Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - America's Serial Killer Family

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

When the Bender family disappeared from Labette county, Kansas, in 1873, they left a dozen bodies buried in the garden of their home.But who were they? Who were their victims? And why did people take bricks from their well as souvenirs?Today Betwixt the Sheets, Kate is joined by Susan Jonusas to explore the mystery of the Benders, a family of serial killers, and finding out how their crimes were handled by the law enforcement and the press of the time.*WARNING this episode includes discussion of murder*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello there, my lovely betwixters. It's Kate Lister jumping in once again to give you a heads up for this episode. This episode contains some pretty heavy themes, including murder, child killing. It's just, it's a dark one. So if that's not completely for you, then please sit this one out. Anyone else that's still with me, let's get into it.

From the number of true crime documentaries and podcasts out there, you'd be forgiven for thinking that we're all a bit numb to this particular horror show by now. But even I haven't heard of this case that we're talking about today. I'll paint you the picture. It's the 1870s. Perhaps you're heading west with the cattle trains, and you're going to pass through Lebet County, Kansas on your journey. Well, you might happen upon a two-room cabin with an orchard and a vegetable patch. It's got a makeshift shop in the front room.

Perhaps you'd stop here for a meal or maybe you'd hope to spend the night with the family before carrying on the next day. Well, for a dozen or so people, this would be the end of that particular road. The Bender family were serial killers, a family of serial killers, and they were never brought to justice. Instead, they just up and vanished into the night. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Today I'm joined by Susan Jonasus to find out more about this family and the rumours that surround them. Oh, and welcome to betwixt the sheets, Susan Jonasus. How the hell are you? I am very good, much cooler than yesterday, thank goodness.

Oh my, that was just ridiculous, wasn't it? Oh, it's just me and the cat huddled round an aircon unit that was fighting the good fight and losing. Oh, well, I'm so, I'm thrilled that you are here because I hadn't heard of this, this, this story and that amazes me the amount of my spare time I spend on true crime documentaries and I hadn't heard this story. This is a story of the family of serial killers. Yeah so I always think it's really interesting actually because during the 19th and kind of early 20th century the Bender family which was the surname they went by that we're still not entirely sure if that was there you know like their real name was a real benchmark for cruelty you know when the crimes of hate

H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. S. S. S. S. What are we talking about? What are the dates? Yeah. So, this is Kans. This is really interesting in that respect. Wow. This predates HH homes and it predates Belganess. When are we talking about? What are the dates? Yeah, so this is Kansas. The benders arrive. We're not sure where from in 1870. And then they flee in the spring of 1873, sort of never to be seen again as the folklore goes. But actually, through my research, I found out that actually people did know where they were. They were definitely being seen. it was just a lot of kind of bureaucratic nonsense that was getting in the way of them being hunted down. Oh my goodness. Right. Okay. So the benders turn up in Kansas. Do we know what they were doing? What was their trade? So when they turn up in Kansas, there's an older couple, we only really know as Ma and Pa. And then a younger couple called Kate Bender and John Gephardt. And there's a lot of debate about whether or not John and Kate are siblings, which is.

how they presented themselves or whether or not they were actually common law married. And some of the newspapers just sort of went the whole hog and said, no, they're incestuous siblings. That must be the answer. Infra penny, infra pound. Right, okay. Exactly. And Kate really becomes the star of the show. She's described as a very beautiful young woman. She's got this long red hair. She's got dark eyes. One man, when he's interviewed for the paper, describes her as a buxom, good-looking country girl.

so the fact that these crimes were committed and then a young woman like that was involved is sort of what really catapulted them to infamy. But they arrive as this group of four, they set up a homestead. So they've got a little cabin on a trail that lots of people, both within the community, but also transient, are coming through.

And then from that cabin, they kill at least 11 people over the time that they're in the area before suspicion rises and they're finally found out. Whoa! There's a lot of. to unpack there. I mean, family events, just how does it escalate to killing? Like, do we have any idea of, like, who did they kill? Let's start there. Who were they killing? So they primarily

killed young men who were travelling alone. My feeling is that they were basically after horses more than anything else. And lots of the victims are described by eyewitnesses as having been spotted on really nice horses. Obviously, on the American frontier, they're really integral to the way communities function, so a good horse is worth a lot of money. But they also kill a little 18-month-old girl called Marianne, because she's travelling with her father. I mean, he's a widower, and they've got this big waggon, they've got lots of goods with them, and she's the only non-male victim. But she's, of course, the victim that really catapults these crimes into infamy, because they describe her as, like, she's still wearing her little mittens, and she'd been buried alive with her father, which is just

