SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Tale of the Bloody Benders

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This mind-boggling episode is an old-timey, true crimey.

It concerns one of the worst families to ever set up shop in Kansas, which is really saying something.

In the early 1870s, the Bender family's surreptitious killings pre, carried out in their own home no less, resulted in the murders of at least 21 people, which earned the family the nickname the Bloody Benders.

This episode will knock your socks off, assuming they're still on your feet after the other episodes so far.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.

So this is Stuff You Should Know,

the Murder Family Edition.

Yeah, Halloween right around the corner.

I've always liked to think of you, me, and Jerry as a kind of murder family.

As in you and I and Jerry, right?

We always have to correct that because people think you're talking about Yumi, your wife.

That's right, okay.

Yes.

You, me, comma.

You, comma, me, comma.

No, no, I mean, me, my wife, Yumi, and Jerry.

I've always thought of us as just.

No, I'm kidding.

I missed what you said, though.

You thought of us as what?

A murder family?

A murder family, yeah.

Sure, in the kindest possible way.

Exactly.

Exactly.

No, we're no murder family.

And after everybody learns about the Bloody Benders, they'll be like, yeah, Josh and Chuck and Jerry are no murder family.

And we wouldn't want to be either because it turns out murder families are not so great, Chuck.

Right.

And can we shout out a listener who submitted this topic?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I feel like that's happening more and more like that.

A lot, yeah.

As our world gets smaller, our listeners are reminding us that it is quite large.

And we got this one from a Kansan.

Oh, that's very appropriate.

Is that how you say it?

Kansan?

I think it's Kansanianite.

Okay, Kansanianite.

Named Star White.

And apparently, Star was traveling with the family through Kansas and saw signs in Montgomery County for the Benders, the Bloody Benders, and things commemorating this and said, I'm

a Kansanianite, and I I had no idea that this was a thing.

I got to learn more about this.

So, we're doing one.

You know, we like to keep it spooky in October where we can.

Sure.

For sure.

And there's nothing spookier than a

serial killing family.

Interestingly, too,

this past, I think, March,

what I'm taking to be is one of the definitive books on the Benders came out.

It's called Hell's Half Acre.

And it is by an author named

a drumroll roll

named Susan Jonusis.

That's why I'm going with her last name.

But it came out in March called Hell's Head Faker, and it does look pretty awesome.

So I figured that had to do with this, but no, it's just completely off the cuff from a listener from Kansas, huh?

Just driving through.

Great name, too, by the way.

Star Wipe.

What a great name.

It's almost like Star Wipe.

No wonder you like it.

It's your favorite transition.

That's right.

I do know a Bender, actually, but this is, I don't think there's any relation.

Yeah, because it's not entirely clear that that was even their names, too.

So we should tell everybody.

We're talking about a family that lived in Kansas in the 1870s at a time when Kansas was like the frontier,

maybe even beyond the frontier.

The Trail of Tears had happened by this time.

So the Osage

people who had lived there previously had been forced off their land and moved further west to Oklahoma.

And the federal government said, Come, anybody, all you criminals, you unsavory characters, people escaping your past, come and settle here in Kansas.

It's like Australia, but in the center of the United States.

That's right.

Did you do bad things back east?

Just pick up your bags and head west.

That's precisely right.

And so a lot of them stopped in Kansas.

Again, this was the frontier, but people were still going west, too.

So as we'll find out, this family, the Bender family, kind of put up a claim or set down a claim.

They did something with the claim.

I'm not quite up on my like old prospector terminology.

They claimed something.

Yeah.

On this road that kind of kept leading west, and they set up a tavern, an inn, for people to stop in, which is neither here nor there quite yet.

But I just kind of wanted to foreshadow that there's going to be a tavern coming in the future.

That's right.

And that's probably a generous term for what they set up.

Yeah.

It was a pretty remote, I guess, you know, not to make too many Kansas jokes, but it was a pretty remote part of Kansas and southeastern Kansas in 1870.

It was not Cherryvale yet, but it would eventually become Cherryvale.

And at first, the two gentlemen arrived, John Bender Sr.

He was around 60 years old.

People called him Pa.

He didn't talk a lot.

When he did talk, it was mostly in German.

And then he was with a younger guy in his 20s.

And, you know, we're going to say things like identified as his son or, you know, may or may not have been the daughter.

Like, this is because of a lot of things.

Uh, partially, just you know, a lot of record keeping back then wasn't super solid, especially when it turns out you may be using aliases and you may be faking that you're a family, or you may actually be a family.

Like, no one really knows for sure the facts of this.

But John Bender Jr.

was with him, and he also occasionally went by an alias.

Put a pen in this one name John Gebhardt.

Chris Gebhardt.

Now, he's a comedian.

He's great.

