The Bloody Bender Family

A family of serial killers in Kansas from May 1871 to December 1872. Estimates report that the Benders killed at least a dozen travelers, and perhaps as many as twenty before they were discovered.

John Bender Sr. was around sixty years old and spoke little English.

The English he did speak was usually unintelligible. According to the May 23, 1873 edition of The Emporia News, he was identified with the name William Bender.

Elvira Bender was 55 years old. She allegedly spoke little English and was so unfriendly that her neighbors called her a "she-devil."

John Bender Jr. was around 25 years old and handsome, with auburn hair and a mustache.

He spoke English fluently with a German accent. He was prone to laughing aimlessly, which led many to consider him a "half-wit."

Kate Bender, who was around 23, was cultivated and attractive and spoke English well, with little accent. A self-proclaimed healer and psychic she distributed flyers advertising her supernatural powers and her ability to cure illnesses.

She also conducted séances and gave lectures on spiritualism, for which she gained notoriety by advocating free love.

Kate's popularity became a large attraction for the Benders' inn. Although the elder Benders kept to themselves, Kate and her brother regularly attended Sunday school in nearby Harmony Grove.

The Benders were widely believed to be German immigrants. No documentation or definitive proof of their relationships to one another, or where they were born, has ever been found.

John Bender Sr. was from either Germany, Norway, or the Netherlands.

Witness Descriptions

Those that new the Benders had these things to say about them:

• "The old man was a repulsive, hideous brute, without a redeeming trait, dirty, profane, and ill-tempered."

• "Old Mrs. Bender was a dirty old Dutch crone. Her face was a fit picture of the midnight hag that wove the spell murderous ambition about the soul of Macbeth."

• "Young Bender, seen when excited, recalled the grave-robbing hyena at once to mind."

• "'Kate proclaimed herself responsible to no one save herself.' She professed to be a medium of spiritualism and delivered lectures on that subject. In her lectures she publicly declared that murder might be a dictation for good; that in 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 called 'miserable requirements of self-constituted society.' She maintained carnal relations with her brother, and boldly proclaimed her right to do so in the following words found in her lecture manuscript: 'Shall we confine ourselves to a single love, and deny our natures their proper sway? ...Even though it be a brother's passion for his own sister, I say it should not be smothered.'

Killings

In May 1871 the body of a man named Jones was discovered in Drum Creek with a cut throat and crushed skull.

The owner of Drum Creek was suspected but no action was taken.

In February 1872, the bodies of two men were found with the same injuries as Jones.

By 1873 reports of missing people who had passed through the area had become so common that travelers began to avoid the trail.

The area was already widely known for "horse thieves and villains", and vigilance committees often "arrested" some for the disappearances.

Only for them to be later released by the authorities. Many innocent men under suspicion were also run out of the county by these committees.

In the winter of 1872 George Newton Longcor left Independence, Kansas with his infant daughter Mary Ann to resettle in Iowa and they were never seen again.

In the spring of 1873 Longcor's former neighbor, Dr. William Henry York, went looking for them and questioned homesteaders along the trail.

York reached Fort Scott and on March 9 began the return journey to Independence, but never arrived.

York had two brothers.

Both knew of William's travel plans and when he failed to return, began a search for the missing doctor.

Colonel York, leading a company of some fifty men, questioned every traveler along the trail and visited all the area homesteads.

On March 28, 1873, Colonel York arrived at the Benders' inn with a Mr. Johnson, explaining that his brother had gone missing and asking if they had seen him.

They admitted Dr. York had stayed with them and suggested the possibility that he had run into trouble with Indians.

Colonel York agreed that this was possible and remained for dinner.

On April 3 Colonel York returned to the inn with armed men after learning that a woman had fled the inn after Elvira Bender had threatened her with knives. Elvira allegedly could not understand English, while the younger Benders denied the claim.

When York repeated the claim, Elvira became mad, saying the woman was a witch who had cursed her coffee and ordered the men to leave her house.

This revealed for the first time that her sense of the English language was much better than was let on.

Before York left Kate asked him to return alone the following Friday night, and she would use her clairvoyant abilities to help him find his brother.

The men with York were convinced that the Benders and a neighboring family, the Roaches, were guilty and wanted to hang them all, but York insisted that evidence must be found.

Around that time neighboring communities began to make accusations that the Osage community was responsible for the disappearances, and the Osage township arranged a meeting in the Harmony Grove schoolhouse.

