American History Hit - Serial Killer Family on the Frontier

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Between 1871 and 1872, Labette County, Kansas became a source of mystery. Several people have gone missing on their journey west and a few bodies have been found. Is this the work of highway robbers? Or could it be the peculiar family who live beside the Great Osage Trail?Don is joined for this episode for Susan Jonasus, author of 'Hell's Half-Acre : The Untold Story of the Benders, America's First Serial Killer Family'.Email us at [e-mail] if you have any areas of history that you would love Don to explore.For more History Hit content, follow our newsletters here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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heading west with a caravan of other pioneering families and route to your registered claims in the new state of Kansas. Your excitement and exhilaration for this adventure has been considerably tamped down by the days and nights of drudgery and rough sleeping. And when the wooden spokes on the back wheels snapped, you'd spend dreary days waiting for a repair to be done. done, finally sending your wife, three months pregnant with your new one, and two small children ahead with another family. Now you're back on the trail, alone, catching up. But today it rained

for hours, and the long slog through the mud was hard on the mules. As dusk begins to fall, you spot a single cabin ahead by the trail with a sign scrolled in print, General Store. Several people are in the yard, and one of them waves. It would be nice to stop and rest. How nice to eat food not cooked on an open fire. You decide to bring your wagon to a stop. But this will be the last meal you'll ever eat, because you're about to dine with the bloody benders. Welcome to another episode of American History Hit.

I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for joining us. On May 20, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which established the conditions for pioneering settlement of U.S. government surveyed Western lands. If you qualified, if you were a U.S. citizen or intended citizen who had never borne arms against the U.S. government, you could apply to lay claim to 160 acres of, say, Kansas, which had become a state a year earlier in 1861, as long as you agreed to live there for five years as your primary residence. After five years, and you made some general improvements,

the place was all yours. Two hundred and seventy million acres were granted under this law, something like 420,000 square miles. How the West was won? Well, a whole lot of it was given away, Scott Free. And in October 1870, a group of five families pulled their covered wagons into the township of Osage in the southeastern corner of Kansas and spread out to take up their newly registered claims. One of those families, the Benders, would go on to begin. become an American legend, but for all the very, very wrong reasons. Here today to tell us all about it is Susan Janice, who authored a book on this notorious

crew called Hell's Half Acre, the Untold Story of the Benders, a serial killer family on the American Frontier. My lord, what a title. Greetings, Susan, how are you? I'm good, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This is salacious stuff on the American frontier. Enough of this upstabstab. history talk. Let's get into some nasty, gnarly psychopathic murder, shall we? Yeah, I mean, that's why I'm here. Okay, great. All right, so I've painted the picture. We are in the Great Plains. It's the late 1800s, flatness, the middle of nowhere. The native occupants of these lands, the Osage,

have been transferred out of Kansas to what later becomes Oklahoma, and now pretty much all of Kansas is up for grabs. So this family, the Benders, arrive to take up residence, a family of four of sorts, right? Yes. So you've got an older couple who are known kind of colloquially as Ma and Parr Bender. Their details of their first names are basically lost to history. And then you've got a younger couple and their Kate Bender who kind of becomes the focal point of the case as it unravels. And she's a young woman anywhere between kind of 18 and 26. And then you've got a man called John Gephardt and he's kind of in his late 20s, maybe early 30s. And they, arrive as a four-person family unit and the men come first as they would on the frontier and then

they're followed by the women a couple of months later. So this is a family of four, right? I mean, older gentlemen and woman and their kids, I guess, right? Yeah. So the actual kind of specific relationships between the family are kind of up for debate. We don't have anything kind of firmly on the record about who exactly is related to who. The rumor mill in this particular community is that Kate and John are actually husband and wife or maybe even incestuous. They're described by the local people as having a relationship that's a bit more intimate than maybe you'd expect from a brother and sister. It's my feeling that Kate was almost certainly the older woman's daughter,

but you see with poorer inhabitants on the frontier that it's not uncommon for people to be married several times over and to have a vast array of children, interact with some of them and not with others. And you see that a bit more later on when two women are arrested for being the benders. So the family unit presents itself as parents and kids, but the truth is a bit more complicated than that. Give me a lay of the land here. When we talk about these settlements, what does it look like? I mean, when you build a house out there, is there anyone within sight? So the benders are interesting because they specifically pick their location because you can't see them. They're kind of in this dip and there's some mounds behind them.