I know.

But apparently, John Gebhardt or John Bender Jr.

was a bit of a comedian himself.

But

from some reports, he was his own audience and no one else was.

So to put it another way, he apparently laughed at stuff like inappropriately, like Dr.

Hibbert.

And also at times when.

Exactly.

That was a great John Bender Jr.

impression, by the way.

but um at times where people were like this this guy ain't quite right and he also talked a lot so he was kind of an odd fixture as well as we'll find out the whole family was yeah he had a german accent but did speak fluent english uh and some people think he may have been intellectually disabled um looking at kind of some of the things that happened it seems like

I don't know about clear, but you know, at a time in 1870, they wouldn't have been categorizing people as such anyway, you know.

No, for sure.

But from the articles of the time, that's what I'm going with from now on,

nobody said anything even remotely like that.

I saw it on one, I think, like Crime Reads article, and that was about it.

I just got the impression that he was really kind of weird and almost like a Jethro Clampett type.

That's who he reminds me of.

Okay.

So what they built on their 160 acres was,

you called it a tavern.

I call it just a big room, kind of like a bunkhouse, maybe.

They call it a, or Livia, who helped us with this, called it a foothouse.

But it was 16 feet wide, 24 feet long.

So what they eventually did was they would put up a canvas sheet, kind of splitting it in two.

They lived in the back, and then they called, you know, they called it an inn.

You called it a tavern.

It was really just a room with some canned goods and supplies and I think a couple of beds,

sort of like a bunkhouse.

It was not fancy at all.

No, but I'm guessing, like, as you were passing through Kansas back then, and maybe even today, it was pretty appealing.

You think?

Well, I mean, it was better than sleeping out on the open prairie with the bedroll, right?

You know, there was a hot meal.

You know, they probably had tobacco.

And yeah, I mean, it was better than nothing.

And I think I get the impression also, one of the things that made it better than nothing was the daughter who I say we meet right now, her name was Kate, and she showed up after this tavern, this house had been built.

That's right.

The two ladies were sent for after everything was done, and it was Ma Bender,

who everyone just sort of assumed was the wife and

the matriarch of the family.

She went by Elvira sometimes.

She was maybe in her 50s and

led on like she didn't speak.

any, if very little, if any, English at all.

But had like a terrible temper.

She was widely reputed

from anybody that met her that she was just a terrible cuss of a person from what I gather.

Yeah, in fact, I think she may have been the one sort of leading this whole charge that we'll get to.

I've seen both.

I've seen her or I've seen Kate.

And Kate was the daughter.

She was in her 20s.

But I think more than anything,

she kind of attracted passers-by with flyers advertising her mediumship.

Like she was into spiritualism and free love, apparently, too.

And who knows what that means in 1870s, Kansas?

She was showing a little ankle.

I don't know.

Like, I have no idea what free love means in that context, but it was unusual, at least, and got attention.

Some people thought she may have been the daughter.

Other people thought that they presented she and John Jr.

as a couple.

So it was just sort of one of those things.

It's loose out there in 1870s, Kansas.

Right.

So one other thing I read, Chuck, that Livy didn't quite hit on was that this family, they weren't like exactly

fading into the woodwork or the prairie.

Like they were well known in their little community, mainly because there were only like eight or ten other settlements around them at the time.

But also because I think they were the only ones running a tavern and they had an orchard that will factor in later.

But apparently their cherries and apples and peaches were like really prized out there at the time.

So they were part of the community, but they were known to be weird.

And Ma in particular, which you just kind of avoided her as best as you could.

Right.

So they have this thing set up.

It's on the edge of the Great Osage Trail, which is like you mentioned earlier, where a lot of people continued westward.

And it was a good place to have a little bunkhouse that, you know, sold a few things.

What's the word I'm looking for?

A general store.

No.

Ollie's bargain house.

Rations.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Selling rations and things like that.

They sell rations at Ollie's.

What is Ollie's?

It's like a deep discount liquid area.

Like if you stole a truck, you just drive it over there and they'll buy everything and then turn around and sell it.

I don't think they actually do that, but it's the appearance of that kind of thing.

Yeah, we should be clear.

We're not alleged.

Like, I've never heard of Ollie's, so I'm innocent of this.

You should go wander around one.

You'll be like, ah, okay, I gotcha.

Here's an Oriental rug.

Here's some off-brand bleach on the next aisle.

Like, it's just that.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's like that various places.

All over the place.

In every strip mall, in every city,

in every country in the world.

It may be one of those things that's so ubiquitous, I've just never noticed it.

Yeah, like right under my nose.

It's possible.

All right.

So they set up an Ollie's right there on the Great Osage Trail.

And maybe this is a good place to take our first break.

Oh, I wasn't expecting that.

Let me see.

