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  The Passion of Ledrede

  As Ledrede attempted to weave a net of accusations around Alice, the dame was pulling a few strings of her own. Her old friend, the lord chancellor of Ireland, learned about the scuffle in Kilkenny and tried to convince Ledrede to drop the charges. When Ledrede kept trying to arrest Alice, the lord chancellor gently informed him that Alice simply couldn’t be arrested yet, because she hadn’t even been properly accused of a crime. To this, Ledrede “indignantly” responded that “the service of the church was above the forms of the law of the land.”

  This was just so Ledrede. The laws of the land were hindering him, so he decided to strike off on his own. He commanded Alice to appear in court, but instead, she ran off to Dublin. Fuming, Ledrede went ahead and excommunicated her, and then demanded that her son, William Jr., show up in her place.

  One of the Kilkenny authorities, Arnald le Poer—possibly related to Alice by marriage—decided to try his hand at appeasing Ledrede. He went to visit the raging bishop in person and attempted to talk him out of his plan, but Ledrede was so difficult and persistent that Arnald ended up walking out in a blind fury himself. The next day, Arnald had Ledrede thrown into prison until William Jr.’s court date had safely passed. This wasn’t entirely legal, but there was nothing the bishop could do about it. As much as Ledrede may have thundered on about the rules of the church being superior to the laws of the land, both church and law usually ended up bowing to men like Arnald, who had money and soldiers at their disposal.

  In prison, Ledrede screamed that sorcerers and heretics were protected in godforsaken Ireland while religious men like him were locked up. This would have only encouraged the antiforeigner sentiment Arnald was fostering against this “alien from England.” When a few sympathetic parishioners stopped by the prison to bring Ledrede food, Arnald declared that the bishop wasn’t allowed to have visitors at all. The bishop retaliated by placing the entire diocese under an interdict—meaning that everyone was temporarily banned from participating in the sacraments and other church rituals—even though he was not technically allowed to do this. Their struggle devolved into a series of delicious ad hominem attacks: as Ledrede raged from prison, Arnald invited everyone in the community to come forward and complain about him. Parishioners stepped up eagerly, embarrassing the bishop by accusing him of “grievous crimes.”

  When Ledrede was finally released from prison, he made a huge show of it, marching out “in triumph, full-dressed in his pontifical robes.” He had doubled down on his decision to trap Alice, and immediately set a new court date for William Jr., since Alice was still hiding out in Dublin. But before he could drag William Jr. into court, Ledrede was served a court date of his own. The king himself had gotten wind of the chaos in Kilkenny and wanted an explanation for that illegal interdict. Ledrede tried to get out of it by arguing that the journey to court was too dangerous, since it took him through the lands of “his enemy”—Arnald—but no one listened to this excuse.

  Even now, with the king involved, Ledrede didn’t seem to realize he was fighting a losing battle. In fact, he was absurdly overconfident. During one of Arnald’s customary meetings in court, Ledrede marched in wearing full bishop regalia, accompanied by a squad of religious men and holding the bread of the Lord’s Supper in a golden vessel—the transubstantiated body of Christ himself, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church! He hoped to intimidate Arnald into helping him arrest Alice, but all the golden vessels in the world couldn’t protect Ledrede from mockery. Arnald exploded, calling him a “vile, rustic, interloping monk carrying dirt in his hands,” and forced him into one of the seats reserved for criminals. Humiliated and offended, Ledrede cried out that “Christ had never been treated so before since he stood at the bar before Pontius Pilate.”

  Although Ledrede’s conflict with Alice had been waylaid by his ridiculous skirmish with Arnald, Alice had been paying close attention to all of these proceedings, and decided it was time for a little power play of her own. She managed to get Ledrede indicted in a secular court for defaming her character and excommunicating her “uncited, unadmonished, and unconvinced of the crime of sorcery.” The fact that Alice managed to turn the law on her accuser in the face of her own looming witchcraft trial demonstrates once again how savvy and well connected she was—not to mention how bold.

  By the time Ledrede fought his way through this latest legal obstacle and finally managed to get permission to try Alice for witchcraft, it was too late. Alice, who was always so astute when it came to maneuvering through society, decided that a trial wasn’t in her best interest, and fled to England.

