Hell's Half Acre: The Sinister Secrets of the Benders
The narrative centers on the Bender family, a seemingly ordinary group who operated a roadside inn in Labet County, Kansas, during the tumultuous period of the early 1870s. While the Benders presented themselves as a welcoming establishment for weary travelers, they concealed a heinous reality: they were, in fact, predators who exploited the lawless environment of the American frontier. The episode meticulously unravels the chilling tale of their gruesome crimes, which were not merely the actions of a singularly monstrous family, but rather a manifestation of the broader societal chaos and moral ambiguity that characterized post-Civil War Kansas. As we delve into the story, we will explore the motivations behind their brutal acts, the profile of their victims, and the eventual unraveling of their dark secret, culminating in the discovery of a horrific burial site that has since been infamous as Hell's Half Acre. Through this examination, we aim to illuminate the disturbing juxtaposition of civilization and savagery that defined the frontier experience, challenging the romanticized narratives often associated with westward expansion.
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Takeaways:
- The Bender family, presenting themselves as a humble grocery store family, concealed a horrifying trap that preyed on vulnerable travelers.
- Post-Civil War Kansas was a chaotic landscape where lawlessness thrived and provided fertile ground for the Bender's heinous crimes.
- The Benders exploited the spiritualist movement, using Kate's charm as a façade to lure victims into their deadly trap.
- The community's response to the Bender murders reflected the necessity of informal justice systems in a lawless frontier society.
- The gruesome murders perpetrated by the Benders reveal the dark side of westward expansion, contradicting the myth of the American frontier.
- Ultimately, the Benders disappeared without a trace, embodying the terrifying reality of anonymity on the violent frontier.
Transcript
Imagine you're alone.
Speaker A: It's late: Speaker A: United states territory since: Speaker A:But now, almost 70 years later, it was still a very underdeveloped part of the nation.
Speaker B:Although railroads were beginning to gain popularity as a form of transportation, most people who were traveling west continue to do so, using offshoots of the overland trail that went to California and to Utah and the New Mexico territories.
Speaker B:Travelers often went miles and miles without seeing any signs of humanity.
Speaker B:And many of the roads they moved along were barely more than gashes of mud and wheel ruts cutting west.
Speaker A:There is a crushing sense of emptiness to the plains.
Speaker A:The wind is a physical thing, a constant pressure that chills you to the bone.
Speaker A:Every rustle in the grass sounds like a threat.
Speaker A:Every shadow seems to move.
Speaker A:This isn't the romantic west of the dime novels.
Speaker A:This is a place of profound, terrifying isolation.
Speaker B:And now, over 150 miles from Independence, Missouri, the last large city in the Midwest, the lonely traveler likely felt some relief when they saw the single point of a yellow light, a candle in a window.
Speaker B:As they draw closer, a small, rough looking cabin seems to just materialize out of the gloom.
Speaker B:And a crude hand painted sign hangs over the door reading groceries.
Speaker B:It's a wayside inn.
Speaker B:It's civilization.
Speaker B:It seems like it's safety.
Speaker A:The traveler pulls their horse to a stop and they walk toward that warm glow of the candle, completely unaware that this is not a reprieve from the dangers of the Wild west, but rather, it's the very heart of it.
Speaker B:This place that we're talking about is Libet county, tucked into the far bottom right corner of Kansas, not far from the first part of the Santa Fe Trail.
Speaker B:Even today, Levette county is the collection of small towns and cities, along with a few ghost towns, too.
Speaker B: At this point, though, in: Speaker A:It was a chaotic, liminal space, a society not yet fully formed.
Speaker A: The Homestead act of: Speaker A:These were union veterans, immigrants, families displaced by the Civil War, all hoping to claim their 160 acres of promise.
Speaker A:But this was also the traditional land of the Osage people, who were being violently pushed out, creating a landscape of tension, transience and deep seated conflict.
Speaker A:It was a place where people appeared without a past and could vanish without a future.
Speaker B: Now, in: Speaker B:Four of them.
Speaker B:An old man, his wife, two adult children, built a small cabin and started a roadside grocery store in it.
Speaker B:And to their neighbors, they were quiet, strange, and ultimately unremarkable.