Okay, that sounds good.

Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

That's right.

And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and and seeing life from a different point of view.

So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Okay, Chuck, so one of the things that made the Benders, made us call the Benders a murder family, is that they started murdering people pretty shortly after they set up this homestead along the Osage Trail.

And one of the things about Kansas at the time was it was really,

really violent.

Not just in the wars against the Native Americans there.

There were also pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions that committed atrocities against one another.

The Civil War, I read, kind of broke out thanks to Kansas, struggling which kind of state it was going to be.

So it was a really violent place.

And it was with that kind of violent backdrop that a family could just kill a bunch of travelers without anyone really taking notice because it was also just the kind of place where people just went missing.

It just happened.

It was a really dangerous place to travel.

So when it happened, it didn't exactly like set off the media and search parties didn't usually come out for people.

Yeah, absolutely.

However, when they start turning up in regular order around town, then you've got a problem.

And that's what happened.

In May of 1871, the body of a man was found in local Drum Creek.

This is southeast of the Bender's house.

And this is very key here.

He had his, he had been brained, he had his skull bashed in, and had his throat cut, which, as you will see, becomes the recurring M.O.

of this family.

Yep.

Two more men were found shortly after, I think a few months later, a few months after that, another body was found, all in the creek.

And apparently they all

had that same kind of mortal wound or that combination of injuries.

And one of the bodies was identified as a man named William Jones.

And he had been carrying, known to have been carrying about $250,

which at the time was like a lot of money to today.

$26,000, close to it.

Okay.

And he was going to pay off his mortgage for his homestead, which is something people did at that time, too.

It's another thing that made it dangerous.

A lot of people were walking around with a lot of cash because they were going to buy land, pay off mortgages, do God knows what, and there weren't banks.

So they were traveling with cash.

And this guy was exactly that.

And there was a farmer whose land he was found on that was initially accused, but they were like, I don't think it was him.

So he got off.

But I'm sure he was like, wait, what?

What?

No, it wasn't me.

Yeah, and the way he got off, too, was kind of frustrating as a

like a crime enthusiast reader because they investigated it and they found that the wagon that dropped him had a very distinctive track that one of the back wheels was off-center.

And I kept waiting for that to come back.

It's like, remember that wagon?

That's what eventually led to the killers.

But

spoiler alert, that does not happen.

So don't put a pin in it.

Take the pin out of that.

Yeah, just take, throw that pin away, break it in two.

So

the thing about, I think one of the reasons why people started getting hot under the collar about these murders, too, is that this area got a really bad reputation really fast.

Like it was like, you avoid the spot as best you can.

Like maybe go out of your way to avoid this area on the Osage Trail because people just wind up missing there.

And that kind of got people

aware of

the whole problem that the area was facing, but they didn't know who it was.

And they certainly hadn't centered on the Benders.

The Benders just had a reputation as being odd and possibly a little

maybe violently unusual, but not murderers by any stretch.

They just weren't suspected for a really long time.

Violently unusual.

Yeah.

What a reputation.

Yeah, that's pretty serious.

Here's another story, too, that you do need to get that pen out, put it back together that Josh told you to break it off.

I'm sorry, everybody.

And put a pen in this story because this was chronologically speaking, February 1873.

A woman who didn't really have any money apparently stopped at the home, asked to rest, asked for some food, fell asleep on a bed in the back.

And then when she woke up, there was Ma Bender,

and she pointed to a table covered in pistols and knives and said, there, your supper's ready.

So this lady somehow apparently manages to stay composed and not like react with alarm.

She goes after

fiddlesticks.

Yeah, exactly.

And said, I just need to step outside for a minute to do something.

Just apparently made a private excuse, is what the Kansas City Times said.

Yeah.

And

ran and took off running, barefoot, basically, you know, in her sleeping clothes, ran for a couple of miles to find help.

And it's hard to parse together what this sentence from the Times even means, but I'm taking it to mean that it didn't really, it still didn't set off alarm bells for this family.

It didn't.

And that, by the way, is a classic example of being violently unusual.

Right.

Okay.

You know?

They were just like, if you're violently unusual, you have the kind of house that people run two miles away from in their bare feet.

Yeah, where guns and knives are presented as supper.

Exactly, right?

So this is just kind of going along.

The benders are humming along, doing their murdering thing.

People don't really suspect them, but the area's got a bad reputation.

But there was a series of murders, actually, a combo, one, two punch of murders that finally led to their discovery as a murder family.

And the first thing started with a guy named George Newton Longcourt, who left Independence, Kansas, which was just to the west of Cherryvale along the Osage Trail.

And he was on his way to Iowa, so he would have passed through Cherryvale, along with his 18-month-old daughter, Mary Ann.

And he never made it to Iowa.

