After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - American Serial Killer Family: Bloody Benders

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

When a series of mysterious disappearances and gruesome murders happened on the American Frontier in the 19th century, fingers started to point in the direction of not one murderer…but a family of killers. As the case unraveled, their grisly crimes cemented their place in history and earned their nickname as the 'Bloody Benders'.Joining Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney this episode is Susan Jonusas, historian and author of 'Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, A Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier'.This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy and produced by Freddy Chick. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

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It's December 1872 and we join a blacksmith, Mr. George Longcore, as he rides north across the western frontier of the United States, drawn in a wagon by a team of horses. He's cold. The temperature has been stubbornly icy since he set out from his homestead, seven miles north of Independence, Kansas. Beside him, nestled deep in a fur-lined wicker basket, his 18-month-old baby sniffles in her sleep. He mutters to himself, wondering for the hundredth time if this is the right thing to do. He lambasts himself for leaving the journey so late in the season. It's freezing now, but still this is the best thing for little Mary Anne. She'll thrive with her grandparents in Iowa. There she'll have other children to grow with,

and a mother's love, something he cannot offer her. He longs for the warmth of a fire, some hot food perhaps, and a break from the open road, and either side of it the shadows that fall away to the vast expanse of the American Midwest. He must remain alert, for there are all kinds of dangers lurking on these frontier trails. He vows that the next time he sees an opportunity for rest, he will take it. An inn perhaps. Or a friendly roadside cabin. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony.

And I'm Maddie. And today we are journeying into the late 19th century and the American frontier to examine the dark case of a serial killing family who were never brought to justice. Joining us, we have the author of Hell's Half Acre, the untold story of the Benders, a serial killer family on the American frontier, Susan Jonassus. But before we get started, I should warn you this story contains details of murder and infanticide Susan thank you for joining us i'm so. Interested to hear more details about this because it's one of the things that comes up. More and more in our dms and on emails that what about the bloody benders what about the bloody benders and i have to admit i didn't know. What about the bloody benders? And I have to admit, I didn't know much about this at all. So it's incredible to have you on telling us about it. So before we get started, I was just wondering, because one of the fascinating things about this for me is the place.

So could you, for listeners who don't necessarily know, and me too, because I don't, could you give us a picture of where we were set during this story about what's to unfold? Because I feel like that sense of frontier is really key to this history, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the setting of this particular case was something that really drew me to it as well. I think it's quite an alien landscape for us coming from the UK. And when I was over there, I was like, gosh, it's just so, so vast. And that obviously plays a big role

in kind of what unfolds in the story. So these murders, they happen in Southeast Kansas in 1870. And this is a time where kind of the nation's obviously still really in the aftermath of the Civil War. There's a lot of transition, there's a lot of people moving around. You've got displacement of indigenous people, you've got freed people settling in lots of places in the Midwest and stuff like that. And then you've got people who are both from the East Coast and from Europe coming into these spaces to take advantage of the Homestead Act,

where they can pay an $18 claimant fee for 160 acres of land. And if in five years they can prove that they have used the land well, they then get to keep it. So in this space, you have young men, you have civil war veterans, you have big families, small families, you have people who were working on the railroads, and you have kind of big towns, small towns, towns that are there for like a couple of months, and then they'll move the entire town, you know, a hundred miles south to accommodate the railroad. And on top of all of that,

you've kind of just got the vastness of the prairie in this particular state in Kansas, you've got Indian territory just beneath where there's all this forest. And then you've got, you know, human dangers, but also very much weather dangers. So you've got thunderstorms, you've got ice, you've got blistering heat, you've got prairie fire. So the land itself really becomes kind of an extra character in this narrative. You've set such a compelling scene there, Susan, but let's talk a little bit more about the human threat in this landscape. Am I right in thinking that by the 1870s, people who are travelling along

the Ossage Trail, along this landscape, looking for somewhere to settle, they're already avoiding some of the main routes through it, aren't they? And there are stories of disappearances of travellers looking for home. Absolutely. So you've got a main town called Fort Scott, which has been there a while, it's very much established, it's kind of the centre of business in the region. And then you've got this, the Osage Trail, which takes you from Fort Scott to Independence, which is kind of the next growing town. You've got a town slightly to the north called La Dore, which is a railroad town and has this real reputation as basically being like rough and tumble, lawless. It's full of bandits who come in from the open frontier and attack and rob

towns people. And lots of people do go missing in this area at this time and there's a newspaper later that will say that attributing them to the benders is quite a charitable way of getting rid of them as well as the you know kind of the unseen threat that they don't know about. They're every day they're dealing with highway robbers, they're dealing with each other, people are killing each other in land disputes, people are, you know, just getting into bar fights, all those kind of classic Wild West tropes. So we heard at the beginning in the opening narrative about George and his little baby Mary Anne, and they go missing, as I'm sure listeners have already guessed, whilst traveling west in early, I think it's late