Speaker B:But they were running more than just a business.
Speaker B:They were running a trap.
Speaker A:And that's the core of our story today.
Speaker A:The Benders, they weren't just a random anomaly, a single monstrous family that appeared out of nowhere.
Speaker A:We're going to argue that they were a terrifying product of their environment, the lawlessness, isolated and vulnerable American frontier.
Speaker A:Their gruesome crimes were made possible by the unique conditions of the post Civil War Kansas, a place where the promise of a new life was shadowed by the constant threat of a violent death.
Speaker B:The story of the bloody Benders is a brutal counternarrative to the romanticized myth of westward expansion, revealing the predators who thrived in this vacuum of authority.
Speaker B:In today's episode, we're going to take you on a dark journey down a lonely trail.
Speaker B:We'll meet this strange family and follow the string of disappearances that grew longer and longer with each passing season.
Speaker B:And finally, we'll join the search party that uncovered a horrific burial in a Kansas apple orchard, a place that would forever be known as Hell's Half acre.
Speaker A:The story begins, as so many frontier stories do, with a claim on the land.
Speaker A: In the fall of: Speaker A:Filed a claim for 160 acres in Lebet County.
Speaker A: President Abraham Lincoln in: Speaker A:This opportunity was also available to women, formerly enslaved peoples and immigrants who had applied for citizenship.
Speaker B:Now, ultimately, the Homestead act was incredibly successful in the sense that it absolutely encouraged western migration.
Speaker B: decades, the Homestead act of: Speaker B:And those settlers often went on to contribute to the breadbasket nickname of the region by farming wheat and corn, or they established cattle farming and ranching businesses.
Speaker A:There, in the sparsely populated Labet county, The John Bender Sr. And Jr.
Speaker A:Built a small single room cabin, only about 16 by 24ft.
Speaker A:It was a crude structure, but strategically placed right near the trail that took people to the west.
Speaker A:After the cabin was built, the women arrived.
Speaker A:Elvira, the mother, and Kate, the Daughter.
Speaker B:They divided the small space with a simple canvas wagon cover, the kind that you'd see on covered wagons that traversed the Wild West.
Speaker B:And with the cabin divided into two, the front half becomes the public space, a small general store selling a few supplies like crackers and sardines, with a dining table where travelers could get a meal.
Speaker B:And it also served as a place for overnight guests to bunk.
Speaker B:Now, the back half, behind that curtain, was the family's private living quarters.
Speaker A:From the outside, it looked like any other struggling homestead trying to make a go of it.
Speaker A:But from the inside, it was a perfectly engineered killing floor.
Speaker A:Frankly, the physical layout of the cabin was a chillingly perfect metaphor for the duality of the frontier itself.
Speaker A:On the one side of the thin canvas sheet, you have a veneer of civilization.
Speaker A:You have the commerce, the hospitality, a shared meal.
Speaker A:On the other, hidden from view, you have the potential for absolute savagery.
Speaker B:Absolutely, Michael.
Speaker B:It reflects the central tension of the west that historians have grappled with for over a century.
Speaker B:It was a place where the promise of a new civilized society was in constant, direct contact with what Frederick Jackson Turner famously called the, quote, simplicity of primitive society.
Speaker B:The Bender's cabin wasn't just a building.
Speaker B:It was a microcosm of the entire frontier experience, where the line between safety and slaughter was as thin and flimsy as a piece of cloth.
Speaker A:And the family that lived behind that curtain was just as unsettling as their home.
Speaker A:Contemporary accounts from neighbors at the time and the few who survived an encounter with them paint a very disturbing picture.
Speaker A:John Bender Sr.
Speaker A:The patriarch, was around 60 years old, a hulking, imposing figure who spoke very little English.
Speaker A:And what he did speak was guttural and hard to understand.
Speaker B:One local publication later collected descriptions of John Bender Sr. And they are quite damning.
Speaker B:I'm reading from a compilation of accounts published after the crimes were discovered.
Speaker B:It says, quote, the old man was a repulsive, hideous brute without a redeeming trait.
Speaker B:Dirty, profane and ill tempered.
