Lady Killers Page 20

  When Happy Jack stopped by on his return journey, Kate was overjoyed to see him. They began to chat, but were again interrupted by a set of travelers, and these ones happened to be headed right back to Happy Jack’s hometown. They were pressing on home that night, so Happy Jack asked them to carry a message back to his family: he was sleeping at the Bender Inn and would be home the next day. At this development, Kate’s mood shifted. She tried to convince him not to send the message, but he insisted, and soon Kate grew so irritated that she refused to talk to him anymore. With no one left to flirt with, Happy Jack went to bed.

  A piercing scream woke him in the middle of the night. He listened, terrified, and heard several heavy blows, at which point the screaming stopped. Suddenly, he noticed that Kate Bender was standing over his bed, watching to make sure he was asleep. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to breathe evenly.

  Happy Jack wasn’t the only lodger who noticed dubious sounds after nightfall. A man named Corlew heard moaning and rustling coming from the Bender’s cellar, but Kate, ever the glib talker, assured him it was just a hog that had gotten under the house. Some people’s experiences were even worse: a passing saleswoman agreed to spend the night, but got spooked and ran off when John Jr. began to sharpen a nasty-looking knife.

  It’s worth noting that many of these travelers didn’t think much of their experiences at the inn until after the Benders left town in a cloud of suspicion and blood. At the time, the family just seemed a little crusty, a little odd. Once the Benders’ crimes were discovered, though, these incidents were elevated to the status of myth. The story of spending a night next to Kate Bender was now the story of spending a night next to Death herself, and living to tell the tale.

  Innkeepers from Hell

  All the signifiers of “business”—the beds, the home-cooked meals, the tobacco, crackers, sardines, candies, gunpowder, and bullets—were obviously a front, because the Benders were actually operating an efficient killing farm.

  Kate was the bait, of course. As she flirted, she’d make sure the guest was sitting with his back against the canvas curtain, which was greasy and spotted with mysterious stains. On the other side of the curtain, Pa or John Jr. would wait silently, clutching a hammer. Outside, Ma kept watch. If she saw another traveler pulling into the yard, she’d let out a high-pitched cough—the sound that Happy Jack heard—and the seated guest would then escape with his life. But if Ma was silent, the game was afoot. As soon as the guest laughed or shifted or leaned back, letting his head brush against the canvas, one of the men would bring the hammer down, crushing his skull through the cloth. That’s when Kate would leap forward, pull out a knife, and slit his throat.

  The trapdoor would be opened, the body pushed into the cellar. If the victim wasn’t fully dead, he’d die there (thus the moaning that Corlew noticed), or else they’d finish him off later. In the middle of the night, the Benders would drag the body out to the orchard and bury it in a shallow grave. The next morning, Pa would plow the ground over and over again to hide that coffin-shaped square of fresh earth.

  Their system was abominably genius. They only murdered travelers, and these travelers were almost always alone. None of the Cherryvale locals suspected anything, because no one in the area knew or cared who these travelers were, and by the time word of the missing people reached their families back home, it was impossible to say which of the road’s many dangers had killed them. Amid the era’s bright hope in American exploration, the Benders soldiered on—a lurid manifestation of the perils that awaited travelers.

  Like any good American entrepreneur, they saw an opportunity, and they went for it, mercilessly. The Benders targeted their richest guests: the ones with fine horses, well-made wagons, or fat saddlebags. Since many of these men were headed west to stake claims of their own, they were often carrying large amounts of cash—in some cases, their entire life’s savings. One man, John Greary, was sick when he stopped by the Bender Inn, hoping for a rejuvenating night’s sleep. He somehow gave them the impression that he was wealthy—maybe he was trying to impress Kate?—and so the Benders were furious when they discovered, after murdering him, that he was carrying only forty cents. Usually, though, the Benders came away with hundreds or even thousands of dollars per victim, not to mention their horses and wagons (which they sold to neighbors who presumably didn’t ask questions), and even their clothes. Most of the victims were buried without their shirts.

