Legends of the Old West - FRONTIER TRAGEDY Ep. 6 | Bloody Benders, Part 2

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

A father and his daughter go missing in Labette County, Kansas in late 1872. A neighbor searches for them, and he never comes home. His wife sounds the alarm. Search parties descend on the Bender farm. The Benders are long gone, but the victims of their murderous deeds remain. Local authorities hunt for the Bender clan, but justice proves elusive. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. To purchase an ad on this show please reach out: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Warning. This episode contains scenes of graphic violence that may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. At dawn on May 6, 1873, Township Trustee Leroy Dick stared at the bender cabin from his horse. More men rode up behind him. They converged just outside the structure. People brought shovels and flasks of coffee. Leroy whistled and called the group to attention. He divided the volunteers into three groups.

He instructed the first one to go search nearby Drum Creek. He told the second group to tear apart the interior of the Bender's barn and dig up the ground around the structure. He informed the third group that they were coming with him. They were going into the cabin. The volunteers broke formation and headed for their assigned tasks. As soon as Leroy's group entered the cabin, the smell overwhelmed them. The Benders were gone, and they had been terrible housekeepers during their three years on the property, but the lack of basic cleaning wasn't the problem. The worst of the smell came from a specific source. Leroy and his crew moved to the back half of the cabin. They threw aside the nasty

canvas curtain that divided the front half from the back half, and they found the trapdoor in the floor that Leroy had discovered during an earlier visit. They pulled up the trapdoor, climbed down into the cellar, and tried not to vomit. Many of these men, including Leroy, were Civil War veterans. They knew the smell of human decomposition, and they were smelling it now. But they didn't see any bodies. The only thing in the cellar was the seven-foot piece of sandstone that was used for the floor. They needed to lift it and see what was underneath. To do that, they would have to break the sandstone into chunks. To do that, they would have to move the entire cabin. They drove circular logs under the base of the small rectangular building and tied ropes to the logs.

They tied the ropes to horses, gave the signal, and the horses started to pull. Eventually, the horses dragged the cabin a few yards away, enough to give the men access to the cellar. yards away, enough to give the men access to the cellar. The volunteers poked at the soil around the sandstone, and an even stronger smell wafted up. Several of the men stumbled away to throw up. The town doctor announced that the soil was drenched with human blood, both new and old. There were no bodies, but there certainly had been at some point. The search party dug around the immediate area of the cabin, but they found nothing until sunset. Then, a man named Edward York moved toward the apple orchard. He spotted an irregularity in the topsoil among the saplings. He asked someone to bring him a metal rod.

He pushed it hard into the dirt. At about four feet deep, it encountered resistance. Pulling it out, a horrible odor came with it. Leroy and other men hurried over to dig. Minutes later, Leroy's shovel found a heavy, lifeless weight beneath the soil. It was the upper body of a man. He was one of the more recent victims, which was why Edward York was able to recognize him immediately. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're bringing you the disturbing stories of the Donner Party and the Bender family, a murderous clan who were known as the Bloody Benders. This is Episode 6, The Bloody Benders, Part 2 of 2, The Cherryvale Horror.

Reveal Horror. In 1872, farmer George Longcore lived in Rutland Township, Kansas, in the next county over from Labette County. For 18 months, he had taken care of his daughter, Mary Ann, mostly by himself. She was 18 months old, and George's wife had died during childbirth. His neighbors, the York family, had helped when they could, but William and Mary York had four kids of their own, and they couldn't provide the kind of help that George needed to take care of his young daughter and run his farm at the same time. By December of 1872, George conceded that he needed more help than was available in rural Kansas. His wife's family in Iowa wanted him to bring Mary Ann up to live with them, and George finally agreed. He bundled Mary Ann into a wagon that had been loaned to him by William York. They headed northeast and stopped at the Bender cabin to rest along the way.

