Dr. William Henry York was found on the evening the searchers began probing the orchard, buried face down with his feet barely below the surface. The men had come to the abandoned inn on the Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas, about seven miles northeast of Cherryvale, in the spring of 1873, after a cattle drover named Billy Tole noticed that nobody was feeding the stock. Beneath a bed they had found a trap door nailed shut, and under it a pit stinking of blood. They lifted the cabin off its footings and dug beneath it, and found nothing. Then they pushed metal rods into the soft ground of the garden and orchard, marked nine more places where the earth had been turned, and went back at first light. Eight more bodies came out of seven of those graves, and another was found in the well, along with parts of other people.
The four who had lived there were gone. They were known as the Benders: John Bender, about sixty, who spoke little English; a woman of about fifty-five, named in different sources as Elvira, Almira and Kate; John Bender Jr., about twenty-five; and Kate Bender, about twenty-three. None of those relationships has ever been documented. Neighbors told reporters that John Jr. and Kate were husband and wife rather than brother and sister, and a German prayer book left in the house carried the names Johannah Bender and John Gebhardt. According to contemporary newspapers the older woman had been born Almira Hill and married a man named Simon Mark. The surname the case is known by may not have belonged to any of them.
They had come in 1870 and 1871 with a small group of spiritualist families, registered a 160-acre claim beside the trail, the only open road west, and divided a one-room cabin with a canvas wagon cover. The front served as a store, a kitchen and a place where travelers could eat or stay the night. Kate was the draw. She advertised herself as a healer and a medium, held séances and lectured on spiritualism, and with her brother attended Sunday school at nearby Harmony Grove.
The dead were travelers. William Baldwin Jones was found in Drum Creek in May 1871 with his skull crushed and his throat cut, and two more men were found on the prairie in the same condition in February 1872. Among those identified from the Bender graves were Ben Brown of Howard County, Kansas, who had been carrying $2,600; Henry McKenzie, moving to Independence from Hamilton County, Indiana; W. F. McCrotty, a veteran of Company D of the 123rd Illinois Infantry; and Johnny Boyle, also of Howard County, whose body was in the well. John Greary, a man known as Red Smith, and a woman named Abigail Roberts were buried in the orchard too. Most were robbed of horses, saddles or cash, but several carried almost nothing.
George Newton Longcor was a Civil War veteran from Independence whose infant son, Robert, had died of pneumonia in May 1871 and whose wife, Mary Jane, twenty-one, had died some months later after giving birth to their daughter. In the winter of 1872 he set out with the baby, Mary Ann, to go back to his parents in Lee County, Iowa, driving a team he had bought from his neighbor, Dr. York. He and the child were buried together in the orchard. Contemporary papers disagreed on whether Mary Ann was eighteen months old or eight. She was fully dressed, down to her mittens and hood, and had no injury that could have killed her, which led to the belief that she was buried alive; that was never proved.
The method was reconstructed from the room and from people who got away. A guest was given the seat of honor at the table, with his back to the canvas and, it was believed, over the trap door. Someone behind the canvas struck him on the right side of the head with a hammer, his throat was cut, and the body was dropped into the pit, stripped and later buried. Searchers recovered a shoe hammer, a claw hammer and a sledgehammer that appeared to match marks on some of the skulls. William Pickering said Kate threatened him with a knife when he refused to sit near the stained cloth. A Mrs. Fitts said she sensed movement behind it and fled. A priest, Father Paul Ponziglione, said he saw one of the Bender men hiding a hammer, though he only told the story after the killings were known.
For two years the disappearances were blamed on other people. The district had a name for horse thieves, vigilance committees seized men on suspicion, and many innocent men were driven out of the county. What changed it was Dr. York. He had gone looking for Longcor that spring, traced the abandoned wagon and team to Fort Scott, and started home on March 9, 1873. He did not arrive. His brothers were Ed York of Fort Scott and Colonel Alexander M. York, a lawyer and state senator from Independence, and the colonel led some fifty men along the trail questioning every household. On March 28 he stopped at the Bender inn. The Benders said the doctor had stayed with them and might have run into trouble with Native Americans, and York stayed for dinner. He came back on April 3 with armed men after hearing that a woman had fled the inn when the older Mrs. Bender threatened her with knives. Some of the men wanted to hang the Benders on the spot; York insisted on evidence.
The township then met at the Harmony Grove schoolhouse, some seventy-five people, possibly including both Bender men, and agreed to get a warrant to search every homestead between Big Hill Creek and Drum Creek. Nobody watched the inn. It was three days before Tole noticed it had been abandoned and several more, because of the weather, before the search party went in.
The count of the dead has never been fixed. The Kansas Historical Society's marker north of Cherryvale says at least eleven travelers were murdered between 1871 and 1873. Body parts that matched none of the recovered bodies, and four unidentified men found in and around Drum Creek, led to estimates of more than twenty. Only York and McKenzie, the Longcors and McCrotty were claimed by families; the rest were reburied at the foot of a hill about a mile southeast of the orchard.
More than three thousand people came to see the place, and souvenir hunters took the cabin apart down to the bricks of the cellar and the stones of the well. The crowd hanged a friend of the Benders named Brockman from a beam three times, reviving him between, before letting him go. Senator York offered $1,000 for the family's arrest, and on May 17 Governor Thomas A. Osborn offered $2,000 for all four. Addison Roach and his son-in-law William Buxton were arrested as accessories, and twelve men in all were taken in for disposing of the victims' property. The Benders were never among them.
Detectives found their wagon, with a starving team, outside Thayer, twelve miles north, and learned that the four had bought railroad tickets for Humboldt. The younger pair were said to have left the train at Chanute and gone south on the Katy line toward Denison, Texas, and the older pair to have gone on to Kansas City. After that the trail becomes stories. Vigilance groups claimed to have caught and killed them, by shooting, by burning, by drowning in the Verdigris River, and men made deathbed confessions to it. A skull displayed as Pa Bender's in a saloon at Salmon, Idaho, belonged to a man arrested in 1884 who died before he could be identified. A newspaper in 1888 floated the theory that the Benders had resurfaced as a family called the Kellys. In 1889 two women, Almira Monroe and Sarah Eliza Davis, were arrested at Niles, Michigan, and brought to Oswego, Kansas, as Ma and Kate Bender; a panel committed them for trial, but in 1890 a judge discharged them both on affidavits, and many people doubted the identification from the start. Nobody collected the rewards, and the fate of all four remains unknown.