  While the choice of an inn as a front was practical—they owned property next to a main road, after all—the Bender’s business played into a classic trope of terror: the idea that the inn, which is supposed to provide refuge from demons on the road, turns out to have the demons inside. (Of course, the Benders weren’t trying to make a literary statement with their killing farm, but this trope helps explain why their story catapulted so quickly into myth and misinformation.) Today, we recognize this “hell hotel”/“inn of no return” conceit from books and movies like The Shining and Psycho, but the idea was already circulating by the time the Benders emerged in the 1870s, appearing in short stories like “The Red Inn” (1831, Honoré de Balzac) and “A Terribly Strange Bed” (1852, Wilkie Collins, published in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens). More broadly, the fear of comfort turned evil is an ancient one. Why do you think the “evil stepmother” appears in so many fairy tales, a maternal figure gone terribly wrong? Why else is the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel” made so reassuringly out of gingerbread?

  The humble, dirty inn, with its crackling fire suggesting “home” and its beautiful Kate Bender standing in for “wife,” would have seemed like a glimmering mirage for these exhausted travelers, a respite where they could briefly feel safe. For them, the road was the thing they feared—the road curving into the great, unknown expanses of the West. The last thing they would have expected was that Kate, who’d been smiling at them all night, would whip out a filthy-looking knife and spring at them. They had been longing for her to touch them, but not like that.

  Perhaps the saddest thing that happened at the Bender Inn was the murder of a father and his little girl. The man was a German widower named G. W. Longcohr—a former neighbor of Charles Ingalls, the father in Little House on the Prairie—and he was taking his daughter to Iowa to live with her grandparents. When Longcohr stopped in the city of Independence, he purchased a wagon and a team of horses from a man named Dr. William York. As Longcohr and his daughter set off in their new wagon, perhaps he gently explained to her that she wasn’t going to live with him anymore, at least not for a while. When the sky grew dark, and it was time to think about bed, a tiny country inn appeared on the horizon, its windows all aglow.

  I See Graves

  The Benders could have continued their killing farm for years if they hadn’t murdered the wrong person. It was a classic mistake, really: they wanted to see how much they could get away with, and they overestimated.

  Dr. William York was an influential man with a compassionate heart and two very powerful brothers: Alexander M. York, a Kansas senator, and Colonel Ed York, a Civil War veteran. In 1873, when Dr. York learned that Longcohr and his young daughter had gone missing shortly after they purchased his wagon, he decided to investigate. So he set off around March 9 or 10, riding a beautiful red roan pacing mare and carrying almost one thousand dollars in cash. Then he vanished.

  Unlike the Benders’ other victims, Dr. York was missed immediately. After all, he’d disappeared fairly close to home, and he had a lot of important people looking out for him. Word of the incident was published in papers all over the nation, and search parties began to comb the surrounding countryside. This was a real scandal, a mystery everyone could get behind. The doctor’s brothers began painstakingly retracing his final steps and spared no expense when it came to the investigation. They even dragged the nearby rivers. Soon enough, they learned that Dr. York had stopped at a little store just off the road to buy cigars and had mentioned to the shopkeeper that he was planning to spend the night a
t the Bender Inn.

  In early April, Colonel York and his men rode over to ask the Benders a few questions. John Jr. translated Pa’s German answers: Yes, Dr. York had stopped by around noon one day to eat lunch, but then he’d gone on his merry way. Kate hung around, charming and cooperative, and told the colonel she’d be happy to help locate Dr. York using her Spiritualist powers—as long as the colonel returned alone, the next day, so she could have a little time to prepare her mind for the clairvoyant trance. “I’ll find your brother, even if he is in hell,” she insisted. The colonel never returned. Perhaps he thought she was crazy.