So they were after somewhere where they wouldn't be visible by neighbours. In Kansas, I think it would really depend, certainly in the flatter areas. You wouldn't have people on your doorstep, but you might be able to see kind of lights in the distance. I mean, you're talking about lots of families spread over a huge amount of land, but then normally there would be like a focal point in that area. So you've got towns like Cherryvale, you've got Parsons, you've got the bigger town of Independence, which is one county over. And these towns often grow up around the railroads.

There's big competition for who gets the railroad on the frontier because that obviously becomes kind of a commercial point in the district. So you'd kind of have the town at the center and then this network, almost like a spider web, really, of kind of settlements around it. Sure. But any time you wanted to like conduct business, you'd probably come into the town. So they start a trailside inn, a grocery, a general store, but also a way station. I mean, they're located next to a major trail.

This is the Osage Trail, right? Yeah, so the Osage Trail had been in use for a long time by missionaries in the area. But when independence starts to grow, the trail becomes quite a commonly used thoroughfare, but not in the sense that it's a busy, safe road. There's quite a lot of people traveling, but there's still like the weather. You might see the occasional other person in the area. and the benders are kind of a necessary stop that you might have to make on this road. And it's a very rudimentary kind of one room cabin.

But obviously, if you've been out in the elements for hours and hours, and you need food and you need to water your horses, like that's the place that you would have to stop at to do so. Are they taking in guess? Is it a Hitchcock moment here? Yes. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. And they were very kind of canny about the way that they,

pick the people they eventually murdered because they wouldn't go after anybody who was local in the area. They do that a bit later. That's sort of what causes their downfall. But they try to stick to single men traveling alone. So you would have Kate would sit down with the person and kind of talk to them and say, where are you going? Where are you from? Are you visiting anyone? And then if the poor man had no connections in the area, that probably didn't bode very well for him. Yeah, they would choose their victims. I just want to be clear about one specific here that figures later into the story. Independence, Kansas, we're talking about, is further west than Cherryville, you know, where they settle, right? Yes, absolutely. So when we went there, you've got kind of Cherryvale,

which is up in Lebet County, and then you go west, and then you're in Montgomery County, and Independence is in Montgomery County. But it's quite near the border, but it is one county over. So they arrive in 1870, but let's jump into this story. around March 1873. So they've been there for a number of years. People have been going by. They're well known as one of those way stations, one of those ins. At this time, a man named Dr. William Henry York from Independence, Kansas, decides to search for a neighbor friend and his small daughter who've gone missing on the trail. So that's back east from where he's living. And he's wondering what's happened to them. So he writes to his brother, Colonel Alexander York,

who was a prominent citizen, a state senator, I believe, that he's going to do this. But at some point things go awry. Can we pick up the story from there? Yeah. So William York had lived next to this man, George Longer, and his little 18-month-year-old girl, Mary Ann. And George Longer was a widower under very kind of like distressing circumstances. He was also a civil war veteran. And Longkor decides to go up to Iowa to live with his in-laws.

so that Marianne can be raised in a bigger family. And he tells William that he's doing this. William gives him a wagon. And William never hears that he's arrived. And he, you know, travel takes a long time on the frontier. It's not unheard of for people to have to divert or stop or anything like that. But he then receives a letter saying that George and Marianne never arrived. And he realizes like, oh, something has gone wrong here.

And it's important also in the autumn. of 1872, five men have actually gone missing. Quite quickly, there were some bodies discovered earlier in the year and there's starting to be this feeling in the community that, like, this area is actually very dangerous to travel in. And so William York takes it upon himself to make his own inquiries, basically, as to where these two might have gone. I wouldn't think it was unusual for people to be missing. Like, that would be a normal thing almost, right? Yeah. I mean, that's ultimately part of why the bender's got away with their crimes for so long, is that everybody went missing on the frontier.

