Lord Larehip

The human race has a morbid fascination with hereditary degeneration that runs through generations of a family especially entire clans. A clan comprises many families who all claim to have descended from a common ancestor be it man or woman. There are many stories and movies concerning such an ancestor being a witch or a devil-worshiper or a cannibal and there is a whole branch of the clan in the backwoods somewhere that still carries this tradition on. In the rural areas of America, where incest is often disturbingly common, this fascination involves mentally and physically deformed family members that are supposed to be human but are so hopelessly inbred that they are now monsters. Such movies as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The People Under the Stairs, Mother’s Day, The Hills Have Eyes and countless TV horror programs deal with degenerate families who see other humans as prey or playthings to be used, abused—sometimes sexually—and then killed and dismembered. Sometimes their victims are eaten and other times their body parts are used for experiments, incantations or simply décor. The plots are thickened when the victims are taken in by a handsome young man or beautiful young woman of great charm whom the victims see as someone they can trust. These beautiful ones, of course, turn out to be members of the clan who came out looking as extraordinarily attractive as their family members are deformed and hideous. But inside, they are every bit as twisted and contemptuous if not more so towards anyone outside the clan and use their charms strictly to procure more victims.

But where do these stories come from? Do they have basis in fact? And why do they fascinate and yet repel us so? While we might think of a family as people who descend from the same bio-genetic source, I can think of myriad examples where such individuals hated and even killed another. People who do not kill each other are people who share the same beliefs, mores and mindset. Two like-minded strangers bond closer than siblings who are of an opposed mindset. A family then is a group of people united by a shared mindset. They even refer to theselves in familial terms such as Manson’s Family and the notoriously racist killers calling themselves Bruder Schweigen or Silent Brotherhood. Mindset defines the family and it does not matter what that mindset is.

I remember once reading a book about the secrets of Britain's royal family when I came across "the Monster." In England, as with royal families the world over, there was a lot of incest. The nobles believed their blood was superior to that of commoners and so weddings were arranged so as to keep the blood "pure" and this often resulted in incest and hence some kings were born crazy or deformed or both. In one case, a royal child was born in England that was so hideous that it was hidden from all public knowledge and kept in the Tower of London. It was simply called "the Monster." Supposedly, it was huge and powerful, covered with hair, had no neck but a huge mouth and beady, shiny brown eyes with no whites in them. It was no more intelligent than an infant and had to be kept chained in place. Like any baby, it could not speak but cried and bellowed but its shrieks were as loud and feral sounding as an animal's. It was fed only gruel with a huge wooden spoon and it ate prodigious amounts of it. When a young prince or duke or earl came of age, he was taken to the Tower to the room of the Monster where his familial relationship to it was explained to him as he gazed upon it. Then a huge bowl of gruel was brought in, he was handed the shovel-like spoon and instructed to feed it, wipe its mouth while it spit up and belched or vomited. Then after it evacuated into its enormous diaper, he had to remove it, clean the Monster and apply a new diaper. The experience was said to be so horrendous that one young earl--a jolly boy--was so traumatized by his encounter that he never smiled again. This was, of course, an unsubstantiated tale.

Shortly after the Civil War, the Osage tribe of Kansas were removed from their ancestral lands to open them for white settlement. Perhaps what followed was something of a payback for this perfidy. Sometime around late 1870, a small family of German immigrants claimed a 160-acre plot of this newly “liberated” land and built a cabin there in Labette County in Osage Township (now Cherryvale). The Bender family consisted of four people: John Bender, his wife Marli, their son John Jr. and their daughter Kate. They turned the cabin into an inn and general store they called the Wayside which sat along the Osage Trail. The Benders partitioned the cabin with a canvas curtain to mark off their private quarters. The front area was dining room for boarders. There many a weary traveler would seek lodgings for the night.


The Wayside a.k.a. the Bender Inn

Kate fancied herself a psychic and healer who claimed she could communicate with the dead. This coupled with her extraordinary good looks with a slight German accent caused men to become enamored with her and she used this to her advantage. She was described as having the grace of a tigress and an irresistible smile. She billed herself as “Prof. Miss Katie Bender” and held séances and healings in nearby towns.


Katy Bender (?)