About six weeks later, in late January of 1873, William York received a letter from George's in-laws in Iowa. George and Mary Ann never arrived in Iowa, and the in-laws were concerned. William was concerned too. He was fond of the little family, and he'd heard rumors of people disappearing on the trail in Labette County. Then he received another piece of news. Outside a village several miles away, a wagon, similar to the one he'd loaned to George, had been found. The wagon was abandoned,

and inside was clothing that belonged to a man and a little girl. On March 4th, William York said goodbye to his family and set out to search for the Longcores. When he reached the site of the abandoned wagon, he confirmed it was the one he'd loaned to his friend two and a half months earlier. The wagon was not on the route that George had said he would use to go to Iowa, so William knew there had to be foul play. Frustrated, William returned home and packed up for a more substantial investigation. He told his wife that regardless of whether or not he found them, he'd return

by March 18th. He also notified his sheriff of his mission. On or about March 10th, he set out to the northeast. William York traveled all the way to Osage Mission, 45 miles away. No one had seen the Longcores. He spent the night at a lodging house, and in the morning, he headed back down south. William York never arrived home. March 18th came and went. Mary York was despondent. She called on her husband's brother, Alexander York, who was a state senator. Alexander contacted a third brother, Edward. Edward and Alexander went to Osage Mission, the last place anyone had seen their brother. Then they started working their way south. About halfway between Osage Mission and Cherryvale was a town called Parsons. In Parsons,

the brothers received a credible description of their brother from a general store owner. The owner may have even told them that their brother had planned to stay at the bender cabin down the trail. Satisfied he'd been there recently, they searched the area. Someone suggested they add a person to their search team, a man who was familiar with the Osage Trail. That person was Leroy Dick, a township trustee in Labette County. Leroy was relieved to hear from the York brothers. For nearly 18 months, he'd hoped that the disappearances in and around his county would resolve themselves, but they never did. He was happy to join forces with Senator York and his brother. never did. He was happy to join forces with Senator York and his brother. Edward York was blunt and asked the question, did Leroy know of anyone in the area who seemed suspicious? Leroy thought long

and hard before replying. People on the frontier were quick to spread gossip and unfounded stories, but he had to say it. He'd been hearing complaints about the Benders for almost two years now. He talked about the complaints about the Bender seances, missing horses in town, the missing people from the trail, and the generally strange behavior. Lastly, he recounted the theft of jewelry and cashier's checks from two German women who had stayed with the family. Leroy hadn't seen the older Benders for a few months, but the York brothers were sold. There seemed to be plenty of probable cause to have a chat with the Bender family. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you.

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Alexander York took the lead. He picked up a detective from a nearby county and a friend of his lost brother. On March 28, 1873, they went to the Bender cabin. The two younger members of the family, Kate and John Gebhard, were home. As Kate welcomed the three men into the cabin, Senator York got an idea. He explained that his brother was missing. Kate portrayed herself as a person with clairvoyant powers. Maybe she could tell them where William York was. Kate invited them to sit down. York did so, but the other two men remained standing. Kate began to sing out a jumble of Latin and German. The senator was patient, but the other men weren't. John Gebhard sensed their

anxiety. He interrupted and said he'd been shot at the previous Christmas, near a spot where the body of a missing person had been found. He insisted that they follow him down to the spot. Kate urged them to do so, and she said she needed about a week or so to consult with the spirits about a case as big as the one Alexander York had presented. They should come back then. Gephard talked non-stop about how someone tried to kill him by his creek the previous winter. Later, the men realized he was just trying to deflect and keep them from searching the property. But at this moment, they thought he was just simple-minded. Senator York thought the entire family was simple and eccentric,

but he wasn't convinced they were killers. Though the senator and his two companions agreed the family was hiding something. The three men left to get instructions for deputizing a group of men to legally search every cabin in the area, starting with the Bender cabin. Senator York didn't want the public to hear of their suspicion of the family and to have a lynch mob arrive before they could do a proper search. So, he kept up the pretense of needing to search every house in the vicinity. He also wrote to the governor, asking the state to offer reward money for the person or persons who were responsible for the disappearance of so many people in this little corner of Kansas. On April 8th, Leroy Dick held a town meeting at the Harmony Grove Schoolhouse, which served Cherryvale.