absolutely appalling. So it's the little details like that, I think, that really elevated this crime in the mind of the nation at the time. So they, it's difficult to make these kind of things, isn't it? But it looks like they were killing for gain, like they were killing for their property to nick stuff. Is that right? Yeah, so I think there's been a lot of debate about why exactly they did it. I think you're looking at a family of career criminals. Kate was very, very interested in spiritualism. She actually wanted to be a famous medium and that was part of how they kind of draw victims to the cabin.

Oh, the clever minks. Yeah, they had these little notices up in town saying, Professor Miss Katie Bender will cure all your ailments. So people would then sort of come out to see her. Maybe they'd leave and maybe they wouldn't. Well, it's one sure way of getting to make sure your clients can actually make contact with the afterlife, I suppose. It is true.

It's not funny, Kate. Stop laughing. Right. Okay. There's an amazing scene where, so eventually they murder someone quite high profile. He's a local physician. And he's actually looking for the man and his little daughter because they're his neighbours. So he stops by the benders. They murder him. And his brother at that point in time is one of the most famous politicians in Kansas. His name's Alexander York. So his family organises huge kind of hundreds of people, law enforcement. then everybody in the community goes out to look for William, because William is also very beloved in his own right. But there's this amazing interaction where Alexander goes to the Bender cabin.

He interacts with them. And Kate Bender says, oh, well, if you come back by yourself next week, I'll contact your brother for you. We can find him. And Alexander leaves and he says to the men with him, oh, you know these people, they're stupid country folk. There's no way they could know anything about this.

and it's that interaction that actually prompts the benders to flee because they just feel like, well, you know, we're so close to being found out. And then Alexander obviously just never forgives himself. But that specific part of the case also really stuck with me, that idea that he'd looked at the people who'd killed his brother and just couldn't see that that was what had happened. So had there been rumours circulating, how did people catch on to them? So for over kind of the three-year period, the number of people missing basically ramped up.

So first it was kind of like a person would go missing once every so often. And because life out West was very transient, the postal service wasn't very good. Some people chose to disappear. You know, men would just leave their families and everyone was left to just get on with it. That area of Kansas also at the time was quite dangerous from the point if you have interactions with indigenous people. So often when men disappeared especially, it was just written off as having been killed in conflict with them. But eventually, family members start to write to local members of the community saying, ah, where's, you know, my husband, where's my brother, where's my cousin?

And this is ignored for quite a long time, which is something I don't think the community ever manages any closure over. And then about four people disappear in the space of four months. and within that is George and his little daughter. And it's those winter months of 1872 where the whole thing really ramps up and then obviously William goes missing in the spring and that prompts them to leave the state. So there's an escalation of killing

because that sort of suggests it's not just for profit that there is some fun there for them. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I mean I think there had to be. I think either the whole family enjoyed it or there was some particular person in the family. I mean, the newspapers were very keen to pin it on Kate. All the bodies display very similar wounds.

So there's a very clear emo. They've got hammer wounds and neck wounds. And the newspapers were very keen to suggest that Kate was the one inflicting the neck wounds. And she was this sort of evil genius, like this witch woman who took pleasure. And she's the daughter, right? Yes. And I think because she was the most kind of outward-facing member of the the family, it was sort of natural that people attached themselves to her because she's who

they thought they knew the most. So she's got red hair. She's obviously quite sexy. She's into spiritualism, which was a big thing in the 19th century. It like was this explosion of people trying to contact the other side. What else do we know about her? Do we know anything at all? So we know that she kind of had a really interesting relationship with the rest of the community. Initially, she was very outgoing and friendly. She would lecture on spiritualism. She'd also lecture on free love. Oh, so she's quite educated and well spoken then. Yeah, so another thing that comes out after the crimes are discovered is the assumption that Kate's the only one who was intelligent enough out of the family to have organised the crime and allowed them to get away with it for so

long. Because what actually, the thing is that the rest of the family don't really speak English very well. She's the only kind of English-speaking member of the family. The rest of them are German. John can speak a bit of English, but he's got quite a heavy accent. So one of the widows of the victims writes in her book that the kind of more German members of the family were predisposed to things like murder because they came from a certain part of the Rhine. Okay, okay. Science. Yeah, so I think, but that ties into, you know, this whole idea that you can spot a criminal as well that they were really interested in in the 19th century with phrenology and everything. So I think also the fact that Kate was very conventionally attractive, sort of really spooked people because how could a woman