Seventy-five locals attended the meeting, including Colonel York and possibly both John Bender and John Bender Jr.

After discussing the disappearances they agreed to obtain a warrant to search every homestead between Big Hill Creek and Drum Creek. Despite York's strong suspicions regarding the Benders since his visit several weeks earlier, no one had watched them, and it was not noticed for several days that they had fled.

Three days after the township meeting, Billy Tole was driving cattle past the Bender property when he noticed that the inn was abandoned and the farm animals were unfed.

Tole reported the fact to the township but due to bad weather, several days lapsed before the property could be investigated.

The township called for volunteers, and several hundred turned out to form a search party that included Colonel York. When the party arrived at the inn they found the cabin empty of food, clothing, and possessions.

A bad odor was noticed and traced to a trap door underneath a bed, nailed shut. After opening the trap, the party found clotted blood on the floor of the empty room underneath.

They broke up the stone slab floor with sledgehammers but found no bodies, and determined that the smell was from blood that had soaked into the soil. The men then physically lifted the cabin and moved it to the side to dig under it, but no bodies were found.

They then probed the ground around the cabin with a metal rod, especially in the disturbed soil of the vegetable garden and orchard, where Dr. York's body was found later that evening, buried face down with his feet barely below the surface.

The searching continued until midnight with another nine suspected grave sites marked before the men were satisfied they had found them all and retired for the night.

The next morning another eight bodies were found in seven of the nine suspected graves while one was found in the well, along with several body parts.

All but one had their heads bashed with a hammer and throats cut, and newspapers reported that all were "indecently mutilated". The body of a young girl was found with no injuries sufficient to cause death. It was speculated that she had been strangled or buried alive.

A Kansas newspaper reported that the crowd was so incensed after finding the bodies that a friend of the Benders named Brockman, who was among the onlookers, was hanged from a beam in the inn until unconscious, revived, interrogated, then hanged again.

A great example why vigilante justice is never a good idea.

After the third hanging, they released him and he staggered home "as one who was drunken or deranged".

A Roman Catholic prayer book was found in the house with notes inside written in German, which were later translated. The texts read "Johannah Bender. Born July 30, 1848", "John Gebhardt came to America on July 1 18??", "big slaughter day, Jan eighth" and "hell departed".

Word of the murders spread quickly, and more than 3,000 people, including reporters from as far away as New York City and Chicago, visited the site. The Bender cabin was destroyed by souvenir hunters who took everything, including the bricks that lined the cellar and the stones lining the well.

The Benders Killing Method

It is speculated that when a guest stayed at the Benders' bed and breakfast inn, the hosts would give the guest a seat of honor at the table that was positioned over a trap door into the cellar.

With the victim's back to the curtain, Kate would distract the guest while John Bender or his son came from behind the curtain and struck the guest on the right side of the skull with a hammer.

One of the women would cut the victim's throat to ensure death, and the body was then dropped through the trap door. Once in the cellar, the body would be stripped and later buried somewhere on the property, often in the orchard.

Although some of the victims were wealthy, others carried little of value, and it was surmised that the Benders had killed them simply for the sheer thrill.

How did they escape?

Detectives followed wagon tracks and discovered the Benders wagon, abandoned with a starving team of horses with one of the mares lame.

It was confirmed that the family had bought tickets for Humboldt. At Chanute, John Jr. and Kate left the train and caught the MK&T train south.

From there they traveled to an outlaw colony thought to be in the border region between Texas and New Mexico. They were not pursued, as lawmen following outlaws into this region often never returned.

One detective later claimed that he had traced the pair to the border where he had found that John Jr. had died of apoplexy.

The elder Benders did not leave the train at Humboldt, but instead continued north to Kansas City, where it is believed they purchased tickets for St. Louis, Missouri.

Several groups of vigilantes were formed to search for the Benders. Many stories say that one vigilante group caught the Benders and shot all of them but Kate, whom they burned alive.

Another group claimed they had caught the Benders and lynched them before throwing their bodies into the Verdigris River. Yet another claimed to have killed the Benders during a gunfight and buried their bodies on the prairie.

No one ever claimed the $3,000 reward ($76,300 as of 2024). The story of the Benders escape spread, and the search continued on and off for the next 50 years.

Often two women traveling together were accused of being Kate Bender and her mother.

The fate of the Bender family remains unknown to this day. What do you think happened to them? Were they tracked down by detectives or a vigilante group? Or did they simply escape and get away with their crimes?