The Bloody Benders REDUX

Warning this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. Welcome to a Study of Strange. I'm Michael May. Today's episode a little bit different. I am rereleasing one of my favorite episodes to record, listen to, and research, and that is, of course, The Bloody Benders. And I learned a lot about the story that I didn't know before I went into researching this. Originally this was a two parter, but today it's been cut together as one very long episode. But all worth it.

I have a special guest, the wonderful John Keating, and before I get into the bloody benders, here it is the end of 2024 holiday season. Everybody's busy, so I'm doing a rerelease. I'm gonna have a short episode next week, but I wanted to reiterate I'm very excited about 2025 coming up because I have more time to devote to a study of strange. So we're going to have some deep dives, some thrilling episodes coming out, and make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it all.

All right, enough rambling. Here we go. 1873 Labette County, Kansas A small one room home has been abandoned and almost a dozen dead bodies are found buried nearby, all of them victims of a family of killers known nowadays as the Bloody Benders. The benders have become the stuff of legend. Their heinous acts became fodder for newspapers and tabloids, not just at the time, but through today.

As you can imagine, it can be tough to sift through all the rumors, conjectures, and folklore that came about. But even the stories that might be false don't hold up to what we know to be true. These serial killers were pure evil, and the worst part of their tale is that they got away. This is a study of strange. Hi. Welcome to the show, everybody. I'm Michael Mae, and joining me is the one, the only John M Keating. I do a John. Hello. I'm good, I'm good.

How are you? Yeah, I didn't play any of you that way. That's why I have to use my middle initials. Yes. Right. John m John f so, John, you're a an actor and acting teacher and acting coach with G. Charles Wright Studios in Los Angeles. And you I've told you, I hopefully I didn't make you feel uncomfortable when I was like, I want to find a good murder mystery for you. Oh, no, no, no, no. It's just funny, I that I became, like, the czar of murder. Yeah, I know, I know.

Now, John is a is a big fan of like, Columbo and a lot of old noir movies and stuff like I am as well. So I've been waiting around, wanting to find some sort of unsolved murder mystery to have you on, just because I thought it would be fun to kind of look at it from a detective point of view. This is a little different than I hoped, but I was like, I think John John might enjoy this one. It's a crazy. Oh, I definitely do. This is great.

Yeah. So it's today we are talking about the bloody benders, who killed between 11 and 23 people in southern Kansas, depending on what sources you read in the 1870s. And this was a huge national story line like press was huge. About this at the time when it happened. So it is not an uncommon story. It is very, very popular. There's been documentaries, there's even been some scripted movies. But yeah, it's full of strangeness because the family disappeared.

It's a family of serial killers and they all disappeared. No one caught them. And there's a lot of fanciful reports about the benders and what happened afterwards. And today we're going to talk about some of those. And also what I think what I think most likely happened because there actually are more reports than a lot of the articles out there would have you believe. So that we do know more facts about the benders after they were found out to be killers than, is commonly talked about.

Before we begin, just real quick, please make sure to subscribe, rate and review. Also, I put out a new, a new series for my Patreon listeners and supporters. So check that out through a website study of Strange. Jacob. Thank you for waiting on that, John. You did a good job as I did that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, getting a business out of the way. Gotta get business done. Gotta get it done. So let me ask for a quick John. Had you heard of the bloody benders before?

I asked you about it? Not. Not to this extent. I feel like I may have heard, like, of that kind of genre of the family serial killers, you know, and so I, I may have heard something about that, but not them specifically like that. Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned that. Crazy. Yeah. And right before we started rolling, you mentioned that it's very much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, totally. It is. It really is. There might be some influence on some of those types of stories.

It's a crazy one. There's a lot to go over. So this might be a two parter. So I kind of organized it. However, you never know we might get to it quick. Who knows? But it's most likely a two parter. So one of the things I'm going to posit as kind of a theory to think about over these two episodes is that I don't think The Benders killed people exactly the way that all the stories describe. Like there's this very famous, which you probably looked at when you just.

Yeah, sort of looked it up about them sneaking up behind somebody with the canvas in front of them and hitting them on the head, and then cutting on the throat. Yeah, with the hammer. Some of that is I think it's partly true, but I don't think that's actually how they killed all their victims, for reasons that I'll get into. Yeah. And I'm going to start with a, a certain part of the story and then kind of go backwards. This is like a little a little prelude or a teaser if you will.

So on May 6th, 1873, in Labette County, Kansas, a group of men probably dozens of them, are searching for the missing doctor, William York. Can they arrive at a cabin which is right on the main trail, the Osage Mission Trail, which is an old Native American trail, and it became kind of like the main highway in the area of the time in this part of Kansas.

And Leroy Dick, a local official who is in charge of the search for Doctor York, has been told that there's a cabin that is abandoned in empty, and it is home to the Bender family, what people call the benders. And apparently this family left it abandoned recently for reasons unknown.

And Billy Toll of farmhand, who told Leroy Dick about the desertion of this cabin, is there with the party to search and they suspect the benders might be involved with some nefarious murdering activity in the area. So they decide to search this abandoned cabin. And I'm going to quote from my main source today. It's a book from Suzanne Jonas. It's called Half Hell's Half Acre The Untold Story of the benders, a serial killer family on the American frontier.

So here's a here's a little quote from the story. Inside a single room is divided by the canvas sheet from a wagon. Dick yanks the makeshift curtain aside and is engulfed in a cloud of stills. It settles to reveal a sparsely furnished living space, inhabited by insects that retreat into the crevices at the fall of heavy boots. The cabin has been empty for some time, but it is clear that the occupants left quickly, taking only the essentials needed for travel toward the back of the room.

The scent of decay is stronger. A Bible with a cracked spine lies discarded near the straw mattress, pulled aside to reveal a trapped door or a trap door is the proper English of that. Instead of trapped door grasping the leather strap nailed to the wood is a handle. Dick throws the door open and the smell leaks into the cabin. It sticks to the throats of the search party beneath them in a dark void, opens Silas, Tall, Billy's older brother, volunteers to descend.

He is a rancher and used to the smell of animal carcasses, but down in the cellar he struggles to breathe. The floor is a slab of sandstone reddened by unnatural stains. When Silas crouches to investigate further, he finds that soil surrounding the slab is damp.

Hoisting himself from the pit, he tells the group that they will have to move the cabin to gain better access to the cellar, that there is definitely something buried beneath the slab and that thank you for bearing with me with that long little section there, John. But I just like I like the setup that they find this abandoned cabin and there's terrible smells and blood. Oh, yeah. It's the opening of a movie. I mean, it is. Absolutely. Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah, yeah.

And the, we're going to have to. There's something buried under the slab is such an ominous sentence. Yes, indeed. And this is a tale. This tale is grotesque. It is macabre and it's weird and people are still trying to understand it today, including us today. So, yeah, let's start at the beginning of this craziness that led to that moment of searching. This goes back, I think, three years. I think it's 1870 Kansas at the time, in 1870. It's a rugged place.

And I don't just mean the landscape, I mean culturally to during the Civil War, just before this, there were the Bushwhackers, primarily in Missouri, but they would fight in Kansas a lot. They were pro-slavery. Then there's a J. Hawkers, which if you know you're Kansas sports. Everybody, you know. Damn totally. Yeah. And they were abolitionist and they were primarily in Kansas, and they got caught up in all the fighting after the war, after all of this brutal, brutal fighting.

Now these people are there's a lot of them are still around. They're living amongst each other. There's a lot of emotions. People in America are generally moving out and migrating west at this point through Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and all these kind of places. And there's a lot of thieves and robbers and murderers and con men, and they're all trying to survive.

Also, in the decades leading up to this, there is famously, the Trail of Tears, where Native Americans were shipped out of their homes and sent to the Oklahoma Territory. And that is on the border of southern Kansas, where our story takes place today. And outlaws exploited the proximity of this border to escape, whether it's like stealing stuff and then hightail it down into Indian territory to get away from any potential, law enforcement. Now, all that said, homesteading is going on.

So people are there are allowed or able to purchase for very little money a large plot of land. And if they cultivate it and build on it for a certain period of time, they get to keep the land forever. It's theirs. This is a huge part of the westward expansion of the United States history. So on an October morning in 1870, two men arrived at the Osage Township in southern Kansas. And this is near today, where the town of Cherry Vale is. I think it was set up, actually, during this story.

And there was a little cabin here, which was a trading post, and two men ran the trading posts and their names were Edward, Ern and Rudolf Brockman. And they're sitting outside, apparently hanging out. And these two, these two men show up on a carriage and one is in his 20s. And he introduced himself as John Gephardt. And the older man was around 60, and he was John Bender.

And the assumption is that the two men were related, but no one actually seems to have inquired about their relationship, whether they were related by blood, by marriage. No one knows. Even still, to this day, no one knows. Now, Gephardt, in common tellings, is referred to as John Bender Jr. And there's a lot of claims saying that they didn't find out his name was Gephardt until after the murders were discovered. That doesn't actually seem to be true.

He actually introduced himself as John Gephardt at the time. He also seems to have introduced himself as John Bender to some people. So it's it's just really strange, these this family now. And there's a lot of that coming up. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. There's, there's still it's there's a hole through both parts. There's a lot of these things. In the second part, when I get into the press that that happened immediately after the descriptions of people are all

over the place. Yeah. So they both these guys had German accents. John Bender, as I refer to him, the PA, as they call him sometimes, he had a very thick German accent and apparently could not really speak English. And he was also incredibly unfriendly and brutish and mean. A lot of the descriptions call him very hairy, like, I imagine, a big brute Bigfoot sort of creature. A lot of. Suit, if you will. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Definitely had a hair suit.

This guy is a he is a walking hair suit, for sure. And John Gephardt was kind of skinny. He had, like, a narrow face. Apparently his eyes were, like, too close together. And he had this really annoying laugh where he would be like. Oh, yes. Except he had a German accent. So it's a terrible impression. But, they sound like they sound like the side characters in a Disney movie. Are they totally okay? Like or like Pirates of the Caribbean? Yeah, they're the two.

The two Mackenzie Crook and the other guy. Pirates that are, like, not the main ones. You got to have, like, the skinny one and the chubby one. The one in the, like 101 Dalmatians. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. They absolutely are. And they allegedly were moving in from Pennsylvania, which actually does make sense because we don't know if they really did move in from Pennsylvania, but if they're German, Pennsylvania, Dutch, even my ancestors were Pennsylvania Dutch.