who, you know, welcome to people into her home, then murder them? Wow. Are there any photos of the Bender family at all? We know what Kate looked like. No, so this is the really frustrating thing, is that obviously it's at a time where there could be photos of them. And actually at this later trial, there's lots of discussion about tint types and kind of identifying the women from the photos. So at some point, there were photos that existed. And I'm sure there may be still out there. But obviously there's no, I didn't come across any that I felt were legitimate. Right. Okay.

There's one at the Cherryvale Historical Museum. And that's a picture supposedly of John and Kate. But it turned up in a Bible, but nobody could really verify where the Bible could come from. So maybe it is them. Maybe it's just some people who are found in an antique shop. So, painting the picture, this is the American West Kansas, very transient population. People are pushing West, pushing West. Lots of people go missing anyway.

So it's going to take quite a lot for people to start to go, hang on a minute, everybody was going to that particular house. Kate's already got a reputation as being a bit of a saucy minks with her spiritualism and her free love and everything else. Do we know who the first person to go missing was? or at least the first person that caught attention because I guess there could have been more. Yeah, so the first person to go missing

who's like attributable to the benders directly is a man called James Ferrick. And he was a railway worker from kind of two counties over and he and his wife were looking to move into the county kind of to the left-hand side of Lebet where the crimes happened. So he says goodbye to his wife. She goes back to New York to have a baby

and she's like waiting to hear from him and waiting to hear from him. and she doesn't. And she starts writing to stops along the railroad saying, has anyone seen my husband? She writes to neighbours in the area saying, you know, has anyone heard from James? And ultimately, because she's quite poor,

she obviously doesn't really have family out there. They've moved out there together after the Civil War. There's nothing she can do. And then ultimately, when the crimes are discovered, it takes two years for him to be identified. but she eventually travels back to Kansas and they assume the corpse and she's able to identify him because he has very distinctive teeth, which I thought was really interesting and also devastating. But then she married another man from that town and actually lived quite a happy life.

But yeah, so he went missing very early on and didn't turn up until much later. But there was a man called William Jones whose body turned up in a creek. Two little boys discovered him. and he's one of the bodies to display these very distinctive head and neck wounds. So he was kind of the first indication to the community that maybe something wasn't quite right. But it wasn't quote unquote bad enough for anyone to really think anything other than it was like a random act of violence at that time.

Wow. So these bodies are showing up, people are going missing and then suddenly the pressure's on to find this quite high profile guy. And you said that the bend is vanished in the middle of the night. They fled. and we'll get to that. But what did the people of the town find? So there's these two bodies.

But presumably they started looking through the Bender's house or their grounds or what happened? So it takes, and this is one of the things that's really interesting is that there's this big man hunt for William York and then the papers declare him dead and the benders disappear. But then there's kind of a month where nobody realizes that they've disappeared.

The weather's very bad and like very bad because it could get that. Like there's a deluge, there's mud, you know, everybody's just trying to look after themselves. And then a young man who lives close to them, Billy Toll, he is looking to move his own livestock. And he hears this noise from the Bender homestead. And it's this kind of really high-pitched whining. And he thinks that's a bit strange. So he goes over to investigate and it's actually a pig that hasn't been fed or watered for obviously a very long time.

And he kind of like tiptoes around the property. and his first thought, as is everyone else's first thought, is oh my goodness, the people who've been killing everyone else have got the vendors. Like the benders have been the victim of a crime. And there's this really distinctive smell of decay on the property and lots of the men who fought in the civil war recognize it as the smell of human decay. And so over a couple of days, they basically pull the property apart looking for the source of this smell.

And eventually they find that the benders have buried. their victims in the apple orchard between the saplings. And it's actually William York's younger brother who's there when his body is discovered. Oh, that's tough. And the detective who's with him, who the family have hired, talks about how devastating that was because it was so, he was the first body and it was so obviously William. So, very tough. And they're just pulling bodies after bodies, after bodies out of the ground.

