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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. This is Into the Dark with Peyton Moreland, and I am your host. If you are new here, hello. We cover all things dark, spooky, murder, true crime, um,
tinfoil tales as we like to call them, murder mystery, unsolved, even all the way down to hauntings. So we do everything dark here and I'm so, so excited that you're here. If you are watching on YouTube, please give this video a thumbs up. If you been watching the last couple of videos, you know, we really need it. We really need this interaction on YouTube. Drop a comment, even if it's just like an emoji and then turn on notifications so you can be notified when we post. And if you are listening,
on audio hi and can leave a review that would be great if not you know I'm just happy that you guys are all here now let's jump into my 10 seconds before we get started with the episode
Okay, for my 10 seconds this week, I wanted to get a little more emo with you guys. I was journaling the other day and I wanted to talk about the feeling of being hopeless. Now, if you've ever felt hopeless in your life, you know. If you know, you know. You know what I'm talking about. If not, I...
hope genuinely that you never have to feel truly hopeless. Some of us feel hopeless every day. Some of us have felt hopeless in our life. But as I was journaling, like kind of going over this feeling of being hopeless, I had never really felt it until about a year ago. And then it truly is like the worst of the worst for me. I hate that feeling. And it's awful.
But then I was thinking about it and I realized that hope there, hopeless is not real. Hopeless does not exist. The feeling of being hopeless is an ideal that we make up in our head because there is always hope. There was always the next day. There was, there's always the next moment, the next second, there is always hope. So just as the sky is blue and the grass is green or even yellow, if you're me and Garrett,
Hope is real and hope exists. So if you need to know that today, just know there is always hope. We are all in this together. I love you guys so much. Now let's get into the episode. Trigger warning, this episode includes discussions of murder and incest, so please listen with care. All right, today we're going back to Southeast Kansas in the 1870s. And
At the time, the region was the home to a lot of indigenous people, but that was rapidly changing. The United States government was encouraging settlers to move to Kansas and they were selling land for very cheap. Any man who wanted to buy a parcel could, there were no questions asked.
Basically, they were pushing out the Native Americans and rapidly redeveloping it to serve the U.S.'s purposes. But for men who had limited funds and nowhere else to go, Kansas really did seem like a promised land.
And so due to our history, a bunch of formerly enslaved people actually settled there in the aftermath of the Civil War. And the region was also attractive to outlaws and people who were escaping their past for whatever reason. For almost no money at all, they could literally begin a new life even with a new identity. So as people are flooding to Kansas and to get across the state, almost all of these new settlers took the same road.
it was known as the Osage Mission Trail. It connected two Kansas communities, Independence and St. Paul, running roughly parallel to the route Highway 400 takes today. So it was a major traveling route, if you will, and the best way to get to the new territory, even if a lot of the route was still underdeveloped. Again, we're in the 1800s here. Travelers
faced illnesses, accidents, and attacks from highway robbers or indigenous people. But if you were desperate enough for a new life, the risk seemed worth it. So it didn't raise too many eyebrows in October of 1870 when two men arrived in Cherryvale, Kansas.
That was a very small, unincorporated settlement along the Osage Mission Trail. One of the men looked to be 60 years old or so, and he spoke with a German accent. The other was in his mid-20s, and they both introduced themselves as John Osage.
The older John also went by Pa Bender, which is how I'll be referring to him for clarity. They began to tell everyone that they were related, but never clarified how. Now, based on their ages, it was safe to say that Pa was John's father, but some people
got the impression that maybe they were just brothers with a large age gap. Needless to say, the Bender men bought a parcel of land close to the road. They built a house on it. They settled. They dug a well. They planted fields. They did everything they needed to to be able to live on it.
Their cabin had a single room, not counting the cellar. And not only did they live in it, they also ran a business out of it. It was a general store and inn. This is very much of the time they hung a thick canvas curtain across the middle of the space. It separated the living quarters from the store. And it also offered a small amount of privacy to the benders and their boarders.
