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Black and white illustration of a prairie homestead landscape. Two men stand in a grave alongside an open coffin. Seven men, women, and a child are bystanders.
Illustration from a photograph taken at the discovered grave. Harper’s Weekly, June 7, 1873, pg. 484. From HathiTrust.

The Bloody Benders: Homestead of Horrors

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In the 1870s, Kansas was a wide-open prairie. Although the Homestead Act of 1862 brought many settlers out to Kansas to claim their 160 acres, community was sparse, and towns few and far between. It was an easy place to disappear, whether by nefarious deed, terrible accident, or evading the law. However, when the brother of a state senator went missing, people took notice and started searching.

In the spring of 1873, Colonel Alexander M. York, a member of the Kansas senate, tried to re-trace the steps of his missing brother, Dr. William York. William went missing off the Osage Mission Trail while looking for his friend George Longcor, who, in turn, had gone missing months earlier while traveling with his young daughter.

On the long, barren trail across Kansas, few homesteads existed to offer shelter or food. Where William’s trail ran cold, one nearby homestead belonging to the Bender family was a semi-regular stop for travelers, providing supplies and a place to stay the night. One day in early May, their homestead was discovered to be completely and suspiciously abandoned.

“Yesterday two men were looking at the claim so suddenly vacated by the Benders, and while they were in the garden, noticed a queer depression in the soil, and suspecting something wrong dug down.” – May 9, 1873, Emporia News.

William York’s body was found on May 6, 1873, buried on the homestead in a crude grave, and the extent of the Benders’ crimes were uncovered and the beginnings of the story pieced together.

Emporia News (Emporia, KS), May 9, 1873.

Local authority Leroy Dick and detective Thomas Beers, hired by York, provided detailed reports to the newspaper about how they pieced the grisly history together and, more importantly, how they progressed in trying to track down and capture the Benders who had nearly a month’s headstart.

“It has been impossible to get more than an outline of the terrible deeds, but we can assure our readers that all facts published in this paper are reliable. No person can describe the horribleness of the bloody deeds.”- May 23, 1873, Emporia News

By the time of the May 23 issue of the Emporia News, up to eight graves were reported discovered on the Bender property, with up to fourteen deaths attributed to them. The front page identifies the victims, reports on the arrests of suspected neighbors, and tells of the crowds that flocked to the site as tourists. Photographers were also on site, and images were famously printed in Harper’s Weekly.

The Bender family was comprised of an older German couple and a young man and woman surmised to be their grown children.

Text from newspaper article describing the Bender family as Hollanders with John , 60 years of age, his daughter a young woman, Mrs. Bender, and her son, a young man.
Description of the members of the Bender family. State Rights Democrat (Albany, OR), June 6, 1873.

They would host travelers in order to rob them – hiding behind a curtain, bashing victims unconscious with a hammer, and dumping them into their basement cellar to bleed out after slitting their throats. Diagrams were provided for context, and newspapers came up with elaborate names for the house and land, referring to it as “Devil’s Kitchen” and “Hell’s Half Acre” as details emerged.

Diagram of the Bender cabin showing the entry ways, the doors and windows, the trap door to the cellar and the cloth partition dividing the cabin in half.
Diagram of the Bender cabin from the Wichita City Eagle (Wichita, KS), May 22, 1873.

“Now that the curtain of mystery which has so long enshrouded the damnable deeds of the Bender family has been drawn aside, revealing to the public gaze the existence, in our very midst, of a system of cold blooded murdering almost unparalleled in the annals of crime, many little incidents are brought back to the memory of different ones, which are now known to have direct connection with the doings of that murderous crew…” May 22, 1873, Wichita City Eagle

A reward of $5,000 was offered by the state for the capture of the Benders. Despite grand efforts and multiple arrests, the fate of the Bender family went unconfirmed – for a while.

Article segment titled Rewards Offered stating that five thousand dollars was offered for the capture of the murderers.
Reward notice from the Wichita City Eagle (Wichita, KS), May 22, 1873.