Yeah, basically. And then as they're pulling bodies out of the ground, thousands of people from nearby villages, towns, people are jumping off the railway trains, getting on horses, getting in carts, everybody just descends onto this crime scene and it's being pulled apart by members of the public sort of as quickly as they can excavate the bodies. No way. Yeah, so they even put on special trains for people to get on. They do not put on special trains. Yeah. So there's an announcement in the paper and it says due to high demand, we'll be running trains from Parsons that will stop halfway along the line and people can get out and you can walk across to the

crime scene. Did nobody at the time go, this is a bit sick? Well, I think so Leroy Dick, who's one of the men who's kind of at the center of this story who's lived in this area his whole life, he talks about how, and he talks about this in the 30s, he's like, oh, you have to understand that back then, that was sort of the only entertainment we had was when something like that happened. And I think, you know, I mean, you see it with Bell Gunness as well. People crawl out of the woodwork and run off with bits and pieces and the Velisca Axe murders as well. Obviously, everything was sort of stripped out of that house. And I think there's so much kind of mythologising of the West that people were aware of at that time. So they wanted these things so they could be part of this story and be part of that local folklore. And the hammers are still around. So they're in a local museum near the murder site. But I'd love to know where all those. bits and pieces when like kettles, stove tops, curtains, you know, floorboards. They just stripped it bare. Yeah.

And they pulled like dirt out of the ground. They pulled trees out of the orchard. They just took everything. I suppose like it shocks me, but we're still obsessed with true crime today, aren't we? Really. I mean, yeah, all right. We're not doing that. But that's, I don't think that phenomenon's gone.

No. And I mean, I think we're only not doing that because we don't have access to crime scenes in the same way. Because obviously everything's extremely controlled now, as it should be, right? Because that's how we find people who commit these crimes. But, you know, people still drive to murder sites. People still, you know, go and see specific houses, specific walkways. You know, it's still very much there.

You're right. Jack the Ripper tours. Exactly. And I mean, when, so Cherryvale, which has the museum, they have a very complicated relationship with those crimes. They used to have a replica cabin, which bought in thousands of people and a lot of revenue for the town, but half the town were really upset by it, and eventually it was, you know, taken down and moved.

It is a weird thing that he must... I've sensed a shift at the moment in crew-time documentaries and true-crime books that we're now all trying to focus on the victims. But a lot of the time, it seems like, no, you're not. What we're doing is we're kind of re-going over the same thing, but re-emphasising who the victim was. And it's a really complex relationship we've got to this because it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that there were real people and real humans and people really did love them and they really were brutally murdered. Oh, absolutely. And I think especially in cases like this where the case is a bit older and maybe there's not as much information like readily available about the victim.

So when I first started researching, the stuff that was available to me, it was like a newspaper article where it says, William McCrottie came from over there and he was a Civil War veteran but it didn't say anything else about him and for me writing the book I really wanted to find out who these people were because obviously they did have families they had dreams a lot of them were carrying

a huge amount of trauma from the Civil War and they were really out there looking to kind of rebuild their lives and also there are so many sources out there that are written by victims, by victims' families you know, you see exchanges in local newspapers, you've got family memoirs, and Mary York's memoir is an incredible piece of writing because she was fed up.

She wrote it a couple of years after the murders and was like, why does everyone care so much about this family? What about my husband? What about all those other people that they killed? So she talks all about William. She tried to find out a lot about the other victims to give them a voice. So she was a really amazing woman to find out a lot more about

she's not, you know, just the name in the paper that she was when I thought. first started. She took over her husband's, or her husband's admin when he went missing. She helped organise the search for him. She had actually been a nurse during the Civil War. That's how they met. She was down working near the front line while he was down there. And he'd been a prisoner of war in a Confederate war camp, which was really, really interesting, all of his experiences. And then their relationship as well with George Longer and his little daughter, Hugo missing. And I think she was such, And I know it's a phrase that's kind of overused,

but she was such a strong woman in such an unforgiving environment. And then after William's body was discovered, she was essentially sort of booted out by the rest of the York family. Susan and I will be back in just a tick. Millions dead, a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the Second World War. America, Britain, Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day.

So why is the Korean War of 1950 to 53 called the Forgotten War? The North Koreans and the South Koreans, even today in the 2020s, they're still officially at war. This July, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this unique conflict was all about. From the halls of power? I've seen documents in the last week where the British Chiefs of Staff are telling Clement Attlee, this might lead to World War III. This might be a nuclear war. To the battlefront. During the Korean War, the ship fired its guns far more than it ever did in the whole of the Second World War, because that's what we were doing, die in, die out.