And that caught the attention of another man, a physician named William York, who was his neighbor and was concerned enough that he started traveling around, inquiring inquiring about him to see if he could figure out what happened to George and his daughter Mary Ann.

Yeah, good neighbor.

Yeah, really good neighbor.

Like to do such a thing, to take this trip.

So starts investigating, finds out that the

horse and wagon team was abandoned near Fort Scott, Kansas.

And in the spring,

I mean, I think that's what led him to go out there.

So he's out there in the spring.

He gets to Fort Scott.

All that stuff is still there.

Basically, all of their stuff had been abandoned.

They were nowhere to be found.

So he's like, something is going on.

I need to go back to independence.

And then he disappears.

Yeah.

And that really caught the attention of people because it turned out Dr.

William York.

And if I said Edward the first time, please forgive me.

His name was William, and he was a doctor.

And he was a York.

And there were two other Yorks.

He had a brother named Edward, who was neither here nor there.

But he had a really important brother named Alexander York, who was a colonel from the Civil War and also a Kansas senator.

So they had murdered the brother of a Kansas senator who was known to be out looking around the area of Cherryvale for somebody else who had gone missing.

And that really got people's antenna up.

Yeah, big time.

Enough to where they got a search party, Colonel Alexander, I think about 75 men set off.

And they were, you know, they were scouring around.

They were,

they basically kind of figured out at one point that they definitely went by the Bender's house.

So let's go by and talk to these people, see what's going on.

When they do this, Ma Bender,

you know, claims to not speak English, which seems like her main jam, her big joke, besides here's her supper of guns and knives, was I also don't speak English.

Kate, young Kate says, I don't know anything about this guy.

And then John Jr.

said, hey, listen, I was shot at when I was out there at Drum Creek where all these like bodies have been found.

And I can take you out there.

And like, maybe the people that shot at me killed your friends as well.

Yeah.

And again, just imagine Jethro Clampett saying this and taking people out to look at a place where he claims to have been shot at.

Right.

I just, I love that bit.

So, um,

so, but he's also just kooky, you know.

Um,

did you watch the Beverly Hill Billies?

I did.

Like a lot?

Uh, yeah, yeah.

I watched it a lot.

So, do you remember the time or the period?

I guess it was a phase where Jethro ended up becoming like a movie producer in Hollywood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it just got a little weird later in that show.

It really did get weird.

So it's not clear whether this is that Hollywood producer of Jethro or the original Mountaineer son of Jethro.

Either way, it works pretty good.

But he takes Alexander and the search party out there.

And I guess he gave enough of an explanation and was, you know, pointing out different spots well enough that they're like, either they believed him or they just didn't really care.

And they kind of headed on, basically.

Yeah, I mean, he showed bullet holes in a tree or not holes, but bullet markings,

which, you know, Kansas in the 1870s, about half the trees had bullets in them.

So that doesn't prove anything.

But like you said, it was enough at least to sniff him slightly off the case.

At least temporarily.

But they came back a few days later, said, listen, we heard about this lady over the past few days who came here.

And I don't want to really start anything, but she said that you said, here's your supper, and it was guns and knives.

There was something about a pistol supper or something like that.

And that's weird.

She ran away barefoot for two miles and no one made a big deal out of it.

But now we kind of want to know, this is where Ma Bender, all of a sudden, starts speaking English.

Apparently, the quote is she flew into a violent passion and went off saying, you know, that that lady was a witch and she has,

you know, cursed Kate's coffee that she was going to drink.

And if she ever comes back here, I'm going to kill her.

We got her out of here.

She was a witch.

Yeah, she converted Kate's coffee into that mushroom coffee and now Kate refuses to drink it.

What's mushroom coffee?

It's exactly what it sounds like.

Except

it doesn't actually have coffee.

No.

Oh, it's made out of mushrooms.

Yeah.

Yeah, you should try it sometime just to say you tried it.

Yeah, that's what on those survival shows, they get like roots and twigs and boil that stuff down.

They're like, here's my morning coffee.

It is not coffee.

Have fun with that.

So

they, so again, still, like, they were kind of like, okay, this family's really weird, but we don't really have anything on them.

But it was enough that Alexander York kind of stuck around town and they held a meeting

with basically the whole town that Pa and John Jr.

even attended.

And they said, hey, this place has a bad reputation.

Something's going on.

These two people at the very least have been have turned up missing.

We need to just search everyone's homestead.

And apparently, very brassily,

at least one neighbor said, I've got nothing to hide.

Search my homestead.

And Pa said the same thing.

He said, I don't either.

You guys search my homestead.

And so I guess they kind of did a slow motion search because it was at least a week, I saw, if not a couple weeks, before they finally made it out to search the benders place and when they showed up they realized very quickly that the benders weren't there and probably hadn't been there since the night of that meeting yeah when they realized they told people to come search their house you said what

My favorite part about Kate's jam is that they asked her to do the seance to like give some more information.