They immigrated into Pennsylvania. So it actually makes sense. They may have been from Pennsylvania. And so, earned the gentleman and showed these two German guys around to the various plots that might be they might be interested in in town. And they picked one out that was perfect for travelers because it's literally right on the Osage Mission Trail. So it's right on the highway of its time.

But it it was sort of sunk in low between some mounds and hills that are still there today, where people can't really see the cabin. There's there's some privacy and the otherwise sort of flat, sparse Kansas terrain. Kansas. Yeah. Yeah. Not known for its hilly. No, no. Not it known more for its tornadoes and, taking people up inside of tornadoes. Now, what I didn't know until researching is that John Bender? He is the one that purchased the plot. It was 160 acres that the cabin was on.

And Gephardt actually purchased his own plot, which was kind of nearby. It was a narrow strip that was a bit I think it had more trees and stuff on it. They never he never built anything on it. He never did anything with the land. So some people suspect that it was for more privacy in the area, which I totally buy now. When the man got the land, they kind of quickly paced out the cabin in the ground. They literally took their feet and like drew a line.

It was like, here's the cabin where they're at. They use sticks to kind of draw things out, and then they built their own cabin because that's what that's what men did back then. John, what do we do with our lives now? We were podcasting. I am I am not a man like they went back I can't yeah I mean I don't even I don't know, like people make bread. I don't know how they sleep I just diet. Yeah, yeah. Bread is hard. I've actually tried to make bread.

It is not easy is it. Yeah. It was doing all that. So they built a 16 by 24 cabin, with nine foot ceilings. There was a door at each end. Some stories say there's only a front door, but there actually was a front and a back door. There was a what is always called a trapdoor to the basement. It's not a trapdoor, it's just a little thing you lift up. It's like it's a hatch. They did cover it and hide it, but it's not a trapdoor.

And they built the cabin really quickly because winter is a common when they're when they're moving in. In 1870, over the period of, of months after that, they planted an orchard behind the house. They also built sort of a stable like corral for, for animals right there. They also dug a well. And allegedly, when they first moved, Dan Gebhart would make money by taking stolen horses across the border. I don't know, I don't know how to confirm that.

That's just one of those stories that comes up with tales of the time. And the men nailed a sign out front that said groceries, but they spilled groceries. Groceries. I mean, you know, English may not be their first language, so make sense? And so, yeah, they planned to sell some goods to make some money along the trail. Now, apparently John Bender was when they opened up shop and they started having customers, you know, stop on their travels to buy things. John Bender was, unfriendly.

There's much worse ways to describe it. He was a very unfriendly dude, and sometimes, like, wouldn't even help potential customers. And he also didn't speak English, which doesn't help, but he never really tried. In March of 1871, the Bender boys were joined by the lady folk Kate Bender or Katie, sometimes, in her early 20s, and Ma Bender. She's sometimes referred to as Elmira or Elvira Bender. I will explain that in part two. No one actually knows her name.

It was. They just refer to it. Ma. No one actually knows her real name. And that is the truth. The book I read, my main source. This is the only place I ever saw this. It says that they came from Ottawa. The women, which I was like, can I can I get more information on that? And there wasn't it just that they came from Ottawa. And I was like, that's weird, because the guys came from Pennsylvania. The women are coming from Ottawa. I don't know, it just it's a very interesting detail.

I wish I knew more about his. That might explain some of why the vendors are the way they are is we don't know. We don't know why they were as crazy as they are. So, Ma Bender, similar to PA Bender, spoke very little English, very heavy accent. She did know more English than she let on, but she didn't know it very well. And she was considered a she devil is what a lot of people called her. She was also just as unfriendly as the the hair suit man known as PA Bender.

And Kate or Katie, I'll probably refer to as Kate, but she went by both. She did have a little bit of a German accent, apparently, but she spoke very good English. Not as much of a German accent as the other guy. And Kate came with mom, right? That's right. Yeah. They came together. Not born of Ma and PA vendor, right? No. People. People assume that if they are related, she's most likely Ma's daughter. But again, no one knows. No one knows if this entire family is a real family at all.

No one. We have no confirmations of any of that. And it is interesting that they're German, but coming through Ottawa. Right? Right. Because it is an Ottawa primarily, I would imagine, French speaking at the time. I don't know enough about Canada, but I think so.

Now around the time that the that Kate and Ma showed up, they started kind of running their, their business model they landed on, which is accepting guests at the cabin not just for groceries, but also to make a warm meal, give people a place to sleep out of the elements for the night because you have all these travelers. There are no motels at the time, so you just stop at someone's house to stay the night. There's no like, guest room. This is all one big room separated by that canvas sheet.

So it's probably a chair. Or you put your saddle on the ground with a blanket, and that's that's where you sleep. And that's primarily how the vendors tried to make money. Now, the word about town is that Ma and PA did not socialize like they would stay at the house and do chores around the house. They would every now and then go into town or a township to buy supplies. But they didn't really talk to people. And again, they were really terrible at socializing. They were not good people.

And so Kate and John, it was up to them to kind of socialize in town. And they did. They went to church. They went to Sunday school, Kate worked at a hotel and eventually a couple other jobs as well. So they were more well known amongst the town folk at the time, and they were considered much nicer. But there are periods of time where they're oddities. They're they're eccentric.

Cities would come across to the locals and rub them the wrong way, like Kate was apparently a healer and a spiritualist and would hold seances and admit that cheek or not admit, but suggest that she could heal all sorts of abnormal abnormalities and she would push people a little too hard for that kind of business. She was an aggressive car salesman, and John again had that irritating.

Not you, John, but John Gephardt had the irritating laugh that made people think that he might be stupid, like there might be some sort of mental disability. At the time, I think one of the quotes from a source back then is calling him a halfwit, which definitely sounds like a 19th century. That's what passes as a mental health. Yeah, I know, since back then. Yeah, early 19th century indeed. So here's where something strange begins to happen.

And who is the the guy that showed the Bender boys around for claims, he was bought out of his business, out of the trading post. And so he took that money that he earned, and he sent it overseas to pay for his fiancee and her mother to move to the States, I think, from Germany. So they're making the trek over. And when you travel and make big moves back, then everything you own comes with you. There's no there's no Fedex, there's no storage facilities, there's no banks.

Well, there are banks, but they're not everywhere and they're not very accessible. So I'll just buy a couch when I get there. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Everything so. So everything's coming with them. And Ern set it up so that they could stay at the Bender cabin when they arrive to town for a little bit. So they arrive to town, they're staying with the benders, and one day the entire Bender family suggest to the fiance that her mother we should go on a long walk.

And they were like, oh, that sounds lovely. So they all go out to walk. And the two older benders at one point are like, we're not feeling well or we're old. And they came up with some excuse. They turned around and left the younger, the younger group to keep walking. And when the younger group made it back to the cabin, a jewelry box was gone, as well as all their cashier's checks.

I don't know how much money the cashier's checks added up to, but it had to be, again, probably everything they had. Yeah, and they were gone and nothing else is gone, by the way. Those are the things that are gone. So the the family immediately blames the vendors. They think they've been had and they've had a, they've been stolen from by the vendors. And so they're very upset about it. And John Gebhart is like, the horse thief. It's horse states that happens around these parts are horses.

You shouldn't stay here. It's too dangerous because they might still be around. So he takes the ladies to some other family nearby and has them stay somewhere else. Ern, of course, finds out about this. He actually threatens the vendors, shows up at the cabin with a gun and holds it to the vendors and is like I demand to have the jewelry box and the checks given to me. I know you have them. They declined. They play dumb and stupid and like, we don't know what you're talking about. It's so sad.

And he realizes wisely, he can't really do anything because there's no evidence. So he threatened them, didn't get anything out of it. So that's all he could do. But it's gone away. And he's left, by 1871, in this same year, this is all happening, the the cabin became what we all know it to be from all the tales, because it didn't always look the same. They obviously planted the orchard, which was growing. They may not have even had the canvas separator right away.

That may have taken a time before they did that. And very famously, there is this white canvas that hung in the middle of the cabin to separate the living quarters for all the benders, all of them in one little spot, and the front area for cooking, eating. There's a table that had two benches. It's always in pictures. They always draw chairs, but it actually apparently it's two benches and one side faced the door with the canvas right behind it. And that's very important for the story. Yes.

And one thing I don't know how important this is for the story, but I love these kind of inconsistencies when you research things. Apparently the canvas, according to one account, was not white. It was a red calico curtain and not a white canvas. And this is where I like to say on the show, both can be true. It's not like, oh, we proved it wrong. They might have switched it out at one point, you know, or maybe they rotated it. Maybe they cleaned them.

There are lots of white. One gets dirty everywhere. Oh yeah. There are reports that it's like stained red. And I think those are reports are from all the press articles that came out that are mostly making up stories that like because some people are like, oh, stained with blood. And I'm like it that would just scare away customers. I don't think they just left blood on the canvas. Yeah. So here I have some dinner and sit right by the blood stained.

Yeah. Put your head right there by the blood mark. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Which is one of my theories of why I don't think they were attacked the way everybody thinks they were attacked. However, apparently they were very dirty. Like, there's a lot of comments on, like, dirty dishes and bugs and stuff like that. I got a lot of negative Yelp reviews. Yes. Oh, yes. The Yelp reviews are getting breakfast. Not good. But this will be reflected in my Yelp reviews.

And the vendors didn't care because there's no other business nearby that does the same thing. So they're like, yeah. They leave a bad Yelp reviews. We don't care. Kate was also she was very interested in her spiritualism practice, her business of healing. That's I think she would have much rather just been telling fortunes and telling people she can cure blindness, then kill people. That's my own assumption.

She did market and advertise her services all around the area, so I actually, I'm going to read one because it's fun. So it says Professor Miss Katie Bender can heal all sorts of diseases, can cure blindness, deafness and all such diseases are also deaf and dumbness. Residents 14 miles east of independence, on the road from Independence to Osage Mission, one and one half miles southeast of Nora Head Station. Katie Bender June 18th, 1872. Yeah, I love that stuff. I love that I love Fitz. Fitz.

Yeah, that covers so many things. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Now, spiritualism I'm not going to go into. But people can listen to my William Mumler series to learn a little bit more about it. Spiritualism is a huge belief. Religion at the time where people said they could talk to dead people. And Katie is not the only spiritualist in the area. It was very, very prominent, including one story from a woman named Julia Hessler who was a friendly medium.

She would hold seances around the area with Kate Bender sometimes, and one night Kate invited Julia to come to the cabin for a seance. This is where I first seen comes and John, you excited? I'm very excited. Okay. So scene one. Who do you care who you read? Which part do you want to really know? Let me pull it up here again. It. So it's the first scene. That is. I am open to whatever casting decisions let's have you do. Let's have you do, Julia. Okay, great.