1872 into early 73 in that cold winter. Is that the first time that people start to get suspicious of these disappearances? So prior to that, there have been some bodies which have turned up on the open prairie and some boys, they find the body of a man called William Jones in a creek in that area. And this kind of disturbs the local community because he's got very distinctive wounds. So he's been bludgeoned and has had his throat cut and he's found wearing a lot of clothes, but there's no valuables on him. And in 1871, the husband of a, well, a railroad worker goes missing while his wife is in New York and his name's James Ferrick. And she's really concerned about him.

But, you know, when she tries to look for him, people in that area are kind of like, oh, well, people disappear all the time. But it is around this kind of the winter of 1872 where a lot of people go missing, a very quick succession, and people in the area are starting to be like, well, you know, this isn't great, maybe something's going on. But there are also people who don't have very long standing ties in the community. So there is still that thing of like, oh, well, maybe they've just decided to go somewhere else.

So there is still that thing of like, oh, well, maybe they've just decided to go somewhere else. What is it then, Susan, about George and Mary specifically that draws a little bit of different attention? What are the connections that they have, perhaps? Or is it a case that there's a baby involved? What is it about those two people in particular that causes a little bit of attention to get more deliberately focused on these disappearances? So George and Mary are actually neighbours to a man and his family called Dr William York and he lives with his wife Mary York and they're next door and they've kind of had a reasonable amount of interactions together, these two families.

And William York is actually the man who sells George Longhurst the wagon that he's traveling in. And William York knows that George is taking Mary Anne and they're going to Iowa and he's expecting to hear from Mary Anne's grandparents that they've arrived. And travel in this time, it takes a long time, it's very dependent, you know, lots could go wrong, things can take much longer than you would expect. But then by spring, William still hasn't heard that they've arrived and he eventually receives a letter from Marianne's grandparents saying, well they never got here and they definitely should be here now. And so it's that kind of like community connection that then prompts William York to be like, well, I know this man, I know what he's like. I know what he wanted for his little girl. If he's not there, something's gone wrong.

It's remarkable as well that it's almost by chance that they are able to communicate in that way. And obviously, as you say, so many people who are killed in this landscape or who meet their deaths in mysterious ways don't have those connections. And so there is no follow-up. There are no questions asked and they're not investigated in the same way. So how is it that the name of the Benders family becomes embroiled in this case? Who is it who sort of casts the first aspersion, the first stone in their direction? Well, the Benders as a group are quite interesting in this community because

they've kind of been there from, there's lots of towns growing in this area and the Benders have been there since 1870. So they're comprised of an older couple in their sort of 50s, 60s, who we only really know as Ma and Pa. And then we've got this younger pair, I will say, because we're not exactly sure if they were married or siblings or what was going on. But they're called Kate and John. And Kate, she's about 24. And the younger couple have made a big effort to kind of ingratiate themselves in the community. And Kate is very well known in the area. And she's kind of a controversial figure. She's

a big into spiritualism. She keeps offering to like, cure townspeople using essentially like magnetic healing, psychic powers. Some people really like her. Some people find her to be a bit of a nightmare. But the whole family are known for running this cabin on the trail where you it's like a single room divided by a curtain and they're one of the few places that you can stop on this particular route. And nobody at any point really suspects the benders of being anything other than a bit stupid, essentially. They're kind of viewed as maybe a bit simple. Their beliefs are a bit strange. Kate's popular with men, but less popular with women, so there's a lot of just friction in the community. They're never raised as suspects,

I think purely because it just didn't occur to the community that the call was kind of coming from inside the house. These are people who are used to being attacked by people they have no connection with on the open road. The idea that a group within the community would be, you know, systematically killing people on the side of the road in a house is just not anything that would have occurred to them. And William, after he goes missing, his brother, while they're looking for him,

he actually stops at the bender cabin because that's kind of one of the few places William would have stopped in that area and he has a conversation with them and he comes away and he says basically these people are too stupid to have committed a crime like this and then that evening the benders are like, oh actually maybe it is getting a bit hot. You know, we've had people in the cabin now and they flee, but it takes a whole month for people to notice that they've gone and then even when they've gone,

the community think, oh well, they must have fallen victim to these criminals as well. It takes such a long time for the penny to kind of drop. Like I said a minute ago, I just don't think it would ever have occurred to them that like people would have killed people they knew essentially. Hey folks, since you're a fan of history, you clearly want to understand how we've ended up with the world that we have. Well, I'd like to tell you about my show. It's called Dan Snow's History Hit.

