Horrors on the Homestead

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Speaker 1 I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

Speaker 2 And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Speaker 1 Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

Speaker 2 And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Speaker 1 Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st-century lens. Some are solved, and some are cold.
Very cold. This is Buried Bones.

Speaker 1 Hey, Paul.

Speaker 2 Hey, Kate. How are you today?

Speaker 1 I'm doing really well. Happy Halloween.
Oh, you too.

Speaker 1 We're a couple of days off, but we start, I've said this before, we we start so early. And I know you said you guys throw up some stuff and that's it.
You're very anticlimactic about Halloween.

Speaker 1 You're sort of like, nah, you know, we'll answer the door and give the kids some treats. And that's it.

Speaker 2 There's aspects of Halloween that I could most certainly really get into, you know, but just really have never taken the effort.

Speaker 1 So I have kind of an odd internal debate that I have with myself every Halloween for a couple of years in a row. And tell me what you think about this.

Speaker 1 For a few years in a row, these are not our neighbors, but they're on a major road.

Speaker 1 It's a family that lives on the kind of a major road that goes, it's near a grocery store and across the street from like a Stoke home place. A lot of kids travel along it.

Speaker 1 For the last few years, this family, as many families do, they decorate the outside of the house for Halloween, but they've done something interesting, which is they've sort of put up a reenactment of a scene that was from maybe like a Friday the 13th or Halloween, which, you know, is what I grew up with.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm a Halloween fan.

Speaker 1 I don't like horror movies, but, you know, I had seen the original, but it is that scene that you and I have actually talked about in True Detective, which is the screaming woman who's sort of flailing on the ground.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the killer coming after her.

Speaker 1 And they had made this scene. And so it is a mannequin doll kind of thing that looks terrified and is screaming.
And then an axe murderer coming after her.

Speaker 1 And there were all sorts of complaints because it scares little kids. I mean, this is down the street from an elementary school.
Sure. But it's also a legitimate part of Halloween.

Speaker 1 It's from the Generation X, people who grew up with that. But, I mean, it's also kind of in the true detective realm, too, which is kind of gross.
I don't know if Halloween aged that well.

Speaker 1 Young people having sex and then being murdered. is kind of the way I summarize a lot of those stories.
So where do you think about that?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's Halloween, but and you should be festive, but at the same time, little kids are crying.

Speaker 1 And, you know, but don't you have a right to put up whatever you want as long as it's not offensive?

Speaker 2 Well, I guess, you know, first, I've never seen the movie Halloween, you know, so I can just envision, though, exactly what you're talking about. And, you know, to clarify,

Speaker 2 when you say, you know, out of true detective, you're talking about the true detective magazines.

Speaker 1 Right, magazines.

Speaker 2 And, you know, for

Speaker 2 somebody who's worked the cases I've worked,

Speaker 2 you know, those true detective magazines are characterized as porn for the sexual sadist because they literally get off seeing women in such compromised positions, screaming, the man holding a knife up against her, she's bound in some way, et cetera.

Speaker 2 You know, all these various permutations. And,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 on one level, it... I can understand

Speaker 2 the Halloween costume. It's in fun.
You know, people kind of gravitate towards the spooky and ghoulish.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I think I'm torn about something like that. You know, because of this location, maybe this type of setup would be something that should be a little bit more hidden from plain view.

Speaker 2 You know, and I've seen some of these pretty extensive Halloween displays for, you know, trick-or-treaters, and people will have like a fairly, you know, know, tame display up front that the little kids can walk through.

Speaker 2 And then there, there'll be a source of candy right there. And then there's also a secondary location for the adults to go into.
And there's a sign that basically is saying graphic past this point.

Speaker 2 I think doing something like that maybe is, I don't want to use the term responsible because I don't want anybody listening to think I'm a fuddy daddy, heavily involved.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that I'm just being a fuddy daddy. But I just think it's also, you take a look at who typically is out and about on Halloween night, and you are dealing with five and seven-year-olds.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 You know, and there's reasons why we don't want young children to have this type of imagery, but I also don't want to, you know, go, well, don't have fun either because everybody has, you know, has different experiences that they want to have on Halloween.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I'm kind of torn, but I think, yeah, maybe keeping something that that's that's that graphic a little bit more out of plain view may be a better way to do it.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, there was a lot of outrage, which I understood, but there's so many horrible, what I would say are fun, but that are violent imagery for Halloween out there, but it is all fake stuff.

Speaker 1 It is like ghouls and goblins and the headless horseman holding his own head, which I love, by the way. Like there's all that kind of stuff that legitimately will scare you, but it's not real.

Speaker 1 It's, you know, know, supernatural. That scene depicting some mass murderer going after a woman, that was realistic.

Speaker 1 I mean, it didn't look like real people to me, but it was depicting a scene that was definitely out of a slasher film. Having a six-year-old see that would be pretty awful.

Speaker 1 And the neighbors who did it really were pissed. I mean, there's only, that's the only way I can describe it from the backlash.
And they put up

Speaker 1 a, in dramatic fashion, they put up like a sheet, like maybe several bed sheets and covered the scene from the streets. Okay.

Speaker 1 And then they had spray painted essentially the name of our neighborhood censored by the name of the neighborhood.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I just thought, oh my God.

Speaker 1 Okay. So it was dramatic, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's, you know, and I know it's hard and I can see where people would really polarize.
with something like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. When I, where I was living in California, there's this one couple that did this amazing Dexter scene in their garage

Speaker 2 where literally it's Dexter standing over a saran-wrapped body and there's blood everywhere and everything like that. But it was tucked back into the garage itself.

Speaker 2 So you could see as

Speaker 2 a parent walking your kids,

Speaker 2 you're going, well, I'm not taking them in there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think.

Speaker 1 If I had little kids, I'd be kind of offended too, for sure. But then I look back and I go, I love that kind of movie.

Speaker 1 But then I thought, yeah, but it just didn't age well, especially when you and I, I was just telling my class this today about the true crime detective and you telling me that, you know, some of the most well-known serial killers were found with these magazines and what that really means.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, I mean, you know, that's the part of Halloween that I think can be really touchy for people.

Speaker 2 No, for sure.

Speaker 1 So, you know, let's scare the shit out of little kids, but in a different way, maybe right now.

Speaker 1 Save the horror films for later. And this was up for several weeks before Halloween even started.
So, of course, yeah. You know, they were milking it for sure.

Speaker 1 But then, hopefully, nobody's offended by my pal back here, the one who's desperately still hoping that Victorian chairs are comfortable, which they aren't.

Speaker 1 So, if you see me shifting around, if you've ever noticed me shift around in this chair, probably about three-quarters through basically every episode we've ever done, it's because my left butt cheek has fallen asleep

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 the chair needs to be somehow updated. But yeah, I feel bad.
I see why the Victorians could be so uptight.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, when I was having a lot of pain in my left hip, I was using one of those.

Speaker 2 To me, it looks like a hemorrhoid pillow, you know, just so it was softer. And it would avoid some of the pain.
Versus now my hip is better.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I don't have to have that hemorrhoid pillow underneath me anymore.