Speaker A:His wife, Elvira, or more commonly known as Ma Bender, was just as grim.
Speaker A:She was somewhere around 55 and so notoriously unfriendly that some neighbors simply called her a she devil.
Speaker B:Then There was John Jr.
Speaker B:He was about 25 years old.
Speaker B:He was described as handsome, but with a habit of laughing aimlessly at nothing in particular, which led many to dismiss him as a, quote, half wit.
Speaker A:And finally there was Kate, the 23 year old, attractive, intelligent and charming daughter.
Speaker A:She spoke English perfectly and was the public face of the family.
Speaker A:The one who greeted the travelers and put them at ease.
Speaker B:But even with Kate's charm, the family was a source of local gossip.
Speaker B:People were spread out in the community, but they still met up occasionally for social events or church meetings.
Speaker B:But the Bender family kept to themselves, and more than one neighbor noted that the relationship between John Jr. And Kate seemed unnervingly intimate, More like a husband and wife than siblings.
Speaker A:This strangeness, this sense that they weren't quite what they seemed, is key to the story.
Speaker A:The Benders were commonly believed to be German immigrants, Although that wasn't always completely sure.
Speaker A:But this mysteriousness of where they came from wasn't necessarily a red flag to others in the area.
Speaker A:Many people went west to start over, to create a new life for themselves where no one else really knew them.
Speaker B:And this is where the work of historian Suzanne Joneses and her book Hell's half acre is so illuminating.
Speaker B:She argues that the Bender family may not have been a biological family at all, but rather a constructed unit, you know, in a place where the ideal of a hard working homesteading family was the very bedrock of society.
Speaker B:This presented them with a perfect cover.
Speaker B:You know, presenting themselves as a family made them appear normal, trustworthy.
Speaker B:And that facade of family, Jonas suggests, was their most effective weapon.
Speaker A:A weapon that they would use to exploit the most vulnerable people traveling across the plains.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B:And the people they targeted were vulnerable for a reason.
Speaker B:Post civil war Kansas was a landscape of economic extremes.
Speaker B:You had profound desperation, but you also had people carrying their entire net worth in cash, looking for a fresh start.
Speaker B:A man traveling alone to buy a plot of land might have hundreds or even thousands of dollars on his person.
Speaker B:And in a place with no banks, no law enforcement to speak of, and miles of empty space between settlements, these travelers were the perfect prey.
Speaker A:The benders crimes, at their core, were a form of brutal, predatory capitalism Flourishing in an environment with absolutely no regulation or oversight.
Speaker A:They saw a market opportunity, and they exploited it with hammers and knives.
Speaker B:If the Bender family was a trap, Kate was the bait.
Speaker B:While the rest of her family remained withdrawn and stolen, and Kate cultivated a vibrant public Persona.
Speaker B:She billed herself as Professor Ms. Katie Bender, a healer, clairvoyant, and spiritualist medium.
Speaker B:She printed flyers and placed advertisements in local newspapers proclaiming her ability to cure diseases, communicate with the spirits of the dead, and hold seances.
Speaker A:She was also a radical thinker, or at least she played one.
Speaker A:She lectured on spiritualism and advocated for controversial ideas like free love.
Speaker A:Her personal philosophy was a chilling rejection of all conventional morality.
Speaker A:A manuscript of one of her lectures was later Found.
Speaker A:And it gives us a direct look into her mindset.
Speaker B:According to those who transcribed it, she said, quote, she proclaimed herself responsible to no one save herself.
Speaker B:She advocated free love and publicly declared that murder might be a dictation for good.
Speaker B:That in what the world might be deeming villainy, her soul might read bravery, nobility and humanity.
Speaker B:End quote.
Speaker A:What the world might deem villainy, her soul might read bravery.
Speaker A:That line is absolutely terrifying because it's not just a quirky belief.
Speaker A:It's a philosophical justification for murder.
Speaker A:It's the creation of a private moral universe where the Benders, and Kate specifically, are the sole arbiters of right and wrong.
Speaker A:This wasn't just for show.
Speaker A:This was likely the internal ideology that allowed them to do or feel like they could do whatever they want.