If you were going really far west into kind of less settled areas, it was very hard to get word back to people where you were. Some people chose to disappear. Some people just froze to death while they were travelling. And you see it takes the disappearance of somebody's, whose family has the financial ability in this way before this is actually, investigated as a series of crimes, as opposed to a series of kind of unfortunate mishaps. And that's not to say, so a lot of these men were married and a lot of these men's wives

were trying to look for them, but they were also trying to raise families or they weren't in the area. And so they just didn't have the ability to do so. You've got George and Mary Ann disappear, and then that's kind of the catalyst because that brings William York in. And then when William York disappears, the York family just descend on the air. with hundreds of people. And they cause quite a rift in the community, by the way that they go about searching for William. But Alexander York, like you said, he's very kind of notorious in the state at this time because he had basically just admitted in the Senate that he had taken a bribe

to prove that the current senator was handing out bribes. And lots of people had very mixed opinions about this. He had essentially sacrificed his own political career to prove this. William York disappearing, I guess, had the added benefit at that time in terms of Alexander was very prominent. So the case received a huge amount of attention. And it would have any way, but this was kind of like an added level of scrutiny. As spread out as people are, I mean, there aren't that many people. You would think that word would get around pretty quickly that something mysterious was happening and that there were clues, right?

Yeah. And I mean, word certainly was around. I mean, people in the local community were trying much more not to travel individually. They were kind of less helpful when people came through from outside. But at the same time, you've got huge amounts of transient workers in the area because of the railroad. There's a settlement north of Lebet County called La Dore, which had a very bad reputation. It was kind of thought of as a party town. They had a horrific crime committed there by a group of bandits.

they called them and the town actually ended up hanging all the bandits because of it. And when these disappearances started, a lot of people in Lebet County pointed to LaDor as kind of the source of all of this. So there was this idea that something was going on, but there had never been a crime like what the benders did. And so it did not occur to the community

that someone within that community was basically disguising themselves as hospitable and then was murdering people that would not have even occurred to them. They would have assumed it was either outlaws, indigenous people, or, again, like the weather. Well, we're before H.H. Holmes.

You know, this is early days. I mean, the idea of being a serial killer hasn't really even been born yet in America. No, I mean, you've got the Hart Brothers, there's, again, confusion about how they're related. Yeah. But they're kind of before the bender. they're the only real idea we have of a serial killer.

And you have like old frontier stories about cannibalism and stuff like that. But this is the first, you know, Texas chainsaw massacre style group that we see. So Alexander York tracks the story down. He's looking for his brother. And he eventually confronts the benders, right? They eventually come to the house. Yeah. So this is one of the points in the case that really fascinated me when I first.

read about it. He tracks his brother essentially to the bender cabin and then he has this interaction with the benders and he essentially tells the people he's with that this family are too stupid to have possibly had anything to do with the crimes. And he then regrets that obviously for the rest of his life. Then he has this interaction with Kate where she tells him that if he comes back alone, that she'll contact William. She's a medium. She wants to be a famous medium. So she spent a lot of time in the community telling people that she could talk to their dead relatives. Some people liked that. Some people didn't. And it made her quite controversial. But she offers this to Alexander. He says no. And while this is going on, John Gebha is kind of taking another group of

men down to a tree where he claims he was shot out by a bandit. And he makes such a performance of it that they write him off as stupid. And there's also a bit of this idea that they're like uneducated Germans going on. And Alexander York is like very much feels he's an American and, you know, obviously his brother's a physician. He's a senator. Like these kind of farm people, it would just be above them. And the irony is really is that that visit is what prompts the benders to flee because even though they've kind of successfully diverted his attention, they are very aware that they won't be able to keep doing that for that long. And it's easier for them to just pack up all their stuff and leave, which is what they do

the evening after he's come to speak to them. In the coming weeks, I love this detail of the story. A guy named Billy Toll was driving cattle past the bender house. And he notices that there's nobody there. but the livestock is there, which is, that's the interesting thing. That would be the indication for somebody who's, you know, schooled in these matters who understands how this works. And he reports to the township trustee that this is weird.