  Humans

  Alice’s supposed accomplices, with their tales of demons and peacock eyes and dead men’s nails, did not have the wealth or the connections to skip town. After Alice left, several of them were arrested and thrown into jail. Under torture, they confessed to all of their purported crimes and claimed that Alice was their dreadful leader, “the mother and mistress of them all.”

  Petronilla of Meath, the woman who’d allegedly cleaned up after Robin and Alice, was unlucky enough to become the scapegoat for all of Alice’s offenses, both real and imagined. After being flogged six times, Petronilla confessed that she had been the medium between Alice and her demon lover. She also said that Alice had a magical broomstick that helped her fly, and that she herself had bewitched local women so that it looked like goats’ horns were growing out of their heads. When it came to black magic, said Petronilla, nobody in the world was as powerful as Dame Alice.

  Poor Petronilla was burned alive on November 3, 1324—the first time anyone was given this sentence for heresy in Ireland. But her memory lived on as a symbol of injured and innocent womanhood. (In 1979, the artist Judy Chicago re-reminded the world of Petronilla by including her in a feminist art installation called The Dinner Party). Other abuses followed for members of the “pestilential society of Robin, son of Art” —whippings, banishments, excommunications, and more burnings—but Alice was never touched.

  It’s hard to say which of the major players had the last laugh here. Alice left Ledrede in the dust, but she had to spend the rest of her life in exile. Ledrede eventually succeeded in dragging William Jr. to court, but when William Jr. finally showed up, he was irascible and “armed to the teeth.” The two managed to hit upon a testy agreement: the bishop would forgive William Jr.’s offenses if William Jr. promised to demonstrate he was repentant by going to church, feeding the poor, and paying for a beautiful new cathedral roof made of lead.

  Ledrede also managed to get revenge on his nemesis Arnald by accusing him of heresy, excommunicating him, and flinging him into jail, where Arnald eventually died. But revenge was not sweet. Ledrede was now convinced that his diocese was swarming with witches and apostates, and for the next few years, anyone who crossed him risked being painted as a heretic. He grew even more unpopular, if you can believe it, and managed to alienate everyone from his parishioners to the king himself. In 1329, he was driven out of Ireland and, like Alice, forced into exile. A few years later, the beautiful lead roof—his one concrete symbol of victory—was destroyed when the cathedral’s bell tower collapsed.

  Today, Ledrede has been mostly forgotten, along with the original allegations against Alice: serial murder. Though too many centuries have passed to declare Alice a murderer beyond a shadow of a doubt, later cases of husband killing would end up being chillingly similar to this one: infatuated husbands who start wasting away, wives who gain something material from each death, methodical remarriage. The black widow archetype has become so prominent that it even appears on the FBI’s website. Many of its characteristics describe Alice well: the black widow is intelligent, manipulative, usually older, and very organized; she profits from each murder, works patiently over a long period of time, and doesn’t hesitate to kill those who trust her.

  Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence against Alice was the fact that her surviving husband, Sir John le Poer, never disputed the accusa
tions against her. In fact, he finally grew suspicious of his beloved and rifled through her belongings until he found a “sackful of horrible and detestable things,” which he handed over to Ledrede. That summer, Ledrede built a huge bonfire in the middle of Kilkenny and burned the sack, telling onlookers it contained the powders that were used to poison Sir John le Poer as well as “human nails, hair, herbs, worms, and other abominations.”

  It’s funny how much human imperfection is evident in this case, even though its characters have been dead for centuries. Ledrede wanted to prove that Alice, in all her cruelty and greed, wasn’t just guilty, but that she was unhuman: a demon-loving sorceress who preyed upon men. So he accused her of spectral crimes instead of staring her mortality in the face. And really, who can blame him? For centuries, people have done the same, pinning crimes on magic and hysteria and midnight visitations and madness in an attempt to believe that actions like Alice’s are foreign to us, that they’re totally outside the bounds of normal human behavior. But they’re not. At the end of the day, this ancient case simply highlights the humanity of everyone who raged and lied and manipulated their way around Kilkenny: the stubborn, hypocritical, self-righteous Ledrede; the shameless, materialistic, expertly self-preserving Alice; the spoiled brat, William Jr.; and even Arnald, with his petty need to get involved in other people’s drama.