Speaker A:By framing their actions as a higher form of bravery or nobility, they could rationalize the systematic slaughter of innocent travelers.
Speaker A:It transformed them in their own minds from common thieves into something more.
Speaker A:Profits of this new morality, and this Persona worked.
Speaker B:Her reputation as a beautiful, charismatic psychic became the primary attraction for the Bender Inn.
Speaker B:Lonely men, in particular were drawn to her.
Speaker B:They would come seeking a hot meal, but also the thrill of a seance, a glimpse into the spirit world, or just a conversation with the captivating young woman of the prairie.
Speaker A:And that is why most accounts and analyses of the Bender murder suggest that Kate herself was the mastermind.
Speaker A:She was the only member of the family who was the least bit sociable or intelligent.
Speaker A:And she often seemed to be the ringleader of the whole operation, the one who seemed to be always calling the shots.
Speaker B:Kate would welcome them in, sit them at the dinner table and engage them with her dazzling conversation.
Speaker B:And she would always seat that chosen guest in the seat of honor, a bench with its back pressed firmly against the canvas curtain that divided the room.
Speaker A: derstand how community in the: Speaker A:Today, we might dismiss it as fringe occultism, but in the mid 19th century, it was a massive social and religious phenomenon.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B:The Civil War had left hundreds of thousands of families shattered by loss.
Speaker B:And images of the battlefield produced through the new medium of photography demonstrated that their loved ones had not only died in overwhelmingly huge numbers, but but horribly as well.
Speaker A:Spiritualism offered what mainstream religion at the time couldn't.
Speaker A:Not just faith in an afterlife, but the promise of tangible proof.
Speaker A:Through mediums, seances, and other forms of post death communication.
Speaker A:Grieving parents, grieving widows, orphans believed that they could receive one last special Message from their loved ones.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B:And one well known case is that of Mary Todd Lincoln, who, grieving the loss of her son, organized seances in the White House which were attended by her husband, President Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker A:So when Kate Bender offered spiritualist services to passerbys, she was tapping into a very real and widespread belief system.
Speaker B:She was, and she was exploiting it brilliantly.
Speaker B:Spiritualism was also one of the only public platforms where women could hold positions of authority.
Speaker B:In an era when women were largely barred from public speaking, a female medium supposedly channeling a male spirit, could speak with absolute authority in front of large audiences.
Speaker B:Progressive figures like Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president, used spiritualism to champion radical ideas about women's suffrage and equal rights.
Speaker B:And leading up to the Civil War, there are cases of female spiritualists using their skills as a form of abolitionism against slavery.
Speaker A:But Kate Bender represents the dark side of this movement.
Speaker A:She co opted the language of female empowerment and radical thought, but then twisted it for her own predatory ends.
Speaker A:She used the authority of the movement granting her not for liberation, but for luring victims to their deaths.
Speaker B:While the reality of survival often enforced a level of social equality between men and women, most people still held idealized gendered roles.
Speaker B:Pioneer women were supposed to act as a sort of civilizing force, the nurturer who brought domestic stability to the wilderness.
Speaker B:And, and so in that sense, Kate Bender represented a subversion of the traditional female role on the frontier.
Speaker A:And that's exactly it.
Speaker A:Kate adopted the public facing role of the healer and spiritual guide, the ultimate female nurturer, and turned it into a mask for a killer.
Speaker A:And she wasn't a passive accomplice in the family's crimes.
Speaker A:She turned out to be the architect of, of the entire deadly performance.
Speaker A: So between May of: Speaker A:A man named Jones was found in Drum Creek, his skull crushed and his throat cut.
Speaker A:Two more unidentified bodies turned up the following February with the same gruesome injuries.
Speaker A:But the victims were often drifters or travelers or just men passing through.
Speaker A:Men with no local ties whose absences wouldn't be immediately missed or noticed.
Speaker B: And then in the winter of: Speaker B:Now, Longcourt was a widower, recently having lost his wife after childbirth, and.
Speaker B:And he was taking his only remaining child back to live with family.
Speaker B:He was carrying his life savings of about $1,900.
Speaker B:But they were never seen again.
Speaker B:Their disappearance cast a pall over the region.