The family's gone, but the livestock's there. And the township checks it out. And the family is gone. The cabin's empty and their stuff is out of there. Yeah, I mean, their first thought is, oh, my God, the vendors have been got by these people who are killing all these other people in the area. It still doesn't occur to the. really, that maybe the benders might be responsible.

And it's only when Leroy Dick kind of comes on to the homestead and he smells like death, basically. And these people are used to the smell of death. You know, they're like very hardcore frontiers people. They've seen dead animals, whatever. But this is like the smell of a dead person. It's like coming up from the soil. They can't work out where it is.

And that's really what prompts the bigger excurs. the bigger excavation of the site and eventually the discovery of the bodies. It's always somebody smelling something, isn't it? It is. A smell I really, really, really don't ever want to experience in my life. I'll be right back after this short break with more from Susan Janusus. From biblical fame to its fabled great walls, Babylon was home to kings, conquerors, and wonders of the ancient world.

But what do we actually know about this legendary city? And how much is still shrouded in mystery? Join me, Tristan Hughes, every Sunday throughout May on the ancients, as we delve into the story of Babylon. We'll be covering topics varying from the King Nebuchadnezzar II and how he forged a massive Babylonian empire. We'll be exploring the mystery of the hanging gardens of Babylon, looking at world-renowned objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder,

and also looking at Babylon in the aftermath of one of the most well-known conquerors in the whole of history. Babylon, after Alexander the Great. That's all to come this May on the ancients every Sunday. So now we're into CSI territory. They begin to actually excavate this property. Where do they find the bodies? So at first they kind of investigate the cabin, and the cabin's disgusting. I mean, it was disgusting before it was abandoned, but now it's in a real state.

And their assumption is first that the bodies are buried in a cellar beneath the house. Kind of their system was they would attack someone with a hammer when they were sat at the table. And then they drop that person into the cellar beneath the house through a trap door. And then when they were down there, somebody would go down and slit the person's throat. you would kind of assume that would be Gepp Hart or the older man. The newspapers wanted it to be Kate because obviously that was more interesting and salacious

but we have no real evidence either way for that. And down there in the foundation of the cellar, like there is blood. So it does smell, but they spend a long time digging down there and there's nothing. And then eventually they're out in the orchard and they see as the sun comes down that there's like irregularities in the topsoil.

and they take a rod and they stick it down into the soil in one of these areas and they pull it up and it's basically covered in human debris and they realize that that's where the bodies are and then over the next couple of days they start to excavate them they find William York first and then the one that kind of everyone remembers in all the accounts is when they find Mary Ann and she's in the grave with her father and there's a woman there who recognizes her as mittens that she'd given her when they were on their way up. And that particular murder is really kind of what sends the whole country into like a fever, a pitch of excitement and disgust at these crimes. Because not only is there a dead child, there was a woman involved in the murder of this

child, which is just obviously a complete corruption of all the moral values in the country at the time. How many victims did they discover? So in the property, there were eight. One of them was in the well. We don't know exactly who that man was when you're dealing with older cases like this. The newspapers are useful for an overview, but they're very bad at recording detail properly.

So I went into this with a big list of names in the newspaper, and they're kind of like 30, 40 names over different papers. And then you kind of whittle it down, you compare, you look at burial records, you look at other sources. So there's eight on the property, seven of them are in the orchard, and then there were three who were found out on the prairie. And these people were discovered in the build-up to the discovery on the property. But because they were on the open prairie, the assumption was they'd been gotten by bandits,

but the wounds are exactly the same as the wounds that were found on the bodies in the orchard. So the assumption is that they're all connected. So the method of killing these people was to entice them in. as the inn that they were, you know, a meal or something, and get them to sit at a table, then whack them on the head, drop them through a trap door, and then slit their throat. It boggles the mind that you could even walk into this cabin without smelling death everywhere. I mean, after the first several people had been buried, it's extraordinary. But I suppose that's the frontier.