Join me, James Rogers throughout July on the Warfare podcast from History Hit. As we remember the war, the world forgot. Tell me about the benders disappearing. So they vanished and somebody realizes that their pigs haven't been tended to. Where did they go? Do you know? So the assumption for a very long time was that maybe they had been hunted down by the York family, kind of secretly, and that they'd been executed on the frontier. The York family always denied this. But if you go to Kansas today where, like, we went doing research, my partner and I, a lot of the people in that community still really ascribed to that idea that somebody in that area killed them

and then everyone pretended that they'd gone missing, but that wasn't the case. But I'm, unfortunately, Unfortunately for the community, when I went to the Kansas State Archives, they've got boxes and boxes and boxes of correspondence between the men who were actively pursuing the vendors and the governor and all their expense sheets and statements from people they'd spoken to. And then I also found a series of statements written by a man who'd spent some time with them on the open frontier as well. and they had essentially, they split, they took a train slightly north, and then the older couple went to Missouri, and the younger couple went down through Indian Territory and into Texas, and then they all regrouped down there. And there's lots of eyewitness testimony.

Oh, so they stayed together eventually. Yeah, so they did regroup. So they definitely were a family unit of some sort. I think otherwise they wouldn't have stayed together. They wouldn't have made such an effort to. But they regrouped with the rest of the gang that they were a part of, which was a group of horse thieves led by a man called Missouri Bill. And they were then helped out into the Texas Panhandle

and hid out there as part of a bigger outlaw colony. And the colony at that time was actually quite famous. But the Texas Rangers sort of didn't really want to go after it because it was in really dangerous territory. And at the time the benders are hiding out there. There's the Red River War going on between the military and the Native Americans. So they were kind of very well placed to just fly under the radar for a very long time. And then, I mean, I traced them as far as 1877, and then they do just

drop off the map. So they were never brought to justice. They never got their just desserts for this. No, I mean, there's an arrest of some women in 1889, which is kind of his own whole kettle of fish, where two women are accused of being Marr and Kate and definitely weren't. But the actual Bender family, I mean, it's even things like so many people will call Bender. at that point in time, that the name is useless when you're trying to track them down through things like census records. You can find 12-K benders in one state, and maybe two of them are married to someone called John. So it's very, very difficult to work out exactly what happened to them. Why do you think that this particular crime caused the sensation that it did?

Because, like you said, it was a violent time. People would have, they'd just come through the civil war, for God's sake. They've seen violence. Why did this? this one recaptured the imagination to the point where people are demolishing their house to have a bit of it? I think it was sort of everything that frontier life wasn't supposed to be. I mean, there were an accepted collection of dangers of living on the frontier, whether that was disease or, you know, attacks by Native American tribes looking to take land back or, you know, land disputes between different people in the same area. But the idea that a family had set up this wayside cabin, specifically to intrap and then murder people,

I think was just something that would not have even occurred to people in the general population at that time. It didn't fit the kind of idea of what frontier hospitality was. You know, these were people who were pretending to help. This was a group of people who'd set up a wayside cabin and then welcomed people in. You know, it was a very difficult... When we drove out there, I mean, it's so vast.

It's so vast. What was it like when you went when you sort of saw what it was like? It was amazing. I mean, I don't think I could have written the book the way that I did if I hadn't been because I grew up in the London suburbs. And you go out there to Kansas and it's, you know, like incredible. It's big. It's vast.

It's beautiful. But then you go down to southeast Kansas and you just think, oh my gosh, the people who were out here trying to live, it's so difficult. I mean, I'd never been anywhere where it just stretched. and stretched and stretched. And I mean, you drive for six hours and see two towns. And when you grow up in the UK, that's just unfathomable, basically. I mean, I think that, yeah, the scale of the place.