Speaker B:You know, these, these random male travelers might just disappear.
Speaker B:But a man and his baby girl don't just vanish.
Speaker B:Especially those who had an expected destination and waiting family waiting for them.
Speaker A:And this is where the Bender's fatal mistake comes into play.
Speaker A:Their entire operation depended on the anonymity of their victims.
Speaker A:Much like modern day serial killers you may be familiar with, the Bender family preyed on the transient, the disconnected, the people who could disappear without raising significant alarm.
Speaker A:But in this case, the Benders.
Speaker A:Their greed eventually made them careless and.
Speaker A:And they broke one of their only rules.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B: In the spring of: Speaker B:The searching friend was Dr. William York, a well known and well respected physician from Independence, Missouri.
Speaker A:Dr. York's search along the trail led him inevitably to the Bender Inn.
Speaker A:He stopped for a meal and asked the family if they had seen Loncor and his daughter.
Speaker A:The benders admitted that Dr. York himself had stayed with them, but claimed that he continued on his way.
Speaker B:But then Dr. York vanished too.
Speaker A:But unlike the others who had disappeared before him, Dr. York had powerful connections.
Speaker A:His brother was Colonel Alexander York, a former state senator and a man of considerable influence and determination.
Speaker A:And when Colonel York's brother didn't return, he went looking for him.
Speaker A:And he started his search at the last place Dr. York had been seen alive.
Speaker A:The Bender place.
Speaker B:The arrival of Colonel York changed everything.
Speaker B:In a society with weak formal institutions, Social capital and reputation are paramount.
Speaker B:Dr. York was not an anonymous drifter.
Speaker B:He was a pillar of his community.
Speaker B:By killing him, the Benders had for the first time attacked the established social fabric of the region.
Speaker B:This act mobilized the community's informal power structures.
Speaker B:The posse, the town meeting in a way none of the previous murders had.
Speaker B:They had finally chosen a victim who would be missed.
Speaker B:And more importantly, a victim who would be avenged.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:He questioned the family directly.
Speaker A:They were very evasive.
Speaker A:Kate offered to use her psychic powers to help find the missing doctor.
Speaker A:A brazen act of misdirection.
Speaker A:York left this and he left deeply suspicious.
Speaker B:A few days later, the colonel heard a story from a woman who had recently fled the Bender Inn in terror.
Speaker B:She claimed that Ma Bender had actually threatened her with Knives.
Speaker B:And based on this new insight of the family, the Colonel returned with a group of men as backup.
Speaker A:It was during the second confrontation between the Colonel and the Bender family that Ma Bender, Elvira, who normally pretended to speak no English, flew into a rage and revealed her fluency.
Speaker B:That certainly confirmed to Colonel York that the family was hiding something.
Speaker A:On April 3rd, the community organized a meeting at the local schoolhouse and to formalize a search of every homestead along the trail.
Speaker A:And in a moment of stunning audacity, Both John Bender Sr. And John Jr.
Speaker A:Attended that meeting.
Speaker A:They sat there, stone faced among the very men who were voting to search their property for the bodies of the people that they were accused of murdering.
Speaker B:That town meeting is a perfect illustration of what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called the frontier thesis.
Speaker B:Turner argued that the American frontier was the crucible of American democracy and character.
Speaker B:He wrote that as people moved west, the old institutions and social structures of Europe and the east coast were stripped away by the wilderness.
Speaker B:And in their place, pioneers were forced to create their own forms of social order, their own systems of justice to deal effectively with their problems.
Speaker A:And that's exactly what was happening in that schoolhouse.
Speaker A:There was no effective sheriff's department to call, no state police to investigate.
Speaker A: ready discussed, in the early: Speaker A:While Colonel York strongly suspected the Benders, there were also rumors that Native Americans were.
Speaker A:Were responsible for all of the disappearances.
Speaker B:And that was possible.
Speaker B:As more Americans and would be Americans pushed west, they often came into conflict with Native American tribes who resided there.
Speaker B: In the: Speaker B:And now, a few decades later, settlers were again moving into the area, pushing them farther west, creating a new layer of tension.
Speaker A:The Lebeck county community thus decided to form a posse, a vigilante committee, if you will, to impose order and investigate the true cause of all of the disappearances in the region.