Like, well, if you're so good at that.

And she said, no, it's like it's

daytime.

There's too many people around.

Like, have you ever seen a seance?

She was like, why don't you come back tomorrow night, just the two of you, and we'll do one.

And they were like, no, thank you.

Right.

I think I'll take the zero in that one.

Yeah.

That's what I'm saying.

Dr.

Colonel, no, Colonel Alexander York was a sharp dude, basically.

Yeah.

But the townspeople weren't sharp enough to go.

I don't know if they were searching other places.

I know there was a weather issue.

But like you said, by the time they got there, they were gonzos.

They left their, they took a train because they found their horse and wagon and even their dog just on a public street near the train station.

And they got the heck out of Dodge.

Well, not out of Dodge, out of what would become Cherryvale.

Very close, very close.

So the volunteers were like, well, I guess since they left, we can just go ahead and go on in.

And apparently they found very quickly that there was a trap door in the floor.

And when they opened the trap door, I guess a lot of them gagged because it smelled like decaying human remains.

And even though they looked in there and there weren't actual bodies, there was so much blood and gore in this cellar rotting that it was enough to make a person gag, even without a full body decomposing there.

I think it's a great place for our second break.

Oh, okay.

Great.

The height of suspense.

Let's do it.

We'll be back and talk about what was making that smell right after this.

Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

That's right.

And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

But Anibay changes that.

It's washable, like fully washable.

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All right, so they have a stone cellar under the house covered in blood and stinks like dead bodies, even though there's no dead bodies.

And we said we were going to get to the bottom of the smell.

The bottom of it is there were dead bodies in there previously.

Yeah, so they had this.

It's pretty easy.

They had

the trap set up, the trapdoor set up, so it led to a hole in the cellar.

And then there was a way out, or I guess a way in from the foundation.

And they would kill people, put them in the trapdoor, through the trapdoor to the cellar, and they'd retrieve them at night when there weren't pry and eyes around.

Yeah, pretty good system they had going.

They started searching around.

They did eventually find bodies.

They found William York's body buried in the orchard.

They found Lonker's body buried, along with young Mary Ann, who

the two gentlemen had the head wounds and the throat wounds.

Mary Ann, I've seen variously, was either suffocated or suffocated from being buried alive.

Many announce,

but not brained and throat slit at least.

Tragic either way, of course.

Sure, sure.

But very, very sad case.

Eventually, they would go on to find about a dozen bodies and were eventually implicated in as many as 21 murders.

Yeah, they found it, yeah, I saw 11, I think, including Marianne.

A bunch of them were in the orchard.

They looked around the property and realized that there were a bunch of depressions in the orchard, and they're like, I wonder if those are graves.

And they turned up people in the graves, they found somebody in the well.

And then, yeah, when you add them together with all the people dumped in Drum Creek, I guess it comes to about 21.

And they developed this theory of what had happened, in part based on some people who had narrowly escaped with their lives and hadn't realized it until after the Benders became national news.

But that that curtain that they had dividing the tavern,

the Ollie's bargain bin, from the rest of the house

was

right behind the seat where they would have travelers and guests sit when they were eating a meal, right?

Yeah, and they would have them sit there and, you know, from the other side, it would, you know, they would be

silhouetted by the candlelight so they could see clearly where they were.

And then Pa or John Jr.

would either use like the butt of an axe or a hammer to brain them.

They would put them in the cellar and rob them and then slit their throat.

And

that's how it was sort of a,

I don't know.

The fact, like, all right, let's go ahead and tell the stories about the other guys because after this came out, people started coming forward.

Like you said, a guy named Mr.

Wetzel said, hey, wait a minute.

They tried to get me to sit right by that curtain and I wouldn't sit by the curtain.

And Ma Bender got really mad about that.

And so we got the heck out of there.

And then another guy named William Pickering said, yeah, I didn't want to sit by that curtain because it was dirty and gross.

And I took a different seat and they got in a big fight.

And Kate came at me with a knife.

So I don't know why they just didn't come up behind the membrane them.

Like maybe they felt the curtain offered some sort of cover.

It just seems very like stubborn.

Oh, like they had to follow procedure or else the person.

You have to sit there.

I'm like, well, you can't murder a guy in another chair?

Well,

yeah, I don't think it would have been as easy to come up behind him from the curtain.

You know what I'm saying?

Maybe.

It sounds a little,

I mean, I guess they got away with it for a little while,

but I don't know.

It sounds a little amateurish.

Sure.

Or they were such professionals, they just stuck to the script.

And if the script deviated, they didn't take chances.