Speaker 1 I can't believe we're talking about this. We went from Jason and

Speaker 1 Michael Myers to Hemorrhoid Pillars. That was a good transmission.

Speaker 1 Well, I promised you a spookier story, and we're going to have spooky stories here because this is a lot of missing people. And we're trying to sort out who's responsible and what is happening where.

Speaker 1 This is also a spooky time period, 1870s in the Midwest. I don't know if that's a spooky area for you, but I am scared of vast open spaces also.
I'm scared of the countryside and the vast open spaces.

Speaker 1 Where am I not scared? I guess by the the ocean. And so this is a Midwest in the 1870s, and it's a little bit of a Halloween story.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's set the scene.

Speaker 1 We are in 1873. It's May 6th, and we are outside of a wooden cabin.
on the frontier.

Speaker 1 This part of the frontier is 14 miles east of Independence in Kansas and a half a mile southeast of a couple places that I've never even heard of before.

Speaker 1 And so we are in what they would say then was Indian territory, which is a very treacherous place. And it's not because of the Osage

Speaker 1 Native Americans, but rather all of these criminals and fugitives that have run from the East Coast out to, you know, the frontier to escape justice.

Speaker 1 So already we're in kind of a lawless area to begin with. And we're at this cabin.
And we have a really, it's a small space.

Speaker 1 And the reason is because on the frontier prairies, lumber is really scarce. And so everything was, you know, very small.

Speaker 1 When I was in Cape Cod a couple of months ago with my family, we stayed in a 18th-century home. And my kids kept saying me, the sealings are so low.

Speaker 1 And I, and you and I had discussed this before, where, you know, I thought, oh, maybe the men were of shorter stature back then. And I know that that can happen.

Speaker 1 But I had a listener email me and what she said makes sense, which is just the lack of resources meant that they were not not going to make tall ceilings in the 1700s potentially.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, they made them just tall enough. So, anyway, this is a small cabin.
The family that lives there squeezes into about 400 square feet.

Speaker 1 And they're using half of the cabin as a storefront, which is pretty interesting. So, they took a canvas wagon cover and divided the space into two different rooms.

Speaker 1 And I'll tell you about the family in a bit because they're in trouble. They're missing.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the cabin, the front part of the cabin, just to give us some context, like I said, is a general store.

Speaker 1 And the kind of business they built was just, you know, something that was very profitable in this time because you have so many people who are just pushing west, literally pushing west.

Speaker 1 And so you have all of these homesteaders and frontiersmen who needed to buy supplies and provisions, and they want tobacco, and they can get all of it from this particular store and it's on the what's called the Osage Trail okay and they could also grab dinner there if they wanted to so a remote space and I wanted to show it to you and so there are quite a few for 1871 there are a decent amount of photos for this story and so I this might be a good time to just show you because we do have a missing family how remote we're talking about here so the first photo and the second photo only check it out and you could see this is the cabin.

Speaker 1 First one's a, you know, kind of a closer-up shot, so you can kind of just see the size. And these are locals who are around the cabin because it does turn into a pretty bad crime scene.

Speaker 1 And then you'll see the second one, which is a sketch and a depiction. I just wanted you to see the wideness of what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 You know, this cabin looks like it's just on open plains. You know, if there's any vegetation, it looks like it's, you know, weeds and grass.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 No trees anywhere in sight, really.

Speaker 2 The cabin itself, you know, this is a,

Speaker 2 you know, it's a single-story gable roof. I mean, it's hard to call it a house.
It's a, it's tiny. I'm shocked about at how many different products that they are selling

Speaker 2 out of this. But yeah, no, it, it is definitely remote and it looks like you can see in any direction all the way to the horizon.
There's no hills,

Speaker 2 nothing that's really blocking it. And then the, you know, the sketch just shows the cabin with maybe a few other structures and then horses and various

Speaker 2 people, I'm assuming, you know, that are, you know, along this, what is Osage Trail, you know, passing through.

Speaker 2 So, you know, immediately, you know, of course, the remoteness is significant and then the transient nature of the population at this location, you know, because people are just constantly flowing along the trail.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so for me, when I think about

Speaker 1 the dust bowl that will happen decades later, this shows why it would happen. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, with no vegetation, dry dirt, drought conditions, massive winds coming in and creating like a cyclone effect, nothing in this scene feels grounded to me.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, just like a gust of wind could knock over this whole little homestead here.

Speaker 2 Well, and I look at this, and if I were, you know, somebody that was looking for a place to live, it wouldn't be here,

Speaker 2 right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I'm glad that Allison, our crack researcher on this one, found the photos because I had pictured off a trail, just rows of trees and kind of in a forested area, places where people could sneak around and jump the family and stuff.

Speaker 1 And no, there's nowhere to hide with this. Not at all.
You know, they are literally coming down almost like a desert, stopping. And there's a sign that's not there anymore that said groceries.

Speaker 1 So when you're talking about being vulnerable, as this family would be,

Speaker 1 you know, you're in this open space, you're advertising that you have items that are valuable, and maybe you have some guns.

Speaker 1 But with enough people, if they show up, if you've got a gang of criminals show up here, this family is wiped out almost instantly. There's four people living here.

Speaker 1 So, there's Elvira, and you've got John Sr., and then Kate and John Jr. Okay.
And those are their adult children.

Speaker 1 So you've got four people in, let's just say, 200 square feet, which this cottage is, you know, a little less than 200 square feet. And then you've got the storefront.

Speaker 1 I don't know how much the storefront is, but man, this is, isn't it ironic? All of that space. And because of a lack of lumber, they have to make this little tiny house.

Speaker 1 They're the only ones around for miles and miles and miles.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And there's also no services.

Speaker 2 You think about it, you know, something happens to this family. Where's law enforcement coming from? How far away is law enforcement?

Speaker 2 Or any neighbors really to be able to help out?

Speaker 1 The people who come across this, you know, they're alarmed because, again, we always come back to the, I always use the same example of the woman who left the laundry out overnight and it rained and she didn't bother to come pick it up.

Speaker 1 Something's happened to that woman. I mean, that's how we know.

Speaker 1 And in this time period, people were very alarmed because they had cattle roaming loose all over the property. I didn't see it, but there's apparently some kind of fencing that's up

Speaker 1 to keep the cattle in. They do have cattle.
It looks like they've been unfed for at least several days. And without vegetation, I assume it's grain that they had to buy.

Speaker 1 So, you know, these are starving cattle. And so that's what makes this really alarming for neighbors.
They said that the cabin had either the people had been taken or they had left very quickly.

Speaker 1 There's half-eaten food and mugs of coffee on the table still. Okay.
There's pots and pans that are on the stove like they had been cooking. Utensils are scattered all over the floor.

Speaker 1 There are insects everywhere. There's clothing all over the place.
Furniture's overturned. That grocery sign has been pulled down.

Speaker 1 And this is bad news, I think, for this family in this remote area when you're surrounded by hostility all over the place.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, you know, the disruption to the inside, that's where I'm wondering, is this a result of ransacking? Somebody's in there looking for something.

Speaker 2 Was there combat? Was there a fight? You know, some of that attributed to, you know, maybe the family resisting being abducted, if that's what happened.