I do mean a small amount of privacy though. The Benders slept right next to their guests. Everyone piled into the one and only bedroom. Sometime the following year, two women actually moved in to join the Benders. The oldest, Kate, was Pa's wife. And like him, she had a German accent. She went by Ma Bender. Her daughter was also named Kate. So yes, there were two men named John and two men named Kate.
which wasn't necessarily that strange. Maybe Pa and Ma named their son and daughter after themselves. This is assuming that Kate and John really were brother and sister. I'm not entirely clear on the details, but apparently Kate and John came across as overly flirtatious or romantic with each other. So these two women move in a little bit later and one become Ma and Pa and the other are like siblings, but they're also siblings.
flirtatious which again this is the 1800s so I don't know about the brother sister romance at this time but it's definitely weird nowadays so the people who met them assumed that they were sleeping together so people are like oh bro and sis are also a couple and
Either they were incestuous or maybe they were only pretending to be a brother and sister. Gossip suggested that maybe they were actually a married couple who were posing as Ma and Pa's children for some reason. Either way, the rumors about the benders are kind of spreading throughout the very small area. And it's just kind of mysterious. And no one really asked any follow-up questions. After all, Cherryvale was a place where people moved because they wanted to disappear.
The locals liked their anonymity, so they respected others too. And the weirdness of their relationships aside, the benders did seem pretty harmless. Ma and Pa kept to themselves. They were always scowling and seemed annoyed with the whole world. Most locals actually avoided them, and Ma and Pa seemed totally comfortable with that arrangement.
But Kate and John were more eccentric. Unlike their parents, they had American accents. John loved to talk nonstop. He also laughed at inappropriate or unexpected times. Occasionally, he could barely get out a sentence without erupting into giggles.
Because of this, some people thought he may have been developmentally disabled. Kate, on the other hand, was beautiful with long red hair and she flirted with everyone. She liked to play up her sensuality at least some of the time. On other occasions, though, she did seem distant, maybe shell-shocked. Nobody knew why she fluctuated between these extremes. And it was hard to predict how she'd behave in any given situation.
Now, besides all that, Kate also had a reputation for having some out-of-the-box ideas.
She said she believed in free love, and according to the rumors, she was sleeping with more than one man in town, and also maybe her brother. She also practiced spiritualism, meaning she was fascinated with seances, palm reading, and psychic healing, which is very dangerous territory at this time. Kate even told people that she could channel ghosts and cure people's illnesses and injuries using the power of her mind.
Now, because of this, Kate offered her supernatural services to the people who came by the inn and general store, which is where her and John and Ma and Pa live. She'd invite them to come in the evening after the store was closed, and then she'd connect with spirits in relative privacy.
Now it's worth mentioning that in the years after the Civil War, spiritualism was actually kind of a mainstream movement. Lots of people really believed that it was possible to summon ghosts from the afterlife or perform psychic feats. So Kate's business wouldn't have seemed off-putting or fringe to most visitors. Like we're definitely over the witches era, but again, there are definitely skeptics. They might not have thought much of it, maybe just that she was a little weird.
but beyond that again i want to reiterate that the sorts of people who are passing through this area passing through cherryville had a lot of reasons to worry about the future i'm not lying when i say this mission trail was full of dangers there were natural disasters storms floods wild animals again we have highway robbers fights between indigenous people
It's kind of safe to say that a lot of people who set out for independence or St. Paul then were never heard from again. So if Kate could offer some degree of comfort, a promise that she could glimpse into their future and warn them of upcoming hazards on their journey, it's no wonder plenty of people actually did pay her for her services. And if some of those people vanished without a trace afterward, that was part of the course on this trail.
In fact, no one even took it seriously when creepy stories started going around about Kate's psychic sessions. At one point, a few months after the Benders opened their business, a passer-through named Julia Hessler agreed to attend one of Kate's late-night seances. So her travel companions dropped her off at the Bender General Store close to Sunset.