In August of 1880, the Benders were in the front pages of the Chicago Tribune. Two people alleged to be the elder two Benders were arrested in Nebraska and gave full confessions to the deeds in Kansas. The daily updates were printed August 1 through 8 as they were brought to Kansas for identification. However, by August 10, public opinion was that the two were imposters, and they were reportedly discharged in the August 11 issue.

Small notice in the newspaper titled Discharged: Oswego, Kansas, August 10, the supposed Benders had a preliminary examination here today and were discharged.
Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago, IL), August 11, 1880.

The week of the trial of the supposed-Benders, a Pennsylvania paper printed testimony from one S.A. James that the Benders were indeed caught and executed in 1873. Two days later the paper was gratified to print confirmation that the discharged couple in Kansas were not the Benders and so they must have indeed been “put out of the way.”

Two articles, one printed August 14 reporting that S.A James of Sigourney swore to witnessing the execution of the Benders. The other article was printed August 16 agreeing that the discharged couple in Kansas were not the Benders.
Two articles from the Lancaster Daily Intelligencer (Lancaster, PA). Left: August 14, 1880. Right: August 16, 1880.

One month later another eye-witness testimony was printed in Pennsylvania that claimed to witness the executions of the Benders back in 1873. The letter was printed anonymously.

Article titled Bloody Benders, a man who says he helped to hang them.
The Post (Middleburg, PA), September 9, 1880.

In November of 1889, new headlines emerged: two women in Niles, Michigan, were purported to be the Bender women. The arrests were made based on the detective work of Mrs. Albert McCann, first name Frances, the daughter of the one of the Bender victims. Leroy Dick was called to identify them and a court case proceeded in Kansas. However, by December evidence had been gathered to place the women in Michigan during the 1873 murders.

Article titled Bloody Benders, their terrible crimes recalled by arrests in Michigan. Mrs. Munro and Eliza Davis, with two portrait sketches of the women.
Wichita Eagle (Wichita, KS), November 26, 1889.

Kate Bender, the young woman of the Bender family, was the most sensationalized character of the tale, and she was never forgotten by the press. Articles frequently appeared quelling local gossip and dispelling rumors that Kate Bender had died while living locally in secret.

Three articles all reporting that an old woman who died locally was not in fact Kate Bender. The articles date from 1904, 1910, and 1920.
Articles about the fate of Kate Bender (left to right) from March 8, 1904, Billings Gazette (MT); May 5, 1910, San Francisco Call (CA); and October 20, 1920, Idaho Republican (ID).

The newspapers in Chronicling America* lay out the news as it emerged and as it continued to appear over time. The Benders remain a sensational story, gruesomely thrilling, and while it is hard to establish what is fact and what is fiction, the headlines about the Bloody Benders will always hold a captive audience.

Explore More:

Kansas Historical Society: Kansas Memory

The Homestead Act: Research Guide

Historical Marker database – The Bender homestead

Nonfiction:

Bender Hills Mystery: the story behind the infamous serial murders from 1870s Kansas by Tom Vitelli, Jean McEwen, and Leroy F. Dick (2023)

The Benders in Kansas by John T. James (1913)

The Benders: Keepers of the Devil’s Inn by Fern Morrow Wood (1992)

Hell Comes to Play: The true untold story of America’s mass murdering family, the Bloody Benders by Lee Ralph (2023)

Hell’s Half-Acre: the untold story of the Benders, a serial kill family on the American frontier by Susan Jonusas (2022)

Fiction:

All the Blood We Share: a novel of the Bloody Benders of Kansas by Camilla Bruce (2022)

The Hell Benders by Ken Hodgson (1999)

 

*The Chronicling America historic newspapers online collection is a product of the National Digital Newspaper Program and jointly sponsored by the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Comments (2)

  1. A Hollander was a Dutchman, not a German.

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