Yeah. And I'm I'm not going to try to do a German accent because I will I will be terrible for Kate. All right, so here we go. So it's a brisk night, and Julia Hester knocks on the door of the Bender cabin. Kate Bender opens the door and gestures for Julia to enter. Julia notices a small fire in a stove and two candles lit on a table in the center of the room. A dirty canvas hangs behind the table, separating the room in two. Good evening Kate. Thank you for inviting me. Sit, sit.

Julia begins to sit down and one of the bench on one of the benches at the table. Not there. Sit facing the door. It's much more comfortable. All right. Julia takes a seat with her back against the canvas. I'm very excited you've come. Let's get started. Kate blows out the candles in the room, which was already barely lit, is now exceptionally dark, except for bits of light from the stove casting strange shadows across the walls. Close your eyes. Where's the rest of your family?

They don't partake in seances. Kate reaches for Julia's hands. Now close your eyes. Kate closes her eyes and Julia begins to close hers, but a swarming flies swoops across her face and she pulls a hand away from Kate's, the spot at it. Come now. It's just a net. Kate grabs Julia's hands again and they both close their eyes. Those from the spirit world. We wish to communicate. Spirits we offer ourselves as vessels. Julia notices a creaking sound. She tries to ignore it.

Kate begins to make a strange humming sound home. Julia. Here's another creak and opens her eyes behind Kate, lit by the faint flickers of fire. From the stove stands Ma PA and John Gephardt. They are staring silently at Julia. Oh. Julia pulls her hands away from Kate. Don't worry about them. Stay focused. Kate tries to grab Julia's hands. I have to excuse myself. Sorry. The outhouse. I have to use the. When nature calls. I'll be right back.

Julia stands and swiftly manages to skate around the bend, her family and exit. As she does so, she begins to run Porbandar, grabs a rifle and aims at it. Julia. But she's hard to track in the dark night as she runs, Paul fires the gun into the air. As Julia disappears into the fields, John Gebhart giggles while Kate Bender slaps PA on the iron. I'm unhappy with how the night played out. You should probably do a John get part giggle to give your best take. See that perfect, perfect. Nailed it.

So yes. That is our that. It was our first scene. There'd be another one in part two. Yeah. So this is this is a is a story that I read in, again, my primary source for the evening that I was just a little fascinated by is it really paints a picture of what the Bender family was like. And we don't know if they were planning to kill her that night, but it's definitely suspect that they grabbed a rifle. You know? Well, yeah, exactly. And and that they were just there staring at her. Yeah. Yeah.

Eyes were supposed to be closed. Yes. Now, one thing I will say, this is not a way to defend the benders by any means. So hopefully it doesn't come across that way. But this story, I don't think people knew this story until after the benders were discovered to have been murderers. So it's not like she ran to town and was like, oh my God, that family, they were trying to shoot me. It was really weird. They tricked me into coming. It could be some sort of embellishment.

However she was, Juliet was known to be, you know, doing seances with Kate. So it does. There is some validity to this story. It could have been like one of those. One of those I was there story. Yeah. Oh, yes. Absolutely. You know, like, oh she's just been there for the Sands but. Oh no. Then they tried to kill me too, but I got away. Yeah, yeah. And God, there's a lot of those even today. So there is a little side tangent.

But when, when I research I, I hate comments on videos and articles and stuff, but I find when I'm doing these stories, it's actually really helpful to read through because every now and then someone will be like, oh, did you see this link? Or oh, I actually read that, you know, like you'll find more information that you're not going to normally find. And still to this day on, I think there's some on Reddit, there's some on some YouTube documentaries I watch about them.

There are people that's like, oh, my grandfather told me a story about his grandfather that went down and shot the benders and like, there's so many of those tales and it's like, it's a lot of these. I knew them, and we will cover more of those in part two, actually, because there's quite a number. It's really fascinating. So I, I'm not sure when the Bender family actually started killing. It could have been right away and we just don't know.

But I do think it most likely because of when people started to be found or go missing, I do think it may be late 1871. And we do have some details of victims of the benders. Not everybody, but I will cover some of them today, starting with late 1871, right around the holiday season, like like today when we're recording this. Oh. That's creepy. A gentleman named James Feyerick and his wife, Mary had a young son, and Mary and the son. We're going to go visit family in New York.

And James was going to stay behind and build the family home in this area of Kansas. And so Mary and the son, they depart for New York for a number of months, because back then, when you left, you left for a long period. We're just going out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the plan was, yeah, build, build the home. So when they return months later, there is a home for them to live in. So as soon as they leave, James sets off along the Osage Mission trail.

And it's likely he was carrying most, if not all, of the family's money at the time. And Mary and her son arrive in New York and they write a letter back, back to Kansas, and they never get a response. Now, at some point in time, I don't know how long, but after she's not getting any responses from James, she gets a letter from a family friend from the area in Kansas that say they have not seen or heard from James since he left along the trail. Now, right around this time as well.

This is when Kate begins kind of working in town. She's doing her spiritualism stuff. She's doing her senses and people are starting to say that negative Yelp reviews saying it's starting to pass around like the the Bender family has now been there for about a year. There's a lot of tales of them either treating people poorly, treating guest poorly, mine poor being just really terrible people, and Kate would be dirty.

Kate would be like very flirtatious to men one minute and then days or minutes later she would be complete 180 and be really rude to them and standoffish. And I wanted to say this just because I'm trying to paint the picture of their personalities because they are so strange. Hence a study of strange. Now, there are a lot of these sort of anecdotal things about their personalities are rumors. Again, it's the oh, I knew them. I solved the thing when happened.

That's where a lot of these come from, however, because they're all similar, I think that we can actually be like, yeah, Kate was probably very flirtatious one minute and then really rude the next. John probably was super weird, and manpower probably really unfriendly because everybody says that. So there's just a there's a commonality to all these stories. So there's also a tale from the same book that I wanted to share, just because, again, it's very interesting and scary.

A priest named Leoni, I think that's how you say that, was traveling in the area and he was raising money for a mission. And so he stopped at the cabin because that's where he was told, you can get a warm meal and stuff like that. And Kate got really excited when she asked him what he was doing, and he explained he's raising money for a mission. And the priest noticed after he started telling his story that the men who were in the cabin suddenly disappeared. He never heard them leave.

He didn't know where they go, where they went, excuse me? And he asked Kate like, oh, where? Where, you know, you're where are the guys? And she gave some sort of like, vague answer and she was making him coffee. And apparently she was acting really bizarre. And she's like glancing around the room, her eyes are darting around, and she's putting a lot of focus onto the second half of the room behind the canvas, and it just rubs the priest the wrong way.

And when she sat down with his coffee, he jumped up and made an excuse and left. And part of what makes this really dramatic is there was a huge storm. That's why he stopped. There was to get out of this huge storm, and now he ran off into the storm to get away from the vineyards. So that's another interesting story. In October of 1872, a dead body was found by two kids in a river called a Drum Creek, and the body had a blunt force trauma to the head and also a neck wound like a cut.

And it was assumed by authorities that the body was there about six days, and the body was later identified as a man named William Jones, and he was traveling the Osage Mission Trail for work, and his wife claims that he had hundreds of dollars on him. Locals thought that the guy that owned the land that his body was found on must have done it. This is very like investigating the 1870s. Oh, it's your land. You did it. Yeah. And this guy was named R.M. Bennett.

And he was actually arrested for this murder. And he noticed he was Columbo ING himself that there is this interesting, track left by a wagon that went that was near where the body would have been dumped in the creek. And the track of the wagon meant like one of the wheels was jutted out. And he was like, look at all my wagons. I don't know how many he had. Maybe he only had one, but it was like, look at my wagon or more. I don't have any wagons that have wheels like that.

And so they looked at him and were like, okay, yeah, you're right. And we have no other evidence. So you're free to go. So luckily he was not. It's kind of like the early version of like, the tire treads. Yeah, absolutely. It's the exact same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The benders, I will point out, were not suspects. They were not suspects for any of these murders or disappearances for quite a while. And that is because life was tough like that.

It it's a place where a lot of people are going missing for sometimes just very natural reasons. But again, there's other thieves and robbers and murderers and con men. There's also right across the border into Oklahoma Territory. It's all where the Native American tribes are, and they, rightly so, don't always get along with the westward expansion of white people moving through the area. So there are, you know, some, some violent interactions that can happen.

So a man named Benjamin Brown came through the area and he traded horses with somebody at the door, another nearby town or settlement. And then he disappeared. His wife actually went looking for him, knowing no one else is going to look for the guy. So I've got to go do it, too. And she actually stayed the night at the Bender cabin along her search for her husband, which is just super scary now that we know that she didn't know that that you know. Yeah, exactly.

A man named William McCarty, who was a war veteran, disappeared on his way to a land office. He stopped at the Bender cabin. It's assumed because right before he disappeared, he talked to a guy and said, where can I stop to get some food? And they said, oh, go to the Bender cabin. That was the last person to ever see him alive. Around Christmas. This would be of 1872. A man's body was found which had been practically eaten entirely by wild hogs.

He was able to be identified because of his clothing. He was a guy named John Phipps, and his family said he also was traveling with a lot of money. So you'll notice here that some people had been found, dumped the guy in the creek. And now Phipps. And this is all about to change. And I think it's about to change because word is getting around that there's dead bodies being found, and that makes people suspicious of a lot of things.

So especially since that and the last people to see them was the vendor cabinet vendor. Yeah. Exactly. So I think the vendors, they are both incredibly stupid and try to do something a little smarter, which is we're not going to dump bodies. We should bury everybody for a little more privacy. I mean, they got 168 acres. You might as well. Yes, you got it. You got to land. Use some of it. Yeah. So the the saddest story is the one that happens next.

And that's a gentleman named George Long, or his name is misspelled or spelled different ways and different articles and things. But I think that's just the product of the time. And not everybody knew how to spell it. He was traveling to Iowa in December of 1872. Now he and his wife, Mary Jane, they had a daughter who was 18 months old at the time, named Mary Ann, and the mother had actually passed away due to complications of childbirth.

So George Long, poor, unsure of how to raise a daughter on his own, befriends a doctor, William York and Doctor William York has a family. Mary and his daughter gets along with the family. So the York family actually helps take care of this little girl until one day the the step, not step. In-laws. George Law of course in-laws actually write to him are like, look, Marianne should come live with us. We're family if we need. If you need help with her, send her up to us. And he agrees to do that.

