FREE ARTICLE: Hell Has Always Been Other People
Even in rural old-timey Kansas
Hoping this is going to be the first in some American local history pieces. Have now been to 27 states and love the way they love their local history, even when it is completely batsh*t. Chasing cowboys and dinosaurs are two of my favourite things. And hiking in national parks. In the words of a friend “Oh Lord what are you doing in New Mexico, do they have the world’s biggest ball of yarn?” It was actually the largest pistachio in the world. Rude.
First stop: KANSAS
I’ve been reading a book called Hell’s Half Acre. It’s history meets true crime, because it covers the infamous Bender family, a murderous band of lunatics of supposedly German origin who terrorised the brutal, actual Wild West, not the Kevin Costner version, for a spell in the 1870s. One thing that struck me about it was that for all we think the world is going to hell on our watch, with our social media obsessions and our morbid need to get attention and photograph everything and parroting fake news, this is nothing new. The only thing that has changed is the speed at which peoples’ nonsense is spread.
This map shows the region in 1869. If you could handle it, Kansas promised land and a new start, but frontier life was grim. The Benders had a dirty little cabin on the road west, in the southeastern corner of Kansas. They provided accommodation and supplies for people passing back and forth on the Osage Mission Trail. If you’re confused because Killers of the Flower Moon is about the Osage and set in Oklahoma, you can see OK doesn’t yet exist, it’s still called “Indian Territory.” That’s where the oil was discovered in 1897, but the Osage were shunted down there from Kansas by bewigged douchebags.
Very much not Little House on the Prairie
The Benders comprised Ma and Pa, both born in Germany, then siblings John and Kate. Only they might not have been German in origin at all, and John and Kate might not have been brother and sister. They might have been together. Nobody really knows what they all were to each other, or where they came from, but they were known as a family unit and even before they found out they were serial killers, people didn’t really like them. Ma and Pa were mean and didn’t really speak English, John had a weird laugh and babbled and people thought he was “simple,” and Kate went all round the region aggressively offering services as a medium and advocating free love. Basically all four of them freaked people out.
In the early 1870s, men started vanishing on the Osage trail. Needless to say their relatives wanted to find them. One of them, William York, came from an influential family and was a local doctor, and his brothers were particularly determined to find out what had become of him.
By spring 1873 there were search parties out, ready to meticulously comb the area. One day, a local snooping about at the Bender cabin found that the family had gone. They had been spooked and done a runner, towards Indian Territory and then Texas, taking only what they could carry and leaving their livestock to starve. The place was empty, but the smell suggested why the Benders might have fled.
On 6th May volunteers assembled at the family cabin to get to work.
There were enough Civil War veterans on hand to know what the smell of rotting flesh smelled like.
They shifted the cabin by rolling it on logs and upturned the cellar. It stank, but no bodies. Then, just as the sun was setting, one of William York’s brothers made out an unusual looking mound in the adjoining, sad looking orchard. When they stabbed the ground with a ramrod, the smell got a lot worse.
The grave of William York with his coffin alongside. (Murderpedia)
Needless to say when you live in the middle of nowhere and spend your days working your fingers to the bone, this is all going to be of interest. Which is where it starts getting really distasteful.
People are yuck
Before midday on 6th search parties coming in already reported that a stream of people were heading towards the Bender cabin. Not just the odd nosey local, but entire families arrived. This was a day out. Actually, as the afternoon wore on and before they had unearthed Dr. York, the crowd got irritable because so far there was a distinct lack of entertainment. Leroy Dick, the Township Trustee who was in charge of all this, ended up shouting at them because they were drifting into the cabin and poking about. Most of them had left again by the time William York was found, but those that remained were rightly horrified and furious that this had happened on their doorstep.
This is one of the images taken by the first photographer on the scene, George Gamble raced to get there on 6th May in the hope of making some money. That’s the Bender cabin, with nosey spectators hanging round to see what happened when they began digging. The little girl in the doorway has already got her instagram pose down in 1873.
Leroy Dick had already located three hammers in the cabin and put them safely away. When he showed them to the doctor on hand, they got a ruler out and did some CSI stuff with the remains of William York, he confirmed they had their murder weapons.