  Around that time, Cherryvale residents held a public meeting, noting with dismay that they had become the subject of national suspicion. Dr. York’s disappearance had thrown a harsh light on the fact that many other people had gone missing around Cherryvale during the past two years. Some of the farmers immediately volunteered to have their lands searched, and others spoke of burning the guilty parties to death when they were discovered. Pa and John Jr., both in attendance, made sure to act casually disinterested. But they knew exactly what was at stake. Soon after the meeting, the four Benders bundled up their victims’ cash, loaded their wagon, and—with only their little dog accompanying them—slipped away like ghosts.

  Around April 9, sixteen miles away, someone discovered a deserted wagon in the woods near the town of Thayer, where a train station was located. The wagon was riddled with bullet holes, and the horses, still tied up, were famished. There was a little dog milling about. The wagon itself was shoddily constructed out of random pieces of wood, one of which was printed with the word GROCERY.

  A few weeks later, several neighbors were passing the Bender property when they heard a calf crying from its pen. Upon closer inspection, they found that the calf was starving and that its mother, tied nearby, was trying desperately to reach it, her udders swollen with milk. After the men released the animals, they peered into the house. It was in total disarray: dishes and food strewn everywhere, a stove full of burned papers, a German Bible discarded in one corner. The Benders had clearly skipped town.

  Word of the family’s suspicious disappearance soon reached Colonel York, who set off with his posse to inspect the Bender property. Farmers from nearby settlements joined the inspection, curious about the fate of their missing neighbors. The men didn’t find any hard evidence at first, but they allegedly stumbled across a series of eerie clues: three hammers, all different sizes; a nasty-looking knife; curious drawings scratched into the floor, symbolizing the twelve signs of the zodiac; little voodoo dolls, or “spite dolls,” half-burned in the fireplace.

  Soon enough, the men found the trapdoor in the floor of the Benders’ bedroom. Upon opening it, they reeled back from the stench. When a few brave ones managed to crawl through the dark portal, they quickly realized that their hands were sticky: the entire cellar was soaked with two years’ worth of thick, fetid blood.

  But there were no bodies in the cellar and no bodies hidden in the house. The men even rolled the inn away from its foundation—and still, nothing. Eventually Colonel York sat on his wagon to rest and fight off an encroaching sense of despair. Had they been wrong about the Benders this whole time? Just because they were standoffish and surly didn’t mean they were killers.

  From his seat, the colonel had a clear view of the entire Bender property. As he gazed around, dejected, something in the orchard caught his eye: a series of long, narrow depressions in the ground. He stood up on his wagon.

  “Boys,” he called, “I see graves out there!”

  The men rushed to the orchard and began to probe the ground with a slender iron rod, which plunged easily into the depressions. Several accounts say that after the rod was pulled from the first grave, there was human hair clinging to the end. And so they began to dig. The first body they uncovered was buried facedown, with the base of his skull smashed in and his throat cut. When they flipped him over, the colonel’s worst fears were confirmed: it was his brother.

  In reports, the number of bodies unearthed from the Bender property usually ranges from eight to eleven—though some accounts cite numbers as high as thirty-five. Most of the victims had died of blunt head wounds and slit throats. Two of the bodies were stabbed multiple times, including the sick man who was only carrying forty cents—maybe Kate had mutilated his body in anger upon discovering that he wasn’t rich. One of the corpses was a young woman no one could identify. Beneath George Longcohr’s body, they found his little girl, a piece of silk cloth tied around her throat. None of the men could figure out how she died. She may have been strangled, but they worried that she was buried alive beneath her dead father.

  Disappearing Act

  The Benders were primed for escape: they had a serious head start, and they carried thick stacks of dead men’s cash—possibly as much as fifty thousand dollars. Four people matching the family’s description boarded a northbound train at Thayer, where the bullet-riddled wagon was found. They carried a dog-hide trunk and a sheet stuffed full of their mysterious possessions. Once they got on the train, they effectively vanished.

  The people of southeastern Kansas were deeply shaken by the thought that such horrible crimes had happened right under their noses. The murders were especially disturbing because of several factors: the whiff of the occult, the death of the child, and the fact that they had all known the Benders for two years. It turned out the Benders had been making a bloody mockery of “neighborliness” all along. Now, newspapers printed hysterical accounts of the “Human Hyenas in Spiritualist Circles,” and amateur detectives set off in groups, hell-bent on lynching the family, with more enthusiasm and bloodlust than investigative skill.