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Try Sperry and get 15% off at Sperry.ca with code podcast 15. Sperry, trust nature. So there's this search that's instigated. And as you say, there's William York, the just to recap, he's the neighbour of the man and the little baby who go missing at the beginning of this story, and he goes to the cabin and he disappears. And then his brother is sent out to search for him as well, and comes across the family and they come across to this brother as being not necessarily capable of committing these crimes. So we have this scene sort of set and then the family, the Benders, disappear,

don't they? They disappear from the house and the cabin that they're living in by the road and the search party that then comes across the empty house and is drawn to this strange scene discovers something pretty gruesome. The Bender's cabin is less than 10 feet from the trail with a stable and a vegetable garden off to one side nearby to which apple trees threaten plump spring blossoms. The house itself is one story tall, unremarkable though pretty enough, except for the strange smell that surrounds it. It catches in the noses of the 75-man search party that draws near now. Veterans of the civil war, they recognise the smell of death. They split off, some to the stable where inside, unfed animals bray, miserable and starving in

their stalls. The sound has already alerted neighbours to the apparent, and somewhat sudden, disappearance of the family who farm this land. The rest of the party enter the single room of the cabin. As they push back the door, they're greeted with a sparse and grimy scene. There are few furnishings, though what's left is covered in a thick layer of dirt. The smell is stronger in here, almost overwhelming, and the men glance at each other. Could this be the place they've been looking for? And what exactly might they be about to discover?

This is kind of what I've been waiting for. As soon as Susan mentioned the cabin, it feels like a location that really draws you in. I don't know, maybe that's just me, maybe that's just the kind of macabre sensibility that I have around these things. But in that landscape, this cabin, only because we know what we know now, but it feels like a beacon for where this story might unfold. And now the narrative is taking us there and it's taking us inside this cabin. And it's really getting a sense of what it was like in there, what it smelled like in there. But once they're inside, once this search party were inside, I believe, Susan, that the main

area of concentration in great after dark tradition is a trap door. Yeah. So the cabin, like you said, is such an evocative image, I think. And so many people in this community had actually been in that cabin at various points as well. And I think that's really interesting, this idea that they were then coming into it and because everybody thought the vendors were, you know, a bit unhygienic anyway, but then coming into this space and being like, oh my gosh, like, what is that on the canvas petition between the spaces, you know, like, like what is that on the canvas petition between the spaces, you know, like kind of what's going on here. And yeah, so one of the

things they find, they're kind of trying to work out the exact source of this smell, and they find a trap door and they open the trap door and beneath it is a cellar and one of the men goes down and the smell is terrible and it's like it's you know it's rained for weeks so the ground is really waterlogged so you've got that on top of this kind of fetid decomposition smell and he's down there and he there are these big stone slabs that the benders have put to form the base of the cellar and he puts his finger down in the gap and brings it up and it just you know it's not quite just mud and they're like well we can't excavate this properly with the cabin on top so then they build this amazing contraption where they kind of lift the whole

cabin off the ground and move it slightly away so that the cellar itself is just exposed to the air, which obviously helps with the smell as well. And then a bunch of men get down there and they're all, you know, they're covering their faces because the smell's so bad and they pull up the slabs and they're digging beneath the slabs and the smell's still there but they can't find it, you know, they don't come across any remains or anything like that and they basically then become aware that like, well, probably now there are remains on the property, we just have to try and find them and that search for the exact location of them then kind of takes over the rest of the day but they ultimately come to this conclusion that whatever was going on, there was excessive violence

against other people taking place beneath this cabin. So what you're saying, Susan, is that these attacks on people have happened potentially in the cellar, but the bodies themselves aren't in there. So where are they? Where do they find the bodies? Because surely they are, as you say, on the property they are nearby. Yeah, so I think and this I think this particular element of this case is why it has endured so much in American folklore. So basically, you know, the search party are there, it's reaching the end of the day, they're kind of looking at what they've got around them, the garden, the apple orchard, all of this kind of stuff. And then one of the men is looking at the orchard, and he