The selection of hammers. The theory is that whilst customers were entertained, Pa Bender loitered on the other side of a canvas screen that divided the family’s quarters from their shop/inn. He’d attack them from behind with said hammers, then they slit their throats and dumped them in the cellar whilst they bled out, before digging a basic grave and disposing of the bodies. (Murderpedia)
The MO matched another man found dead nearby in 1871. Nobody thought this was the end of it. By now, Dr. York’s other brother, the important one, had arrived and could make out at least five more mounds of disturbed earth. They were going to have to do it all again tomorrow. Repeatedly.
The following day, by the time Leroy Dick returned to the site, it was mayhem. This latching on to a disaster and seeing it as a source of great entertainment for the whole family was not a new thing. Some eager beavers had even set up campsites because they didn’t want to miss anything. Whilst the men working the site tried to build a perimeter around it to keep them out of the way, they gossiped, and children had to be chased away from the emerging graves. What’s more, they robbed the place blind. Everything from inside the cabin vanished, then they began stripping the squalid homestead itself, the crops, saplings on the land, literally anything that would prove they had been there. Leroy Dick had to walk about the Bender place all day carrying the three hammers on his person, because he knew that the second he put them down, they would disappear.
They found the men they were looking for, and more. Turns out the Benders had been on a killing spree. One of the men was identified thanks to the fact that he had his name and date of birth tattooed on him. He’d done it during the Civil War in case he was killed, so that he wouldn’t be just another body if he died.
Robbery was the motive. Some of the victims had been carrying nothing of value at all, but other Bender customers were people relocating and carrying their wealth with them, or moving about on business. Added to that, they could sell on the wagons and horses that all of these people left behind via criminal associates and cash in even more.
All of that was grim enough, but the bit that made me queasy was the fact that one of these men was a widower heading back to Iowa to his extended family. With him was his toddler Mary Ann. The Benders didn’t kill her, not in any humane way. When they dumped her father in a grave on their land having caved his skull in and slit his throat, in the coldest of winters, it looks like they chucked her in after him and buried her alive.
A photograph taken on 9th May showing the full extent of what was recovered by Leroy Dick and his band of volunteers. Another photographer arrived on the site on 7th May, this one intending to fashion stereoscope souvenirs out of the murder scene for those wanting a memento. For those that didn’t own a viewer to look at the enhanced images, they could pay to look at them at his studio. (Murderpedia)
Othering
More and more bodies were found. When they lifted little Mary Ann Longcor from her shared grave, there was sobbing in the crowd. These people were not entirely heartless. They were clearly disturbed by events, but they were equal parts excited to be part of it.
Their number was growing all the time, even though it began to rain, flooding the open graves. People were coming now from further afield and the numbers were becoming impossible to manage. Some of them used the weather as an excuse to get inside the cabin “for shelter” so that they might look for souvenirs. Local newspapers did not help, all but promising that if they got there in time they too might see bodies unearthed. As fast as they printed their editions, they ran out and had to print more.
That night there were families camping all over the place nearby to see what happened next. This unwieldy crowd was getting more and more angry, too.
Then people started losing their sh*t. The Benders were long gone, so distant associates (it’s fair to say they didn’t have any good friends) felt suspicious glances cast their way. One man that had been nice to them when they arrived in the area was also German. Gossip had erroneously decided that he was on excellent terms with the family, almost one of them. He had stayed away, wondering if this might be the case, but now he ventured across from his land to see that was happening. Spurred on by the men (now understandably drunk) who had dug the site, he was basically lynched. He was pulled from his horse and forcibly taken inside the cabin. This mob was comprised of his friends and neighbours. Once inside the Bender place, he had a noose slung around his neck, and said mob hoisted him kicking and screaming into the air. When he had almost suffocated they dropped him and demanded he confess. But he had nothing to confess. They tried again. Nothing. The third time, they let him hang, or so they thought. After they’d given him up for dead and lost interested he found a second wind and managed to run away.
He was not the only local accused of being complicit. A swathe of arrests took place. A travelling preacher was thrown into jail because one of the York brothers didn’t like the look of him. Whilst ridiculously locking up a couple nearby, one of whom confessed to nothing more than attending a seance in Kate Bender’s presence, the rest of the township at least felt bad enough to look after their kids until it was all cleared up. Eventually, public opinion turned against the idea of locking people up with impunity and they were all let go.