So he actually buys, a carriage from Doctor York and travels through Kansas, where he lives along the Osage Mission trail with his 18 month old daughter. And they never make it to Iowa. Now, a couple days after he left, a man named John Hanley stopped by the Bender cabin with a colleague. They were just looking to warm up. I don't think they were planning to stay the night.

And the bender seemed uninterested in having a guest at the time, like they were really standoffish and he wanted to light a fire and and they were like, no. And he's like, well, I'll buy the firewood. And they're like, no. And so it's suggested that they were being really kind of rude and wanting him to leave, probably because they still had George Long called in his daughter's body, maybe even in the cabin. Maybe in the cellar. Sure. So that's the. Way to deal with it.

This is the first step towards the benders being found out. So they they should not have they should not have done what they should have done, which is just a terrible comment because they shouldn't have done any of this. John, what am I saying? They should not have done any of this. So months later, after law Court goes missing, a doctor, William York, his buddy, the person who helped raise his daughter for a period of time. He had been a Civil War vet. He was a bit of a hero in the Civil War.

He had also been a prisoner of war during the Civil War, which is just the stories I've heard about that are just pure hell and he went to visit his brother Alexander York, because George Lung Core is missing. And Doctor William York wasn't sure what to do and wanted some help. And not only had York not received word that Lung Core had made it to his family in Iowa, but there was a wagon was also found and that was crashed and something obviously it had been abandoned or something.

And it had a wardrobe, clothing from a man and a probably an 18 month old girl. So William York went to see the wagon wherever it was found and was like, oh shit, that's my wagon. That's the one. He sold George Long Horse, so he knew something happened to him. So he went to his brother. Like I said, Alexander Alexander is a former Kansas state senator, very recently, Kansas state senator at the time.

He was very well-respected, very powerful, very interesting guy in Kansas, knew how to push a lot of buttons, get a lot of things done. And there's a story about him that I have to share just because it it kind of shows how kind of interesting and cool he is. So he was no longer a state senator because he accepted a bribe, but he accepted a bribe to prove that another senator was paying bribes.

So he kind of like, threw away his own career as a senator just to get the other guy out of the Senate. So, yeah, he tricked he tricked a guy by accepting a bribe, and he actually went to the Senate floor and showed proof that he accepted a bribe. He's like, I accepted a bribe. Here's the proof. It came from that man that senator there, that scumbag who we all know is a scumbag. So they had to kick them both out of the Senate and actually was pretty amazing.

Like, yeah, stand up for your principles. Yeah. It's like I'm actually running where your mouth is. Absolutely. So I want you I want to read part of his speech on the Senate floor because it's so cool. And also, I just love the language back then that people use. Oh, sure. So here you go. This is Alexander York on the state Senate floor.

I know that there are many present who may feel disposed to impugn my motives in this matter and decry the manner of my unearthing the deep and damning rascality which has eaten like a plague spot into the fair name of this glorious young state. I am conscious that standing here, as I do a self convicted bribe taker, I take upon myself vicariously the odium that has made the name of Kansas and Kansas politics a hissing and byword throughout the land. Yes. So he is. He's not a senator anymore.

But people love him for what he did. He of course, he is both feared and respected. And William tells tells his brother Alexander that he's going to actually go search for for George long for himself, and he's going to start by traveling the same path that Langhorne traveled and so he gets in is probably horse and buggy or carriage of some kind, and he heads on down the Osage Mission trail, and he soon to went missing.

And his brother Alexander gets worried that that now Doctor William York, his brother, is missing. He never showed up. So Alexander is like, something's going on in that area. So I need to figure this out. And there's somebody I trust. My other brother, the youngest brother, Edward York. He calls in Ed and says, get a detective, get a team together. We got to go find out what happened to our brother, Detective William York.

And in certain respects, they did find out what happened to Doctor William York. He two met the bloody benders. And that is where we're going to end part one. John, is with the the hunt for whatever happened to Doctor William York. And next week we're going to conclude the story of the bloody benders, what investigators found, what they didn't, and the details of the benders escape from Kansas and into the, I don't know, infamy.

Are they. Inside much? Yeah. And they're like, it's like folklore or legend. Yeah, absolutely. It definitely is. And out now I'm thinking about Infamous and The Three Amigos in famous. In these hidden babies. Yeah. So, yeah. Doctor William York to to surmise, his disappearance leads to the downfall of the benders directly because the York York Burrows are on the case and it is not pretty.

And we're going to get kind of more macabre in part two, is we find out all the details of the crazy bloody benders picking up in the 1870s, near the end of the bloody benders reign of terror in Labette County, Kansas. Things in this mystery are about to get. Messy in. More ways than one. The rest of this tale is like an abstract painting. The details. The meaning is in the eye of the beholder. It provokes imagination and just might be a great way to study the human psyche.

Or I'm just trying to find meaning in these crazy freaking bloody benders. This is a study of strange. Welcome to the show. Welcome back. I'm Michael May, and today I'm still joined by John M Keating, who is with me on this strange tale of the bloody Bender family. The weeks fly by. It feels like just five minutes ago, doesn't it? Does it? I think more like a minute and a half. Off with the last week's like like. So thank you everybody for your support of the show and listening to the show.

And I am always having an amazing time doing this. And the best thing to do to support is just to subscribe, rate and review and check out our website, a study of strange.com for Patreon and episodes and anything else you might be interested in. So I'm going to we're going to jump right into it. We're going continuing the story right away. Where we left off is the benders. A family, maybe not family, are leaving a trail of bad first impressions around Labette County, Texas.

That is, that it might be the best thing, right? Yeah. I leave leave a bad first. A bad, bad first impressions everywhere and. Analyze where you find it. Yeah. And they a many, many a traveler are going missing in the area. And some dead bodies have been found that no one is. No one is casting suspicion on the benders quite yet. We're in like 1872 ish, though. I have jumped around a time a little bit. And John, you actually pointed out a really good thing that I'll clarify here.

At the beginning, John was like, I don't know if you actually said how they kill people. So very good point. The the common story of the benders is that there. And please listen to part one so you can catch some of these details if you haven't already.

But there's a canvas in the cabin that separates the front room, which is where there were some goods that they would sell a table to eat at, where people could stay the night and the back area with a couple of straw mattresses where the Bender family would live. And the canvas. It was right up against one of the chairs or benches at the table. It was the seat of honor at that. Yes, it's the. Seat of honor is. A great way to it.

Name that. Yes. Yeah. And again folklore here is that they would it usually you hear it as Kate would seduce or flirt or makes people come down and she would get them to sit with their head right up against the canvas. And as they're relaxed and unassuming or being fed food and getting comfortable, someone would sneak up behind them on the other side of the canvas with a hammer, and Wakeham, hit them on the head.

And then immediately it's said a lot of times as well that Kate, because a lot of them had their throats cut. Kate would then cut their throat and they might be dumped into the cellar to bleed out and die, or they might. Just be trapped under. The trapdoor. They make it sound. Some of the reports make it sound like it was like a mechanical, like a drop opened and like, like, Sweeney Todd. Yeah, yeah, it's. I even saw a movie where there's. There is a door right underneath the table.

So they would move the table and then just dump the body. It's like, no, it was in the back under a mattress. And it's not a trapdoor. It's just a, like, you know, thing. Yeah. Sorry. There's an interesting thing about about the putting the head next to the canvas that might, lend a lot of credibility to the. This is how they did it. That was a commonly used, used technique in carnivals where they would have, like the wrestler challenge someone from the audience.

Yeah. And they would, you know, they would have someone that knew how to wrestle, that knew how to hurt people, basically. And, you know, there was always the drunk people, oh, I can take and blah, blah, blah. And you had to last so many minutes with the person. But if the person was too good and got the better of the wrestler so they didn't lose money. Yeah, there was always someone behind the curtain. The blackjack with like, a flapjack.

And the wrestler would maneuver the other person, the person from the crowd towards the curtain. Boom. And he whack them with that and knock them out. And then they. That is. So there is there is precedent for. That's interesting. Yes. Yeah. That's really interesting. Oh wow. John. Yeah. That was an old old like because because that's where like pro wrestling evolved out of was the carnivals like that and because of that you know. Yeah. Yeah. That brings and that's.

I was going to say that actually brings up an interesting theory because we don't know the benders past before they showed up. And no. And there was a lot of like germ, like there was a lot of carnival stuff in that air in that. Yeah. Area of the country. Yeah, yeah. At those times. Absolutely. Oh, cool. That is awesome. So, yeah. So we will get into that. Some of some of my own theorizing about the benders deals with that, that canvas and that method of, of killing people as well.

So we're going to get to that towards the end of this, which is already that is that is cool. That is a really good, really good that so where we left off, Doctor William York was searching for his missing friend George Lancashire and Lancashire, his 18 month old daughter and then Doctor York went missing. And his brother Alexander, the former state senator, gets another York brother, Edward, to come and help search for what happened to their missing brother, Doctor York.

Now, Edward York was a bit of a wannabe cowboy. He was brash. This is all my own description of him. This is nobody else saying this. He's brash, cocky. He definitely cared for his brothers and wanted to find out what happened to to Doctor York. But he definitely seems a bit kind of like trigger happy again, just a figure of speech. And I mean, he was shooting people, but he seems a bit trigger happy and he becomes the family's main guy on the ground investigating.

And they get a group of people formed around the town and townships to help look. And they were actually able to trace Doctor York's movements pretty clearly, because Doctor York was looking for his missing friend. So he was talking to everybody. So when, when the group searching for him is now going around, like, have you seen a doctor, William York? People are like, yeah, he was here asking me about this George Long career fella.

So there is a they were able to trace where he went, who we talked to, even a house he stayed at for the night, not the benders. And they heard a story about a guy named James Roach in La Dore, Kansas. James Roach was a hotel owner.

And Roach was worried when he heard that the York brothers were out looking for their missing brother, that they would come to him and suspect him because apparently James Roach was a suspect and a lot of strange disappearance cases or thievery or other strange rumors about town. People thought Roach was behind it and had like a gang of not vigilantes, a gang of thieves or whoever that, like, worked for him.

So when the York brothers showed up in his town, he was like, oh shit, they're coming for me. So sure enough, young Ed Ed York shows up at the hotel and threatens Roach, and I think he even, like, pulled a gun on him. And it's like yelling and threatening him and blaming him for the disappearance and other disappearances and all this kind of stuff. Thankfully, Alexander was there. The former senator, who seemed to be the he was the head on the shoulders of this group.