notices that essentially the soil is laying in a way that it wouldn't be naturally just with the trees and so they go over and they take a ramrod out of a rifle and they kind of lower the rod into the ground and they pull it up and as soon as it comes out, out comes the smell of decomposition and they're like, right, okay. And then actually the first body that they dig up from this apple orchard is William York and his younger brother Ed is on scene as well as the private detective they've hired to kind of investigate. And he's like, oh, that's William. And then they look at the rest of the orchard, and they notice that there

are a lot more kind of divots in the ground. There's something so insidious about these bodies being placed into the orchard, and presumably, you know, they're feeding the trees and the fruit that maybe this family has been giving out to people and selling or at least consuming themselves, if not using that to make potions and treatments, you know, you say that they're sort of treating the local community to some medical degree. What about the little baby Mary Anne, who we heard about at the start, is she amongst the dead there?

They gradually start digging up all these bodies. And the whole process of this immediately becomes hampered by the fact that word gets out to the local community and hundreds of people start coming in on horses, on wagons, on foot because you know this is like the biggest thing that's happened in this area since the war and so while they're excavating these bodies they're also dealing with photographers and journalists and there are these amazing pictures taken of the crime scene where you've got like children in little bonnets kind of standing outside the

cabin and then people standing with coffins in the background but during one of these excavations they're digging in the ground and they find George Lonker in his grave and then they pull him out and Marianne is in there as well. And this is kind of, the rest of the victims are all kind of young men. And it's obviously like hugely distressing for the community, but this specific murder catapults these crimes into a national and international story because her body is in the grave

and she's still wearing her mittens and it's not entirely clear, you know, whether she was murdered before she was is in the grave and she's still wearing her mittens and it's not entirely clear, you know, whether she was murdered before she was put in the grave or whether she was just put in there with her dad and then buried. And so that element is obviously hugely distressing and very emotional for everybody on scene and ultimately is what kind of whips the crowd there into such a frenzy that they try and hang another member of the community who they assume was complicit in the crimes because he was also German and he's rescued by a member of local law enforcement. But the emotional intensity

of that whole kind of 48 hours I think really culminates in that specific event. And it's a really interesting moment in terms of the technology that is available to people who are documenting the crime scene and investigating you. You speak about there, there being a private detective involved in this case, there's a contraption built to remove the cabin, these are real serious technological advancements. And then of course, you've got the photographs of the crime scene, and then also the sort of the macabre social aspect as well going on. Do you see this crime, this particular case is sitting within a development of true crime narrative in America? How does it fit into other cases at the time and that sort of development of documentation? I think that's a really good question. because I was thinking about this actually before recording and how this is kind

of the last, like really rural crime, before we start hitting very famous serial killers like H.H. Holmes and Belle Guinness, and that kind of like, much more high profile serial killer that people in the UK have also heard of. As I'm sure you guys know, doing this podcast, True Crime has been just such a focal point of interest for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. But I think this specific crime scene, the story around it becomes so big that the local train company put on special trains to take you out to the cabin that stop halfway along their

normal route so you can get off and then people pay to get in wagons to go and see the scene. And then there are people there selling postcards of the crime scenes taken the day before. Obviously we're really missing, we don't have photos of the benders themselves or anything like that. We only have photos of kind of what they left behind. And I think because we have photos like that, it really just like, and it sounds like a funny thing to say, but it really cemented them as like real in the public imagination. You know, they didn't disappear into folklore,

which you kind of see with earlier crimes. Cause there are certainly crimes kind of similar to this that happened earlier on in the frontier, but we don't really have the tangible evidence that we have with this case. Also, I mean this particular part of Kansas was famous for its newspapers during this period. Kind of every town had a newspaper, they were a big part of the community and so you get all these different newspapers bickering with each other about why the crimes happened and who was actually involved. But it means that we have a very like solid record of what was unfolding literally day by day, hour by hour. One of the things that's striking me here, Susan, and you alluded to it already in this talk of frenzy around the crime

scene where the local people have come in and there's anger and outrage, understandably. So what has happened to the benders? I would imagine people are now going to want to try and find these people to try and get to grips with what has happened here and enact some form of justice. Is there any, I presume, there's some kind of a search mounted? Yeah, so interestingly, in the direct aftermath of the crimes, people are still obviously they have no real idea where the benders went, but the focus of Alexander York and law enforcement actually turns back to that

town I mentioned earlier, Le Dau, and they arrest basically everybody in that town connected to a man called James Roach, who's a local salon owner. And there's no evidence for this arrest other than the fact that this town and this man have kind of a dodgy reputation. And at the same time, these arrests are happening, a pair of men who ultimately end up joining up with the benders are busy escaping Kansas and the benders themselves are on their way out of Kansas.