And I suppose as well, it's the idea that you've been murdered in someone's home where you're supposed to be safe and something else that we've kind of lost a bit today. Like, if somebody knocked on your door tonight and went, hi, I'm a traveler, I'm somewhere waiting the next town, can I stay over? You'd go get out of here. I'm phoning the police. but that was completely normal practices for like maybe even thousands of years because people were so remote people would stay at their homestead and it was supposed to be a place of safety yeah and i mean that

particular area of kansas is a bit like that now still you know you could turn up and say you could we sleep here overnight and somebody would be like yeah of course no no problem and i mean now the other really interesting thing is that at the time i was writing about it it was very much kind of it's a hometown. That whole area is one of the most prosperous in Kansas in the west even. You know, you've got Fort Dodge near, you've got cowboys, you've got, you know, every kind of Western archetype you can think of is wandering around. And now it's deeply, deeply poor. It's a really difficult place to live. All the agriculture has been taken over by engineering. It's all automated. So all these communities have lost their main source of income. And you, you know, you go to these

little museums and you see this very rich, illustrious past that people, I mean, some of it's still in living memory for these people. They've got, you know, great grandparents who remember these places as being some of the most beautiful and busy in America. And now crime is through the roof. There's drug addiction. It's just really hard. And I think that's an amazing thing to see that just really reinforces how transient that lifestyle was, even if they didn't realize it at the time. So let me ask you this, and this is the million dollar question. What do you think was going on in that house? Do you think it was one person doing the killing?

Do you think it was a group effort? From the research that you've done, what's your gut on this one? My personal feeling is that probably Kate, I get the impression, she was quite greedy, she was quite vain. She obviously had very big aspirations for herself, but I think she was also quite lazy. And we don't really know, obviously, how she grew up, whether I'm sure she experienced some deeply unpleasant things, has did lots of women on the frontier in those scenarios.

But my personal feeling is that you are looking at a group of people who are all more than willing to be complicit in murder. I think the way that they posit the murders happened is that they had a wagon curtain dividing the space and she would sit with a man at a table and kind of chat him up, maybe do a circle, talk to some ghosts, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And while he was sat with his head to the back of the curtain, either John Gebhard or par vendor would come up and strike them on the back of the head.

So you're definitely looking at a communal effort. I don't think there was anyone in that family who was like, oh, guys, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. Or anyone who could not have known it was happening. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just not possible. You're looking at one room divided by a curtain, and there's no way that, you know, you sleep through 11 murders or anything like that.

No. And Kate was obviously such an integral part of how the crime was committed, that there's no way she wasn't there. And Ma is kind of a bit of an enigma as well, but she's always described by witnesses as sort of sitting in the corner and mumbling. Oh, that's, I mean, that would be a red flag, wouldn't it? Oh, my gosh, yeah. If someone invited you in and there's just a random woman sat there mumbling away,

that's, yeah, run. And I mean, some, so there are a lot of, like, bullet holes in the cabin. They realized when they'd gone through and sort of looked, at everything before it was whisked away. And one of the men who was killed was like a very big man and he had defensive wounds up and down his arms. So obviously the first hit hadn't been enough. And then I think that's where you need four people.

If you've got a huge man who's armed because most people travelling were, then one person is not going to be enough to take them out. Were there any survivors? Does anyone like come out of the woodwork and go, I'd have this really weird night with them actually? Yeah, so there is so, much of this. Basically everybody and their mother who had ever sort of gone near Kansas

came out with stories about the benders and I had to do a lot of sifting when I was writing the book to look for ones that felt like they were very legitimate. One of the ones that I ended up including was an account by a woman called Julia Hessler who'd worked with Kate at a local hotel. She was really interested in spiritualism. Kate says, oh, why don't you come out? We'll do a seance. So she goes out there and then while she's doing the seance, the rest of the family sort of appear in the room and she gets really spooked by it because Kate's not really interacting with her properly and she basically says, I need the toilet. And she gets up and she just runs into the night away from the cabin. And the family come out after her and, you know, they're like looking for her.

She's hiding in the grass. I mean, she's interesting because obviously she was a woman. Yeah. From the local area. So I don't necessarily know. know if they ever would have killed her, but they were certainly having a bit of fun with her. And I think that's something that I felt more and more like they just had a really mean sense of humour because there are lots of different accounts of Kate being very friendly and then being very, very nasty out of nowhere. That's interesting. Yeah. And also, you know, if you said you weren't interested in what she was selling, she'd get very annoyed. There's a great account by a woman whose daughter-in-law, lost her husband and Kate's like hounding her like let me talk to him let me talk to him for you

and this older woman says you leave my family alone dead and alive because she had become such a pest wow and Kate reacts very badly to that and sort of won't speak to the family anymore and you know openly talks about how rubbish they are as a group of people so she is really interesting in that respect she is do you think she became the focus of this because she was the likely culprit or because she was a woman and there's something, they need to throw in a femme fatale somewhere. Like, we have to try and make it sexy somehow. Yeah, and I think she had obviously presented herself to the community as very sexy and obviously enjoyed the attention she got from that.