  Alice entered the annals of history as the dark center of what became known as the Kilkenny witchcraft case, and was remembered ever after as a witch, not a killer. Six centuries later, W. B. Yeats ended one of his bitterest poems with the image of a desperate Alice offering up peacock feathers and cockscombs to her “insolent fiend.” Seven centuries later, Kyteler’s Inn in Kilkenny lures in tourists with live music, ghost sightings—and a bronze statue of Alice, looking exhausted, holding a toad in one hand and a broomstick in the other.

  BEAUTIFUL THROAT CUTTER

  Kate Bender

  In late 1870, a mysterious quartet crept into the southeastern corner of Kansas. Both men were named John. Both women were named Kate. The older John and Kate were married; the younger John and Kate were siblings. Their last name was Bender, and nobody knew anything else about them.

  Back then, Kansas was a place to reinvent yourself. It had only been a state for nine years, and plenty of its residents were still rough around the edges—outlaws who’d moved in from the North and the East to lose themselves in the wild expanses of the prairie. Sure, there were plenty of decent, God-fearing folk clinging to their scraps of farmland, but they lived miles from each other, surrounded by nothing more than the plains and the keening wind.

  The Benders were from German stock, as evidenced by their accents, but everything else about them turned out to be questionable, including their names and even their relationships to one another. Some said the younger Benders were actually husband and wife masquerading as brother and sister, or brother and sister who were secretly lovers. One legend claimed that the four were driven out of a German settlement in Pennsylvania because the women turned out to be witches: they frolicked naked in a graveyard at midnight, slept with a “Dark Stranger,” hung their clothing on an “infidel’s tombstone,” and recited the Lord’s Prayer backward. Still, since nobody out West knew anything definitive about anyone’s past, no one blinked an eye when the Bender family materialized on the Great Plains, the nightmare of the American frontier made flesh.

  In Kansas, the Benders eventually settled down on a little farm seven miles northeast of a town called Cherryvale, right beside a road that connected the larger cities of Fort Scott and Independence. It was a prime location, and the Benders knew just how to take advantage of it: they threw up a few curtains, they hung a sign, and they opened an inn.

  On the frontier, proper Americans placed a high premium on “neighborliness,” which they saw as being next to godliness. Being on good terms with your neighbor was more than just a way to score social points; it was necessary for survival, especially in a desolate land dotted with strangers. And opening an inn—with its vague reference to Jesus’s birth, its implications of a crackling fire and warm beds—was the most neighborly of gestures.

  But this was a one-star inn at best. Really, it was just a tiny cabin divided in half by a heavy canvas curtain. The Benders turned the front “room” into a miniature store and dining area, where passing travelers could snap up tobacco, crackers, sardines, candies, gunpowder, and bullets, along with a home-cooked meal. If you pushed past the dirty curtain, you’d see the back room, which was used for sleeping—overnight guests had to snuggle up next to the Benders. You’d also notice a trapdoor in the floor, which led to a little cellar. Behind the house, there was a small garden, an orchard, and a stable with a few scrawny animals inside. Aside from that, the land was empty.

  A careful observer might notice something curious about the Bender homestead: the orchard was always freshly plowed. This seemed like an unnecessary expenditure of farming energy, but the neighbors chalked it up to German idiosyncrasy, and thought no more about it for the next two years.

  John Jr. decided that they needed a sign to advertise their wares, and so he found a plank of wood on which he wrote, arduously: GROCRY. Kate, who was always the brains of the family, corrected his spelling. They hung it above the front door, and they were open for business.

  A Beautiful Wild Beast

  Neighbors thought the two older Benders were weird and kind of unpleasant. Pa Bender, who was about sixty years old, was short, a bit stooped, and “never looked a feller in the eye,” according to a neighbor. He said he was born in the Netherlands and ran a bakery in Germany before coming to America, and he spoke nothing but German (with the exception of a few choice English curses). Ma spoke broken English and seemed about fifty years old. She was short and stout, with blue eyes and brown hair, and she was once described as the very picture of Lady Macbeth: in other words, ruthless and unfeminine.