And so this kind of mass arrest of these people with nothing to do with the case actually results in this lag between discovering the crimes and going after the benders themselves. The benders have this very distinctive piece of luggage like a trunk but it's covered in dog hide so it's very you know like rough and furry and just not something that everybody had. And they're able to track down the route the benders took out of Kansas on the train by asking people if they had interacted with or seen this particular trunk, which I think is a fascinating detail. But it does take a while for the kind of outrage to manifest

into an actual practical search. And there's a huge reward that's offered to find the Benders isn't there? Is that unusual for the time? It seems like a lot of money. Yeah, so the reward for the Benders is $2,000, which I think today is something like £45,000, something like that. It's like a big amount of money. And it's the highest that the governor of Kansas could legally offer. And actually before William York had been found at the cabin, the community drew up a big petition asking the governor for help,

searching for these missing people. And he had then offered a reward of $500 for information relating to the disappearance of William York. And then obviously when they decide the family are guilty, it's $500 a head. So cumulatively, it's $2,000. And the reward itself is interesting, that document, because it's basically the best description we have of the family physically, whereas the paper, you know, can't decide whether Kate was attractive or not,

or how old anybody was or anything like that. The actual essentially wanted poster provides very detailed descriptions of them. We have an idea. Well, I suppose, spoiler alert, they are not found in this hunt. And, but we do eventually get a bit of an insight into what may have happened. However, there seem to be competing theories, as is natural in these things when justice is not enacted. People start to fill in the blanks for themselves because we like to tell ourselves stories and we like to round out a narrative. Just to help us come to some sort of resolution with the benders as they escape justice. Is there something you can tell us about the different theories that were going around, and if there's one that you think is most likely? Yeah, so one of the things that I discovered in my research was that even though the press and the general public were like, oh, nobody has any idea where the benders were, the reality was

that they did know where they were. Up until about 1975, they had tried repeatedly to send people out there to get them. But due to kind of like bureaucratic issues, the Benders had then escaped. So basically what the Benders did is they went down through Indian territory into Texas, and then they went all along the top of Texas and up into the Panhandle and they were hiding in a place called the Caprock escarpment, which is like a very dense kind of riddle of beautiful orange canyons and all of this kind of stuff that then leads on to the high plains and at the time they were there the Red River War was going on between the US military and members of the indigenous population and so it was kind of the perfect place for them to just hide themselves away down in this area.

And it was too difficult for, for example, the private detective to get out there. And when they tried to ask Texas authorities, the Texas Rangers, the military for help bringing them back, they just weren't really interested. It was kind of considered to be a problem that Kansas was responsible for sorting out. But then after that we don't know where they went. But I was really surprised to see in my research at the Kansas State Archives all these like expense sheets from the private detectives saying I was here, I saw them here, I saw them here and all this different correspondence and being like oh okay so there was a very practical frustrating reason why they weren't able to get

them. The people of Kansas themselves, kind of the general public, tends to fall into the category of like, they escaped and then came back in 1889 with this other trial that happens, or that they were lynched by the York family on their way out of Kansas. Am I right in thinking there's a deathbed confession too? We love a deathbed confession. Yeah, so there's actually kind of a bunch of deathbed confessions. Lots of different people, kind of from 1880s onwards, confess to being Marlbender or Pa Bender or Kate Bender, but Kate Bender's obviously the big, for lack of a better word, star of this particular story.

