On March 9, 1873, Dr. William H. York left Fort Scott on horseback for his home in Independence, Kansas. He never arrived there. Nearly three weeks later a local newspaper gave a brief account of his mysterious disappearance and the story was quickly picked up by other newspapers in the state. There was considerable speculation that he might have been murdered, as it was known that he had been carrying a large sum of money, and a posse was formed to find him.
The posse was led by his brother Colonel A. York who followed the trail, it was said, "with the tenacity of an Indian and the devotion of a saint"... Rivers were dragged, possible spots for an ambush thoroughly searched, and the route Dr. York must have travelled was taken from town to town. There were no signs anywhere to show how he had met his death, or even that he had been murdered. He was traced as far as Cherryvale in Labette County, about 50 miles from the south line of the state, and no farther. There the trail ended.
Dinner at home with the Bender family. No one knows how many inoocent travellers ate their last meal in the company of Kate Bender. When one of the men of the family had battered their guests' skulls. Kate would finish them off by slitting their throats with her knife. Then they callously dropped the bodies into a pit.
Cherryvale in 1873 was a small railroad town. About two miles south of it was a modest frame house where travellers could buy a meal or a drink. It stood about 100 yards back from Osage trail which ran to east and west in front of it. Over the door was marked "Grocery". The single room, which was all the house was, was divided into two by a curtain. One half served as a store and eating place, and the other half as a living-room and bedroom. for the Bender family who owned it. The house was sparely furnished with two beds and some sticks of furniture.
Steel eyes
The Benders had moved into the house in March 1871. John Bender, who was about 60 years old, and his son, John Junior age 27, were large, coarse-looking men. The daughter was Katie or Kate was 25. Mrs. Bender was hysterically described in an early newspaper account as 42 "with iron grey hair, ragged at the ends and thin over her temples. Her eyes were steel grey and hard".
Ma and Pa Bender were reputed to be the initiators of the idea of murdering hungry guests. They appeared to be normal, simple folk. But anyone who sat at their table was in the most mortal danger.
On April 3, 1873, some of the posse rode out to the Benders' home and asked if they had seen or heard antyhing about the missing Dr.York. The family had said that they were ignorant of his whereabouts. A few days later, however, another bunch of men rode out and asked the same questions. The Benders, believing that they were under suspicion, then hastily abandoned their store and fled.
Their dissapearance was discovered by a horseman riding in from the prairie who galloped into town and soon returned with the posse.
Terrible smell
Beneath it was a small pit about five feet in diameter and six feet deep. The bottom and sides looked damp. One of the men climbed into the pit and probed the bottom with a rod to see if anything was hidden. He could find nothing. But as he climbed out he saw that his hands, where he had been groping the ooze, were covered in blood. This was the source of the mysterious smell.
The search moved to the back of the house, where there was a half-acre orchard.
"Boys, I see graves yonder in the orchard!", called Colonel York.
Heavy metal rods were then driven into the ground. As they were withdrawn it was seen that they were matted hair and putrefying flesh. Shovels were used to carefully scrape away the soil, and within a few minutes the first body had been uncovered. It had been buried on its face and some of the flesh had dropped away from its legs. It was only covered by a shirt which was torn in places and thick with dump of decay.
As soon as it was disinterred it was laid on its back, and Colonel York numbly identified the body as his brother. The rear of his head had been smashed in. The skull had been driven into the brain, and to make quite sure that the victim was dead, his throat had been cut right through to the spine.
By nightfall seven more bodies had been found. Five graves contained only a single body. But buried in the sixth was a man and a little girl. Some of the corpse were in the last stages of composition, but others were not so far gone that they couldn't be identified.
Benders Boot Hill....Searchers found six graves near the Bender family home. One of the bodies was that of a little girl interred alive with a dead victim.
