Kate Bender, two years younger than her brother, seemed cut from a different cloth. He had a claim just to the north of Pa Bender’s but never lived on it or built any structures on it. John Bender Jr., about 25, was somewhat more neighborly, but something about him, perhaps his inappropriate laughter, suggested he was simpleminded. Ma Bender, the heavyset woman said to be his wife, looked all of her 50-plus years and was as unfriendly as Pa.
John Bender Sr., known as “Pa,” was about 60 and by all accounts sullen and ill-natured. In 1870 the Benders were among the families that took advantage of the vacated area, building a cabin on their 160-acre claim along the Osage Mission Road (aka the Osage Trail or Trace) between Independence and Fort Scott. Once authorities had relocated the Osage Indians to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) after the Civil War, homesteaders descended on Kansas’ Labette County.
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Psychotic killers like John Wesley Hardin and Jim Miller roamed the post–Civil War West, but few of these warped individuals could hold a candle to the greed and dirty deeds of the family of serial killers that operated from their Kansas homestead. The family would become known as the Bloody Benders, and with good reason. The diggers would harvest the bodies of other unwary travelers who had fallen prey. The cold-blooded Benders, with the brutal efficiency of predatory animals, claimed many victims in the early 1870s in Osage Township, Labette County, Kan. York’s body was just the tip of the iceberg. York had mentioned his intention to go to the Benders’ inn, nearly 80 miles southwest of Fort Scott. A number of people living along the road told the pair they had seen the doctor. Using Fort Smith as a starting point, Ed and Alexander traced William’s movements along the Osage Mission Road. When the doctor didn’t show up, his brothers, Ed York and Kansas Sen.
That task completed, he had mounted his horse and ridden for home. York had left his home on Fawn Creek and traveled north of Fort Scott to identify the team. It seems the doctor had sold the Lonchers a wagon and team that soon turned up deserted, with no sign of or word from father or daughter. York there was an even earlier disappearance-that of a man named George Loncher and his daughter in the winter of 1872. The doctor’s disappearance two weeks earlier was what had drawn his brother and friends to the Bender property that crisp morning. He was looking into the lifeless face of Dr. That done and the dead man’s hair parted, York had his worst fears realized. The men severed the head in order to wash the face clean. A sinking feeling hit York, but neither he nor anyone else could make an immediate identification-dirt and dried blood obscured the face, and the body was too decomposed to be moved. There were gasps the killer had knocked the poor fellow unconscious and then cut his throat. One of the diggers rotated the corpse’s mutilated head slightly to the side, exposing a deep gash across the neck. The men could clearly see that someone had bashed in the skull. They continued digging, more carefully now, until a body lay exposed. Before long their tools made contact with something hard-not a rock or a root, but something that didn’t belong there. Some began to dig feverishly, their shovels and spades clanging against one another. “I see graves!” The other men quickly converged on the hollow. “Boys!” he yelled as his gaze settled on a rectangular depression in the earth among the immature fruit trees. With hand to forehead, Ed York shaded his eyes, scanning the Benders’ orchard. While some of these Kansans feared the worst, none was prepared for what they were about to discover. It was a harvest-an unusual harvest, not one of good spirit in which neighbors converge under the common weal to reap the bountiful rewards of a successful growing season. George Mortimer, harnessed to his harrow and horse, plowed furrows through the soft earth as others worked their spades and shovels.
In the spring of 1873 a community of southeastern Kansans descended on the Bender homestead with all the tools necessary for planting. The odd Kansas foursome ran an inn that proved deadly to travelers for years before suspicious neighbors did some digging in the family’s apple orchard and learned the gruesome facts 'The Bloody Benders': America's First Serial-Killer Family Close
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