It was standing room only. He told the people what he knew. Over the last six months alone, eight men and one little girl had vanished on the trail through Labette County. Two of them had turned up dead, and there were probably more they didn't know about, not to mention the deaths and disappearances from the past two years. Everyone left the schoolhouse that night, feeling confident that the perpetrators would soon be caught. But the next day, a powerful rain system moved in.

For more than two weeks, it rained so hard that visibility was virtually nil, and the roads were impassable by people or horses. The search was postponed, much to the York family's disappointment. On the first day of May, there was a brief break in the rain. A man named Billy Toll owned a homestead that was connected to a corner of the Bender land. He took advantage of the clear weather to do some work around his farm. At midday, he set out to round up the cattle that had gone missing during the storm. He rode past the Bender cabin, and when he approached, he heard a high-pitched whine from an animal.

He thought it was strange that none of the benders came out to check on the troubling noise, so he investigated for himself. He found a pig lying on the ground, starving to death. He jogged over to the barn to get some food for the pig, but he had to stop about 15 feet away. barn to get some food for the pig, but he had to stop about 15 feet away. The smell from the barn was overwhelming. Having worked on a farm his entire life, he knew it was the smell of a dead animal. He covered his nose with his sleeve and kicked the door of the rudimentary barn. He was immediately hit by a wall of flies. A dead calf lay on the floor of the damp and putrid enclosure. He managed to grab a bag of feed for the pig, and by now he was furious about the mistreatment of the animals. Billy Toll stalked over to the bender cabin. He lost his nerve for a direct

confrontation, so he flattened himself against a wall and peered into the building. It was dark and he couldn't see much inside, but he could smell, and the stench was very similar to what he had just experienced in the barn. Billy Toll rode away and informed two of his friends, who agreed to go into the cabin with him. They had to fight through a cloud of flies. The Bender cabin was clearly deserted. The family had left a lot of stuff behind, indicating they left in a hurry.

Billy and his friends hurried to Leroy Dick. When Leroy heard that the men had entered the cabin without permission, he was upset. When Leroy heard that the men had entered the cabin without permission, he was upset. Even as the suspicion grew around the Bender family, Leroy still entertained the possibility that they had left because they felt harassed by Senator York and his companions. All the same, if the Benders were gone, it was up to Leroy to take a full inventory of the home and its goods. He would eventually have to sell the

place, or, God forbid, make sure everything was accounted for if the Benders suddenly came back. But deep down, he felt sure they were guilty of something and he wanted to go look around. On May 5th, 1873, Leroy went to the Bender homestead. In 1873, Leroy went to the Bender homestead. He was halted by the same smell that hit Billy Toll. But as a Civil War veteran, Leroy knew this was not just from a dead calf in the barn. It was human decomposition, and he figured he might have stumbled into the final resting place of William York. Then he noticed a huge mound of manure piled against the side of the barn.

A closer look told him it wasn't manure. It was topsoil, and a lot of it. Someone had been digging awfully deep somewhere around the property and piling the dirt next to the barn. Going into the cabin, Leroy smelled the unwashed dishes and rotting food, but he could tell there was another source. At the back of the cabin, behind the canvas curtain, he noticed a leather strap protruding from underneath a mattress. When he kicked the mattress aside, a fresh odor assaulted him. He pulled the strap and opened a trap door. He peered down into a cellar until the smell of it became unbearable.

He didn't see any bodies, but they had to have been there at some point. Leroy closed the trap door and stepped back. He looked around while gathering his senses. He knelt by the stove to see if he could figure out how recently it had been used. Then he discovered the hammers. There were three of them, stuffed underneath the oven. One was a three-inch claw hammer. The second had a longer handle and an elongated head. The last was a homemade sledgehammer, and it was heavy. The hammers, along with the smell in the cellar, made him extremely suspicious. He wrapped up the hammers in newspapers and packed them into his saddlebags.

Riding off toward his home in town, he passed two local men. He told them of his discoveries. The two men reminded him of a recent news article. He told them of his discoveries. The two men reminded him of a recent news article. A funny-looking wagon had been discovered broken up and abandoned in a nearby town a few weeks earlier. Leroy rode home, and a few hours later, one of the men he'd met on the trail showed up at his house.