Among those subsequently identified were two men from Cedarville, who, on different dates, had apparently stopped off at the Benders' for a meal. One had been contesting a land case in Independence, and the other was a horse trader who --because of decomposition--could only be recognized by his silver rings.
A third man had been missing since December 5, 1872. he had been travelling to Independence to live there. His sister could only identify him by his clothing. The fourth and fifth victims were a Mr. Longcor and his 18 month old daughter. His wife had recently died and he was leaving for Iowa. The sixth and seventh bodies were the unidentified remains of two men.
In every case the skull had been smashed in from behind and the throat of the victim cut. The only exception was the Longcor child, who had been suffocated. As there were no marks on her body it was assumed that she had been thrown alive into the grave, and her father's body dropped on top of her.
Badly mutilated
The horrifying discoveries were not at a end. The remains of a second child victim were found the next day. This time it was the body of a small girl of about eight. She had been so badly mutilated that her sex and age could only be guessed at. After she had been exhumed someone cut off her golden hair and wove it into a wreath. Her breast bone had been driven in, her right knee wrenched from its socket and the leg doubled up under the body.
In the search party was a grocery store owner named Brockman, who had been a partner of the Benders for two years. He was a close friend of theirs and, like them, German. He was immediately suspected of being an accomplice. To make him confess, a rop was thrown over a beam and he was strung up.
According to an eyewitness his eyes were starting to come out of his head and, he was nearly dead when he was cut down.
"Confess! Confesss! the crowd screamed. Brockman swore that he was innocent, and again he was jerked to his feet and again his face convulsed.
Once more he was let down and revived. This time he did not appear to understand what was wanted. It was an eerie sight. "The yelling crowd, the mutilated and butchered dead, the flickering and swirling torches spluttering in the night wind, the stern set faces of his executioners......."
For the third time he was hoisted up, and this time he was only released when he was unconscious. Gradually he revived and was permitted to stagger away, his innocence now accepted. Afterwards, several rewards were offered for the capture of the Benders--particulary of Kate who was generally credited with being "the leading spirit of her murderous family". But descriptions of her were widly conflicted.
One was that she was a "large, masculine, red-faced woman", and the other, "her hair was a dark, rich auburn. She had deep greyish-blue eyes. She was medium in height, some five feet six or seven inches tall, slender,well formed, voluptuous mold, fair skin, white as milk, rose complexion."She was a good-looking, remarkably handsome woman, rather bold and striking in appearance, with a tigerish grace and animal attraction, which but few men could resist.
Rapacious greed
"She was a fluent talker, gifted with fine conversationalist powers, but she did not display any educational advantages of high order. She used good English with very little, if any, German accent." Apart from her greed for money, and the ruthless manner by which she achieved it, she had longings to be a great lecturer. She had an inflated reputation as a medium and gave talks in the nearby towns on spiritualism.
Professor Katie... the sensual serving girl at the Bender store satisfied her intellectual pretensions by lecturing on spiritualism, or setting herself as a doctor genius. But her patients never returned home.
Certainly she fascinated men--including her father's old partner, Brockman, who was very much in love with her and who thought that she was going to marry him. She encouraged this belief, but postponed their marriage until Easter Sunday 1873 when, so she said, the planets would be in the right conjunction for them.
Meanwhile, she milked him of money and jewellery and possibly persuaded him to be an accessory to the Bender murders--although this was never more than a suspicion. Certainly he was brutal enough. Later on his daughter died of the treatment she recieved from him, and Brockman was indicted for her death.
A more bizarre sexual relationship is the incestuous one she enjoyed with her brother John. According to one of the many lynching stories, Kate confessed that she and her brother had been living together as man and wife and that they both had gonorrhoea. If true, this would explain Brockman's fights on several occasions with John Bender over his sister--when he accused the younger man of being his "rival".
Clearly whatever the truth, Kate was an attraction when the Benders opened for business. As their store was on the outskirts of town they must had needed someone--or something--to pull the customers in. Otherwise why should travellers have shopped there when they had just started their journey, or had only two short miles to go to end it?