Speaker 2 With the cattle being unfed for several days, once the discoverers get there, I mean, the trail is cold at this point, you know, because it happened several days prior.

Speaker 1 And you have to think, I don't know how popular this trail is, but you have to be a good planner to follow along this trail because it could be hundreds of miles before you see one of these, like we talked about, way stations, you know, and in one of our other stories where you know it's predictable.

Speaker 1 It's like seeing the gas in 10 miles sign up on the highway. So you have to know what you're doing.

Speaker 1 If there are people coming in and attacking this family that's really vulnerable, there are two adult children I had mentioned, and by adult, I mean 20s, you know, very early 20s.

Speaker 1 And I don't know who's armed there or not,

Speaker 1 but like I said, it just didn't seem like it would be a stretch to have even a few people be able to come.

Speaker 1 And I don't know what the motivation is to take them or if they've been killed and they're buried different places. I guess we don't know yet.
I just have to kind of give you some more information.

Speaker 2 Well, also with the fan, you know, the family itself, but also the storefront, there needs to be a

Speaker 2 regular delivery of product. You know, so that's also somebody that is going to be flowing through here.
You know, how far away are they from the nearest town?

Speaker 2 Are they going someplace to get to restock their store? Or is somebody actually

Speaker 2 using a horse-drawn wagon to do deliveries?

Speaker 1 Well, it says 14 miles east of Independence, but they're a half a mile southeast of Moorhead Station

Speaker 1 in Lubbock County.

Speaker 1 So they're a half a mile from something that has a name, but where they are doesn't really have a name. It's sort of like Indian territory, quote-unquote, is what I see.
So that's how remote they are.

Speaker 1 But again, you know, man, open spaces like that. There's almost like,

Speaker 1 where are you going to run? But they obviously have been able to build a business. But I will say that this area has really spooked people for a long time.

Speaker 1 Along this trail, there have been quite a few people who have gone missing.

Speaker 1 And I don't mean specifically right in this area, you know, where the cabin is, but it's just been people who have said, I'm going to go on the Osage Trail. We've talked about this before.

Speaker 1 You know, it is not unusual. It's like going out to sea.

Speaker 1 It's not unusual to not see a loved one for weeks or even months at a time when they are pushing west and trying to find new territory and everything is

Speaker 2 brand new and and they don't know what's around the corner so it wouldn't have been unusual for somebody to go missing for a while and then they pop right back up yeah i could see that and i could also see where this is a built-in victim pool if you will for people that you know whether you want to say they have financial uh motive you know robbers you know they'll start picking off people as as they're going along this trail wouldn't be surprised if you have you know predators that are sexually assaulting and killing some of these travelers.

Speaker 2 Predators go to where the prey's at. And here you have prey that are just in many ways going to be helpless.
They might be armed, but everybody was armed back in this day.

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Speaker 1 Now we have a little bit of a jumpy timeline, but I think you can keep up with me here.

Speaker 1 Okay, about, I would say, a month earlier, this is where they start thinking about the different disappearances and discoveries in this area that could be tied to the missing family.

Speaker 1 So about a month earlier, there is a wagon found and a starving team of horses, one of which was lame. This wagon had been found about 12 miles north toward Thayer.

Speaker 1 There were no bodies found, but this was suspicious. People in this area, certainly in the frontier, would not abandon a wagon and certainly perfectly good horses.

Speaker 1 So they assumed that somebody had been taken. And we're still trying to figure out who owns that wagon.
But, you know, that was over two years starting in 71.

Speaker 1 This was sort of similar circumstances to what has happened before. So a few days before that wagon was discovered, there are a pair of brothers who are concerned about their missing brother.

Speaker 1 And they are actually well known. So Colonel Alexander York and his brother, Ed York, had traced the disappearance of their brother along this trail.
He was named Dr. William York.
They knew

Speaker 1 that he had stopped at the house, he had eaten a meal there, he had watered his horse, he bought some provisions, and then he took off.

Speaker 1 And no one had seen or heard from him since. And then, of course, we can't ask the family because the family's not there either.

Speaker 1 His brothers and his pregnant wife and his three children are in a neighboring county and they're very nervous because they don't know what happened.

Speaker 1 But they do know that, you know, he had ridden away.

Speaker 1 After spotting the loose cattle, the people on the prairie had assembled like a search party that had been led by a guy named Sergeant Leroy Dick, who was a Civil War veteran.

Speaker 1 And he was a township officer, which is about as close as a, you know, to a sheriff as you're going to get. He divided the party into three groups.
One group explored the stables. of this family.

Speaker 1 So this would be John and Elvira's stables, kind of where the cattle and the horses would have been. And then another group patrols spill out and drum creaks on the land.

Speaker 1 And then a third group, which includes the sergeant, searches the cabin. So you've got these three groups working kind of at the same time.
So the group with the cabin reports this.

Speaker 1 They find a dozen bullet holes that have speckled the roof and the sides of the cabin. So somebody has shot, you know, there are dozens of a dozen bullet holes there.

Speaker 1 And they find a bloodstained knife with a four inch tapered blade and it was in the mantle clock

Speaker 1 so you know the the clock that's sitting on the mantle and it sounds really really chaotic

Speaker 1 so you've got you know guns and knives at a minimum here and wedged behind the grocery counter is a horse bridle. And Ed York, who is the brother of Dr.

Speaker 1 William York, says that was his brother's horse bridle. Now, I mean, I didn't know that horse bridles could be that distinct.

Speaker 1 I don't see anything about initials or anything, but Ed York, who happens to be there, says this is my brother's bridle, and it's behind the counter of the grocery.

Speaker 2 So Dr. William York, his horse bridle is actually found somewhat hidden inside of this cabin, like somebody's trying to tuck it away.
Yep.

Speaker 1 And then you've got the bloody knife that's inside the mantel clock. And then you've got bullet holes, a dozen bullet holes in the roof and the sides of the cabin.

Speaker 1 And then here's where things get kind of graphic to me. There's a bad odor that pervades the room.

Speaker 1 And the searchers, Sergeant Dick, says it's really particularly coming from a trapdoor, which is concealed by a straw mattress.

Speaker 1 Trapdoor is not unusual, of course, especially in the, you know, for it would be for the Midwest in the 1800s. And people would store stuff down there, blah, blah, you know, this is not anything odd.

Speaker 1 So they move the mattress and the search party pries open the door and this is an awful stench that they all recognize is death.

Speaker 1 The joists beneath the trapdoor are stained with what appears to be blood. The door reveals a small cellar room.
It is six feet deep, seven feet square to the top and three feet square at the bottom.

Speaker 1 I don't even know what math that is. That's enough for a body, right? The six feet part for sure.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, no, for multiple bodies.

Speaker 1 So without ventilation, they can't i mean nobody's going in that cellar because it's disgusting and smelly it's too strong and they're vomiting so they set up a pulley system and they place the cabin on log rollers and tie it to a horse and pull the structure aside I mean, ingenuity.

Speaker 1 It's like the, it's like the cop with the magnets on a string to try to fish out a weapon in a river.