Julia expected to see other customers there for the session, but when she walked in the front door, there was only one other person there, Kate Bender. But Kate told Julia not to worry that they were alone. That night's ritual would be more intimate, more personal. It might be more attractive to ghosts that way as well.
Now, I need to let you know that this general store had a strong unpleasant smell and it was full of flies. Now, Julia didn't want to seem rude, so she pretended not to notice the stench or the bugs. And it must have been pretty bad considering that I feel like maybe everything was a little stinky around this time.
Now, meanwhile, Kate told her how the seance would go. She had Julia sit at the dining table with her back to the canvas curtain, but Julia couldn't focus on ghosts or thoughts about life after death because the flies in this place were too distracting and the odor was only getting worse. Then something inspired Julia to look up at what was behind Kate.
she saw that the women weren't actually alone anymore. And it wasn't that they had been joined by ghosts, but the rest of Kate's family. So somewhere in the middle of this seance, Ma, Pa, and John come just silently walking into this very small room.
Pa was actually holding something in his hands. Julia couldn't make out what it was because the room was very dark. But when it reflected the candlelight, meaning it was shiny, it looked almost like Pa was holding a knife. Now this all obviously becomes too much for Julia. This is something out of a horror movie. So she gets up and announces she needed to use the outhouse. Then as soon as she got out the front door, she broke into a run.
As she fled the bender farm, she heard something that sounded like a gunshot behind her. Like the benders were literally trying to shoot her as she escaped. But luckily, Julia managed to make it. And when she got back to town, she told everyone what had happened. She's like, I went out to the benders. I was trying to do a seance. And then all of a sudden, the whole family was there and he was holding a knife. And it was really creepy and weird. I tried to leave and I think they tried to shoot me.
Now, most people in town dismissed her story like she was overreacting. Maybe she'd even imagined the gunshot. And without it, this was just the tale of a family who walked into their own home during a seance happening in their own small home. Like this is nothing that's that alarming. Similarly, nobody cared that much when a guy named Happy Jack Reed told a similarly unsettling story about his visit at the Bender's home.
Happy Jack spent the night at the Bender's Inn one night. He had some traveling companions who decided to take their chances at another hotel. Happy Jack told his friends to deliver a message to his family for him, specifying exactly where he was spending the night.
And the benders seemed annoyed with him, like they didn't want everyone to know where he'd be all evening. But Happy Jack didn't think much of it. Not until later that night when he awoke with a start. He'd been disturbed in his sleep by some strange sounds. It was a scream and heavy thuds. He opened his eyes only to see Kate standing at the foot of his bed.
Happy Jack got the sense that she'd react badly if she knew he'd woken up, so he kind of kept his eyes closed and pretended he was still asleep. By the next morning, he didn't know what to make of the whole encounter, even though he wasn't alone in being unsettled by the Benders. Other lodgers at the Benders' home reported hearing moans from the basement, but nobody ever thought to check it out for themselves to see what was down in the cellar.
So obviously, as all of this is happening, more people are coming out of their stay with the Benders, just feeling weird, coming with strange stories. So rumors spread through Cherryvale and no one actually followed up on all these reports. It was kind of just like, well, that family's a little weird. We don't know what's going on there. But then things become even more wild.
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It says that one day the whole family went for a hike with some travelers who'd stopped over in a covered wagon. During their walk, Ma said she was tired and actually turned around and headed back home and Pa accompanies her. So they split from the rest of the group. Now when Kate, John and their guests got back to the home much later, the visitors realized some of their valuables were missing, a checkbook and all their jewelry.
Now the travelers accused the benders of robbing them. When Ma and Pa went back, they must have used the opportunity to raid the unattended wagon that these travelers had come in on. But Kate and John denied the accusation. They said a group of rowing thieves must have helped themselves while everyone was out on this hike. So the visitors are like, well, if that's the case, let us search your home. And when they couldn't find their things, they just gave up.
