The Bloody Benders: A Serial-Killing Family

What was your topic though, Michelle, The Bloody Bender as as as as a Bloody Benders. Yeah, the Blenders, the Benders, the Bloody, the Bloody Blender, the Buddy, the Buddy Bloody Bender Blenders, the Buddy Bloody Bender blood the Bloody Buddy Blender, Benders. There you go, but Benders their last name Benders. Okay, Okay, I thought it was like a ghost that just bends. Imagine that like that's yes, I can't imagine that, and I hate just like you've just said, Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle. Wow. Are we ready? We're ready? Are we ready? Okay, we have to get in the time machine. Let's go. There are those your new time machine glasses? Yeah, the doileys protection guys for those who can't see Edwin. He has a blanket on his head and now he has doileys in front of his eyes. For some reason, it's for audio, the doilies. No, they've blake it. Okay, we got to get in the time machine. Let's go. Ready, in the washing machines. I mean it does both things, but it takes gasoline. Oh, we're here. Good. That was too much, Yeah, it was went too far. It's October of eighteen seventy. You have no idea when that is, do you? No? I try to imagine. No, it's we're in the West, a couple of years after the Civil War. You're traveling, you Edwin along a newly opened Kansas territory. It's time to find adventured fortune after the war, and you want to explore the west. Kansas is still wild and you haven't passed any travelers on this road for quite a while. You notice it's getting late and you're tired, and your back hurt and you're hungry, and off in the distance you see a nice cabin. And on that cabin, it says the bender in and grocery friendly smoke drifts out of the chimney. The aroma of something delicious on the wind gets your nose. So nice, Ah, yeah, so pleasant. I mean I imagine it's like probably like dusk, and it's like you hear the sound of the horse clothing. You know, you're on your horse, and you're like, oh, that'll be a nice place to rest. You set up your horse in the barn and enter the inn. You're welcomed by a beautiful young woman. She says her name is Kate. You ask for a meal and a place to rest. The young man at the counter takes your money. Kate introduces him as her brother, John Junior, and Kate escorts you to the head of the table as an older woman, probably her mother, places a big plate of stew in front of you. M smells good. Then bam, everything goes black. Am I dead? Yeah, it's a nice way to go, I'll give you that. I mean, yeah, I mean everything's been pretty good up until that moment, so it's not bad. It's not bad, especially after all the horrors you've seen during the Civil War. So worse ways to go. I must suck though, you survive all that and then and then just die. So I tried to write some jingles for basically, I wrote welcome to the Bender in Welcome to the Bender and you're home away from home, and then I wrote, well, I feel like I qut the eagles too many times on here because it's you could check out, but you could never leave like that, Like such a good line, though, why it is, but like we use it all the time. We've used it at least on at least one, but probably two others. I think two. Yeah, I think two. Even if it's gotten cut out, we've definitely used it. And then don't go on a bender at the bender in. And then here's a story about the bloody Benders who are bringing up two very awful kids, all of them loved gold but also murder. And then I couldn't think of a loud And then it just says the youngest one in curls, which you might have had. Yeah, it's possible. Anyway. This might sound like a seen from some sort of horror movie, but it's actually a true story behind the first family of serial killers, the Benders. After the Civil War in the eighteen sixties, many Americans wanted to open up the Kansas Territory to homesteading. But there was a problem because the O Sage Indian tribe was still there, and in the classic American style, they were relocated by the government to a reservation in Oklahoma. And so basically this trail that they marched the O Sage down became the main road, the only road open at the time for traveling farther west. So that's where this road is in October eighteen seventy a man and his son, John Bender Senior, around sixty years old at the time, believed to be a German immigrant, and John Bender Junior, around twenty five at this time, settled in the county with four other families. The Benders settled one hundred and sixty acre homestead that faced the Osage Trail, Okay. So they built their cabin right by this trail, the main road to the west. If you wanted to go further west, you had to go buy the Bender's cabin. So once they built this cabin and they built a barn and a corral, they sent for the mother and the daughter to join them. And in eighteen seventy one, Miss Elvira Bender fifty five years old, who spoke very little English at that time, and her daughter, Miss Kate Bender, twenty three, who spoke fluent English, arrived at the cabin John Senior pa. John Senior was described by those around him as quote as a repulsive, hideous brute without any redeeming trait, dirty, profaned, ill tempered, and it was generally believed that his son, John Junior was a dim wit because he yeah, I mean, nobody really liked this family that John Junior was a dim wid because he had a tendency to laugh at anything, the neighbors said, and that seeing John Junior excited brought a grave robbing hyena to mind, which is a quote from someone who knew them, like a neighbor. What does that sound like? I'm imagining someone who laughs at inappropriate times because I thought, like the way that they laugh or sounding like this is annoying, high pitched like that like that. I don't know if that's it, but I mean, I guess it could be like you laugh at inappropriate times, but also brave robbing hyena, which is like what is that? What does