Speaker 2 It's like the FBI collecting the Unobomber's cabin.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 so they shove this little cabin to the side using these horses. Even with the breeze, the rancid air leads two men to vomit.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I know you've dealt with a lot of dead bodies and a lot of different, you know, stages of decomposition.

Speaker 1 My first real, real experience was when I went to the quote-unquote body farm at Texas State University to, you know, interview the head of the forensic anthropology program there.

Speaker 1 And he took me to the outside outside area where the bodies were buried and doing research. And he said, you know, I know this is weird, but it's like we solve crimes here.

Speaker 1 You know, we teach people forensics here. And there were students testing the temperature of the bodies based on how deep they were buried.

Speaker 1 There were bodies that had cages on them because the people had requested that they didn't want. you know, vultures or deer or anybody to have access except for the bugs and stuff.

Speaker 1 And they were building a small house in which they they were going to put a body in to show a law enforcement agency, a federal one, I can't remember who it was, the FBI or who it was, what it would be like if you burned down a house with a body inside.

Speaker 1 And so they were doing real work, but you know, I was, it was 103 degrees and I was walking around and even exposed. It was so distinctive.

Speaker 1 I couldn't even, he said, oh, you're going to get used to it. I didn't know.

Speaker 1 I did not get used to it. I can tell you that.
But, you know, it was a, it was a good learning experience, but it is a distinctive smell, especially when there's decomposition there, you know?

Speaker 2 No, it definitely is. I mean, it's something that I immediately recognize.
And I've been on scenes that are really, really bad in terms of the decomp and the circumstances or even at the morgue.

Speaker 2 You know, we, I would say the worst, and I'm not going to get, I mean, it's not graphic. It's just that we had to zoom up a homicide victim that had been found floating in the Sacramento River Delta.

Speaker 2 And his head and hands had been cut off. And then he had been weighed down in the water, but he was literally bobbing at the surface.
And he had been buried,

Speaker 2 I don't know, for 10 plus years at least. And his body was buried below the water table in the ground.
And so he continued to soak in water while he was in the ground. So he was exhumed.

Speaker 2 And I remember driving to work that morning, and I was blocks away from where my office was, which was just above the morgue. And I could start smelling him that far away.

Speaker 1 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 2 It was, and it was, it was powerful. You know, now,

Speaker 2 I mean, the smell is, is something that you just, I mean, you get used to. You have to deal with it.

Speaker 2 You know, I always laugh if you watch Silence of the Lambs and you have Jodi Foster, Clarice Starling, going into where there's this, you know, body that they've recovered and her and her, you know, co-workers are putting, you know, Vic's vapor rub underneath their nostrils.

Speaker 2 And I was just like, oh, nope, nope.

Speaker 1 It's not going to do it.

Speaker 2 And quite frankly, you'll be ridiculed. You're showing weakness.

Speaker 2 There's a certain aspect where you just have to suck it up and deal.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm going to tell you what you could expect, which is clotted bloodstains in the cellar floor.

Speaker 1 And there's a narrow passageway that leads under where the house had been into the backyard, vegetable garden, and apple orchard.

Speaker 1 So, you know, you've got these places where bodies can be. They had, you know, had this awful smell, but no bodies when they pulled out the house.

Speaker 1 But they, you know, now see this passageway that goes to the orchard and the vegetable garden. So now, are we,

Speaker 1 I mean, where do you stand with this? It's a big mystery, and you probably don't even have enough information, but you've got a missing family, a wagon that's been abandoned a month earlier.

Speaker 1 There's all kinds of pieces. You see, this is what our Halloween, this is what our Halloween special gets us into.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that, you know, first, just from the crime scene of the house, you've got these, you know, 20 bullet holes in the roof and the side of the cabin.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm kind of curious: are those bullet holes all being shot from within the cabin, going out? Are they being shot from outside the cabin, going in, or do you have a combination of both?

Speaker 2 Like maybe you have a gunfight going on with offenders on the outside of the cabin and you have the family trying to ward them off. But obviously, they have at least a dead body that some of the

Speaker 2 blood, and who knows if there's decomp fluid, soaks down from, let's say, the trapdoor area onto the joists.

Speaker 2 And then that body was in this little cellar room for a period of time, decomposed, 103 degrees outside, you know, very warm area. So probably, you know, started to bloat

Speaker 2 and give off the decomp smell. fairly quickly.

Speaker 2 And then somebody came back and moved that body, you know, so what they're smelling is the remnants, you know, the decomposing, you know, fluids that are still in the cellar room, but the body isn't there.

Speaker 2 And now, why would somebody feel compelled to do that?

Speaker 2 So that's, you know, one of the questions. And then the other thing is, is this connection to

Speaker 2 the missing Dr. William York and the horse bridle? So that would suggest that there is a connection between those two cases.

Speaker 1 Also, kind of once we get deeper into this, this, I don't think anybody would be surprised about a trapdoor.

Speaker 1 I certainly don't think anybody would be surprised about a passageway leading from, you know, the basement area, storage area to an orchard or a garden, because that's just the way these were built in some ways.

Speaker 1 You know, it's obviously an easy passage where you can kind of just shove, you know, food down and you're not holing things all over the place. These were practical people.

Speaker 1 So, and, you know, they were raising animals and farming and all of that kind of stuff. So don't be suspicious of that if you were in any way.
No, not at all.

Speaker 1 So Ed York is, I mean, this is so unfortunate. He's searching for his brother and they go over to the apple orchard.
We've had stories about, you know, things happening in apple orchards before.

Speaker 1 And he has a metal wagon rod and he's probing the earth and it hits something. Just a few feet below the surface, there's a body.
And it does turn out to be Dr.

Speaker 1 William York, who's buried in this orchard.

Speaker 1 And I mean, how awful for his brother to find him there. Here's the condition.
Dr. York was buried face down.
He was only wearing his underwear. The back of his head was smashed in.

Speaker 1 His throat had been slashed ear to ear.

Speaker 1 And when the search party exhumes the body, he sees what he says is clearly, you know, a death by blunt force trauma.

Speaker 1 Although my guess is that the slashing from ear to ear could have just as easily done it. The investigator finds some hammers and they are beneath the cabin stove.
And I wanted you to see the hammers.

Speaker 1 So there's a shoe hammer, had never seen one, three-inch claw hammer, I've seen one, and a handmade five and a half pound sledge hammer.

Speaker 2 Sounds petrifying. I'm looking at it.
So what I'm looking at is what appears to be a glass display cabinet.

Speaker 2 So I'm assuming this is like in a museum somewhere.

Speaker 2 And then you have these three hammers that are inside a blue box, and they're mounted in this blue box. And

Speaker 2 these hammers, I'd say there's a small, medium, and large one. You know, you see on the left-hand side, you see a small hammer with a very

Speaker 2 narrow face and short claws. And then on the right side, you see a medium-sized hammer that has a very large face

Speaker 2 and then just a single claw, if if you will. And then in between those two hammers is the one I'm going to say is large, which is a

Speaker 2 short-handled sledgehammer. And all three of these weapons are capable of inflicting pretty significant damage to a person

Speaker 2 with, of course, the sledgehammer being able to inflict the most damage just due to its sheer size and weight.