Yeah, I mean, you get all these accounts of people who like sleep in the cabin and hear like, screaming in the night, but they're like, oh, no, it's just hogs. It must just be a pig. I think these people were used to a level of like general grossness, honestly, and hardship that we don't understand. And I think also it was very cold at that point in time. People are really focused on just like getting to their destination. They don't really want to ask too many questions. There's this kind of combination of you expect a lot of hospitality on the frontier. but you also don't expect to be asked exactly what you're doing and you're not going to ask questions that are going to end up with you having to sleep outside.

Sure. Because it's very cold, that five-month period where everyone's disappearing, like it's the depths of winter. It's very dangerous weather conditions. And so you really would just be focused on shelter. It's crazy to think about all those people out there. Why suddenly was the smell so strong at this point? How long would it have taken people to notice?

Would the benders have had to move the bodies eventually because the smell was so bad? Or would they have just tried to disguise it as like a farm smell? They even find a prayer book, which is a spooky detail, which has notes about the murderers, right? They were keeping a record. Yeah, so the prayer book or the Bible's interesting because it's one of those things that, like, lots of sources mention. So it's mentioned in the newspapers. the transcription on the inside varies, depending on what you read. Some of them say that it said big slaughter day,

and then you get more kind of sensational things that's like Katie went to the Department of Hell, which sounds more like a penny dreadful than something that would have been written. But, I mean, we don't know where the prayer book went. We don't know where the Bible went. It's perfectly plausible that they were recording stuff, and they left it. It's also plausible that there was a Bible and the newspaper men made up what was in it

to make them sound more exciting. But that is of the things that are in the house, that's kind of one of the details that's repeated a lot across sources. Where have the benders gone to? Are there any clues? So one of the really interesting things about this case is that for a very long time, the idea was that nobody knew where they went. They just went.

and any speculation about where they went was speculation. Lots of theories said that the benders had actually been hunted down by the York family and killed, but that was supposed to be a secret. Alexander York, his whole life, says, why would I keep that a secret? Like, I wouldn't have gotten in trouble for that. I would have been a hero. I would have been able to avenge my brother. Like, there would be no reason to kind of conceal that.

One of the things that I found out in my research, which was kind of interesting, and also ultimately disheartening was that they knew where they were for a very long time. They just could not get to them because of various kind of forces at play on the frontier. And basically, the family split,

Kate and Gebhardt traveled down to a place called Denison in Texas where they rendezvous with the older couple. And then basically, they join up with a wider group of horse thieves who they were likely working with during their time in Kansas. And then that,

group makes its way kind of along the bottom of Indian Territory, past the big and little Wichita, up into the panhandle of Texas. And at the time they're in the panhandle, the Red River War is going on. And so the location of this group of fugitives from Kansas is the last thing on the minds of the military of law enforcement in that region. So their trail is lost. No one ever knows where they went to. We know where they were up until about 18. 74, 75, from a source written by a man who was with them called Samuel Merrick, who was a horse thief who was caught in 1877 and ended up at the Detroit Department of Correction. And it was a very detailed source. And when I first read it, I was kind of like, this seems a bit, a bit,

like too good to be true. But actually, what they had at the State Archives in Topeka is they had boxes and boxes of governance correspondence. And all this correspondence contain things like letters written by detectives who were sent after the family at the time they disappeared, letters written by private citizens who were looking for the family. And there's all sorts of crazy stuff in there like, oh, I saw them with Jesse James and stuff like that. But the actual detective's letters, they list a series of locations and people that match up with the locations and people that Samuel Merrick talks about. And Samuel Merrick, in his letter, actually references the detectives and this particular man

called James Sullivan, who got very close to the family and then disappeared by the help of one of the family's accomplices, a man called Missouri Bill. But after that, one of the things Samuel Merrick does is he offers to go and look for the benders. He says, you won't be able to take them. You need someone who knows them. I'll go and do it. And the really interesting thing there is that he has never taken up on this offer.

The man who runs the prison sends this information to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and they write back to him and they say, the benders are dead, don't worry about it. But there's no paper trail to confirm that. Nobody ever mentions the Pinkertons as having been aware of it. The Pinkertons don't mention it in any of their stuff. So unfortunately, post late 1870s, we don't know where they went. We never found out where they went.