And there's actually a good suggestion of why they didn't take chances because there were later discovered in the house bullet holes in the walls and in the door frames.

And that was taken to be from people who had tried to fight back when they realized what was going on.

But I guess they had ultimately been unsuccessful because nobody escaped that house saying they had shot at everyone because they tried to brain them, you know.

Or maybe it was just supper.

I guess so.

Pistol supper.

You're right.

Who knows?

So the story gets out,

becomes, you know, for the 1870s, becomes a pretty big media storm, whatever that looked like back then.

And people, you know, it became like a bit of a tourist stop.

Like people, it sounds like people essentially showed up there and kind of looted the place over time.

We're just kind of, you know, breaking up pieces of the cellar and breaking up the bed frame and kind of just taking whatever they wanted with them.

Yeah.

And one of the reasons it became such a media frenzy is they were the first serial killers in America that America America ever produced, at least as far as the media could tell.

A decade later, Austin would have what's frequently referred to as the first serial killer in America with the servant girl Annihilator.

This was pre-I don't even know if I want to do a podcast on that.

No, I don't.

No, that name alone, it's like, nah, that's all right.

That stopped me cold.

I mean, this was 10 years before Jack the Ripper, even.

Right, exactly.

And H.H.

Holmes, who's also often referred to as America's first serial killer, he wasn't until the

1830s or 1890s.

So he was like a good 20 years on.

So it was a big deal.

So not only did we have America's first serial killer, we had America's first dark tourists show up at their house and take everything they possibly could as a memento.

But one of the things that happened about this being such a huge media sensation is that...

like the country was following this and everyone was basically looking for the benders because don't forget they'd vanished no one knew which way they went.

All they knew is that somewhere not too far off, they'd ridden their wagon to that train station and the train ticket person had said, yeah, those four people definitely bought tickets, but I can't tell you where.

Yeah, exactly.

And they said, you can tell us.

I'm a doctor.

They did arrest 12 men.

This sounds a little bit like, hey, we've got to kind of do something.

So they arrest these guys who they alleged maybe were involved as far as receiving stolen goods because they never really found a super clear motive i mean it seemed like a lot of them may have had like traveling money or like the guy who had the 250 bucks which was a lot of money at the time um

but it was never like a hundred percent established like their motive was just to rob people But they implicated these 12 guys, as guys who may have helped them move stolen items and money and stuff like that.

And apparently one of the guys was a member of a vigilante committee who tried to get on to help lead the investigation with Colonel York, but was denied and rejected.

And I think that kind of hurt his feelings.

And I think what it came down to was these guys, they were known as the regulators, these vigilantes.

They were throat cutters.

They would cut people's throat instead of like bringing them back to face trial.

And then they just sort of tied it to these people because of the throat cutting.

Yeah, and a lot of people were pretty innocent.

Well, a lot of innocent people died as a result.

So these people were bad dudes.

But I saw that it was more than just the throat cutting, that there was a way that they would particularly leave bodies.

Like they would put the right hand against the right breast and the left hand down, like just by their side.

Like a pledge of allegiance?

Almost, but you're

like as if you don't know which side of your chest to put your hand and you got it wrong, kind of like that.

And apparently they found a lot of the bodies in the orchard

at the Bender's place

posed like this, basically, almost like this was the sign, like this is what this gang did.

So I don't think they were like in the gang, but it's possible that gang of vigilantes were fencing this stuff for them and that they were at least tangentially related, you know?

Sure, it's possible.

Sure.

When it comes down to who these people really were,

we're not exactly sure.

There's been a lot of modern investigation about who they were, and they think that Ma was a woman named Almira Meek

and was from upstate New York near the Adirondack Mountains, so not German at all.

There were some pretty sketchy accounts, not super well researched, that said she had been married before and that her husbands had all met violent deaths from head wounds.

So, you know, I don't know if that's just the internet running with something or if that's true.

Apparently, out of all of the four, the

Ma and Kate seem to have actually been related.

Although I don't know how.

I didn't see how, did you?

Like how they were related?

No, no, no.

Like they were supposed to be mother and daughter, but how did that ever get turned up?

Like where was that?

How was that ever defined?

I think just people doing like modern research on lineage and stuff like that.

Okay.

Because they think they turned up her original name, too, that Ma was married to a man named Griffith and that Kate was really Eliza Griffith.

Okay.

John Sr.

apparently was John Flickinger

and was either from Germany or the Netherlands.

And then John Jr.,

apparently his real name was the alias that he was using that I said to put a pen in, John Gerhardt.

And now you can take that pin out and break it in half and throw it away.

Yeah, so if he was using his real name as an alias, then

I'm not sure what was going on with John Jr.

No.

No, he was a Jethro type.

Don't forget.

So

there were people who were like, oh, we've seen the benders.