Speaker 1 I went down a pretty weird rabbit hole thinking about these three hammers and what were the, I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks like this, but like what would inflict the most damage versus what's the easiest to use and conceal?

Speaker 1 You know, is it like the small pointy hammer which could really pierce, or is it the blunt of this sledgehammer? And then I said,

Speaker 1 Halloween needs to be over with sooner rather than later for me. I'm thinking bad thoughts here.

Speaker 2 No, but you know, let's say on Dr. York's skull, you know, if these hammers had been used, there's some distinctive features of each of these hammers.

Speaker 2 So you might, let's say all three had been used on the back of his head, but there's also blows on other parts of his head.

Speaker 2 You might be able to tie select wounds and skull fractures to each of these hammers.

Speaker 1 Well, from your mouth.

Speaker 1 to someone's ear. That's what they did.
So there was a round wound on the back of Dr. York's head, and they said it matched perfectly to the shoe hammer.

Speaker 1 which was the medium one that you had mentioned. So, you know, it has a very round head.
The search party loads Dr. York into a coffin, then puts him on the wagon.
And the searchers are talking.

Speaker 1 And this is where the experience that you and I have talked about over and over again, people who know the area, and especially people who know the history of the area, who have been there a long time.

Speaker 1 You know, like the case of the serial killer who was caught because someone in Canada recognized, you know, a crime that sounded very similar to what happened in, I think it was Vermont.

Speaker 1 You know, this one guy made the connection, a judge made the connection. And so that's kind of what happens here.
So the search party is standing around, and one of them says, okay,

Speaker 1 this reminds me of the wagon that no one believes is some innocent wagon with perfectly good horses that has been abandoned. But they said, this is even weirder.

Speaker 1 So in May of 1871, so this is two years earlier, two little boys discovered the body of a guy named William Jones in Drum Creek, which is around this property.

Speaker 1 And they said that there were distinctive wagon wheel tracks that had been found near the body. One of the back wheels was, they said, dished the wrong way.

Speaker 1 And then they concluded why, which is that it had been carrying a load that was way too heavy and the load had been shifted and it kind of twisted the the wheel. Again, historical context.

Speaker 1 That's not something I would have thought of. And so they said they've got this distinctive track.
We know exactly what caused it. But no luck.
They couldn't find who it was.

Speaker 1 Again, they're on this remote trail in the middle of nowhere. Then we've got about, let's say, seven months later, no, longer than that, February of 1872, after the snow thawed.

Speaker 1 around Drum Creek where William Jones was found, the body of a guy named John Phillips was found.

Speaker 1 But they weren't getting a ton of forensic, if you could even call it that information, because wild hogs had mutilated his remains. So it was difficult to figure out the cause of death.

Speaker 1 But I guess it could have been suicide or starvation. They didn't know.
But his father, of course, was convinced that he was murdered. But no one's connecting it to the cabin.

Speaker 1 They're just, these are people who were found on these two guys were found on the property. So so far, now, what do you think? Now we're talking about, you know, Dr.

Speaker 1 York, and then you're talking about William Jones, you know, in Drum Creek, which is very close by. And then you've got this guy, John Phipps, but they're spread out.
They're years apart.

Speaker 2 And this is just where

Speaker 2 what is the,

Speaker 2 I guess, the typical pattern of crime or deaths in this particular area.

Speaker 2 So, because that's critical for an investigator to go, okay, hold on. I remember these cases from two years ago.

Speaker 2 You know, but I imagine, you know, in the Wild West or in this period of time, there's probably a lot of accidental deaths. There's exposure, you know, deaths.

Speaker 2 Somebody's out there working in the field and isn't hydrating and ends up dying. So

Speaker 2 it's hard to say that there's anything conclusive about these two bodies, you know, William Jones and John Phillips, to say that it's related.

Speaker 2 I think William Jones is interesting just from what appears to be the presence of a wagon that they're convinced is somehow related to his death.

Speaker 2 And you fast forward two years and you have Dr. William York and then you have the family, Elvira John and their two adult children

Speaker 2 who are just missing. And then Dr.
York is found literally buried on their property.

Speaker 2 I think it's possible that you have, and I'm just going to use the term predator very loosely.

Speaker 2 I'm not connotating that I'm dealing with a sexually motivated predator, but I think it suggests that you have somebody who is preying on people in this area over the course of several years, potentially.

Speaker 2 And then what is that person's motive? You know, Dr. William York has found it just in his underwear.

Speaker 2 Well, is that because there's a sexual aspect to this, or is that because the offender needed a change of clothes for one reason or another and took those or utilized? Now,

Speaker 2 I was going to say, you know, is this a way to further control Dr. York by rendering him in essence naked outside of his underwear? I think that's less likely.

Speaker 2 I think the offender possibly just needed his clothes,

Speaker 2 maybe to dress up in something else than what he'd been seen in previously. But even though it's a male victim, it doesn't eliminate the possibility that there's a sexual motive.

Speaker 2 So right now, I think I'm wide open. I just think it does sound like somebody is preying on people in this area.
And they took over.

Speaker 2 They commandeered the cabin. Seems like they had Dr.
York with them when they did commandeer that cabin.

Speaker 2 And chances are the family is dead and buried either in the same apple orchard or somewhere else.

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Speaker 1 So I messed up one date. Okay.
So, and let me just, and it actually I don't think is going to make a difference, but the body count is different.

Speaker 1 So, in May of 1871, that's when they find William Jones, and that's the weird wagon tracks, and that's in Drum Creek.

Speaker 1 Then in February of 1872, the snow had started to thaw, and they found two more unidentified bodies. It just says on the prairie, but they mean off this trail.
So in this area.

Speaker 1 Enough where they go, okay, they can call this an area.

Speaker 1 They're all men. Then in December of that same year, you have John Phipps.

Speaker 1 He was the one who was attacked by the wild hogs. We don't know his cause of death.
I could say the three men, so so that is William Jones plus the two identified men, their bodies were intact.

Speaker 1 And the same thing that happened to Dr. York happened to them.
Heads bashed, probably by a hammer, throats cut. So now you've got all of these bodies here.

Speaker 2 And their state address, do you have any information as to that?

Speaker 1 No, it's not. They're fully dressed.
It's not the same situation. And, you know, you've got York where the house is, where that orchard is.

Speaker 1 And these people, these other three people are there, but they're not directly, you know, where the cabin is.

Speaker 1 So we have all of the searchers talking about it. And in the meantime, they're also searching the stable.
Now we're back in 1873 at the homestead that's, that's, you know, this family is gone.

Speaker 1 The wagon and the team of horses are gone in the stable that normally would have been there. I will tell you, it turns out that the wagon that had been abandoned was their wagon, the family's wagon.

Speaker 1 So John and Elvira's wagon is the one that looked like, you know, it had been totally abandoned. And that was found about a month ago.

Speaker 2 So now you're dealing with a month-long trail that's gone cold

Speaker 2 or a trail of the offenders that's been cold for a month.

Speaker 2 So they end up interacting, abducting Dr. York.
They kill him.

Speaker 2 And we don't know if he was killed on the property or if he had been killed and transported to this property.