Yuckness on a national level
Reporters arrived from both east and west coasts, and everywhere in between. Local newspapers in the nineteenth century were like Twitter is now. There was no fact checking going on, they didn’t have copyright. Not that they acknowledged, anyway. They saw the most lurid version of a story, lifted it, shared it around and added more embellishments as if it was fact. Half the time, they then printed the complete opposite, but who cared at that point? That was two papers sold and everyone had moved on to the next story. People didn’t have Netflix. Gruesome, true crime was big time entertainment, even fifteen years before Jack the Ripper became the focus of everyone’s attention, and newspapers were in the business of making money.
Claims were outlandish. One victim count claimed fifty people done to death by the Benders, another claimed that this happened at a luxury establishment on the trail. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that their place was a one room dump. Kate was a monster, of course, but as an attractive woman who liked to talk to the dead (or pretend to) and practiced free love, was perfect for casting as a femme fatale. She was attempting to be a witch, she was the one that slit the victims’ throats with her weird feminine bloodlust. She might even have been a she-devil.
By 11th May, the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad was actually laying on special trains that dumped passengers out two miles east of the cabin so that they might see the crime scene for themselves. Locals made a killing of their own charging for lifts to the homestead. Trainloads came in from Independence and from Coffeyville. Leroy Dick even wandered around proudly displaying the hammers to visitors. The authorities let him hang on to them for now if he promised to look after them. He claimed he did his show and tell thing a respectable distance from the actual graves.
That Sunday, nearly 700 people turned out to ride one of these trains to the trail. More were coming in via carriages and wagons from all over the region. When even more arrived the next day, genuine relics were long gone, so people were selling fake souvenirs instead. The gruesome discovery at the Bender homestead caused an economic boom on this part of the Osage Mission Trail.
And beyond.
At least the photographers went down there and did some work to earn their money. People jumped on the bandwagon from miles away without lifting a finger and tried to exploit the gory tragedy for their own gain.
A Blacksmith changed his advert in one Kansas newspaper so that the headline read BENDERS FOUND, to get attention. One shop in Topeka claimed IT IS HARD TO FIND THE BENDERS, and then proclaimed that it was much easier to find all manner of fruit jars at their establishment. As far away as Pennsylvania, people tried to cash in with advertisements using the Benders as a sales pitch to grab people’s attention.
Even Laura Ingalls Wilder was at it. For reference, this is the pigtailed kid with the buck teeth on Little House on the Prairie. The programme was based on her family shuffling about the old west. Spoiler alert, I don’t think they stayed more than five minutes in Walnut Grove. Into the 20th Century she was trying to claim a link to the Bender case. Her family did live nearby at one point, and she claimed that she remembered it all, that she’d been to the cabin, and that her dad was involved in searching for them, but she was only four when they left the area. So before cognitive memory kicked in. Also, they left two years before any of this happened. She didn’t foresee the internet or ancestry.com.
Don’t trust her. She lies.
The morbid fascination continues to this day. In 2021 a bloke called Bob bought the land where the cabin is thought to have been. According to the Kansas Reflector he’s actually excited that he might own the spot where these people were slaughtered. It even sounds like he might be hoping there are more bodies. “If we could find some stuff,” he apparently told the Reflector, “some bones or maybe teeth, that would allow for DNA matching with living relatives.” CSI Bob, new spin-off coming soon. No more television police procedurals for Bob.
In all, eight bodies were found, with three more attributed to the Benders from the surrounding area. Could there have been more? Absolutely. Fingers crossed for Bob, I guess. Were people any classier in the 1870s than they are now when they see a car accident and get their phone out to take a picture? Nope. Sadly not. Did they try and attach themselves to other people’s misery for their own gain? Yep. We didn’t invent the virtue signalling either. And as for the internet ruining the world with fake news, nope, we’ve been at that for centuries too, we can just spread it around quicker now.
The book I read was Hell’s Half Acre by Susan Jonusas. It’s a bargain on Kindle. Come back soon as she’s sent me down a rabbit hole about how nuts Kansas was before the Civil War. And who doesn’t want to read a history article where I can use the word “bushwhacking” with impunity. It means something else where I’m from. Then the next state on my travels will be Montana. Beth Dutton is my spirit animal.
If you are going to Montana let me know. I might be able to arrange a ride in a Working WW1 tank for you.
So interesting