We saw the benders here.

They went this way.

They went that way.

For years and years and years, it was...

like it like people would would report on their whereabouts and it's unclear to this day whether people did or didn't know where they went i saw there was one like kind of article i guess from the time that was basically like, Yeah, everybody knows where they are, and there's just nothing anyone can do.

They made it to another state, and everybody just kind of leaves everybody else alone out there.

Other people have always reported, like, no, they have no idea where they went, they just kind of vanished into thin air.

And then there were reports that were usually incorrect: that they'd either been captured or that they'd been killed.

Or there was one report that Pa died by suicide in Lake Michigan in 1884.

Right.

Another one said, John Jr.

and Kate went to

New Mexico, like sort of Texas-New Mexico border, and John died of a stroke.

Some people said that vigilantes got them and they burned Kate alive and shot and killed the other ones and buried them in the prairies, but no one ever claimed the pretty substantial reward, you know, close to 70 grand today.

So it seems like none of these stories were probably true, or maybe, who knows?

Maybe one of them was.

There's just no way to know.

So Laura Ingalls Wilder actually had a family story that I read that her daughter basically said, hey, you should weave this into our family story.

So it's almost certainly not true.

That she and her family on their way to Homestead passed by the Bender's tavern, but they didn't have enough money to go in for food or to stay there.

But they settled in a close enough area that after the benders were found out,

her father, there was a knock on her family's door, and her father was summoned outside with his gun and he didn't come back till morning.

But that anytime you ever asked him about the benders, he would say,

they'll never be found again.

Again, this isn't true.

And one of the other things that really undermines the vigilante theory is, again, $70,000 in today's dollars was offered as a reward.

Somebody from that group of vigilantes would have stepped up and taken it.

Or

even if they didn't, how could a group of vigilantes keep that secret for for all that time?

That it's still to this day never came up because that would be something to boast about: that you were among the group of vigilantes that caught and killed the bloody benders, you know?

Sure.

So I think the vigilante thing is

get a book deal at the very least.

For sure.

These days, I think it's the kind of thing where a lot of Kansas City and the

celebrated Bender Days for a while.

They had a replica at Cherry Vale at one point of the Bender house.

More recently, in fact, just a couple of years ago, a gentleman named Bob Miller, who is a financial advisor from Independence and a historian, and who knows, maybe a bit of a murder junkie, bought the land and basically said, like, hey, the people that own this land never did anything.

thing with it.

They never searched for the location of the murder sites or the house.

And I want to do that i want to like uh have like professional expert investigations done on the property

uh

i don't know if he plans to like put up like a lizzie boarden house or something um but he wants to get to the bottom of what he can at least right yeah he's get he's said he's going to try to get with UK or K-State.

I don't remember which one to do like ground-penetrating surveys, but I don't know what his end game is either.

But it's pretty neat that he bought it.

And one of the reasons why he's feeling good about finding something is the family that he bought it from owned the land for like the last 65 previous years, and they showed zero interest whatsoever in finding the actual site, and they just turned it all into cropland.

So there's a good chance that there's something like the foundation, maybe even that ghastly cellar, the well that the one guy was found in, remnants of the orchard.

Who knows?

There could be plenty of stuff left there.

I don't know if they're going to,

I believe they exhumed all of the bodies that they found, but that's not to say that they found every body, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

There was a movie made in 2016 called Bender that does not look great.

Did you see the trailer?

No, I didn't.

I just saw Olivia quoted a user from IMDb that said it had some of the worst acting I've ever seen.

What was the trailer like?

Not, I mean, it didn't look great.

I read some other reviews that said it was okay,

but it wasn't like

super murdery or super scary.

So it kind of fell too much toward like historical drama.

Oh, they talked a lot about like raising and harvesting grain.

Maybe.

I don't know.

But

there was a thing that in Red Dead Redemption 2 that is funny because I kind of forgot about this.

I played that game a couple of years ago.

And

there's a pig farm.

where your character shows up and there's a creepy old lady and a creepy old old man and they're like trying to get you to stay for dinner.

And apparently it's modeled after this and you don't really know when you're in those games.

You don't know quite what to do.

Like I feel like I should leave.

It's kind of like real life.

But they offer you libations and you need libations.

So if you just

if you want to play this game and you haven't, it's pretty old.

Don't listen to this part.

Okay.

But if you don't care, like most people, don't drink the drink.

Because as soon as you drink the drink, the screen goes woozy and you wake up the next day, and I'm not sure that good things happened overnight.

Okay, but you're not dead, huh?

You're not dead.

That's not very bendery.

No, it's not.

I think they were inspired by the benders a little bit, but I don't know.

Supposedly, also, um, I've never read American Gods, the Neil Gaiman book.

Have you?

Have you read any of his stuff?