Speaker 2 And it's possible that he was the one that that was put down in the cellar room and that his body was moved out to the orchard and buried.

Speaker 2 But it's also possible, you know, you could have had one or more of the family members killed and put down there, and then their bodies were moved.

Speaker 2 The fact that you have the decomp smell now a month later, I can't say that those bodies were down there for any period of time and decomposed and then moved.

Speaker 2 It's possible they were just put down there, and then maybe later, a day later or two, you know, they're moved out. And then the fluids

Speaker 2 their wounds is what's causing this horrific smell.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They in the stable, they find the family's, one of the family's calves, well, it's the only thing they find really, and it's dead, starved to death in the pen.

Speaker 1 So the family, it looks like, has been gone for a solid month from April. And so, you know, again, that matches the wagon.

Speaker 1 There is, you know, soil around that over the last couple of months has been moved.

Speaker 1 And the men start looking around the prairie where this property is, and they start to see indentations in the earth.

Speaker 1 But they're scared because it's nighttime and there's a serial killer around here. So the next day, they don't do anything about it.
And then the next day, they come out.

Speaker 1 And Colonel York, I mean, bless that guy, even though his brother has been found, he says, I'm going to help.

Speaker 1 So he comes back out and they find at least seven more victims in shallow graves in that apple orchard. Now comes the weird part.
Okay. This was pretty weird all the way up, but this is the weird one.

Speaker 1 And now this is your criminal profiling part. Some of the victims have been mutilated.
Their penises were cut off. One victim is found wedged six feet down in an upright position in a well.

Speaker 1 Other bodies were dismembered.

Speaker 1 Then they don't know the number of victims because they aren't able to match all of these body parts together, but they think it is somewhere between 11 and 20 people on this property.

Speaker 1 And if you look at your photo packet, you will see them discovering the graves and just how deep these poor people had to dig.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, typically

Speaker 2 when bodies are buried, you usually see the term shallow grave because it's hard to dig down deep. Most offenders think, oh, I'm going to, you know, put them six feet underground.

Speaker 2 And then when they start doing the digging process, it's a lot of manual labor. They start getting into that hard-packed dirt the deeper they get, and it takes a long time.

Speaker 2 And they start panicking and they speed things up, or, you know, maybe a witness drives by. So

Speaker 2 here, obviously, this one photo, which appears to be behind the cabin.

Speaker 1 Boy, you see how open that is. That's another preview.
Look at that. I mean, there's nothing there.
There's nothing out there.

Speaker 2 So, but obviously they had to dig down. I mean, you have a man standing in this open pit

Speaker 2 and, you know, that pit goes up to his elbows, almost chest height. You know, who knows how tall he is.
Well, I'm going to assume he's my height. You know, so that's that's down a ways.

Speaker 2 You know, that's down four to five feet.

Speaker 2 And then this other photo. Not sure what I'm looking at.
So there's a photo which shows a crowd standing in the backdrop. There appears to be a wooden, what I've described as a casket with the crowd.

Speaker 1 I think these are bodies that are covered up maybe I don't think those are holes I think those are bodies you know sorry about 19th century photos so all seven of these the family's not included in these seven bodies they aren't sure because of the they haven't found heads necessarily they can't come up with the right figure you know they're saying between 11 and 20 because there are no there aren't 11 heads or 20 heads okay some of the stuff is missing of course you know they could have left it out and animals could have taken we don't know yeah there is one unusual part of this, besides, of course, the penis is being lopped off on some of these people.

Speaker 2 I'll comment on that.

Speaker 1 So, this is not the unusual one, but the guy found in the well was so badly mutilated that the cause of his death couldn't be established, but everybody else had died by hammer, and then their throats were cut, and they were all robbed.

Speaker 1 And, you know, these are young husbands and fathers who were looking to establish a homestead. They were looking for property.

Speaker 1 So, there is one victim that doesn't fit this profile, and it's a little girl. It's a child.
And she's a daughter of one of the victims. They did not do anything.

Speaker 1 Whoever did this didn't do anything that could be seen to this girl. So there's no mutilation or anything like that.
But there's dirt under her fingernails.

Speaker 1 So I didn't know if either she was buried alive or maybe it, you know, came when she was being dragged, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, I'm not sure you can even draw a conclusion. Just, I think burying a dead body, there's a chance that you're going to, you know, have dirt underneath the fingernails.

Speaker 2 There appears to at least be

Speaker 2 a financial motive as part of the offender committing these crimes. Now, I'd be interested in seeing the specific types of mutilation to the bodies, but penises being cut off.

Speaker 2 Now, I start going into, okay, you're dealing with potentially a sexual predator, and this predator's

Speaker 2 preferred victim are

Speaker 2 what appear to be adult men.

Speaker 2 And it's very possible that this

Speaker 2 type of mutilation and the penises being cut off,

Speaker 2 it is very reminiscent of a serial killer out of the Los Angeles area, known as Randy Kraft, out of Orange County,

Speaker 2 and who targeted, you know, like Marines and stuff. And he would typically drug them.
But, I mean, he would, you know, cut their penises off, stuff it down their throats,

Speaker 2 you know, do all sorts of genital mutilation, as well as other types of torture. There's a sexual sadistic aspect that's happening.
Now I'm starting to kind of gravitate towards

Speaker 2 you have an offender that is taking advantage of these men that have isolated themselves and we still have the family to deal with. somehow taking control.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how many offenders, you know, this could be more than one person acting in concert.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, the mutilation, is that torture to get these men to talk about where their valuables are or something like that? I mean, that's a possibility.

Speaker 2 And even the cutting of the penises off could potentially be along those lines, that it's more of an MO based to accomplish the crime versus a fantasy aspect.

Speaker 2 It's just that it's really, you know, starting to sound like the offender or offenders are going, well, we can make money off of these men. Nobody will ever know where they're at

Speaker 2 and potentially sexually interact with these men, kill them, kill them the same way, you know, crush their heads in, cut their throat and, you know, stick them in graves.

Speaker 1 But where is this person living? I mean, there's nothing out there except this cabin. What is he doing?

Speaker 1 Just sort of waiting behind a hill for days and days to find these people who are wandering down this trail. These aren't locals.
These are people who are, you know, wandering through.

Speaker 1 How would that even work?

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't think we can eliminate John Sr. or John Jr.
as being the offenders.

Speaker 2 They could be living in the cabin, selling products out of the store, and one of them's going out, or both of them are going out and killing men, and they're burying them on their own property.

Speaker 2 You know, right now, I think the family's still,

Speaker 2 the fact that they're missing and haven't been found, I think that

Speaker 2 that's kind of compelling in terms of, okay, what is going on with this family?

Speaker 1 Well, let me tell you what's going on with this family.

Speaker 2 Here it goes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, you know, this is why I love working with someone who doesn't know about historical cases most of the time. I mean, I was grateful you had heard of the Lindbergh case.

Speaker 1 What's going on is this family is they're very famous. And I wonder how many of the listeners and viewers had guessed this, you know, partway through.

Speaker 1 They're very famous because they are called the Bloody Benders. Have you heard of this case before?