That is, until the next day. One of the travelers came back to the general store to confront the benders once again. This time, he was all alone, without the rest of his travel group. But the benders were all together. Plus, they were also tending to some different customers in the store. So when the visitor accused the family again of theft, the benders just stared back at him in silence. And as things were even starting to get heated, the customers that were there actually reached for their holstered guns, which...
It is a little surprising the Benders didn't exactly have a good reputation, but even with the spiritualism, the weird noises in the cellar, the alleged incest, lots of people still kind of saw them as innocent, maybe just ignorant country folk. The consensus was that they were just too simple to rob anyone. So it's just this weird thing that goes on. So in the meanwhile, bodies were turning up along the Osage Mission Trail. Three were found in 1872. They were all men who'd been traveling alone.
It was obvious they died in a robbery, their valuables were gone, their skulls had been crushed, and their throats were slit. Now, given how common crime was on the trail, this wasn't seen as a very big deal. Three murders in one year, that's really nothing to worry about. But there were even more robbery homicides in 1873, seven to be exact, which
which was enough to make the locals start to get a little nervous about what was happening around them. There were too many dead bodies to shrug off anymore. And even more people were just disappearing without a trace. This included a man named Dr. William York. He was traveling for two reasons. The first was that he wanted a fresh start. He was a Civil War veteran who still was grappling with the psychological toll of battle. He thought it would help if he moved somewhere new.
But also Dr. York had recently received a letter from an Iowa family. Their relative, George Longcore, had gone missing on the Osage Mission Trail. He was traveling with his baby girl who'd also disappeared. So William figured if he was going to go that same way, he might as well do a little bit of investigating, like travel through the area, see if he can maybe find his distant relative.
see if he could figure out what became of George and his daughter. So instead, in March of 1873, William also goes missing on this trail, becoming yet another missing person. So now with two people missing from this family, there's two other brothers, Alexander and Ed. Now Ed was pretty young, young enough that he never had a chance to serve in the Civil War, so he was eager to prove himself now that he was 21. He was also very close with his now wife,
missing brother William and wanted to learn what had happened to him. Alexander the other brother was a wealthy politician, an accomplished lawyer and a former union colonel.
He had the money and the influence to invest in solving his brother's disappearance. So once it was clear that William was missing, brothers Alexander and Ed were like an investigative dream team. They brought both passion and resources to this investigation. So they begin retracing William's steps. And Alexander recruited a posse of 15 armed companions to help him investigate. This is all very just like,
Old school cowboy days. He got all the way to Cherryville before the trail went cold. William had last been seen around there on March 10th. So Alexander and Ed figured this must be where William got lost or died or whatever had happened to him. They
They started questioning the locals to get more information. Now, neither brother had any specific theories at this point. They were just trying to get a handle on the situation. And because the area is so small, at one point, Alexander drops by the Bender's home slash general store slash inn. He asked about his brother and the Bender said they didn't know anything about William.
John actually offered to join Alexander's posse. He seemed really enthusiastic about finding this missing doctor, but Alexander was unimpressed. He thought the benders seemed like backwater rubes. He couldn't imagine they had any useful information or skills to offer. Before Alexander could leave, Kate walked up to him and said she wanted to help too. She told him about her psychic services and said she might be able to connect with William's spirit if he has passed.
She said, "I'll find your brother, even if he is in hell." Kate explained that she just had one rule. She'd have to prepare for the seance so she couldn't connect with William right then and there.
Alexander would have to come back later that night and he should come alone, not with his 15-man posse or with his brother. Alexander declined the offer. He didn't believe in the supernatural and figured Kate was just a con artist, faking her seances to scam her gullible neighbors. He honestly thought there were better, more productive ways to solve the case.
But the people of Cherryvale weren't happy with all the questions he was asking. I mean, you have to keep in mind, this place has kind of not got a very good reputation. And then this posse of 15 people who are a lot more wealthy, are a lot more established, come in and start demanding answers. And also remember, a lot of people who had settled here were running away from their past. So now that this big posse is coming in,
This is a lot to risk if the police or the government decide to get involved because of all the murders and disappearances. They needed to resort to frontier justice. So in April 1873, not long after Alexander and Ed came to town, numerous Cherryvale residents got together to talk about the problem happening in the area.