Never have.

I've read some of his short stories, and they're amazing, so I'm surprised I've never read his novels.

But in American Gods, one of the characters is a Slavic god named Zernborg.

That's what I'm going with.

And every time the Benders killed somebody, he gained strength from their sacrifice, which is a pretty neat little take on the whole thing, you know, because we're so like, we have the blinders on here on Earth.

We don't even realize this murder family is actually contributing to the well-being of a Slavic god.

I thought you were going to say whenever they killed someone, they would yell, Zurnburg!

Well, they did that too, but that was never captured in the articles from the time, Chuck, which, by the way, if you're like, I need to know more about the Bloody Benders, and I will not have it filtered through history.

I need the original stuff.

There's a website called genealogytrails.com.

And if you search that and Bender family and your favorite search engine, it will bring up the crime-related news articles from the time about the Bender family.

And it's awesome because it has a bunch of other details, but also it's got like that old-timey 19th-century, you know, crime reporting, too.

Right.

It's just worth reading for sure.

It's always fun.

You got anything else about the benders?

Nothing else.

Well, that's it about the benders for now, everybody.

And since Chuck said nothing else, that means it's time for listener mail.

Hey guys, stumbled across you in the summer of 2020 when I was employed as a USPS Rural Carrier Associate.

Hmm.

Not a rural juror.

I heard of it.

Wait, wait, no.

I need to know.

What was that?

I can't remember what that's from.

30 Rock.

I still can't place it, but I'll think about it and I'll say Eureka later, okay?

Well, what's funny is after we talked a little bit about 30 Rock on our sitcoms episode

and Emily went out of town for a week and I barreled through season one of 30 Rock while she was gone and it was so good.

Yeah, it was really good to do it again.

What a show.

God, Alec Baldwin.

Yeah.

And Tracy Morgan.

Yeah, and don't forget Liz Lemon.

She was great, but oh boy, Baldwin and Tracy Morgan just slayed me on that show.

I mean, everyone on that show was really funny.

Yeah, Tracy Morgan's best quote was

somebody offered him cashews and he said, I'm glad you said that because I thought it was a bowl of baby penises.

His other good one that I got was

he was talking about how they go together like peanut butter and he said, or like chicken in the chicken container.

That's pretty good.

So Rural Juror, though, was the movie that Jane Krakowski was in.

And the joke is she goes, Ruror Juror, and like no one knows what the title of the movie is.

But it had gone so long, they couldn't really ask her what the name of the movie was.

I mean, I'm going to keep watching it.

She's so funny, too.

I love her.

Okay.

All right.

Back to the email.

I have heard of podcasts before, but never gave it much thought until a friend insisted started to listen to some.

And it got to the point in stuff you should know where I'd talk so much about y'all my husband finally came and said who the heck are Josh and Chuck and when you're going to introduce me to your new friends

but now the show is our go-to for family road trips awesome one neat thing I wanted to write about though is my last dental appointment in February I decided to bring along earbuds so I could listen to y'all while getting some fillings done.

I asked the dentist and the assistant if it would be okay to listen to the podcast while they work, and the dentist said it was okay, but asked asked me what i was going to listen to first i told her it was stuff you should know and how much i enjoyed it and i was listening to the chow chilla bus kidnapping episode

my dentist lit up and told me how awesome that episode was her assistant had never heard of the show but the dentist uh was happily talking about your show uh so much that my entire visit

I didn't get to listen to the episode because I was half-chatting to my dentist about stuff you should know.

That's awesome.

Thank you for saving me while I was delivering people's mail and for keeping me company during my commutes.

With love from the land of 10,000 lakes.

That is Tanya Vanderpool.

From Texas.

10,000 lakes.

Texas has like two lakes.

What is that, Minnesota?

Minnesota.

Yeah, right?

10,000 lakes, yeah.

It's gotta be.

Michigan?

No.

Minnesota?

Yeah, it's Minnesota for sure.

She really didn't say you're not toying with me?

I don't know.

I mean, I'm saying, I'm not toying with you, but I'm also on the verge of saying so many things that are wrong about lakes and states that I'm just stopping.

That's fine.

That's fine.

But can you imagine the audacity of just signing off with the land of 10,000 lakes and not putting in parentheses what state you're talking about?

I mean, I like all my emails, Chuck of the Peach State.

Okay, well, that is pretty audacious, Chuck.

It's violently unusual.

What was the person's name again?

Minnesota.

You're in fine form today, aren't you?

You're being playful.

I'm kidding.

It was Tanya Vanderpool.

Okay, thanks a lot, Tanya.

We appreciate that, and we're glad we can keep you company and that we made your dentist's appointment so special.

If you want to get in touch with us like Tanya did and tell us about your dental visits, why not?

You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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