a great what is a grave robbing hyena? Also at the time, how did they know what hyenas were? Right? Like? Do they have hyena in Kansas? What about maybe someone went to a zoo. I don't know zoos. I think so yeah. I mean King's always had weird little little things where they kept animals, But I don't know how common hyenas were anyway. Elvira aka Ma was notorious ill tempered and called a she devil and a dirty old Dutch chron cheese. I'd like the insults though, those are like very I know me too. They really thought about it, and I honestly hope I get described as that one day. That's an honor that I'm hoping to achieve. A grave robbing hyena, Yeah, that's the one I'm still stuck on because it was in multiple locations and so it was like I wasn't going to include it. But then it's like was in multiple sources of research where I'm like, why does this quote keep coming up? So someone it was the quote about him where he just inappropriately laughed. What is a grave robbing hyena? Is it anything? Or is just ugh? So just a hyena then, because in the Middle East, striped hyenas have been recorded digging up graves, the link with grave robbing or eating human remains has added to the horror with which they are viewed. So it's just a hyena, Like that's the hyena. Okay, Well that's interesting. I'll put a pin in that because that might explain more as we go forward. So anyway, we get to Kate, the beautiful youngest of all the venders. Kate stirred up the settlers by not only being pretty, but she was a self proclaimed healer and psychic, and she held seances to speak to the dead, and she openly practiced and gave lectures on spirituality and her ability to cure illness, which was not unheard of at the time. So she was like a spiritualist. So I guess they were all spiritualists. However, she did cause quite a scandal when it became known that she supported free love outside of marriage, free love and general, which is pretty progressive and shocking at the time, but either way, she was into it. And then I found this other quote courtesy of Wikipedia's Kate proclaimed herself responsible to no one save herself. She professed to be a medium of spiritualism and delivered lectures on the subject. In her lectures, she publicly declared that murder might be for good, in that what the world might deem villainy, her soul might read bravery, nobility, and humanity. She advocated free love and denounced all social regulations for the promotion of purity and the prevention of carnality, which she has called miserable requirements of self constituted society. She maintained cardinal relations with her brother and boldly proclaimed her right to do so. Shall we confine ourselves to a single love and deny our nature's their proper suay, even though it be a brother's passion for his own and sister, I say it should not be smothered the voice. Look, I'm channeling Kate right now. And anyway, she was into doing it with her brother and doing it with whoever. So that drew the people in. People liked to go to the vendors. In summary, it was to say their business was doing great, and in eighteen seventy one it was enough to draw people to the end to see what all the hype was about. And the inn itself was a fairly large, one room cabin. The vendors decided to hang a large sheet of canvas to separate the cabin into two parts. The back was their living quarters and the front housed a small general store, kitchen and the dining area. Wow, sounds like a big place though. Still Look, there's not a lot going on out on the prairie. If someone's like, oh, I'm going to do a sand Oh I'm going to sleep with my brother, Oh I'm gonna people just want to go watch. Yeah. I meant like the sayan spot, but also like yes and no, not a lot to do, not a lot to do. It's like now though, like we watched you know when people take the they clean the hoofs off of horses and donkeys, and we just sit there watching a video for like half an hour. So much I watched those all the time. I can't stop. That's what I imagine back then, like hey guys, I'm gonna go cook a kill a chicken. All right, I'll go, and then they go watch. It's like free entertainment. Anyway, we have a bit of a scene change. The idyllic prairie scene turned grizzly in May eighteen seventy one when a man's body was founded in nearby creek. His skull was bashed in and his throat was slit, and in February eighteen seventy two, the bodies of two more men were found nearby with the same gruesome injuries. And by the fall of eighteen seventy two, news of the brutal murders and if several unexplained disappearances had spread far and wide, and people were afraid to travel the route so they avoided it all together. There were like stories of it being paranormal and all sorts of things. So in the early spring of eighteen seventy three, a man named George Newton Landcourt was traveling to Iowa with his eighteen month year old daughter mary Anne when they both disappeared, which also impressive that he's traveling with what like a two year old. That's like a two year old, right, yeah, wow, yeah, a year and a half whatever, whatever, What do babies need time for? I mean they grow pretty quickly, as I like, a two year old versus a year and a half is like like a few pounds difference. It's like Robbie versus like small pitbull. Oh okay, well, thank you for using dogs, because now I understand. So they both disappeared soon afterwards. A doctor, William Henry York, who had sold them the horses and the wagon, became concerned when the horses and wagon were found abandoned, and doctor York set out to find Landcourt and Marianne and followed the homesteading trail to Fort Scott and interviewed people along the way. Once he got to Fort Scott, he identified the horses and the wagons as the ones that he had sold to land Court. He wanted to return to Independence, Kansas, but he never made it. He decided to stop at the bender Inn and