  Many were convinced that the Benders had been working with nearby camps of Romani and African American settlers, and so those sites were eagerly raided—perhaps by men who’d been looking for an excuse to do it anyway. Meanwhile, rumors sprouted like wildflowers: the Benders had gone south; the Benders had gone north; the Benders had been killed in a bloody shootout and buried in the deepest of graves. The state of Kansas offered a two-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who brought the fugitives to justice, but no one ever came forth to claim it.

  Shades of the Benders were suddenly everywhere. They were infamous now, and they seemed to appear before the hungry eyes of the public like mirages—especially Kate. People swore they saw her in New Orleans, Mexico City, New York, Havana, and even Paris. They said she’d married (or remarried), changed her name, and was continuing her killing spree down South. They claimed that she started cross-dressing in order to work as a cowboy. The paranoia took on a sort of freak-show aesthetic: at one point, a couple supposed to be Ma and Pa were displayed at a theater in Kansas for an afternoon. The owner of the theater charged twenty-five cents to see the pair, and ended up making a “handsome profit.” But none of these unfortunate people were ever proven to be the real Benders. After their disappearance, the family’s identity had become as malleable and mercurial as the wind over the Great Plains.

  Even the strong arm of the law couldn’t prove who the Benders were or where they’d gone. Sixteen years after the discovery of the graves, two women were arrested in Michigan on suspicion of being Ma and Kate and were dragged down to Kansas for a disorganized joke of a trial, where no one could decide whether they were the real deal or not. Public opinion was fiercely divided; for every witness who identified them as Ma and Kate, another insisted that they weren’t. Without photos, it was hard to recognize people after many hard-lived years had aged them. Even one of Kate’s alleged former lovers couldn’t say for sure if the woman in front of him was Kate Bender. Finally, the prosecuting attorney became convinced that they weren’t the Bender women after all, and released them back into the wilds of America.

  Go West

  Part of the reason public opinion was so divided about these two women was that many Kansans fervently believed the Benders had been killed back in 1873, when their bullet-ridden wagon was discovered. It didn�
��t matter that everyone had a different story about how they were killed. Some people just felt, in their bones, that the Benders were no longer living. And plenty of men were eager to claim the glory of killing the Benders for themselves.

  In 1908, the New York Times published a “deathbed confession” from a man who declared that he and his self-made “vigilance committee” had slain the brutal family. In his retelling, the man borrows liberally from the tropes and aesthetics of frontier myth:

  The Night was dark, and we feared that they might escape us, but our luck was good. We sighted them racing as fast as they could over the prairie, and shouted to them. The moon had risen, but frequently was obscured by heavy clouds. . . . We set our horses going at breakneck speed, and the bullets flew fast from both sides.

  Positioned this way in history, the tale of the Bloody Benders is a quintessentially American one, seasoned liberally with American gothic and American grotesque. It begins with someone settling a wild frontier and ends with someone vanishing into the sunset. It’s a classic tale of a stranger coming to town: demonic outsiders who moved in and slew good American people but ultimately came to justice, chased down across the prairie by American horsemen in a hail of gunfire under a ghostly moon.

  This deathbed confession probably isn’t true—if only because there were so many of these same “confessions” circulating in the years and decades after the Benders disappeared. But it’s easy to understand why so many people swore they’d killed the Benders, even beyond the fact that doing so would have been a great claim to fame and a damn good story. Think, for a moment, about how perfectly terrifying the Benders must have seemed to their fellow settlers. This family—which may or may not have actually been a family—was the inverse of everything the frontier wanted to believe about itself. They were so disturbingly suited for their environment that they might feel totally imaginary, like something the collective pioneer mind dreamed up, if it weren’t for the fact that we have photos of their orchard, spotted with open graves.