He he comes things down and he ended up questioning James Roach and determined that Roach had nothing to do with it. And so so that was Roach got very lucky because there is there's always a chance for mob justice in these parts at that time. Oh, 100%. Yeah. And also too, if he was, which I'm sure he was doing a lot of shady stuff, he doesn't want the heat. Yeah, he doesn't want the heat. And this is this is why I really want to know more about James Roach.

If anybody knows anything about this guy emailed me a study of stranger gmail.com. Because it's so interesting, because what I'm reading, I'm focused on the benders, so I'm not going down like that rabbit hole. But he he was worried. Everybody suspected him for all sorts of stuff, which I'm like, why, why, why are people. Suspecting you for all this? He obviously was doing some shit.

And then he wrote to the governor for help with law enforcement, which is interesting because if he isn't shady stuff, but he was like, we need more law. Like, I'm scared. I'm tired of being a suspect in everything. Please send law enforcement to help out in the area. So it's just an interesting little, little anecdote there. Or maybe he was just a little weird and everybody was just like he was an easy go to. Yeah. Absolutely nothing. You know.

Now, a local guy named Thomas Beers who, as far as I can tell, did not have any training for being a detective or law enforcement officer. But he became a private detective, and he was one of the main investigators on the case. And another local official I mentioned in part one, Leroy Dick, becomes a part of this group of investigators as well, because he is sort of like a city or county or township official.

He carries some some, he wasn't like a law enforcement officer, but he carries some authority around town. And Leroy Dick, I'll mention this real, real quick to Leroy Dick is actually a very important historical figure when it comes to the vendors, because a lot of the stories we have about them or information come from Leroy Dick. And the decades after the benders were found out and disappeared, he was interviewed a lot. I think he may have even written a book or two.

And he he definitely embellished his role in things as one does, I guess. But he did play an important role in sort of a lot of the details we know about the benders being shared down through the generations. Now, as an example of what Leroy Dick brought to the case, he's actually the first person to connect the benders as persons of interest, not suspects yet, but persons of interest.

This comes up because as the search for New York is happening, Leroy Dick remembers the theft charges, which I mentioned in part one with the two ladies that moved in from Germany and the jewelry box and the cashier's checks went missing.

Leroy Dick was told at the time about that, but there was nothing he could do because there was no evidence they took it so he couldn't put out, you know, a vigilante group together or whatever they called him at the time to go out and and actually investigate a posse, a posse. And so he remembers this. He shares this information with the Yorks. And Ed York actually knew who Kate Bender was because he had seen her advertised easements for her.

Like, I can cure Blindness and Dumb witness and whatever else she was at this. Don't forget the Fitz. Don't forget Fitz. And Ed actually was like that. That all seems like hooey, but he remembered the name and was able to piece that together. So this group wisely. And I'm just going to give Alexander the credit. But it's an assumption they decide to go visit the benders, but they're not going to go being like, they don't want the benders to think that they're persons of interest.

So they decide to go by the benders to stock up on supplies. And also they're looking for their brother. So they are going to ask about him just because he probably went down the trail. But they're not going to give any sort of inkling that they may be thinking of the benders. And that is where our next scene comes in. John. So yeah, we're we're going to do a dramatization here of what happened between the York boys and their group investigating this and the benders.

And a lot of this is actually taken from accounts from the York brothers. So some of this language is taken right from them. So that's fun. All right. You ready? Yes. Which who am I doing? Oh, that. Is a good question. I don't want to just dive in. Let's see who is who's. Maybe Alexander. Yeah. Okay, I'll do that. It's Andrew. You do? Kate and Gephardt. Yeah, I'll do Kate and Gephardt. Okay. Oh, that means I have to do my laugh. All right. You laugh. Yeah, yeah. All right, here we go.

So it's the Bender cabin one day, and Alexander Yorke, his younger brother, had Detective Beers and others right up to the cabin. They open the front door and walk inside themselves to get out of a light rain. Inside the cabin, they find John Gephardt sitting and reading a Bible. He introduces himself but doesn't attempt to help the alleged customers. Suddenly, Kate appears from behind the canvas curtain. Can I help you? Beg your pardon? You, Miss Kate Bender? Yes. Kate. Nuts.

I'm Alexander Yorke. I'm sure you've heard that, my dear brother, Doctor William Yorke, went missing around these parts. We're looking for any clues about what may have happened to him. Yes, of course. He stopped here for groceries. Like I wish you would find out if he is alive or dead. He was a very nice man. I cannot imagine the distress. Yes, it has caused distress for not just our family, but everyone who knew him. He left here without worry and only only spoke to him a few minutes.

Isn't that right, John? That's right. It's a big mystery. I wish you well in your search. I got shot at near where they found the dead body in Drum Creek. I could show you if you'd like. Kate Gibbs. Gephardt. That was Gephardt. If could tell Kate Gibbs Gephardt a look that says, what the hell are you doing? Then she smiles at Alexander. Yes, I suppose that could be helpful.

Gephardt jumps up and leads the men out of the cabin, but Kate stops Alexander and whispers to him, if you come back alone without your men, I will have an answer about your brother. You're aware of my gifts? Yes. Come next week. Alone. Alexander politely smiles and walks outside to his men. Don't. I wouldn't do it, Alexander. I wouldn't go. Back. No, no. Anytime someone specifies a loan that much? Yes, indeed. So the brothers left with Gephardt.

Apparently they were really annoyed with them when they went to go to the area where they found the dead body by the creek. Apparently, they were just seems logical. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the whole group, I don't know if the whole group, but they definitely, definitely the Yorke brothers because they were the ones that actually had the most influence of this group. But they suspected the benders that like that meeting was like, yeah, yeah, something's going on here.

That almost confirmed it for them. Yeah. So they decide to come up with a plan again. I think Alexander's in charge of this. I think he wisely thinks this through. He decides that they should basically come up with a meeting. And I don't know if he decides it, but I know he's part of the thinking. We can't just show up and claim that they killed all these people, or especially Doctor York. So we got to do something to to kind of catch them.

So this ruse is created where there's going to be a town meeting about elections, apparently, but they are going to bring up topics of all the missing people, all the thievery, all the missing people in the area. And they're going to put forward a motion to search all the cabins in the area, not just the benders. It's not about them. They're not suspected. But we got to search all the cabins to figure this out. And Alexander helped make this even more formal.

He actually put together a petition to the governor for help to catch all these bandits, because they're trying to make it sound like it's not a family. It's a bunch of bandits out there. Well, you don't. Want to scare them off. No. Exactly. And keep them in there and. Yeah, absolutely. So the governor actually signs this thing to give 500 bucks per head of bandit cut. And so that makes it more official.

Now legend has it, and I believe it, because it seems to be mentioned a lot that at least Parr and John Gephardt were at this town meeting. So they're hearing this and they're aware of the searches. And the binder is actually see the writing on the walls and they decide to get the heck out of Dodge, so to speak. So there's a lot of guessing legend and other nonsense in regards to what happens next with the binder specifically.

But we actually know more than I ever realized reading about this story. So on April 4th, 1873, the benders went to a train station and sayer a settlement not too far from them, but like farther away from other train stations. The best that I can tell on your way, Paul Bender got into an argument with a ticket agent. They, you know, so they're standing out already and leaving their mark and impressions with two people.

And they got tickets to Humboldt, and then they got two different connections. So some of them are going to go into Texas and others are going to go into Missouri. They left. They are at 9:03 p.m. that night. Ma and PA were the ones that were going to continue to Missouri. John Gephardt and Kate would go into Texas. They all had a layover stop because I don't think you say layover with trains. Yeah, yeah. They all stop now.

Stop for a little while in Chanute, where they were seen actually having breakfast at a hotel near the train station, and Chanute is interesting because it's actually north of Labette, where their cabin was in Labette, but then they're also now Kate and John are now going to go south, so they're going to cut back through. And I was actually trying to figure out like where the train routes were at the time. And I could not.

So I don't I don't know if they did that because they had to then connect to go south or if they did that just to hopefully put people off the train like backtrack. Right? Yeah. So I don't know if they thought it through that much or not. It kind of depends on the routes and the trains at the time. And I just could not find enough information.

So Kaden Gephardt eventually make their way to Denison, Texas, which is known as an area where a lot of people headed to the west, the American West, or into Mexico, stop. And it is near the North Texas border, sort of outside of Dallas. So May comes around. That was in April. So almost a month goes by. And a farmhand named Billy Toll, who I mentioned in in part one, the scene I kind of read from the book in part one talks about Billy Toll.

He's a farmhand, and he's rounding up cattle that got out during a storm, and his route took them on the path that led to the Bender cabin, and he wasn't planning to stop there. It was a plan to talk to him, but he heard an animal like what sounded like a lame animal making noise, and he noticed that no one was coming out of the cabin to help the animal. So he went over to the to the corral.

There's a little stables they had built in the Bender property and found a pig that was like dying and hungry, and he fed the pig. And then inside the stables, it was smelled really bad. It was due to the putrid smell, and it's hard to say. And full of flies. And there was a dead calf in there. The stands out to Billy Toll is like something or something isn't right here. So he heads over to the cabin, knocks on the door.

The door opens and it is devoid of life except for flies, and it also had a very similar smell to the dead calf from the stable also coming from the cabin. So Billy told hi tales that out of there he doesn't like go searching. He doesn't, you know, start touching everything. He leaves. But he tells everybody that the benders are gone and they left and there's dead animals and some smells bad in the cabin. Like there were some real estate agents on the trail that he, like, stopped and told.

And they even went by the cabin themselves and looked and and so by the time he kind of makes it into town, Leroy Dick, the city official, has already heard that Billy Tuttle was found out the benders aren't there. Apparently, because word spreads fast even without. A faster than you can move. Yeah. And so Leroy Dick gets information that the vendors must have abandoned the cab to the cabin. So Dick gets the York brothers, the group, together. They head out the next day to the Bender cabin.

And you all can listen to part one, my little summation of when they show up to the cabin and they go out in the basement and they smell something, and they're like, we're going to have to move the cabin to search the cellar, and there's probably a dead body under there. So they they have to move the cabin, literally move the whole cabin. And they have to break apart the stone flooring that was put into like the little cellar. And they think there's a dead body under here.

There has to be because there's blood in the soil. There's blood on the stone. And while they're moving the cabin and doing this initial search, Leroy Dick found three hammers of differing sizes all underneath the stove, which is very strange. Someone also found a knife in hidden in a clock, which is also very strange. The following day, there's an abandoned wagon that was found, and it turns out that it was the Bender wagon. So people are know that a the benders are in the cabin.