But then as a woman who is complicit in crimes within the domestic environment, she's also committed kind of the ultimate corruption of womanhood. Like a woman in the house is supposed to be, at that point in time, certainly like, submissive and warm and caring and maternal. And not only has she been involved in the murder of men, she's also being complicit in the murder of a child and shows she really is kind of this ultimate perversion of what a beautiful 19th century woman should be.

So I think that is really why people just essentially couldn't get enough of the story. I mean, there's accounts sort of 10 years later who were like, I saw Kate Bender walking naked out of the woods. And you just think, well, you didn't, did you? That is a fib, isn't it? But that's the kind of thing, you know, and they're all under kind of anonymous sources.

And stories about, you know, people hunting down the family always have Kate as kind of biting and snarling and riding around and really putting up a fight to the last. She's such a weird frontier figure in that respect because she's not quite a female outlaw like Pearl Star, but she's also obviously not quite Burgess either. She's somewhere in the middle in this kind of murky terror. Have you found at all in your research any comparable cases to this? I don't think I've heard of a family of serial killers. That's proper Texas chainsaw massacre stuff that is. Have you found anything similar? So interestingly, about two years after the Bender Crimes occurred, there was a family called the Kelly family who did exactly the same thing in a town about three hours north of Lebet County. And it's the same thing. So you've got an older couple and then you've got, I think there was,

were slightly more children in this family, but there was a young woman who was sort of very well thought of in the village. But the difference there is that they were immediately caught and killed by the community. As soon as they tried to run, they were hunted down. The older woman fell off her horse and broke her neck. And they basically just shot them and buried them in the ground. So there's no mystery to it. And obviously, it had been done before by that point in time. But there were people who thought, oh, well, that must have been the vendors, right? Because otherwise, why would they do the exact same thing? But other than that, I mean, not really. They're so unique in the crimes and also very unique to a time and place. I mean, it'd be very difficult to do that now.

God, it would, wouldn't it? It's just not a plausible crime anymore. And don't try it, anybody who's listening to this either. I think that's quite important. We'll throw that out there. But, like, the idea that there's a family doing this, that's I think the fact they've disappeared. They were just like Willow the Whisp. They're just up and we don't have the answers. We don't know why they did it. We don't know what the motivations were.

Was there a ringleader? It just all adds to this mystery, doesn't it? Yeah. And I couldn't believe, you know, discovering that they basically knew where they were for about five years. You know, and they kept going to the Texas Rangers and being like, will you help us? And the Texas Rangers said, no, that's not our problem. That's your problem. And like the governor had to pull the funding for the search because lots of people in Kansas

thought he was wasting the money, which I thought was really interesting. And normally you have some person, some detective, some rich man who's desperate to make a name for himself and says, you know what, I'll fund this search. I'm going to go and get the vendors. I'm going to earn myself, you know, the highest laurel in frontier history. But there just was nobody who did that. And they essentially got away because there wasn't enough money or cooperation between the States, which I mean, you see up until a lot more present-day crime, sometimes that lack of cooperation across state lines. But I was like, oh, it really took them a long, long time to change that, huh? That's, I mean, it's kind of crazy. Think about it, like, that you could go to the local

law enforcement and go, hi, we've discovered 13 bodies. We'd quite like you to find these people and them just going, no. Yeah. And they obviously, like, they were dealing with a lot more. We've got a lot on. Essentially. But also, the benders don't have that kind of, sheen that people like Billy the kid have. They're not glamorous, are they? No, because the crimes are so awful. And I think that's also why they never quite reach that level of like frontier notoriety, because you see in the true crime community,

there's kind of like the big names that everyone knows. And then there's other crimes which just feel like they're worse or they're icky or they're just not glamorous, like you said. There's nothing that you can do to make them a bit. appear that way either. Susan, you have been absolutely incredible to talk to and you've absolutely blown my mind with this case. I'd never heard of it before. But if people want to find out more about you and your research, where can they find you? So I'm on Twitter just at my name, which is Susan Johnis. I post a lot more on my Instagram, which is the same thing. And the title of the book?

Because everyone should run and buy this right now. So the title of the book is Hell's Half Acre, the story of the Benders, a serial killer family on the American frontier. You have been amazing to talk to. Thank you so much for sharing your research with me. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Susan for sharing your remarkable work on this piece of history that I hadn't heard about before. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.

Thank you.