he was never heard from again. While the Benders seemed to have free reign in their deadly game, they made a big mistake. Doctor York was from a very prominent family and his brothers were Colonel Ed York and the Senator Alexander M. York. So anyway, Colonel York organized a seventy five men search party to track down his brother, and they ultimately tracked doctor Yorke's last movements to the bender In, and in March eighteen seventy three, Colonel York interviewed the Benders, but they denied all knowledge of the missing man, and within a few weeks Colonel York heard rumors that a woman claimed to have barely escaped when Alvira attacked her with a knife, so curl York. On April third, Colonel York returned to the bender In with the new accusations. During the second interview, Alvira tried hard to hide it, but ultimately she blew it by ranting about how the woman had cursed her coffee. Personally, I just love that Elvira couldn't keep it together long enough to just be like that girl had it covered. She cursed my coffee. I'll stab her again if she ever comes here, and I'll keep stabbing her, just like I sapped, just like I stead all these other men whoops. After her outburst, Elvira threw Colonel York and has been out. Unfortunately for the vendors, the damage had been done, and around this time words started spreading among the homesteaders about disappearances and mutilated bodies. Days later, the neighbors noticed that the animals on the Bender farm were dying and starving. The place seemed to be abandoned, basically. An elected official in town named Leroy Dick went to the Bender farm to investigate. He noticed a truly awful odor coming from under the trapdoor in the house. He called for a search party, and hundreds of homesteaders armed with pickaxes and shovels, turned up. They couldn't begin to guess the horrific scene that waited for them. Under the trapdoor was a secret room. Blood had clotted and soaked into the stone floor and into the dirt underneath. There were no bodies, however, This made them spread out and search the property in the area of the orchard in the garden. Doctor Yorke's body was found buried in a shallow grave. The next day, ten bodies were recovered, as well as a gruesome assortment of body parts. All the bodies had their skulls bashed in and their throat slit. However, little Mary Anne land Court, eighteen months old, appeared to have been buried alive. Oh no, And to make the scene even worse, many of the bodies were described to have been indecently mutilated, suggesting some sort of sexual torture. Well, I'm glad that first death was just you're eating stew and good night, and that's it. That's a good way to Yeah, who's to say what they did to your dead corpse, you know, from what they saw. It soon became clear how the benders caused the sad demise of so many unsuspected travelers. So the victims would enter the inn be given a seat at the dinner table over the trap door. Once seated, one of the men would hide behind the canvas and smash the victim's skull with a hammer, and then one of the women would slit the victim's throat and drop them through the trap door into the secret room below. Later, the body would be dismembered or just buried. Any valuables on their person would be taken by the Benders. But the thing is is that many of the victims were not wealthy or in possession of valuables. It appeared that they were killed more for sport than for money, and there were about a dozen bullet holes in the cabin, suggesting that some of the victims tried to fight back with guns and steides. Yeah, but also you're up against like four people, and you're think about how vulnerable you are when you're like just you're tired, you think you're safe, you're like ready to relax, and then all of a sudden you have to go into fight or flight mode. Wow, So actually serve the food, yeah, or just you sit down and then they're just and then they will bam and then you're maybe conscious enough to pull a gun, but there's four of them and you're incapacitated, so it's gotta be careful. Weird chit. Very few of the benders possessions were left in the cabin by the time the neighbors came to inspect it. At this point, nobody knows who the vendors really were or where they went when they abandoned the farm. The Benders seem to have ridden off into the folklore of Kansas. Senator York and Governor Thomas Osborne offered a substantial reward for the capture of the vendors, but to this day that reward has never been claimed. As for the Benders, one rumor stated that Ma, Ma and Pa fled back to Satan Louis, Missouri, and the other stated that John Junior and Kate hitched a ride on the railroad down to an outlaw camp between the borders of Texas and New Mexico. A detective claimed that he personally chased John Junior to the border, but found him dead. Some neighbors also claim that John Junior and Kate were a couple instead of being brothers and sister. They couldn't have been both, yeah, I mean, we don't know. Actually, neighbors thought they were common law married because she was very open about sexual relations with John Junior. It is also suspected that the only members of the family are the only members who were actually related in the Bender family were the mother and daughter, and it's also thought that none of them were actually named Bender. They were all, however, serial killers. So that's a common bond, a strong family bond. Yeah, I mean, what else would make a family besides all killing together? You know, like family that kills together stays together at least for a while. Anyway, in eighteen eighty four, I mean, the easiest way I think to get away would be to split up. That you couldn't ever ever stay all stay together. You'd have to all split up. But I mean, they've never been caught, they've never been found. Here are some possible theories of people that might have been them, but nobody knows. So