Alexander was at the meeting too, helping guide the conversation. They all decided they had to solve the mystery of recent murders and disappearances, including that of Dr. William York. If they found some real killers, out-of-towners wouldn't keep asking uncomfortable questions. They concluded that the best place to start was by searching every property in town one by one, see if they could find any clues.
Pa and John were actually at this meeting, the benders, like most of the local men. Weirdly, they seemed almost bored, like they couldn't care less about the murder investigation.
But a few weeks later, on May 5th, a Cherryvale resident passed the Bender farm while he was tending to his own cows. Now, he wasn't there to search the property for anything to do with the murders. I'm not sure if that's because the locals hadn't gotten around to the Benders yet or if they'd just kind of given up on the plan at this point. But the cattle driver noticed that some of the Benders' animals looked like they hadn't been fed in a while.
One calf was tied up in the barn. He had died of severe dehydration. And when the man knocked on the front door, he found it locked. Nobody answered. It was almost as if the Bender family had abandoned their property and their animals.
Now, it's hard to ignore the timing. The Benders skipped town right after the people of Cherryvale began talking about the murders taking them seriously. And this is pretty soon after Alexander and Ed York began asking all those pointed questions.
But for whatever reason, nobody responded to this disappearance with any urgency. The man with the cattle reported what he'd seen. Then a few days passed before a town official followed up on his testimony. That official broke down the door to get inside the Bender's home. And he confirmed that the Benders were indeed long gone. But
But when he strode through their house, he found a knife and three hammers. And when he went into the Bender's cellar, he recognized the horrible scent coming from there. It stank of decomposing bodies. And he still waited to act on what he'd found. Another day passed before everyone in the area got a group of 50 men together to search the Bender home. This included Dr. York's youngest brother, F.,
He found a pair of glasses there that he recognized as Williams, his brother. So he knew his brother had been there at some point.
The search party also found the signs of apparent occult rituals. According to Lady Killers by Tori Telfer, some reports said that symbols had been scratched into the ground representing each zodiac constellation and bits and pieces of burned up voodoo dolls were actually reportedly found in the fireplace of the family home.
At this point, a bunch of the searchers decide to dig up the family cellar. They know that this putrid, rotting corpse smell was coming from here, but they don't find anything in it. So they decide to keep looking and begin digging in the yard. And that's when they found the bodies. They were scattered across the Bender property in the orchard or tossed down a well. All had their skulls crushed.
Some were badly decomposed beyond recognition, but others were fresher, including the corpse of missing Dr. William York, who Ed, his own brother, identified. So in this 50-person search party, they have a local doctor, and he confirmed the holes in the victim's broken skulls matched the hammers they'd found in the Bender cabin.
Now, these men weren't trained forensic investigators, and some of the corpses were together, sharing a grave. This made it tricky to say how many people were buried outside the Bender house. It's estimated that they had anywhere between 8 and 11 victims on their property. This included a baby girl who was only a year old. Her name was Mary Ann Longcore. If you remember, she met her fate after her father, George, was unlucky enough to book them both for the night at the Bender Inn.
Now, ironically, George was the same man whose family in Iowa initially wrote to Dr. York.
the people who inspired him to make the same trip to see if he could find George. I mean, if the benders hadn't even killed George and Marianne, Dr. York might not have even ever come this way. And maybe the serial killer family might not have ever been discovered. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me.
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Let's get back into the episode. We can guess at how the Bender family murders worked thanks to testimony from the survivors. People like Happy Jack Reed and Julia Hessler, who we talked about earlier, who fled the house before they became the next victim. Other people said they visited the Benders for one reason or another for dinner or to buy supplies or to spend the night.
They sat at the kitchen table with their backs to the curtain, and they always felt uncomfortable with the way Pa strode back and forth from the other side. His behavior was just weird and creepy, so they made their excuses and left. They were just some of the lucky ones.