There's a wagon abandoned nearby. They got out of here before we had a chance to actually catch them doing what they likely did to missing people, or at least Doctor York. And if you know anything about human nature, John, the entertainment at the time, there's no there's no YouTube back then. There's no TikTok. If you hear there's likely been murders at a cabin, you're going to you're going to get rid of whatever you're doing that day and go on down there to check it out.

That's a night out. Yeah. That's yeah. Get the kids, gather up, get the kids. And they do. There's Kate, there's photos of the property and there are children because that is human nature. And people start showing up to search. Luckily, they're still searching. So I think people show up just to see, but then they're like, oh, volunteer, you need help digging. So like, people volunteer and they help to to search it out and they decide it is Leroy Dick. That's what I was.

Leroy Dick decided to divide everybody buddy up into three teams. So one team is going to go search John, get parts, land down the road, sort of narrow strip. One team is going to search the ground underneath the stone in the cellar. One team is going to excavate the like stable corral area. And they're doing that. And there's bad smells. Billy Tall apparently threw up when he was digging in like the cellar area, because the smell of it. Nobody, though, is found.

No one finds any bodies, just blood and stuff. And I think it's Ed York who may have been the first person to notice that the soil in the orchard, some of it's disturbed, some of it's like loose soil. So they take a rod and they decide they're going to jam it in the ground wherever there's loose soil. And if it hits something, that's where they're going to, dig to see if there's a body. So sure enough, they hit something right away.

When they do this and they start digging, and about four feet down, the first person they find that day is Doctor William York is is dead because. He was the most recent. It was the most recent. Yeah. And there's a claim, I don't know if it's true that his head was cut entirely off. I don't know if that's true. There definitely was a cut on his throat and also blunt force trauma to the head, which matches the other bodies that have been found prior to this.

And all the theories about how they killed people. Hey everyone, I wanted to take a second to let you know about audible. This is an advertisement. I may make a tiny commission, but I'm only going to promote things I use, and I love an audible fits that requirement. I use it literally every day. Audible is an audiobook and podcast service that lets you enjoy all of your listening entertainment in one place.

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All you have to do is visit audible, trial.com slash, strange again, it's audible trial.com/strange or see our show notes for a link. Thank you. Yeah. Now, allegedly, the size of the wound matches one of the hammers that they found those hammers do you can actually go visit to this day they're in the Cherry Vale Historical Society Museum in Cherry Vale, Kansas. They are still there, as well as the knife that they found as well. That may have been a knife. They used to get people.

So yeah, check that out. Everybody. I said that like I actually do suggest checking that out if you're in the area. I said that like like how crazy would you be to check that out? I mean. That's a no no. Check that out. I was in Kansas. I was checking absolutely. But there were more graves, at least five that they could see. They found a man named Henry McKenzie, William McCarty, Benjamin Brown, and then George Long Core and his 18 month old daughter.

They were kind of she was buried at his feet. The suspicion with the daughter is that she was buried alive. Oh, now, seven total bodies were uncovered from the orchard. One in the well. A guy named Jimmy Johnny Boyle was found in the well sometime. He's credited in articles as John Geary. Regardless, they found a poor soul in the. Well, a doctor was on site, doctor cables.

And he's the one that actually came up with this M.O., this modus operandi for the benders, the stuff that has become folklore and legend of the canvas and everything. I actually don't think he. He mentioned the canvas that just some people think of that he more said someone would sneak up behind the person, hit him, probably hit him multiple times. It's not like one hit. It's hit him multiple times. And they would also sometimes cut the neck as well. So it's a brutal, brutal death.

This is not a clean act by any means. Now this law has grown with time. People say Kate is behind it. She's the brains. She would cut the neck and PA would hit him on the head. We don't know that there is nothing. There's no evidence anywhere that suggests Kate did one thing, someone else did another. The only evidence is people would go to the cabin and they would die under these methods. We don't know where they were sitting. We don't know who did what. Could have been all. We don't know.

So here's here's my question. While we're on this. Murder. Modus operandi process, whatever you want to call it, John. So I mentioned in part one of my theorizing is that the common story of the person's head being against the canvas. I actually don't think that's true. Your your comment about the, the, the wrestlers and stuff actually makes me kind of. Yeah. And the carnival actually gives me more question. It makes me question my own. It was a practice.

It was it was definitely a practice to knock someone out that way. Yeah. Well here's my here's my issue with it because it actually does make sense because it helps hide you. I know it hides sound really. But it definitely you can definitely sneak up to somebody like that. But if you're hitting somebody on the head, there's likely going to be blood. And I just don't think you want to stain the canvas that's now been hanging in your cabin for three years.

When you're trying to convince other people to stop and have lunch or dinner or stay the night, I just I don't think that's a move that anybody would do. Even a dirt dirty family like this also. Was what I wondered, too, though, was was the intent of the hammer to kill them or to knock them out? I think it's probably to knock them out because everybody else okay. Yeah. But doesn't. So. Yeah. So so so that could be a case of where there wasn't blood. Yeah. From the head wound.

But I just you can't control that. But maybe they don't. They didn't care. Maybe they weren't trying to control it. Yeah yeah yeah I'm sure I'm sure this canvas, if it was white was not like, you know, perfect for pristine. Really? Yeah. That's a good point. That's a good point. It's probably brown and faded and again. Right. And it's very dimly lit in there. Yeah. And one person did say it was a red curtain at one point. So maybe. Right. Which would be more sense. Yeah that would be that. Yeah.

And but my other, my other thought on it, the reason I question that is don't you. Also you may cut it open. You may tear it by doing that all these times. But maybe it wasn't the same canvas. Oh yeah. Every time. Yeah. All right. Fine. It had a supply. If they were. They should have gotten into the canvas business. That's what they should have. That was the move. That was the move they may have, but that was fine. Yeah. Yes, indeed. But I was giggling all the time with all that money.

That's a that the. Canvas money man. He would leave town from time to time to do stuff. That's probably what he was doing. Yeah, exactly. He was in the canvas game. No, but those are my issues with that common theory that, like, they're hitting people through the canvas is I worry about blood. I worry about ripping it. And it's like, you don't have to have that to sneak up to somebody. Because especially if somebody is getting relaxed or having a cup of coffee, they're out of the rain.

They're chilling and chatting with John and Kate. Not my pogs were apparently just not very social, but it's like you get comfortable, you just walk up behind somebody and smack him on the head. So you know, and if they're ready and they're prepared and they communicate, they're a team, a good team of serial killers, and they're practiced and yes, skilled at what they're doing. They have a they have a process.

They have a process down, but here's, here's a John, here's a little tale of human nature that is, shows how terrible we are. We are we're just we're we're all horrible. Yeah. And there are laws to help sort of mitigate mob rule and mob law, and it can be a lot. It could be a big problem. And something happened when all these people were were digging up these bodies and searching the land.

Is that a neighbor, the nearest neighbor and another German immigrant, a guy named Rudolph Brockman, was around there as well because everybody from from the areas hanging out at the old Bender place. Yeah. What else is there? And so people are like, oh my God, look at the benders. Did they're terrible people. Hey, Rudolph Brockman is kind of nice to the benders. And he's also German, so he was in on it. So that's all they needed to hang Brockman in the rafters of the cabin.

So they hang Brockman, and right before he's about to die, they cut him down, and they tell him he needs to confess. Confess to his sins, confess that he helped the benders. He killed all these people. He didn't confess because he didn't have anything to do with it. So they hang him again. And this time he passes out and they actually pronounce him dead. Cut him down later, though, he actually wakes up. He did not die, so he wakes up. He was only mostly did. He was mostly dead.

And he he just gets out of there. And the story is that he kind of got up and stumbled, is probably delirious and just walks in at this point. It's the night time, and he stumbles on his way back down the trail, back to his place. And from what I can tell, no one even helped him. No one helped him up. Nothing. And that is just such a horrendous story. But that's part so like it's so of the time and all of the time. Yeah, I could see it happening now in certain areas. It's just.

Yeah, that, that, that whole you're guilty by association, you know, you get him, everyone get them. And you see it. I mean look we don't change. We're humans. We don't change. You still see it today. We just have we just have certain things in place to help stop that. But. But those kind of things can and do happen. And the reason this story is important is a just because it is interesting. It is interesting to to look at human nature and human behavior.

But also people immediately suspected that the benders had accomplices. And when I first read that, I was like, I don't think so. They're killing all these people. I think that's just too risky to have people know. And then I was like, oh, wait, but they have to sell everything they get. Like they had to sell horses, sell carriages, like whatever people are leaving behind. So they, they very well might have had accomplices, but I think in hocking goods, I don't think in.

A complex sense. Yeah. They needed a fence. And there are stories that John Gephardt would leave and leave for long periods of time, like he would be gone for days or weeks. He wasn't just running into town for for supplies. So I think John would take stuff and had people or accomplices or fences, whatever you want to call them, to be able to sell goods and other places. And again, they are not far from the Oklahoma Territory at the time where people could kind of disappear.

So it's just a thought, because I do think it is important to think about that. Maybe this roach guy had something to do. Yeah. Maybe. Roach. Yeah. Well, there are there are some people we're going to talk about very shortly here when they were on the lam that could have been associated with them selling goods. I wrote down this little note. So Bonnie and Clyde, they're famous after they were were shot in the in the Ford. And it came through town and they were towing the car.

People would come up and cut hair off Bonnie and cut pieces of clothing off Clyde and get bloody bullets and glass from the car and just mobs of people taking stuff. And, and it is so McCabe and we think of it as very weird, but people did that. And the same thing happens with the Bender cabin. As soon as this stuff happens, they start finding bodies. People are taking sex. So there is stuff out there that is from people stealing stuff from the Bender cabin and even the pictures.

There are pictures from the search and you'll see, like paneling is missing from the cabin. That's not because the cabin had holes in it. People had already taken wood paneling off the cabin to keep as keepsakes. Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. And also you get con men, especially back then too, because then as soon as people are taking stuff, you get people showing up and it's like, I have a fork.

This was a binder's fork. And it's like they just brought it from home and they're selling it to tourists. And along those lines to the trains started having more rides into the area because a tourist. So they opened it up for more tourists to come by and see the Bender property. Press picks this up. They're starting to share stories, and they're not confirming anything. They're writing, they're taking. They're finding other news articles and using that to confirm their news stories. Sure, yeah.

