This is a group entry, and the reason is the record rather than convenience. Four people were named: John Bender, his wife, given variously as Elvira, Almira, Kate Sr. and Anna Marie; a younger man called John Bender Jr.; and Kate Bender. Not one of them was ever charged, tried or found. No court ever separated what each of them did, and no source available can do it either. Every other multiple-offender case in this archive is carried as individual entries because there are individual verdicts to record. Here there are none.
They were not certainly a family. Neighbours told newspapers at the time that John Jr. and Kate were husband and wife rather than brother and sister, possibly by common-law marriage, and one account gives the younger man's name as John Gebhardt. The surname that the case is known by may not have belonged to any of them.
They kept a one-room cabin on the Osage Trail in Labette County, about seven miles north-east of Cherryvale, running it as an inn and a small store. Kate presented herself as a spiritualist and a healer and drew visitors on that basis.
The method was fixed to the room. A canvas curtain divided the cabin, and guests were seated at the table with their backs to it. They were struck from behind it with a hammer, their throats were cut, and they were dropped through a trap door into the cellar. The bodies were robbed and buried on the property.
Documented killings run from May 1871 to December 1872, though sources extend the span to 1873. In the winter of 1872 George Newton Longcor left Independence with his infant daughter Mary Ann to resettle in Iowa; neither was seen again.
Disappearances along the trail became common enough by 1873 that travellers began to avoid it. What is easy to lose in the telling is what that did to other people. The area already had a reputation for horse thieves, and vigilance committees seized men on suspicion and had to release them again; many innocent men were run out of the county before anyone looked at the inn.
It ended with a doctor. William York vanished in March 1873 while making his own enquiries into the earlier disappearances. He had visited the Bender place. His family was prominent and his brother, Colonel A. M. York, pressed the search. On March 23 about seventy residents of Osage Township met at the Harmony Grove schoolhouse and formed a committee.
By the time the searchers reached the cabin the four had gone. In April and May 1873 bodies were exhumed from the property. Reporting of the number is not uniform: the Kansas Historical Society's marker says at least eleven travellers were murdered between 1871 and 1873, other accounts give eight bodies on the land with three more nearby attributed to them, and the newspapers of the day ran figures above twenty. Eleven is the figure the state record uses and it is the one carried here.
The inn itself was pulled apart by people wanting a souvenir, which destroyed whatever else it might have held.
What became of them has never been settled. The official position is that they escaped. Against that sit deathbed accounts from men who said a vigilance committee took them and killed them, and a theory that they surfaced later under the name Kelly. None of it has been established, and the case is carried here as unresolved.