There was a big reward for them. I mean, there was a $1,000 reward, $2,000 reward I read. I mean, this is a big money for those times. Yeah, I mean, I'm always astounded that private person didn't just go and try and get them. You'd think there were plenty of people out there who would like want to have their names in the annals of frontier law. But I think everything moved very quickly on the frontier. I think it was kind of the next case, the next case, the next case. You see there's a family called the Kellys who commit a very similar series of crimes

only a couple of years later. They are caught and executed. And I think the benders were just slightly, they felt unreachable to people because there was no real idea really what they looked like after a certain point. I mean, towards the start of the 9th, 1900, you get people crawling out the woodwork claiming to be the Benders and all sorts of weird deathbed confessions and stuff like that. But again, there's no evidence. And Bender as a name was an extremely common name on the frontier. There's even another Bender family in LeBette

County at the same time that they're there. So that in itself as a name is useless when trying to work out where they went. The public reaction and the media reaction is interesting because this is early days for this kind of crime. We're so sadly used to hearing about this at this point. But the idea that someone is just killing for the pleasure of killing, let alone being in a sort of clan version of that, is a pretty extraordinary thing. Never mind, this is the days of sensational journalism. Yeah, I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say that the country kind of entered into a sort of bender hysteria. They're in the newspapers all the way up until the 1950s and also in the newspapers at the moment because it's actually 150 years since the crimes. So we're 150 years away

from the local railroad station putting on extra trains so that people could go and see the crime scene. Wow. The excavation basically had to stop because so many thousands of people had descended on the site and were just tearing it to pieces. So they dismant- Yeah. So they were pulling up trees. They were pulling the cabin apart. They were digging earth out of the ground and taking it with them. Like the entire site was just raised to the ground. And there's pictures of like kids in bonnets standing on the front of the bender cabin and the kind of atmosphere that's described of like ghoulish curiosity.

And Leroy Dick says later, he says, well, nothing ever really happened. Like we didn't have TV. Yeah, right. You know, we didn't have the kind of access to cinema and stuff. So when something like this happened, you would travel hundreds of miles to go and and see it. Wow. It's extraordinary. I mean, to this day, extraordinary how people respond to this kind of thing. I mean, did you, after spending so much time in the primary source material and so forth, get any sense of a motivation beyond the obvious? I think my feeling was the more reading that I did

into it was that the benders were part of this wider group of just career criminals who were operating in the area. You see the people they kill have horses, the people, the bender. The benders, are then with on the open frontier, their horse thieves, there's a very specific pattern where they'd move them from Kansas to Indian territory and then back up into places like Colorado. I don't think you would get the level of repeated violence if someone in the family did not personally enjoy it. And the book is full of men like that, specifically men. I mean, there's a man called Frank McPherson who was definitely working with the vendors. And like, he's a monster. He's, you know, able to be the way he is because there's no real restrictions at that

time and it's very different to place people. And he goes from trying to sexually assault a woman in a bakery and killing her husband. And then 30 years later, he's, you know, killing striking workers during the Colorado Labor Wars. So it really was an environment that if you were violent, you were able to find somewhere to do that. We've inherited this glamorized and romanticized version of the West, but what an invitation that world was for people of ill repute,

let alone serial murderers. It's an incredible open door to getting away from all suspicion and then conducting yourself in secret, a perfect scenario. Yeah, I mean, I think also, like I firmly believe that wherever they went, they would not just have stopped committing crimes.

I think even if the family, actually separated. They were obviously of a specific ilk enough to have set up this cabin at least to rob people. If they weren't intending to murder people initially, they were definitely intending to rob them. And I believe that maybe the first person they killed was an accident. And then nobody came looking for them. So they just thought, oh, this is easier.

And it sort of went from there. It makes you wonder if you'd find serial killers in the revolutionary period and, you know, all the way back. It was like a normal thing in society, I suppose. Oh, I'm sure. And I mean, I think a lot of, like, I know especially in places like France, it gets wrapped up and stuff like, wherewolf law. So you see people trying to make sense of these crimes through a way that's slightly more palatable. Because these people are monsters, you know, and they have existed kind of as long as we have. They've only just kind of risen into the public eye with the advent of like media, basically.