Word spreads, legend grows super fast. And within months this is a national story line. This is also where you start to get the we talked about it may have been in part one or in the early part of this part, but the description of the benders is never the same. Right? Right. There's a famous yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I was I say I've seen some that were like, you know, the father was very ugly or the wolf. Yeah. My bender was very ugly. Yeah. Not you know.

And Kate only thought of herself and, like, oh, somehow, like the these, this mysterious family that people barely didn't even know existed. Everybody knew the intricacies of their personalities. And. Yes. And it's true, because like I said in the in part one, PA was known to be a hairy dude, had a big beard via the famous wood engraving of the family. He's cleanly shaven. And Kate, people say she's fat.

The other people say she's beautiful and skinny, and other people say she had blond hair and others say brown hair. And so it's like all these different descriptions and unfortunately, because of the time they lived in, we don't have any confirmed photographs of any of them. We actually don't know what they looked like. We don't. We have no we have no idea. We can piece together some generalities, but we do not know what they looked like. And that's even from people in town that knew them.

And we know they knew them, and even they will describe them differently. Yeah. So the persistent thought was that Kate was the brains behind the operation. This starts becoming more of a universality in the story at the time when all the press is writing, they say that she's the one that would seduce people and get them in. And she came up with the plan to hit them on the head and then cut the throat. We don't have any confirmation of any of that. It's like we don't know how they operated.

We don't know if she was the brains behind the operation. She was definitely more social and friendly sometimes to people in town, but that doesn't mean that she was the brains behind the operation. But this is where all those stories start. Is all these newspapers just making stuff up just to. It was clickbait of the time. Yes. Everything was based on rumors and. Yep. Yeah. Assumptions. Exactly. And so Alexander Yorke, at this time, he again, he's ex-senator, very powerful in Kansas.

He actually issues warrants or tries to I think he runs for district attorney so he can issue warrants because again, there's thoughts that there's accomplices. So he wants to arrest people and they do. They actually arrest a lot of people. Luckily none of those people ever go to trial. There's not enough evidence for anything, but they definitely are like guilty by association. And they're just arresting people. Now on the lam. If you remember, the benders separated when I went to Missouri.

Kate and John Gephardt went south. And we know actually some of the movements at this time. The younger two bought carriages, they bought guns. Kate began wearing men's clothing to hide as they went through Indian Territory in present day Oklahoma. They were also seen using a ferry, by a guy named Benjamin Kolbert or Coal Bear. Probably probably related to Stephen Colbert, I would imagine.

Yeah, probably. Probably. Yeah. And that was the guy that operated the ferry and in Denison, Texas, where they eventually settled down for a bit. This is where Mob Hall actually circled around and joined up. So they had a plan to meet up in Denison, and they in fact did. And they decide to make a plan to keep moving. They got to move around this is still before they had found the abandoned cabin. So the benders have a head start. So they've already separated and met up in this time.

And they meet up with a man named Frank McPherson. And Frank is a criminal, and he likely knew the benders from potentially like hocking stolen goods. Maybe how he knew them. Right. I we do not know if he knew the benders killed people. We just think he's he's another criminal and they're fugitives and he's always a fugitive, so they're going to help each other out. Meanwhile, it's like a TV show. Meanwhile, back in LA County. Out at the ranch. Back at the ranch, Alexander, her, detective.

Beers, Leroy. Dick. All these people are are starting to piece together happenings of the benders after they find the cabin and it doesn't take long for them to actually find the information about them taking the trains and heading out of town today. They did good old fashioned detective work on their legs, on their horses going around talking to people and find the evidence that they they got on these, these specific trains, they went on these specific routes. There are witnesses.

It's, having breakfast, all that kind of stuff. So they're doing a good job of hunting them down. But again, they're a month behind and a month behind in those days is a very long time. The governor of Kansas starts, announcing rewards as much as he can legally do. He starts offering rewards on the vendors. And there's really interesting. You can actually read the announcement like the proclamations from the governors.

Those are still online. And the really interesting, including the descriptions of the benders is, again, no one's calling them by the right information. Right? Right. Like, as an example, Mrs. Bender is called 50 years of age. Rather heavyset, blue eyes, brown hair. German speaks broken English, but like, there's so many different descriptions. Amazing. So the benders make it to a place called Red River station, which is a frontier town.

And this is after they were in Denison, and they found out that no one really cared that they were fugitives there. No one asks any questions. It's the frontier town. No one. No one wants. No, no, no. Yeah. Exact. No one asks questions there. Yeah. And John Gephardt apparently doesn't even hide the that they're benders like he even introduces them as benders in one of the stores in town.

And they end up meeting up with a guy named Missouri Bill, and he's Frank McPherson's brother, says William McPherson. But he goes by Missouri Bill and Missouri. Bill is very influential in the region. He he even found out through his connections that there were detectives in the area searching for the benders. So Bill decides to help the benders.

He goes into town to meet up with the detectives because he's the well-to-do man in town that knows everybody, so they come to him for questions and he kind of plays along. It's like, oh, let me let me see what I can find out for you, Mr. Detectives. I will ask around and see if anybody knows anything, even though he knows exactly where the benders camp are camping out nearby. So he puts them off the scent. This is also around a period of time where they. Because they're constantly moving.

So it's actually kind of hard to think about their travels at this time. But they're constantly moving. They travel up the Wichita River and they stay with a cousin of of the McPherson's named Floyd Slip. I keep wanting to call him Floyd Shrimp, but it's Floyd Slip, and a man named Sam. Emeric, who was also kind of an outlaw and moving around. He also stayed there at the same time. The benders were there. So he got to know them.

And a lot of the details we have about the benders because of this guy, Sam, Mary and the search for the vendors. This is a period of time, I think it's Sam Merrick runs into the benders. I think over a period of two, two and a half years, like it's 1875, the last time he sees them. And it was 1873 when they left. So this is taking a lot of time, investigations, time. Add those things together. Money. Gotta have money.

But it's taking so long that it's starting to wear down the resources to investigate the benders. And even Alexander York, who was putting a lot of his own strength and might behind the investigation, tells beers and Dick and everybody else investigating, it's time to stop. So the investigation dies down a little bit. However, there was a very close call and IT detectives really missed out on a thing. And it's a great scene that I could see in a movie.

So in a place right outside of Henrietta, Texas, a detective was in town looking for the benders, and they actually tracked him again, doing a very good job of Detective ING back then. Tracks him to this area. He's in town. Bill McPherson again gets word that there's a detective in town, so he does the same thing where he's going to go and lie and say he's going to help and doesn't really do anything. John Gephardt is like, I want to see this detective. So excuse me. Wait, let me do that better.

John Gephardt says, I want to see this detective. He. Gotta gotta. Keep it authentic to my. Impression. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotta give it. Yeah. So John Gephardt goes into town, meets up with Bill McPherson, and McPherson is like, what the hell are you doing? The detective is, I just talk to him. He's right over there in the general store. And John Gephardt is like, I'm gonna go talk to him.

So John Gephardt goes into the general store and stands right behind the detective as the detective is, like, in line buying stuff because Gephardt is like, he's not going to recognize me. I'm alone. He's looking for a group of people. He's not going to know what I look like. So sure enough, Bender was right behind the detective, and I think they even conversed and talked. And the detective had no clue. No clue? And how did you get that?

They could have gotten him right then and there and they didn't. So Sam Merrick, who again kept running into the benders because they're in the same circles of fugitives. He last time he saw them was at a camp further west in 1875. And Merrick was soon arrested. And I got he was arrested, I want to say, in the Midwest, I didn't write down where he was arrested, but it wasn't out West. He was arrested somewhere else.

And investigators realized he saw the benders, and he actually starts divulging most of the information we have about where they went, how they went. Bill McPherson, Frank McPherson, all this kind of stuff. Because it's thought that, Merrick knew they were fugitives, but he himself was an outlaw. It's not that he didn't know they killed everybody. He wasn't aware of it. So the suspicion there, because all of his stories actually make sense. It's not just an outlaw being like, oh, you cut me.

I'll make up stories about other fugitives. All of them really make sense. According to other witness testimony, things they learned from the McPherson's. And it might be because he found out they killed all these, these people. And he was like, wait, you know, a little bit of morals, I have it. Sure. You don't do that? That's what that's too far. They've gone too far. Yeah. And they're just robbing everything. Yeah. And that's an assumption. But but I think it's a good assumption. So we'll see.

And that's when the benders disappeared. There are many, many stories that I'm not going to waste everybody's time with, of the benders being other places, because they're likely all fake. Everybody's great great grandfather has a story about the benders. There's there's people that claim to be the benders that were in Nebraska. There's a report of a woman dying in California that confessed to being Kate Bender.

And the most famous story that I will mention, because it actually ties to a lot of what we think we know about the benders is a woman named Francis McCann. She had, I think she lived in Kansas. She had a housekeeper, a woman that helped her around the house named Sarah Elizabeth Davis, and Sarah Elizabeth Davis was a single mother. And one night, Frances McCann. And I'm butchering this tale a little bit, just for time's sake.

But she had a dream that connected in her dream, connected the woman at her house, Sarah Davis, to Kate Bender. And then she had a conversation with Sarah and claims that Sarah admitted or proved that she actually was Kate Bender. So Sarah finds out this woman thinks she's Kate Bender. She leaves town. She goes and lives with her mother in Michigan. A miss Elmira Monroe Elmira Monroe is where people think mob benders name is Elmira or Elvira.

Just sometimes swapped. Yeah. This woman, I'll say it up front before I share the story. She's not. She's not my bender. She's she's not. I explain why I said okay, but it is interesting because a lot of times you've read articles or stuff when you're researching this, like, mob bender Elmira. That's what her name was. And it's like, no, no, no, that's not it. So anyway, this this story is an episode on it.

So the Cliff notes version is, Frances McCann gets people that support her theory that these are the benders. They go to Michigan, they arrest Sarah Davis and her mom, and each one begins to blame the other one. Or say, the other one is Ma Bender and Kate Bender. So both these women are like, yeah, that's that. No, that's a mob bender. I'm not Kate, but that's wrong. But a little. Below their sign in their son an affidavit. They're doing everything.

They also, I think, share a jail cell for a lot of. Stuff, too. Just so, so awkward. And they get shipped down to Kansas and they're put on trial for being the benders. And it gets even more bonkers because Leroy Dick says that has to be a mob bender. Other witnesses that knew the benders are like, no, that's definitely not the benders. Other ones are like, oh, that's definitely the benders. Everybody's disagreeing. However, for the most part, most witnesses claim that they are not the benders.