John and Marli were more hermit-like rarely leaving their property and talking little with outsiders. Both were rather ugly and spoke with guttural accents so heavy that people had difficulty understanding them. Sixty-year-old John stood a gaunt six-feet tall and the hard-faced 55-year-old Marli was reputed to be both an herbalist witch and a medium and no one doubted her. She was so sinister-looking and unfriendly that the locals referred to her as “she-devil.” The townspeople generally avoided both her and “Old Beetle-Browed John” as her coarse-faced husband was called. Junior (25) and Kate (23) were more normal-looking, spoke better English and possessed better social skills although Junior had a tendency to laugh quite often at strange and inappropriate times causing people to believe him dull-witted, which he may have been for all I know.


Ma Bender


Ol' Beetle-Browed John


John, Jr.

Whenever a traveler stopped at the Wayside, he was often enticed to do so by Kate who stood out front and smiled at him flirtatiously. Kate would then lead him inside and use her allure to keep him occupied while the others went through the man’s saddlebags and any other belongings he may have been carrying. If he was ascertained to be “wealthy” (meaning if he had anything on him at all worth taking), he was seated at a table in the inn. His back was to the canvas curtain that divided the room in two. Often, he was up against the curtain so that his outline could be seen through it on the other side. Kate would cook up a meal while making conversation. According to witnesses, she would talk about bizarre subjects—anything from occultism to free love to justifiable homicide. On the other side of the curtain, Beetle-Brow John or Junior would be waiting holding a sledgehammer. Being able to clearly see the victim’s outline, one of them would heft the hammer and deal the unsuspecting wayfarer a quick, savage deathblow to the top of his head usually busting the skull open. The victim would be quickly dragged back behind the curtain and stripped by all four Benders. Anything of value found—money, jewelry—was kept. Expensive clothing was also kept. Behind the curtain was a trapdoor over a pit which one of the Benders would open. The victim would then be dumped down into the pit. Later, Kate would enter the pit and slit the victim’s throat ear-to-ear even though he was already dead or very nearly so (there is some difference of opinion whether Kate slit their throats before they were dumped or after or maybe sometimes one
or the other). Then the body would be removed from the pit at night and buried in what is variously described as the family’s orchard or garden. Kate often held séances, healings and psychic consultations at the Wayside and would sit a wealthy patron against the curtain. Some of them were never seen again.

Not all of them died, one man who showed up for a séance could not be induced to stay seated against the canvas. Something about the spot unnerved him that he found sitting there intolerable. Even when Kate angrily demanded that he stay put, he could not induce himself to sit there for very long and fancied that he heard whispers from beyond the grave coming from behind the canvas at which point he jumped up and ran out of the Wayside. Another man, William Pickering, refused to sit against the canvas because he was thoroughly disgusted by the stains on it which so angered Kate that she drew a knife (no doubt the same one she used to slit her victims’ throats) and threatened him. Pickering fled the Wayside. In another instance, an itinerant Catholic priest was in the Wayside and caught a glimpse of the either John or Junior hiding a large hammer and became frightened. He got up and said he needed to check on his horse about something, walked quickly out of the inn and promptly jumped on his horse and galloped off as fast as he could go.


A woodcut depicting how the Benders committed their crimes at the Wayside.

The undoing of the Benders came when Dr. William York visited the Wayside on May 4, 1873 to see Kate. He had spent some time there during his journey out West and had told his brother that he planned to stop off there again. That was the last time anyone saw or heard from Dr. York and York’s brother—Colonel A. M. York at Fort Scott—knew exactly where to check. Colonel York came to the Wayside to inquire of his brother’s whereabouts. The Benders claimed they had not seen the good doctor and suggested that Indians had probably got a hold of him. This seemed reasonable to Colonel York but when word got around to the townspeople, the Bender explanation did not seem reasonable at all. There was something very weird about that family. Too many people had disappeared and often the last place they were known to have been was the Wayside.

Lord Larehip

The townspeople held a meeting (which John and Junior reportedly attended). The plan was that all the farms and businesses in the area would be thoroughly searched and particular attention would be paid to the Bender property. The Benders realized the game was over and split town. Bad weather postponed the search party giving the Benders several days head start. By the time, a search party got to the Bender property, the family was long gone and the place deserted. Areas in the orchard appeared to have excavated and looked splotchy and so the party began digging. The Kansas City Times describes what they discovered:

“[They] groped over these splotches and held up a handful to the light. The ooze smeared itself over their palms and dribbled through their fingers. It was blood-thick, fetid, clammy, sticking blood—that they had found groping there in the void.”