Speaker A:This sort of ad hoc community form of justice was the law on the frontier.
Speaker B:And watching all of this take place, the Benders knew that their time was up.
Speaker B:A few days after that town meeting, a neighbor named Billy Toll was driving cattle past their property when he noticed something was wrong.
Speaker B:The inn was silent.
Speaker B:The farm animals were kind of just wandering about, unfed, distressed.
Speaker B:The Benders were gone.
Speaker A:The township trustee was alerted.
Speaker A:The party of several hundred volunteers was quickly formed, with Colonel York at the head when they investigated the Bender cabin, it was empty of food, clothing and most of their personal possessions.
Speaker A:But something else was there.
Speaker A:A terrible smell.
Speaker B:The searchers traced the odor to a trap door under one of the beds.
Speaker B:It had been nailed shut, so they pried it open with a crowbar.
Speaker B:They peered down into the darkness.
Speaker B:It was a stone lined cellar about six feet deep.
Speaker B:There were no bodies, but the floor and the packed earth beneath it were black with clotted, decaying blood.
Speaker B:And the stench was overpowering.
Speaker A:Colonel York and the other searchers would later surmise that when a guest stayed over at the Benders Inn, the family would give their guests the seat of honor at the table that was positioned over a trapdoor into the cellar.
Speaker A:When the victim's back was to the curtain, Kate would distract the guest While John Bender Sr. And Jr.
Speaker A:Came from behind the curtain and struck the guest on the right side of the skull with a hammer.
Speaker A:After that, one of the women would cut the victim's throat to ensure the death.
Speaker A:And then the body was dropped through the trap door.
Speaker A:Once in the cellar, the body would be stripped and later buried somewhere on the property.
Speaker B:So the search party moved outside to the soft tilled earth of the vegetable garden and the small apple orchard behind the cab.
Speaker B:They brought long iron rods to probe the ground and it didn't take long.
Speaker B:In a spot that looked slightly sunken, a man pushed his rod into the soil and sure enough, it struck something solid a few feet down.
Speaker A:When they started to dig, they found the body of Dr. William York, buried face down in a shallow grave, his skull smashed in and his throat cut.
Speaker A:Colonel York had found his brother and.
Speaker B:The horror had just begun.
Speaker B:The men kept probing, kept digging, and they found another body and another.
Speaker B:And they unearthed the remains of George Longcourt and in the same grave, the tiny body of his 18 month old daughter, Mary Ann.
Speaker A:One by one, the Bender's victims came out of the ground.
Speaker A:When the digging was finally done, at least 11 bodies had been recovered from the orchard and the property.
Speaker A:Well, all murdered in the same way.
Speaker A:A hammer blow to the head followed by a slash of the knife.
Speaker B:And the presumed execution method of the Benders was also supported by testimony from people who had stayed at the inn and managed to escape before they could be killed.
Speaker B:One William Pickering later said that when he had refused to sit near that wagon cloth because of the stains on it, Kate Bender had threatened him with a knife, whereupon he had fled the premises.
Speaker A:A Catholic priest, Father Paul Ponzigloni, claimed to have seen one of the Bender men concealing a large hammer.
Speaker A:That understandably made the priest feel uncomfortable.
Speaker A:And he quickly departed, making the excuse that he needed to tend to his horse.
Speaker B:Yeah, I bet that made him nervous.
Speaker B:And in yet a third instance, a woman named Mrs. Fitz claimed that while sitting at dinner with the Benders, she became uneasy.
Speaker B:She sensed a muffled movement behind the canvas.
Speaker B:Kate issued a command, but before anything could happen, the terrified Mrs. Fitz fled.
Speaker A:We should note, however, that all of these claims were only made after the Benders crimes were revealed, Making their accounts more than a little unreliable.
Speaker B:However, the legitimate evidence does suggest a mixture of reasons behind the murders.
Speaker B:Some of the victims were wealthy, and following their disappearances, the Bender family sold some of the victims goods, like their horses, saddles, clothes, any other possessions.
Speaker B:And their explanation at the time was that the items had come from people who paid with goods rather than cash.