The man said he had ridden out to the spot of the abandoned wagon and inspected it. He believed it was the Bender wagon, which seemed to confirm that they were gone. Leroy was back at the Bender farm before dawn the next morning. A dozen or so volunteers rode up to help him search the property. He split them into groups, gave them their orders, and they started their work. They searched the nearby creek. They searched the barn. They pulled the cabin off of its foundation to gain access to the cellar. A local doctor examined the floor of the cellar and said there was evidence of blood everywhere. But there were still no bodies. Then, Edward York found a horse bridle wedged behind the ramshackle grocery counter inside the Bender house.

It belonged to his missing brother, William. He moved outside and looked beyond the throngs of people who were digging haphazardly around the front of the cabin. His gaze fell on the apple orchard. He walked out to the saplings and saw the disturbed soil. orchard. He walked out to the saplings and saw the disturbed soil. He poked around the soil with a metal rod and soon uncovered the body of his brother, William. Some men gently led Edward York away and promised to carefully exhume William's body for a proper burial. When William's body was out of the ground, the doctor examined it. The back of William's head had been smashed in, probably with something like a hammer, and there was a deep gash in his throat.

And after that discovery, it didn't take long to find the other bodies. Leroy Dick did his best to secure the area until the next day. Then, at sunup, scores of men and women descended on the property. Word of possible atrocities on the Bender farm spread quickly, and everyone wanted to see. Local officials tried in vain to keep people beyond a perimeter of the cabin. Billy Toll poked around a place in the ground that he thought looked different from its surroundings. Pushing a pole deep into the ground released a smell that made him gag.

He'd found another body. Leroy ran over to look and nearly passed out. It was his wife's cousin, Henry McKenzie, who had gone missing six months earlier. Just like William York, McKenzie's head was bashed in and his neck was sliced. He was naked except for a white undershirt. Though McKenzie had been married for years, he liked the company of pretty women. Leroy and his wife theorized that Kate Bender had lured McKenzie into the home.

After he was killed, they stole the expensive, flashy clothing that he always wore. After the discovery of McKenzie, the rest happened fast. Searchers found the bodies of William McCrotty and Benjamin Brown, both of whom disappeared the previous year. Then there were three more bodies discovered. Johnny Broyle's body was discovered stuffed down the Bender's well. As horrible as those discoveries were, the discovery of bodies number seven and eight were worse.

Those were George Longcore and his young daughter Mary Ann, who was 18 months old when they went missing. George's throat had been cut so deeply that his head fell at an unnatural angle. Mary Ann's body was in the grave with her father. The doctor found no marks on her body and no signs of strangulation or cutting. He was left with the heartbreaking conclusion that she had been buried alive. After examining all of the victims and the scene, the doctor gave his opinion as to what had happened over the previous two years or so.

People would stay at the Bender cabin because of its convenient location, or Kate Bender or John Gephard would lure them to the premises with promises of speaking to dead relatives. Kate had advertised herself to the community as a spiritualist who communicated with the dead, and she held strange seances at the cabin. When desperate people fell into the trap and agreed to a seance, Kate would station them at the table with their backs to the canvas curtain that separated the front half of the cabin from the back half. Then, Pa Bender or John Gephardt or both would sneak up on the unsuspecting victims from behind

the curtain. They would hit the victims in the head with a hammer to knock them out. Ma Bender and Kate would steal anything of value. Someone would cut the victims' throats and then push them down into the cellar. Finally, at night, away from any possible witnesses, they would bury the victims in the apple orchard behind the house. The discoveries caused a sensation. On May 15th alone, more than 3,000 people visited the scene of the Cherryvale Horror. Newsmen flocked to the prairie from as far away as New York and Chicago. The papers dubbed the scene Hell's Half Acre,

and the hunt for the benders started even before the last body was exhumed. And the hunt for the benders started even before the last body was exhumed. State Senator Alexander York offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the family's arrest. He also secured a $500 reward from the state of Kansas, which then increased to $2,000. With the benders in the wind, rumors of accomplices swirled. How could one family accomplish something so diabolical without help? The town suspected Rudolf Brockmann, co-owner of a trading post, who had welcomed them in the first place. He would be in a position to sell stolen items. Mostly, though, they suspected him because he was German, like the Bender clan.