  John Bender Jr. was in his midtwenties, fluent in English, and a good deal more handsome than his parents. He wore a tidy little mustache and cut a dashing figure, though he was given to smiling at nothing in particular, and some neighbors thought he was weak-minded. But really, nobody spent much time talking about John Jr. or his parents, because the youngest Bender was Kate, and why would you talk about anyone else when you could talk about Kate?

  A lot of ink gets spilled over the physical descriptions of most wicked women, and Kate is no exception. She was a beauty, especially when standing next to her creepy-looking clan, and everyone who wrote about her in the late 1800s stumbled over themselves to describe her allure. She was in her early twenties. She was tall. She had a face “like a young eagle,” her eyes flashed, her hair glinted red. Her body? “Well-formed, voluptuous mold, fair skin, white as milk, rose complexion.” She lured you in with her “tigerish grace” and “animal attraction”—a “beautiful wild beast.” Her beauty was marred only by a small burn or scar under her left eye. (Okay, not everyone gushed about her. The New York Times called her a “red-faced, unprepossessing young woman,” but they also claimed that John Jr. and Pa were brothers named Thomas and William.)

  Kate was bold, intelligent, and a hypnotic flirt. She longed for notoriety, and approached life with a voracious and amoral hunger. Unlike her supposed parents, she was an easy conversationalist and had no problem integrating herself into society. She attended dances (she danced well), rode horses (she rode well), and went to Sunday school and town meetings (she flirted well). She even waitressed at the dining room in the Cherryvale Hotel for a while in 1871, where we can only assume she was tipped well.

  Her charms always tended toward the lucrative. One of her quirkier traits was her belief in Spiritualism—a loose, melodramatic system of beliefs that was popular in the United States during the last half of the 1800s and involved mediums, séances, and a lot of fraud. Kate parlayed her Spiritualist tendencies into a side hustle and peddled her petty magic around the area, giving mystical lectures, offering to locate lost objects, curing va
rious diseases with herbs and roots, and selling verbal charms for fifty cents. She even circulated a handbill in 1872 that advertised her services:

  PROF. MISS KATIE BENDER

  Can heal all sorts of Diseases; can cure Blindness, Fits, Deafness, and all such diseases, also Deaf and Dumbness.

  Residence, 14 miles East of Independence, on the road from Independence to Osage Mission one and one half miles South East of Norahead Station.

  Much that was written about the Benders at the time goes for a sort of “brute” rhetoric when describing the rest of the clan (i.e., Look at these insensitive, unrefined Germans who can’t speak our language and don’t come to our dances and know nothing but toil and violence). But everyone agreed that Kate was special. And the fact that the youngest and the prettiest ended up being the most evil—the center of the whole Bender operation—was just so deliciously ironic. “A perfect devil,” the neighbors called her.

  Strange Nights

  There were so many travelers in those days, and the land was still so violent, that when stories of missing men began to circulate around Cherryvale, nobody was terribly concerned. Men disappeared all the time back then. It was the price they paid for trying to settle a wild country.

  Anyway, business at the Bender Inn was bustling by 1872. Many of the travelers who passed that way were more than ready for a hot meal and a good night’s sleep, and Kate was a wonderful saleswoman. Not only would she sell groceries and convince travelers to stay for dinner, but she’d make sure her clothing was artfully disheveled and “accidentally” brush against her visitors as she moved about the tiny room. She always gave her guests the best seat in the house—the one right up against the canvas curtain—so they could watch her work.

  A couple of travelers reported dodgy experiences at the Bender Inn, but people didn’t take their tales very seriously. One man, who went by the nickname “Happy Jack” Reed, caught sight of Kate in a state of calculated undress when he was riding by. He pulled up short to say hello, and Kate charmed him into the house and seated him at the table, right in front of the canvas curtain. As they chatted, he heard a peculiar sound from outside—a sort of high-pitched cough—and felt something slither away behind the hanging canvas. Moments later, two new travelers walked through the front door. The rest of his meal proceeded without incident.