Speaker 2 No. Benders, is that their last name?

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 John and Elvira. and it's the whole family that does this.

Speaker 1 And they are some of, in the 1800s, probably the most well-known in America, serial killers, because of what they did.

Speaker 1 So the reason that this area was so creepy is because all of the people around were creeped out by the Benders.

Speaker 1 And it is a very kind of weird, complicated family, but I'm going to try to streamline it. Okay.

Speaker 1 They're from Germany. They settled in this county three years earlier.
And so you've got John Sr. and Elvira.
They are 55 and 60. And they had very, very thick accents.

Speaker 1 Now, I've actually heard people describe them as almost guttural, like they

Speaker 1 didn't actually speak any kind of a language whatsoever. But, you know, we have some great sources that are on the show notes that are from books.

Speaker 1 And actually, an author that I interviewed who tried to kind of suss out what was going on with this family. So they've got a son that is 30, John Jr., and Kate, who is 20.

Speaker 1 We don't know if Kate and John were actually related to John and Elvira.

Speaker 1 And we don't know if they're related to each other because they seem more like a couple than John and Kate, you know, a brother and sister. And so it...
it all creeps people out.

Speaker 1 And then when these folks start going missing, then it really gets scary. And then when the benders go missing, people are scared of what, where are the benders?

Speaker 1 I think at this point, no one feels like they're the ones who are murdered. They feel like they thought maybe the jig was up and they took off.
So had you heard of this?

Speaker 1 A family, I mean, the Manson family doesn't count.

Speaker 1 A family of killers who draw people into their place and kill them with a hammer and drop them down to the trapdoor, store their bodies, and then drag them to the orchard or different places at night and bury them.

Speaker 1 I mean, happy Halloween, Paul.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, this one, this, this is a good one. I am familiar with either male-female couples that are victimizing or males who have partnered up.
This family, so John Sr.

Speaker 2 and Elvira are truly a married couple, right? Yeah. Okay.
So that would be like some of these

Speaker 2 male-female predators, you know, that have, that are truly in a relationship and then they go out out and kill.

Speaker 2 And then, and there's various different types of personality aspects to each couple as to, you know, maybe the male is dominant and the female is just following along.

Speaker 2 And sometimes the female is more involved. And I think there's one couple in Britain, you know, where she really seems to be the one that's driving, you know, the criminal activity.
Now,

Speaker 2 the younger pair, John Jr.

Speaker 2 and Kate,

Speaker 2 if they're truly related or not,

Speaker 2 even if they are true siblings, brother, sister,

Speaker 2 they could be in an incestuous relationship.

Speaker 2 And I would not put that outside of the realm of possibilities with this family.

Speaker 2 All four of them could be interacting sexually with each other.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I've never heard of

Speaker 2 a foursome like this that I can think of.

Speaker 2 So that's fascinating to me. And then, of course, I'm kind of curious in terms of who's doing what to which victim.

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 would be part of evaluating

Speaker 2 the psychology of these offenders.

Speaker 2 You could see where you could have

Speaker 2 a woman in distress on the side of a trail and a guy,

Speaker 2 horse-drawn wagon pulling over trying to get, you know, say, do you need help? And then the family ambushes that guy. You know, so it's very easy

Speaker 2 for four working in concert to be able to do that. Anyways, I think that's that's right now, I think that's sort of off the top of my head, some of my thoughts.
But there is the financial aspect,

Speaker 2 but they're deviant, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 there is

Speaker 2 a pathology going on with this forsome, and there is a sexual aspect to these crimes. I'm absolutely convinced of that.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you, you know, Kate is clearly the draw. I mean, provisions are a draw for some of these people, but Kate is the draw.
There's a photo of her. It's the very last photo you have.

Speaker 1 She is described as mesmerizing. She's tall.
She's a redhead. She's a clairvoyant.

Speaker 1 She has ads in newspapers that say she can cure blindness, fits, which are, you know, seizures basically, deafness, and all such diseases.

Speaker 1 And so the theory goes that she would sort of draw these men in and that behind a curtain would hide the two men,

Speaker 1 the you know, the brother or whatever, and the father.

Speaker 1 That they would have hammers, they would beat the guy, drop him down into the floor, well, beat him to death, and then strip him, and then drop him under the attic.

Speaker 1 And then, after nightfall, would take him to the orchard and bury them. I don't know anything about who mutilated who, but I will tell you, Kate has a pretty awful reputation.

Speaker 1 She had threatened a lot of people in town with a knife, probably the knife that was hidden in the mantel clock. The men had been known to conceal hammers in their clothes.

Speaker 1 So, you know, I told you she's a clairvoyant, but also they were Catholic. And the sergeant, I held this from you.
Sorry. You know, police do it.

Speaker 2 It's called a holdback, yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is my holdback. That Sergeant Dick uncovered something hidden.
It's a Catholic prayer book, and it was hidden in the cabin.

Speaker 1 The notes in German were this, quote, big slaughter day, January 8th, and then the phrase, hell departed. I don't know what that means.
They took off, it looks like in April.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and see, these are, we don't know when people were murdered. It's just when they were discovered.
Sure. Who knows when they were murdered?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So there you go. What do you think of all that?

Speaker 2 The idea that, or sort of the, the, sort of the generic sequence that the two men, you know, jumped the guy, bashed his head in, cut the throat, stripped him, and then dumped him down into the cellar.

Speaker 2 that that's all that's happening. I don't buy that at all.
You know, obviously there's dismemberment going on. They've got bodies that are missing heads.
You've got penises being cut off.

Speaker 2 You know, one or both men are probably getting some sort of, you know, having sexual interactions with these male bodies, whether they're dead or alive. Who knows?

Speaker 2 And I wouldn't put it outside the possibility that the two women may be participating sexually with these victims at some level. So now I guess my question is, is, were the benders ever found?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 You're kidding.

Speaker 1 That's why this is such such a

Speaker 1 well-known story for those of us who geek out on 1800s crime. So this is what they do.

Speaker 1 They track down a partner of theirs who is a German immigrant and had worked with the Benders on getting supplies. And that was about it.
He said, I have no idea where they are.

Speaker 1 They hang this poor guy from a beam until he's unconscious. They wake him up.
interrogate him. He denies any, you know, any involvement at all.
Hang him again.

Speaker 1 They just keep going back and forth waterboarding or something. It was awful.
He doesn't know anything about it. What they do, let me tell you what they do know happened.
The family leaves in April.

Speaker 1 They take the horses in this wagon. I'm presuming the reason they abandoned the wagon, the grocery sign that everybody knew was at that store is in their wagon.

Speaker 1 So I don't know if they were going to reestablish somewhere else or what they were going to do, but there was a mention of a lame horse connected to the wagon. I think the horse went lame.

Speaker 1 They realized that they weren't going to be able to do anything. They abandoned everything, but they still stuck stuck together, which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 1 They end up hiking and they go to a place called Cherry Vale and then they caught a train and they went on to Leavenworth and they are eating breakfast, last seen, confirmed sighting, eating breakfast at a hotel in a part of Kansas, not far from Leavenworth.