To stimulate business, Kate served meals while her mother cooked. The food was placed on a table close to the deviding curtain--so that when the traveller was sitting down the back of his head could be clearly seen from the other side.
As he was eating, one of the Bender men would come up behind the curtain.
Then when the victim's head was pressed against the curtain, he would strike at the base of the skull with a heavy stonebreaker's hammer, and crush in the skull.
As travellers were constantly coming to the house, it was necessary to get the body quickly out of sight--and it was hastly dropped into the pit.
According to legend, it was Katie Bender herself who leaped in after them and cut the victims' throats. Later, when it was dark, the bodies were buried in the orchard.
Stories of travellers who realized how near they came to being "planted" in the Bender orchard substantiated the known facts. One man, believing Katie's inflated claims as a healer, rode out to the Bender store with a friend to see if she could cure his neuralgia. After examining him, Katie said that she thought she could. As it was dinner time she invited them both to stay for a meal, and seated them close to the curtain. Both men had noticed the hard scrutiny they recieved from the Bender men, but dismissed it as nothing more than curiousity.
Melodramatic stories
When they sat down to eat the two male Benders disappeared. For some reason the two travellers could only put down "intuition", they got up from the table and took their meal over to the counter to eat. Until then, Katie Bender had been charming and affable to them. But now she began to abuse them and call them names. This added to the men's growing suspicions, and they hastily left the store. They saw some relief two wagons going by on the trail and hitched lifts. Later, they were ashamed of their frightened behaviour and thought that they must had exaggerated the whole incident.
More melodramatic stories flurished of Katie Bender stalking her victims and of her efforts to get behind them. According to these a gust of wind inevitably blew up her apron to show the hidden hand beneath it gripping a large knife.
In two years the Benders earned themselves $5000, plus money they got from the sale of the victims' waggons and horses and the pieces of jewellery, such as rings and watches, which they had accomplices to help them dispose of the goods--including such "innocents" as the young men who came courting Katie Bender. Another account stated that Brockman was their accomplice. The loot was allegedly disposed of--in part at least--through his store without arousing suspicion. Some goods were certainly disposed of by the Benders themselves, and late in April 1873 John Bender was noted to have sold a watch, some clothing, two mules, a shotgun, and some pistols.
Lynch mob
In spite of the posses and vigilante committees which scoured the country-side for the Benders--and the state and private awards that were offered for their capture--they were never officially caught. The waggon in which they had escaped was found abandoned and bullet ridden, as if they had been apprehended and put to death by a lynch mob. This seems to be the fate accepted by most people.
Despite this, stories persisted of the Benders--particularly of Kate, of how she ended her days as a white haired old lady, or a whore, or a society queen. According to another and contradictory account, a band of Gypsies saw the Benders lynched by a posse of armed men. Equally colourful is the version that after the family had been killed, their bodies were split open to stop them from swelling up and floating to the surface of the river into which they were thrown.
The exact truth was never established. Unlike other lynch mobs, the men who wreaked vengeance on the Benders dared not boast openly of what they had done. The several thousand dollars that the benders had made from their killings disappeared along with them.
$2000 reward
In 1884, in an attempt to end the conjecture, Dr. York's family offered $2000 for proof that the Benders were dead. But the reward was never claimed. So the legends continued. One had it that an ear of red-coloured corn found growing on the Benders' land was stained from the blood of the victims they buried there.
A more realistic reminder of the inhuman savegery of the bloody Benders can be seen today in the Bender Museum in Cherryvale. It is a wreath of woven, golden hair taken from the body of a little girl who--most probably--was befriended by Kate and then brutally murdered by her when her back was turned. The inglorious chronicle of this murderous family is commemorated on a Kansas State marker outside the present day Cherryvale.
Cherryvale Museum....A replica of the Bender Store
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