To their horror, they disinterred 11 bodies including Dr. York and a woman as well as that of a young girl. Unlike the others, her skull was not bashed in nor was her throat slit. She had been savaged but not enough to kill her which leads us to the unsavory conclusion that the Benders had sealed the girl’s fate by tossing her beaten body next to the mutilated corpse of her father, George Loncher (or Lochner), and simply buried her alive. The Kansas City Times described the state of her corpse: “The little girl was probably eight years of age. And had long, sunny hair, and some traces of beauty on a countenance that was not yet entirely disfigured by decay. One arm was broken. The breastbone had been driven in. The right knee had been wrenched from its socket and the leg doubled up under the body. Nothing like this sickening series of crimes had ever been recorded in the whole history of the country.” Soon the whole nation was engrossed and repulsed by the crimes of the “Bloody Benders.”


The Bender property being searched and so begins the legend of the Bloody Benders from a sketch in Harper’s Weekly. This burial ground became known as “Hell’s Half-Acre.”


Actual photograph of graves on Hell’s Half-Acre. The photographer blackened the graves with ink to make them more apparent. The Wayside is visible on the far left. Many today insist this area is haunted by the ghosts of the victims as well as by Kate.

Inside the cabin, they discovered the hammers and the trap-door. When they opened it, the stench that arose from the pit was indescribably foul. Nothing from a fictional horror movie could have been more wild or horrific. Especially when we think of Kate descending into the pit to slit the throat of a victim since the stench did not seem to bother her at all demonstrating a shocking dissociation from normal human reactions.

In the search to track down America’s first known serial killers, the background of the Bender family was investigated. They were really not a family at all. John Bender’s real name was John Flickinger and was from either Germany or Holland. John Jr. was really John Gebhardt. Ma Bender’s real name was Almira Meik and was born in the Adirondacks. Only Ma and Kate were related being mother and daughter. Ma married as a teen to George Griffith with whom she had 12 children, Kate being the fifth. George allegedly died from a hammer blow to the head. Ma Bender married several more times but apparently murdered every husband and even three of her own children to keep them from talking. Kate’s name was actually Eliza Griffith and apparently married at a point and called herself Sara Eliza Davis. What happened to her husband is not known but to suppose she murdered him just as Ma murdered all her husbands is certainly not improbable. Again, the Benders demonstrate that the closest families are those individuals who share a mindset not a gene set.


The Bender Museum is an exact replica of the Wayside as it appeared to travelers and Kate’s clients. The original cabin was thoroughly dismantled by souvenir hunters.


Three of the actual hammers used to dispatch their victims were donated to the museum.

But what happened to the Benders? That’s the most disquieting aspect of the whole story. No one knows what happened to the Benders. They were never brought to justice. They had slipped out of town under cover of darkness. The common belief was that Ma and Pa Bender went to St. Louis while Junior and Kate went to live with some outlaw colony somewhere near the Mexican border along Texas or New Mexico. Sometime in 1889, two women in Detroit (one source says Illinois) were accused of being Ma and Kate Bender and were arrested and extradited to Kansas. They were kept incarcerated while authorities investigated them. They were eventually released due to lack of evidence. I know nothing else about these ladies. We can only surmise that they must have told people they were the Bender women. This, of course, does not mean that they were as they might have been trying to seek publicity. People have made the craziest false confessions over the centuries and so something is required more than their bare word. I have no idea what became of them. We can suppose they returned to Detroit but whether they remained there is unknown. When and where they died as well as their true identities remain mysteries. Whatever the case, the Bender men dropped out of sight entirely and were never seen nor heard from again. Did they return to Germany or go live quietly somewhere inside or the United States? One story has it that John Bender committed suicide in 1884 near Lake Michigan. Another story has it that he was murdered by the Bender women for swindling them. If there is any truth to these stories, then it would appear that the Benders settled in Michigan.


Marker erected near US 169.


To this very day, the mounds in the distance near Cherryvale are called the Bender Mounds.