Speaker 1 And then they split up. And that is it.
There have been sightings. There have been people who were arrested and spent jail time, but it turned out it was definitely not them.

Speaker 1 There was thought that there were two women, an older one and a younger one, who could have been Kate and Elvira, but it just didn't, the timelines didn't match up.

Speaker 1 They just couldn't, the math wasn't mathing. They couldn't make it work.
And so, you know, when John Sr. and Elvira left, it sounds like they went to St.
Louis. John Jr.

Speaker 1 and Kate went south to the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, and they went to Denison, Texas, right here in Texas. And then they went to the border.
The rumor is that John Jr.

Speaker 1 died of a stroke shortly after that. So he was in his 30s.
You know, two women were put on trial, but the cases were dismissed, and there were sightings for the next 20 years.

Speaker 1 There was a guy in Colorado in 1901 who claims he had married Kate Bender. The next year he's murdered.

Speaker 1 Seems on brand for her. I mean, and then there's a California woman in 1910 that claims that she is Kate Bender on her deathbed.

Speaker 1 But again, circumstances, her family is like, no, she was never in Kansas. We can prove that.
I mean, the Benders were there for three years.

Speaker 1 They started doing this shortly after they arrived in 1870.

Speaker 1 And then that was it. The crimes fade into Kansas, you know, history.
That's why you have that case with the three hammers because it's on display in a museum.

Speaker 1 There's museums dedicated to this family. So since 2024, the University of Kansas has been formally excavating the site.
They're looking for more information because it was never fully excavated.

Speaker 2 More bodies?

Speaker 1 They had never found any bodies officially after that. Yeah, I guess they're looking for more bodies.
Sure. So we'll see.
I mean, this is just going to add to this is like a Jack the Ripper.

Speaker 1 That's the lore. And I know maybe a lot of people hadn't heard of it, but this was the scariest family, you know, that I had heard of.

Speaker 1 And so sometimes I do hear over and over again people claiming, I've done a book or I've written an article about, you know, the first serial killer.

Speaker 1 The Hart brothers were likely the earliest serial killers. They were in the 1700s and they were in the American Revolutionary War and raping and murdering people.

Speaker 1 But of course, we know there were serial killers working for thousands of years that we don't know about.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they were just attributed to being werewolves or vampires. It was kind of going into the Halloween thing, right?

Speaker 1 Yep, it's very spooky. But the idea that you have this kind of collusion with a family, and I don't know what the motive was.

Speaker 1 I mean, we've talked about the sexual component and the weird quote and the clairvoyance.

Speaker 1 It's maddening when you like crime history to have a family like the Bloody Benders and not understand not just what their motives were, but also where the hell did they go?

Speaker 1 So it's a Halloween mystery.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm looking at the photo of the three hammers and I'm kind of curious to see what else they got out of the Bender house because I'm looking at these three hammers going, well, you know what the bender family was they were touching those uh yeah hammer handles a fair amount uh you know can we get some good dna that's representative of one of the one of the benders and do genealogy and see if uh any offspring any descendants pop up anywhere or do they have any clothing items that the benders wore out of the out of the cabin you know that we might be able to go after or a hairbrush you know what all did they collect we have a a knife.

Speaker 2 You have the knife, you know, and I'm assuming it's just like the, you know, the, the, the working end of the hammer as a weapon is going to be mostly coming back to victims.

Speaker 2 And I imagine that the knife blade is going to be coming back to a victim. But, you know, the handle possibly could.

Speaker 2 It's just that these things have probably been handled by so many people, you know, before being put into a display case. But I don't know.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm just trying to, it kind of galls me that they just disappeared and we know who they are. And it's like, well, let's track them down.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're showing me the knife.

Speaker 1 A couple of knives that they have in there.

Speaker 2 You know, that knife is just showing dripped blood on the, on the blade.

Speaker 2 The handle is looking unstained. I mean, it looks like a smaller line.
It's like a pairing knife in a way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a pairing knife.

Speaker 2 You know, this isn't something that's, it doesn't look like it was used to stab or cut a throat. It had some blood, you know, know, drip on it.

Speaker 2 And, you know, most certainly that blood could possibly be, I mean, it could be from one of the benders who got cut

Speaker 2 in a battle with the with the victims.

Speaker 2 It could be an unknown victim's bloodstain that today we might be able to identify who that person is.

Speaker 1 I mean, I would be down for working on a case like this. That would be amazing.
This case is so just, you know, it's mesmerizing for so many people.

Speaker 2 It's weird to say that. You know, I kind of, I like to go on the hunt, and this is going on a hunt, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this is a, this is an enduring mystery, certainly in the Midwest. And people have asked me about the case and I just thought, okay, finally, I'll just fine.

Speaker 1 We'll sick poll on it and see what happens.

Speaker 2 Well, I just, you know, you mentioned that, you know, one of the bodies found was a little girl.

Speaker 2 And she hadn't been, I mean, there was no obvious cause of death. She hadn't been mutilated.
Right. I mean, I think I initially presumed that she was a daughter of one of the adult male victims.

Speaker 2 Is it possible she's related to the Benders?

Speaker 1 Well, they identify her as the victims.

Speaker 1 Her name was Mary Ann Longcourt, and her dad was one of the male victims.

Speaker 2 One of the male victims. So she just happened to be with dad when they abducted him.

Speaker 2 You know, as they're excavating this property, I would

Speaker 2 think that there's a chance that they may have either aborted remains or actual infant bodies

Speaker 2 that were product of conception between these four people. Because I think they're, you know, this type of psychology, this type of pathology, all four of them could be having sex with each other.

Speaker 2 So, you know, who knows? And it's possible that these women, Kate or Elvira, had conceived either from John Sr. or John Jr.
or both and, you know, killed the kids.

Speaker 1 Well, with that poll holes, that is less spooky and more disgusting. Thank you.

Speaker 1 I appreciate that. But listen, I wanted to give you one of the weirder cases that we have, and I'm relieved.

Speaker 1 I almost kicked myself when I sent you the photo of the case with the hammers because it says the benders. And I thought, oh my God, does Paul, some kind of weird thing happened?

Speaker 2 My eyes just tunnel visioned on the hammers. I didn't even read what it said.

Speaker 1 I hated when you revealed that you knew the Miranda case. I was thinking, oh, no, Paul, I don't want him to know about Miranda, but this is good.
I'm glad I got you.

Speaker 2 Anybody involved, you know, anybody who's been through the police academy knows about the Miranda case.

Speaker 1 I know. Okay, well, I'm glad I got you with the Benders.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Next week, probably not a murderous family, but I welcome those stories because I do think the dynamic is so interesting. I just would like them caught next time.

Speaker 1 So I'll work on that for the next case. All right.

Speaker 2 Sounds good. Thanks once again, Kate.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Paul. Happy Halloween.

Speaker 1 This has been an Exactly Right Production.

Speaker 2 For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Speaker 1 Our senior producer is Alexis Emorosi.

Speaker 2 Research by Allison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Speaker 1 Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Speaker 2 Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Speaker 1 Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

Speaker 1 You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Speaker 2 Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked: A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Deco the Criminal Mind, is available now.

Speaker 1 And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.

Speaker 2 Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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