Speaker B:Which wasn't hard to believe at that time.
Speaker B:But other victims found buried on the Bender's property were apparently quite poor.
Speaker B:And Colonel York and his posse could only conclude that they had killed them for the sheer thrill of it.
Speaker A:Regardless of what was true and what was not, the story was so shocking that it spread across the country like a prairie fire.
Speaker A:Newspapers from Kansas to New York ran breathless, sensationalized accounts.
Speaker B: ,: Speaker A:The press nicknamed the property Hell's half acre and the Devil's end.
Speaker A:And these names stuck.
Speaker A:And this is where we see the birth of a phenomenon that feels incredibly modern.
Speaker A:True crime tourism.
Speaker B:As mentioned before, it was around this time that railroads and trains began to pick up some literal steam across the nation.
Speaker B: ior to the benders Murders in: Speaker B:But even by that time, Kansas had quite a few established train lines.
Speaker A:Following the discovery at the Bender Inn, railroad companies began to run special excursion trains out to the site.
Speaker A:Thousands of people flocked to the remote cabin to gawk at the graves and the blood stained cellar.
Speaker A:They treated it like a tourist attraction, tearing the cabin apart piece by piece for gruesome souvenirs, even as bodies were still being pulled from the ground.
Speaker B:It's an astonishing reaction, A mixture of horror and morbid fascination.
Speaker A:It is.
Speaker A:And it reveals a deep seated anxiety about the frontier.
Speaker A:The myth of the west was one of pastoral virtue and boundless opportunity.
Speaker A:The Benders, though, presented a horrifying counter image.
Speaker A:A family of monsters hiding in plain sight, using the very symbols of the homesteading and hospitality as a lure.
Speaker B:So what happened to the Benders, Michael?
Speaker A:In the end, the Benders got away.
Speaker A:A massive manhunt was launched.
Speaker A:The governor of Kansas offered a $2,000 reward for their capture, which was a small fortune at the time, but it was never claimed.
Speaker A:Investigators found their abandoned wagon near the town of Thayer, Missouri, near the Arkansas border.
Speaker A:The family had apparently bought train tickets and simply vanished into the vastness of the country.
Speaker B:And their escape is a crucial part of their legend.
Speaker B:Over the years, stories and theories multiplied.
Speaker B:Some claimed a secret vigilante posse caught the family in Oklahoma and delivered their own brutal form of justice, lynching them and throwing their bodies in the Verdigris River.
Speaker B: o and Arizona until the early: Speaker B:It's thought that perhaps the Benders changed their names and may have even continued their crimes, but no theory has ever been proven.
Speaker A:They just simply disappeared.
Speaker B:And that's the so what of this entire story.
Speaker B:The Benders became a foundational myth of American true crime because they represent the dark shadow of manifest destiny.
Speaker B:The romantic vision of the west was one of heroic pioneers taming a wilderness and bringing with them democracy and American values.
Speaker A:The Benders offered a terrifying alternative.
Speaker A:A wilderness that could produce its own unique monsters.
Speaker A:Predators who use the tools of civilization, the home, a store, a welcoming smile to practice utter savagery.
Speaker A:Their story is a brutal collective to the sanitized Wild west of popular culture.
Speaker A:It reminds us that the frontier, as many historians now argue, was not just a place of opportunity and heroism, but also one of profound violence, terror and moral ambiguity.
Speaker B:The final haunting question is how they.
Speaker A:Could just vanish, because the very environment that created them was also the perfect place to disappear.
Speaker A:The vast, anonymous and lawless expanse of the American frontier that allowed them to kill with impunity also provided them with the perfect escape.
Speaker A:In the end, they simply dissolved back into the wilderness that had spawned them.
Speaker A:As the historian David Derry so perfectly put it, the end of the Benders is not known.
Speaker A:The earth seemed to swallow them as it had their victims.
Speaker B:They left nothing but their dead in a ghost story that to this day continues to haunt the American prairie.
Speaker A:Thanks for listening to history's greatest crimes.
Speaker A:I'm Michael.
Speaker B:And I'm Alaina.
Speaker A:And until next time, stay curious.
Speaker B:Sa.