And there's a woman in California who does this big detailed deathbed confession, which is very, it's written up in all this like florid evocative language. And I think the thing with this case is that so many of the details were reported in the press, that it was very easy for someone 50 years later to be like, oh yes, I'm Kate Bender

and here's all the details I know about the case. And I mean, you're still at a period where basically like, people just love a good yarn and the Benders are so much, I mean, they appear in newspapers in the 1950s, in the 1960s, these like huge pictorial kind of articles about them where none of the details are right but the story, you know, the vague kind of outline of the story is there. When I was in Kansas a lot of the people I spoke to they're very much ascribed to this idea that they were hunted down and killed by members of the community and That the search was kind of like an illusion to cover the fact out that that had been done

I struggle with that because I don't think I mean if you were the person to kill the benders You'd be pretty vocal about it I think and I don't think anyone would blame you either And there's so many different accounts of how that might have happened that I just think maybe not. Susan, can you give us a sense to wrap up what brought you to this story? Because it's had such a life of its own in the press, really from the moment it was first discovered through the decades and centuries since. And it's, as you say, a very well known story in America and Kansas in particular. So what drew you to it? Why did you want to tell it in your own words? Why was that important to you?

So I kind of came across the Benders and I'm always on the lookout for like, for lack of a better word, kind of ghoulish memorabilia. I've always been that way since I was very young. And I found in a charity shop here, this great big book called More Infamous Crimes, and it's from like the 90s. It's like held together with tape. And in this book were a couple of pages on the benders and it was great big crime scene photographs

and then newspaper illustration of parbender and information about the case. And of all the kinds of crimes in that book, that one just really stuck with me because it was so unlike anything I'd come across before. And then over the years, they're kind of always in the back of my head. I was always thinking about the benders

and like what actually happened to them. And the information that was available was very restricted to kind of 1870 to 1873. And I started to think like, well, where are the primary sources? Like my investigative historian brain was like, this was such a big case, there just must be more about this out there, there must be evidence, you know, in archives somewhere of kind of what was going on. And eventually I like did my masters and that was kind of about the the movement of the criminal in visual culture in 19th century America and how you might track someone during that period.

And I just thought, you know what, I really want to write this because I really want to find what I know is probably out there. And in my mind, I was kind of like, maybe I will find out what happened to the Benders. But actually, when I was writing the book, there's so many amazing stories from just all the different people in the community. Like we talked about earlier, the landscape, the time period, all of that. And it's just so interesting to me, the trail left behind by these people,

and then also having to piece them together through other people as well. Because we obviously, like I said, we don't have anything from them. So our perception of the benders comes exclusively from members of that community and stuff like that. And I mean, when I got to the archives in Kansas, and I just found just, I mean, thousands of letters related to this case from the period. I was like, oh my goodness, this is so exciting. Yeah, exactly. And then kind of like, you know, piecing all those together and working out what was sort of useless and what was true and what corroborated each other. And yeah, so.

Before we go, Susan, I just was wondering if you could sum up in, I don't know, let's say two sentences. Why were the Benders killing? What was the motive here? I firmly believe that the Benders were killing because they were essentially horse thieves. So a lot of the men who go missing, they've got horses on them. Some of them are very distinctive horses. William York is described as being on a very beautiful horse in particular, and horses during this period on the frontier, they're a real form of currency. They're very

important to day-to-day life. A good horse is worth its weight in gold, and the benders are provably connected to this network of horse thieves who were moving them up through the Panhandle into Colorado. Because the murders have such a distinct modus operandi, there's definitely an argument in there that somebody in the family was maybe more of a serial killer in the way that we would view someone like H.H. Holmes and was doing it because they enjoyed it. But I think without knowing the dynamics exactly of that, we have to go with the fact that they were essentially killing for material reasons.

Susan, it's been absolutely fascinating to speak to you. Thank you so much and thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and indeed you can leave us a five-star review there which we love to see. If you have a suggestion for a topic that you would like covered on the show, then email us at afterdarkatahistoryhit.com. That's afterdarkatahistoryhit.com. Canada may be known for its landscapes and friendly people, but beneath the surface lies a darker side of crime, history, and the paranormal. Since 2017, the award-winning Dark Poutine podcast has explored the shadowy corners of the Great White North and beyond, delivering chilling tales from a uniquely Canadian perspective.

Hosted by Mike Brown and Matthew Stockton with over 300 episodes and fresh releases every Monday, Dark Poutine is your weekly ticket to the creepier side of Canada. Mike Brown and Matthew Stockton with over 300 episodes and fresh releases every Monday, Dark Poutine is your weekly ticket to the creepier side of Canada. Listen to Dark Poutine on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most meal replacements are rough on sensitive stomachs, not Sperry. Sperry is a complete plant-based meal crafted for better digestion. What makes Sperry different? It's 100% allergen-free with no dairy or harsh artificial ingredients, so it's

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