Authorities arrested a traveling preacher and a couple who lived just west of the Benders because they had attended more than one seance at the cabin. Ultimately, the accusations and the rumors were hollow and false, and all of the accused were released. A search party traced the Benders to the nearby town of Thayer, about 12 miles to the north. The family purchased tickets on a northbound train to Humboldt, Kansas, which had connecting trains to Texas and Missouri.

The train's conductor seemed to remember the group. He said Ma and Pa Bender took a train to St. Louis. John Gephardt and Kate Bender took a train south to the Red River Country near Denison, Texas. But from there, details became scarce. There appeared to be a few credible sightings of Kate and John in Texas, but after that, the trail went cold. Over the next 15 years, tips poured in,

but none were strong enough to produce the criminals or to collect the rewards. Every so often, people claiming to be the benders or charging others with that identity, made news, but nothing came of those cases either. Then, in 1889, it seemed like at least two of the Benders had surfaced. A woman in Kansas, Frances McCann, had a neighbor named Sarah Davis. One day, Davis became severely ill and had a fever for several days. Davis became severely ill and had a fever for several days. McCann supposedly heard Davis reveal her true identity as Kate Bender. Shortly thereafter, Sarah Davis moved to Michigan,

as if she had realized her mistake and quickly fled the area. Francis McCann stalked Sarah Davis in Michigan for months, leaving her own family for long periods of time to do so. She found that Davis lived with an old, stooped woman. It wasn't too much of a leap for her to believe that the woman was Ma Bender. McCann managed to convince her local sheriff that she was telling the truth, and the newspapers were starting to run the story anyway. So, the Labette County District Attorney felt he had no choice but to have Sarah Davis and the newspapers were starting to run the story anyway. So, the Labette County District Attorney felt he had no choice but to have Sarah Davis and the older woman arrested and brought to trial. The defendants didn't help their case.

Davis, for whatever reason, but probably for attention, admitted to a police officer that the older woman was, in fact, Ma Bender. The older woman became angry at the accusation and filed a report against Sarah Davis. The accusation snowballed to the point where they screamed obscenities at each other during their preliminary court appearances and had to be held back from attacking each other. They went to trial in Kansas on November 1, 1889. It was the first time that residents of Cherryvale, the closest town to the Bender farm,

received a good look at the defendants. The townspeople were adamant that the women were not Kate and Ma Bender. Fortunately for the defendants, their attorney offered such convincing evidence of mistaken identity that the prosecutor moved for dismissal of the case. But not everybody agreed with the judgment of mistaken identity,

including Leroy Dick. No matter what people believed, there would be no real closure in the case of the bloody Benders. John Gebhardt and John Bender, known as Paw, seemingly disappeared after a while. People in Kansas picked the Bender property clean of any visible trace that they had been there. Leroy Dick bundled up the hammers that were probably murder weapons, but everything else was stolen. The cabin and the structures were dismantled, and the wood and that were probably murder weapons, but everything else was stolen. The cabin and

the structures were dismantled, and the wood and nails were taken. The Bender property has been owned by two or three people over the years, until 2020. Then it went up for auction, and the man who bought it recently commissioned the geology department at the University of Kansas to do research on the site. Thus far, field studies have turned up little, but it's a big chore. The precise route of the old Osage Trail is still debated, which makes it hard to find the exact location of the bender cabin and its orchard. Maybe one day, a tip or a family diary will explain exactly where the Benders fled to and what became of them. Until that day, as Western journalist and author Max McCoy put it,

the Benders vanished from history only to reappear in nightmares. Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's a companion series to the stories of Wild Bill Hickok and Texas Jack Omohundro, though it's one that obviously stands on its own. It's the story of the iconic scout, frontiersman, and entertainer, the man, the myth, the legend, Buffalo Bill Cody. That's next time on Legends of the Old West. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week to receive new episodes.

They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. And they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Julia Bricklin. Original music by Rob Valliere. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details, and join us on social media.

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