The Benders were America’s first murderous family--America's first serial killers--but certainly not the first in the world. There is the story of Christie-Cleek from 14th century Scotland. There was a famine in the 1340s when a butcher named Andrew Christie joined a scavenging party at the foothills of the Grampians. One of the men died and Christie butchered the body and served it to the rest of the starving party who developed a taste for human flesh. The party, led by Christie, became a murderous band of cannibals waylaying travelers on horseback in the Grampians. Christie would use a long pole with a crook at the end—known as a “cleke”—to pull travelers from their horses then traveler and horse were eaten. About 30 such unfortunates met their fate in the Grampians. An armed contingent from Perth was sent to the Grampians and they killed off the gang except that Christie escaped and was rumored to have reentered the respectable life and lived out the rest of his days under another name. The story bears some resemblance to the story of the Anatolian butcher that killed three boys and sold their flesh as pork during a famine. St. Nicholas then brought the boys back to life.



Three centuries later, Alexander “Sawney” Bean made his appearance in Scottish lore. He had no taste for honest work, married a nasty woman and together they lived in Bannane Cave for 25 years and raised a family there. Eventually, through incest, the family swelled to 48 individuals who only left the cave at night to attack and kill isolated wayfarers. The bodies were brought back, dismembered, pickled and eaten. Sometimes innards would be found washed up on the beaches by locals. The disappearances grew alarming but no one knew of the degenerate family of cannibals in Bannane Cave. In fact, no one believed that human beings could inhabit such a dwelling which flooded at high tide. Innocent persons were often accused and executed for killings and disappearances but that did stop the crime spree. But when the murderers attacked a couple traveling home, another group of travelers came upon the scene and the Beans fled. Now James VI of Scotland (later to be crowned James I of England) assembled a 400-man posse and the Beans were tracked down to Bannane Cave which they found littered with hundreds of bones teeth. The Beans where were captured alive. The men were drawn and quartered in front of the women and children who were then burned alive. One legend has it that a daughter had left he clan and lived in the town where she planted a “hairy tree” but when the Beans were captured, her identity somehow leaked out and the townspeople lynched her from a bough of the hairy tree.



But then the Benders weren’t cannibals…or were they? We don’t have their confessions or accounts to pore over so we don’t know what went on at the Wayside when the Benders were by themselves. While robbery seemed to be the motive, the truth is, the Benders didn’t get much. About $4600 in cash and jewelry, a few horses and saddles and a wagon. Many of the people they killed owned very little. They seemed to have killed them for the sheer pleasure of killing. Moreover, there were others missing in that general area who did not turn up in Hell’s Half-Acre but are believed to have been waylaid by the Benders. These were itinerant bums for the most part from which the Benders could expect nothing. All told, the Benders killed at least 20 people but probably more and maybe even a lot more. So what happened to them? We have to wonder if one of the weird subjects Kate like to discuss with lodgers and clients at the Wayside was cannibalism and its moral ramifications. What kind of food did she fix? Probably stews mostly. And what kind of meat might gone into the stews that they served to their guests?

While these stories are legend and likely not true and probably influenced one another, both probably spring from a a single source which is true but now forgotten. While the stories sound too wild, when we get bonafied reports of murderous families, the details also sound too wild to be true but they are true nonetheless. The Bender story sounds like a legend—murderous family, insatiable for blood, flee and are never seen again—and yet it definitely happened. Similarly, more modern stories such as Charles Ng and Leonard Lake who killed mainly women after turning them into sex slaves but also killed their husbands and their children and even their infants without the slightest hesitation or remorse. Their compound was full of bones and tissue buried in the dirt. Then, of course, there is Jeffery Dahmer who killed and ate men and boys in his apartment while nobody did anything until it all became too much to ignore. The real stories do not sound much different from the legends and so we can surmise the legends have a basis in fact and that murderous and cannibalistic families have existed amongst us for a very long time and will continue to exist amongst us for as long as the human race continues.

Mr. Charlie

Are you a historian/archivist, Larehip, or is it just a hobby? Your threads are superb and incredibly informative. You remind me of BBC Four.

Scarlett O'Hara

I thought this thread was going to be about people mixing their blood with others to be "blood brothers".

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