What interested you about this story? I mean, as an English person, were you fascinated by the American West first? Yeah, so I grew up being shown pictures by my grandma of America. She's a big fan of all things, kind of Americana. And she had these huge, great photo books. And it was everything from like Yosemite to famous American movie stars. So I've always been really interested in America and its sense of identity. what do we think of when we think of America?

But I've also been always really interested in the more ghoulish elements of history, I suppose. Sure. And during my master's, I focused on the advent of early forensics and the ability to track criminals. And this was a case that I've known about for a while. And then after I finished my master's, I thought, actually, there has to be more about this out there. There have to be primary sources, because this was such a lot of. a big case. There's no way there was no legal record associated with it. And so when obviously went to Kansas and was astounded at the amount of primary source material in the archives there,

I mean, just boxes and boxes and boxes of it. And it was really amazing to kind of be able to build the story out from what I'd initially known it as, which was very restricted to kind of a three-year period. We know the story of the frontier and the American West as this good versus evil. you know, but that is a purely, mostly fictionalized account that comes through the movies where writers create these conflicts for stories. The real world was just full of struggle, first of all, impoverished life, really difficult seasonal survival, like droughts and famines and all the rest of it, never mind, dust bowl comes later. You know, everything about it was a struggle. And then you find these kinds of stories, these pure criminal stories that exist.

in every venue of the trade. It's a fascinating revision of this time, and it accounts for a lot of the seeds of American society. You know, so much violence, so much untoward behavior that has gotten washed out over time. Yeah, and one of the things my editor said to me when I was writing it, because I kept finding all these, like, everybody's life during that time is so interesting. One of the men who took the crime scene photos, he ends up burning down. his photography studio and ends up in prison photographing inmates. And there's so many stories like that where people are like trying to survive in a very good way and then trying to survive and they desperately turn to something that's not so good.

And my editor said to me like, I don't know what the point of some of these is, except to show that everyone was having a really difficult time. And I was like, yeah, well, you know, like that for me really undercut. the book, but also, I mean, the massive strength of some of these people, like William York's wife, Mary, who like takes on his surgical practice does all his administration, desperately tries to keep their family together. And then after they discover that he's been murdered, the children are taken off her and she's essentially abandoned by the family. And she was an orphan. So William was really all she had. And then over her life, you know,

She does find it in herself not to forgive the benders, which you can understand, really, but to forgive the York family for treating her the way that they did. And it's those stories, I think, within these communities, within the struggle, these stories of personal resilience that actually really stuck with me the most writing the book. The benders are their own thing. I describe them as ghosts in the narrative because we don't have anything from them. So we are relying purely on how other people interacted with and described them. But the community itself is fascinating.

And you think that one community can tell you so much about life in that period. And there's hundreds of thousands of communities. And if we had the time to investigate all those lives, like how much richer our understanding of the country would be. It's so true. Resourcefulness and resilience. The two words I most think of of these people, because they have to go through the ringer of life

to get anything done out here. Are you writing some books or anything like that? Yeah, so I am working on my second book at the moment. I actually just got back from Texas. I was there for 10 days, and it's a biography of a woman called Winita Slusha, but she's better known by her stage name Candy Bar. And during the 50s, she was one of the most famous strippers,

essentially in America. She was friends with people like Mickey Cohen and Jack Ruby, but she was also like brutally sex trafficked as a teenager and ended up in what's widely considered to be the first real pornographic film, a film called Smart Alec. And then right at the height of her career, she was sent to prison on what was definitely a fake drug charge. And her life is fascinating because it's such a window

into this really transitional period. In American history, you've got like the sexual revolution, you're just out of the war. You know, like this idea of a woman who was forced into using her body and then kind of managed to make something out of that, the way that she was then treated by the country, by her family, by the community. And she's fantastic. She's got this very distinctive voice

and somehow managed to maintain a sense of humor through all of it. But yeah, that's what my second book is about. So it's kind of still focused on like women in the justice system. But this woman, she didn't like being called a victim. She called herself a survivor. But she's someone who's very, very different, obviously, to a person like Kate Bender. A future episode. Susan Jonas is a historian, writer, taking us through the underbelly of America.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.

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