there's a guy that they think might have been Paul Bender who was arrested in Idaho for killing someone with a hammer, and so they think he might have been Pawbender. And then they when the authorities tried to get a description of the wanted man from Kansas, they soon found the prisoner had cut off his own foot and bled to death before positive identification could be made. Oh wow, okay, because they do a tie him up like that, well, like he was chained up and he'd cut off his own foot to get out of the chain, and then he bled to death, which is like okay, And then by the time, it was impossible to make an identification because of decomposition because everything took so long, so like there was no way to figure out if that was actually John Bender Senior or not. And then in eighteen eighty nine, a mother and daughter named Almira and Sarah Elizabeth were arrested for larcity and Michigan suspicious. That's all I'm saying. Elmira mya is that even a name? Just kidding? I think, yeah, yeah. They were of course accused of being Alvira and Kate Bender and were sent to Kansas for identification. However, the women were sent back to Michigan when the eyewitness descriptions were just they couldn't get accurate descriptions, so they were just too inconsistent. So it's thought that Elvira is actually Elmira Mark from the Adirondack Mountains area and was rumored to have many children from many different men, and it's rumored that many of her husbands died of head injury. It's also thought that Kate was actually Elmira's fifth child, Eliza. Griffith. John Senior is thought to be John Flickinger, an immigrant from either Germany or the Netherlands. While it is true that the Benders never faced justice for their crimes, there were some individuals who did a total of twelve men were charged with accessory to being helping getting rid of the stolen property still like fencing their stolen property. So the Bender victims. It's thought that Benders killed maybe around a dozen people, including one child, although it could be as high as twenty one. Nobody knows. But they did find some hammers when the townsfolk all went into the house. You know, it was basically picked clean when they were looking for the Benders. But they have found some hammers and those now reside in a museum in Cherryville, Kansas that is now owned by Ryville, in the Cherryville Museum, Yeah, by Zach. But it's on display if you want to go see it. So we'll never know what actually happened to the Benders. They kind of got away with it seems like seems like kind of a lucrative scheme they had. But yeah, to just steal stuff from travelers and mutilate bodies. Yeah, I mean, this legend of the Untamed West is still very much alive, so and you know, I still imagine stuff like that happens like out in dirt roads and old cabins and stuff like that too. Yeah, your car breaks down. I think of the movie The Hill. I have never watched it all the way through, but in high school, we were walking down to a beach and my friend kept being like, the hills have eyes, the hills have eyes. So we had to sprint up a hill to get back to our So just to even whisper bird the hills have eyes, you should probably just go back to your car. A bunch of teens sprinting. That reminds me to what time you known those racist parts of California. Uh? Yeah, one time we were like driving by, wanted to just see the stars out by, Like I don't know where we were? Is it I forgot where we were? My friends, if they're listening that they remember, I said. As we parked, we just got a big old spotlight, like a headlight, like a really strong light on the car. What the fuck? We're like, should we leave? Like can we get shot? Like is this a should we leave? And I'm like, yes, let's go, Like what do we do? What we just ran? Yeah? Of course? Yeah? Those fields, man, you don't know, you don't know who's there. I just love how wholesome you guys were being, like, let's look at the stars. Let's look at the stars, everybody. Yeah, we just wanted to park and like we've never seen stars, like as in from La, Like, come on, you don't see stars? Yeah, of course. No. Man, I feel kind of like justice was not served. Nope, not cool, No, it was not served. But also it's not like people like live wholesome, good lives. Just the fact that they got away with this doesn't mean that they got away for very long. Also, there's a rumor that which I think is just a rumor because who can keep a secret, is that that the posse that came and discovered the house empty actually caught them all and like hung Ma Pa and John Junior and then burnt Kate at the stake. So there's a rumor that that happened and then they just all kept it a secret. Oh so there there's like that rumor. But like I also, I mean, think about with that generationally, now, how could that still be a secret. How you know, like that would have gotten out one hundred percent. I just think they disappeared into the West and we're just part of the West. But not together. Probably not together. You can't travel us for when you're known as four. So they would have definitely had to split up. And maybe that's the biggest punishment of all. They lost their the only people that ever understood them each other. They only understood each other, and then they could never be together again and their need to kill. And that's how you have empathy. Folks. All you do is learn on scary mystery surprise. That's all you do. Glad to be of service you, guys. I hope you leave us a review because of that. Yeah, leave us a review. We we're of service to you. You be of service to us. If you're in a car right now, just pull over, you know, take off the phone and just just tap it, like, just tap that follow little plus science. Yep, there you go. That's all you need, well you need to do anyway, What are we going to talk about next week, Edwin? I don't know. I think it'll be a surprise. Oo bye guys,