. Traveling down that trail was not for the meek.
Not only could a person or a group of people starve out there, but they needed their strength
and they needed weapons if they should come into contact with bandits or unfriendly Native
Americans. Let’s not forget that many groups were travelling with everything they owned.
That’s why when the young man we described in the beginning of this story was found
with his throat slashed and his head caved in, it wasn’t exactly a big shock to people.
Everyone knew that the trail was a treacherous place and one could easily be set upon by a
gang who wanted what was in their wagon. In 1871, 72 and 73, people went missing,
always close to where the Benders lived. The locals at the time grew quite worried. People
were told not to go out on the trail alone or at night, but no one suspected that it was the Bender
family that was behind the strange disappearances. In fact, mobs at times would accuse some man down
on his luck, and proceed to chase him out of town. They would soon discover
they’d been chasing away the wrong people. In March, 1873, a physician from Independence,
Kansas, named Dr. William York, alighted a train in Cherryvale, a town not too far from the Osage
Trail. This guy was a person of standing, so when he went missing it was big news.
What was he doing in the middle of nowhere you might ask?
York had made the journey because he was looking for two people that had gone missing.
Those two folks had been acquainted with York, and he was determined to find them.
The friend was George Newton Longcor, and he was accompanied by his young daughter,
Mary Ann. They’d left Independence with the hope of resettling in Iowa,
except they didn’t get very far. They’d found the Osage trail and later disappeared.
We know that on his quest to find his friend and his friend’s daughter that York arrived
at a place called Fort Scott in Kansas. We know that on March 9 he left that place, and we also
know that he never made it home from there. What the Bender family didn’t know is that
they had now bitten off more than they could chew. You see, Mr. York wasn’t just a man of standing;
his two brothers were also extremely powerful people. One was a colonel in the military and the
other was a member of the Kansas State Senate. Those two guys were obviously upset that their
brother had vanished into thin air, a brother that had been looking for other people that
had vanished. While the brothers at first thought that the disappearances might have
been down to attacks by Native Americans, they also wondered if some of those
homesteads contained something quite insidious. What they were about to discover was something way
more evil than they had bargained for, something that would shock America for many years to come.
They got fifty guys together and went out to visit those homesteads,
arriving along the tracks like a small army. At one point the group, led by the brother who was
a Colonel in the US Army, arrived at the Bender’s place. He spoke to the family, well, as best he
could do since the older Benders were terrible with English, and he was told that his brother
had stayed the night with them, but he’d left the next day. The Benders told the Colonel that the
trail was fraught with danger and his brother may have come across some dangerous natives.
There was just something wrong about this family, and Colonel York grew more
suspicious when he learned that Mrs. Bender had recently threatened someone with a knife.
We know that did indeed happen because the newspaper clipping still exists today.
The Colonel went back, and again asked, do you know where my brother is.
He was rather less friendly this time. Mrs. Bender was enraged that the men were back,
while Kate Bender told them she’d use her clairvoyant skills to find the missing man.
At that point, the Colonel and his men were pretty sure that this family were not what they claimed
to be. In fact, some of the men in the group said that they were guilty and should be hanged.
But the Colonel needed more evidence before he sent a family to the gallows, and they went to
talk to more people in nearby communities. Weeks passed, and then one local noticed
something strange. He passed the Bender house and realized that the place seemed to be abandoned.
It looked like the Benders had just taken off, leaving some of their animals behind.
That man reported what he’d seen to members of the township, and soon the Colonel heard about the
missing family. Due to terrible weather, it took some days to go out and search for the Benders,
but in the end a search party of several hundred people was formed.
When they got to the Bender house they discovered that it was pretty much empty
of clothes and provisions. All that had been left behind was something that smelled awful,
as if a decaying body was under the floorboards. The men found a trapdoor that was bolted shut,
but they soon managed to wrestle it open. The door led to a dark room under the house,
and there they saw blood splattered everywhere, some of it not so old.
The group moved the cabin, and they started digging, thinking that bodies
must be buried. Later that evening they found Dr. York’s decomposing body. He’d been buried
in the nearby orchard. The next day they found another eight bodies buried in shallow graves.
When they looked down the well, they found another body, as well as various body parts.
It was a horror-show, a terrible thing to behold. Some of the bodies had been mutilated,
while the body of a young girl didn’t seem to have been injured at all. The group suspected
that the family had buried her alive. In all, the Benders might have killed at many as 21 people,
although a more conservative estimate is 11. The Benders had few good friends in that area,
but suffice to say, the now growing crowd of people weren’t too kind to folks that
had known the family. One man was hanged just because he knew them, although the
crowd pulled him down and he survived. The media arrived at the Bender place,
coming from as far away as New York City and Chicago. The public came from far and wide,
all wanting a look at the place where evil had lived. Rewards were offered to
anyone who could locate the family, which in today’s money were around $20,000 and $40,000.
Where were the Benders? Well, vigilantes wanted that reward,
with some claiming they had caught up with the family and killed them all. Some claimed they shot
and buried them, others said they shot and threw them in the river, but these were likely lies.
No bodies were found and no reward was given. The Benders were either very good at hiding
or they were all six feet under. The reward then went up to more
than $60,000 in today’s money, but still no one could find them. As this was happening,
the story spread to every state. Books were written, including one called, “The Five Fiends,
Or, The Bender Hotel Horror in Kansas.” It wasn’t easy finding this family for the simple
fact that not much was known about them. Were the parents legally married? Were the children even
their children? Were they even called Bender? It was soon speculated that Mr. Bender was
actually named John Flickinger, and that Mrs. Bender had likely been married several times.
Worse, her husbands always seem to end up dead with wounds to the head. It was likely
that Kate and John Jr. were children of some of those men, and that their real names were Eliza
Griffith and John Gebhardt. Where did they all go?
We just don’t know. Their story remains one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in U.S history.
Maybe they were killed by an angry posse, but if they were, no bodies were ever recovered
and no one claimed that handsome reward. They might also have moved West, started another life,
and filled the ground with more bodies. Maybe their descendants are living next
door to you right now, just waiting to carry on their murderous legacy.
Now you need to see this, “The Most Shocking Unsolved Murders In The World.” Or, take a
look at this, “Doctor Intentionally Kills Over 200 Patients (Dr. Death)”