Even Kate's personal doctor Who who helped Kate. With. Doctor things is like, no, I know Kate. That's not that's not Kate. Oh, by the way, this is about ten years after they disappeared. Yeah. During the trials. Just super bizarre. They both claimed that they're not the benders. They were like, we never said we were the benders. After a period of time, it's like, wait, but you did. You were each saying you were the vendors. You didn't say you were the better. Yeah, the other one was.

And it turns out Elmira Monroe was married to a guy named John Flickinger, who had passed away at this point. And people start to assume that John Flickinger was poor. Bender. That's where, again, when you research this, people call Paul Bender. John Flickinger. It's not not his name. That was Elmira monroe's husband. So there ended up there's not enough evidence to convict them as the benders their let go. Also, they were American. Both of them weren't born in the States.

Neither one had a German accent, and both of them spoke English fluently. And we know that Ma barely spoke English. Right. So they were not the benders. So, yeah, it's just an interesting story and a nice example of how a lot of craziness goes on about who is the benders and what happened to them. Frank McPherson, who helped them on the lam. The benders was finally arrested in New Mexico.

He could have been staying with the benders as he kept progressing west over the years, because he definitely was part of their their movements. Thomas Beers, one of the detectives, claimed in 1901 to still be watching the benders closely, so he thought they were still out there and he was keeping an eye on them.

And then the famous story about the benders is that in 1937, Laura Ingalls Wilder from little House on the Prairie, she claimed that she stopped at the Bender cabin as a kid and that her father, PA, was part of a posse that hunted them down and claimed that no one would ever find the benders. And this is this still comes up in like, chats and stuff where people are like, oh my God, the little house on the prairie. They were there with the benders. It's likely this story is not true at all.

It is Laura's. Laura's sister convinced her apparently, to tell this as a story to help kind of publicize things. The the history of when the Ingalls were or when the family excuse me, when that family was in Kansas does not match up with the benders at all. So it is likely a very, very fake story that just gets played around in folklore. So that is the end of the tale, because they just disappear after all that. That kind of wraps it up again.

My my only new theory on this, because there's no way to know what happened to them. I think they my personal thought is they died. I just think, you know, life is tough. They're criminals. Right? Right. Someone's going to. She die. Already? They weren't. They weren't super young. No, no. Especially mine. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think I think they died, I honestly do, I think they did. Became like boogeyman.

Yeah. And I think just from the nature of living out there and also they piss people off. They piss people off all the time. So it's like you're out. You're hanging out with outlaws. You're you're not hanging out with good people. Like, no, no. Yeah, yeah. I could easily even see one of them because it was a national story line piecing it together of like, wait, did you really kill at least 11 people? And you know, who knows what they would have said?

And then just having someone take Western justice out on them. So I do not think they survived. I don't I do not think any of the rumors of Kate Bender being found in California, New York or wherever else. I think that's all hooey and just part of legend. But yeah. What are your thoughts? Do you have any thoughts, John?

I, I there is one one account that I thought was really interesting where, it said, the 12 men, that were arrested and, all had been involved in disposing of the victim's stolen goods with McSherry, a member of the vigilance committee implicated for forging a letter for one of the victims. Yeah, informing the man's wife that he arrived safely in destination Illinois. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting, because it sounds like maybe some of they didn't get rid of all of the stolen stuff.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. I mean, they could have. They probably had a lot of it on the property. Yeah. Well property, I think they took a lot with them because they did when they were on the lam, they bought carriages and guns and clothes and all this kind of stuff. So they definitely took some with either trade or sell to be able to finance their their journey out of Kansas.

If I remember correctly, with that story that happened early on, not the the arresting the guy, but they found out that he forged the letter that was like really early in their in their process of killing multiple people, which is really terrible vigilance committees, by the way, that was the typical way that they did law enforcement at that time, because there wasn't a lot of law.

It was a massive mob, and they would just get people to get, but they would do it under the guise of like some sort of official capacity, like city officials, like they were deputized. They were deputized like you're deputized as a vigilance committee. And historically, okay, because I read a lot of accounts even unrelated to the benders, but just stuff happening in the area at the time, they would just arrest anybody like, oh, that guy looks funny. Let's arrest.

Well, as you saw from the neighbor. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Joe, the. Bracket they hung twice. Yeah. My my big thought on this was I don't think they hit people through the canvas, but I have to say, I can give you a lot of credit, because now I'm. I'm really second guessing that. I just do worry about, like, tearing it open and whatever, and. Well, well, it also depends on what they mean by canvas. Was it a sheet? It was, thick. And you know what I mean?

Like, it's typically referred to as a wagon cover. So it would have been thick. It would have been a thick. So that's very thick and and leather usually. Oh right. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. That's a good point. Stretch leather. Or it could be. Yeah. And it's as much as people say it's the hammers. Like that's one of those historical a not fallacy because they weren't very well might have used hammers but it maybe they did have a slapjack. Maybe they did have something like that. Yeah.

But to hit somebody on the head that wouldn't have necessarily gushed blood just to knock them out and then come around the corner and start hitting them on the head to kill them because they try to kill them fast, you know? So it's like, just knock them out and then start whacking them with a hammer. Or just knock them out and just cut the throat. Yeah, yeah. You know, and it is and, and a couple of the things I read, too said that not all of the victims were rich.

No, no, they didn't have any money. Some of them didn't have any money. They were they either were doing it for the pure thrill of it, or they would mistaken. They would be like, oh, this guy's got to have money. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, that, that kind of thing. But that's part of the motivation of this is they aren't they're not unique serial killers by any means. But they're not you know, they're they're not a Jack the Ripper. They're not a Dahmer.

They were I think they were primarily doing this for it was their business model. You know, like, I guess here's the business plan. You know, you do this. But they did it so often over a period of few years because they, they know for a fact. Is it? I think it's 11, if I remember correctly, 11 victims that they were almost 100% sure they killed. Yes. But it's like they don't know quite if that. Why? Yeah, I've seen it actually up to 2020. Yeah. It's 2023 is what you read a lot.

But they, there's they're not confirmed but I think they're. Not quite sure exactly. But I definitely think it's more than 11. Yeah I think it's more than the 1011. Because you did have those bodies that they initially found dumped in the creek and the other one half eaten by hogs. Right. And it's like there might be other ones. It's it's a sparse area at the time. There could be other bodies dumped, other places they never found. And which also lends credence to you.

It's probably a lot easier to disappear back there. Oh yes. Oh yes. 100 especially split up. Yeah. And that's also part of the reason they may have targeted southern Kansas. As I've said before, in these, these episodes, you can disappear into Indian territory just directly south and, and where there's even less law and there's less people looking for you. So, I, they strategized, they strategized how they were going to kill people, they strategized where they were going to live.

And we don't know anything about where they came from or where they went. And that is sort of part of the mystery, the lingering mystery and part of the the kind of thrill of thinking about the bloody benders is we have no idea who they were or where they went, and they may not have even been. Benders like that may not have been anybody's real name. So it is. It's a bizarre, bizarre tale of just pure evil. Just pure evil.

Yeah. And, and also I will mention this, I have reached out to the gentleman who now owns the property that the Bender cabin was on. I have not heard back yet. So if you are. Listening to this. If you're listening to this and you know him, please pass on a message that I would love to talk to you about. I have emailed the guy I found him. He actually wants people that know what they're doing to come out and like, do sonar and actually like search the property because it's been farmland.

It's been farmland, I think ever since after the benders. So no one's done a proper kind of big excavation of the property, but just that general area where the orchard was, I think is all they did back then. So there may be more. There may be more, more bodies to be found that are still there.

And I think that's a really interesting cause and something if people do that for a living, if you have that kind of technology and you want to help out and you think it's, you know, an interesting thing to be part of, you can email me a study of stranger gmail.com and I'll try to put you through or just find him. He's online. I don't have his information in front of me, but he has not hid his information out there. And I do hope if you're listening, contact me.

I'd love to have you on the show and interview you about your plans and interests. With the Bender property. So. Yeah, there it is, John. That's the is the story. Of the dead is such a weird story. It is? Yeah. And like you said, I think the weirdest part to me is the. I can kind of not understand, but I get, like you said, is the business model. Yeah. This is what we do. Yeah. We get we get travelers and we steal their money. And this is how we make money.

But just like that, no one knows where they came from. The weirdness of the two women coming from Ottawa. Yeah. And the other two guys coming from. From Pennsylvania. And then they just disappear. Yeah. Never really existed, never really exist. And. Yeah, so much legend and conjecture that class. Yeah. Like, it's so hard to figure it out now because so much of the stories we have are embellished or made up or whatever, so. Well, you know, that's there's human nature as well.

Yeah. We're talking about earlier. Yeah. It's, you know, when there's gaps. Yeah. Our human nature is to fill them. Yeah. You know. Always we always make it so we're all storytellers. Even if we think about a story today. We always try to make everything make sense. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, John, for being on and doing two parts of the bloody benders with me. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was a blast. Yeah, it's super fun.

And also, your wife Amber, was on my man in the latrine episode, which I think is the weirdest story I ever. While it's so strange. So everybody check out that episode. It's so strange that I started to feel uncomfortable in the episode with Amber because I'm like, this is just this is this is a dude in a septic tank. And I didn't know I was. I thought it was like, yeah, but I mean, just the just the, you know, how why was he there? Was he forced in there? Why was his shoe missing?

Yeah, just like just really. How did the shoe get in the toilet bowl? Yeah. It's just so many, so many I would I love it. That's intriguing. And I know. I was going to say listeners, I think that's a that's a nice promo for that episode. The man under the the train. It's a few episodes ago. Check it out. Yes. Thank you. Do want to tell everybody where to find you again and, Oh, sure. Yeah. You can find me, on I'm on Twitter, at GKids.

For as long as Twitter is still a thing and, and like, it seems to be out of the way out now, on Instagram under the same thing is probably a better way to find me. Or you can find my website, John M Keating dot John M Keating acting.com and, and I, hope you guys will check out my movie that I co-wrote and that I'm in called concessionaires, most guides about the last days of a single screen movie theater. It's on iTunes and Amazon for rent, and I think it's on to be in Plex as well.

If you don't mind watching with ads, I think you watch it with ads. So what is a movie theater I've heard rumors for? I've heard strange stories about that. I know, yeah. That's how you leave the house now. Yeah, it's. It is it it's. Cool. Well, thank you very much, John, for being on. I really. Enjoy. Yeah, thanks for having me. And I'll talk to you soon. Okay. And that concludes our two parts of the Bloody Benders. These have been two of my favorite episodes to research and record.

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