The assumption is that Pa was prowling by the canvas because he was waiting for his chance to strike. If anyone let their guard down and leaned back just a little too far, he'd smash the hammer down, crushing their skull. Then all the benders would rob their house guests. It's estimated that they made away with hundreds of dollars each time they committed a murder, sometimes thousands of dollars.
And that's not counting the horses, wagons, and supplies that they kept from these people. It's been suggested that they sold those goods to whatever neighbors were willing to keep their mouths shut and not ask questions about where the benders were getting all of this.
Some of their victims died from the hammer blow, but others were just badly injured or stunned. The benders didn't care. After they got all the victims' money, they tossed the person into the cellar. If they didn't die down there on their own, a member of the family would head down and slit their throat later. Then they'd bury the body in their yard. It's unclear if they also dumped some of their victims along the mission trail, or if those 10 bodies had anything to do with the benders at all.
Even if they only killed the people who stayed at their inn, that was still a lot of victims. And now, finally, Alexander and Ed knew what had happened to their brother. So did lots of other people whose loved ones had gone missing. But the dead still hadn't received justice. The Bender family had skipped town.
After that meeting where everyone agreed to search each farm, the benders caught the last train leaving Cherryville. And the ticket agent who helped them escape even thought that the benders were extra memorable. They were clearly in an enormous rush. They took their train to its last stop, had breakfast together, and then all split up. Eyewitnesses saw Ma and Pa boarding another train to Missouri and Kate and John got on one headed to Texas.
We know they all met up later again in Texas and from there headed into the lawless old West. They weren't exactly covering their tracks, but the land they fled to was even wilder than Kansas. No one was willing to go there to go after them. Even a $2,000 reward wasn't tempting enough.
Adjusted for inflation, this was about $51,000 that went unclaimed. Officials from the state of Kansas even wrote a letter to the state of Texas after discovering this serial killing family. They asked the Lone Star State to arrest the benders and send them back home. When Texas's law enforcement leaders wrote back, it was to refuse. They said basically that they had bigger fish to fry in the area. The benders weren't a priority.
And when you get right down to it, nobody even knew for sure who the benders were at this point. Remember, there had already been so much uncertainty around their identities. Were John and Kate really brother and sister? Were they a couple? They weren't even using their real names at this point. It could have been just about anyone.
Weirdly enough, for about 18 months, it was fairly easy to keep tabs on the benders. Then, all the rumors and reports about them dried up. No one knew if that meant they'd skip town again, or if they'd all been killed. But then, 16 years later, the police arrested two women in Michigan. They claimed their names were Almira Monroe and Sarah Davis.
But rumors said they were actually Kate and Ma Bender using false identities.
they were extradited back to Kansas and forced to go to a preliminary hearing for the Bender family murders. All the while, the two women insisted they weren't the Benders. Problem was, these were the days before photography was widespread. Nobody had ever snapped a picture of Kate or Ma, so no one actually knew what they really looked like except the people who'd actually met them. And by this point, everyone's memory was over a decade old, and the Benders had aged too.
The courts called 16 witnesses to try and identify the women. Their testimony was an even split. Seven thought they were definitely Ma and Kate, seven thought they definitely weren't, and two just weren't sure. Eventually, Almera and Sarah were able to prove their innocence. Almera, the older woman, was in prison at the time of the murders and Sarah had been pregnant. They weren't the benders and frankly, nobody knows what happened to the family.
There were a bunch of alleged sightings over the years, but nothing that could be verified. And the Bender family was never found.
And I have to mention that if you go to this area today, there's a plaque talking about the murders. The property is still there. It's no wonder that their legend is so popular even to this day. It was a city founded by people who were trying to start fresh, to get away from their own pasts, and nobody escaped quite like the Benders, who even managed to disappear from their own story. It's pretty rare that we have a serial killing family, especially...
one so well documented back then but that was the story of the Bender family thank you guys so much for listening and next week we have something a little bit different than murder coming your way so stay tuned as we dive further into the dark together
