Swell AI Transcript: CC_Larry 2.mp3

Ben 00:02-00:23

Larry, welcome back to Crime Capsule. Thanks. Glad to be back. So last week we had a delightful tour through the murdery misdeeds of Miss Minnie Wallace. And this week, I'm afraid we've got to go somewhere a little darker, don't we? A little darker.

Larry Wood 00:23-00:24

Yeah. It's a little darker.

Ben 00:24-02:36

Nothing darker. Nothing romantic about this one. No, no, nothing at all. Now, I'm going to start off by saying, so take me a quick second to say it, but I'm going to say it anyway. One of my absolute favorite novels in the world, and I know that I'm not alone in this, is the novel called The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is a staggering vision of what life would look like after a kind of apocalypse and father and son traveling through a wasteland. a very recognizable southern wasteland, I should say. And the folks they meet along the way, and it's kill or be killed, it's pure survival, it's very, very harrowing, challenging novel, but it is also, you know, strangely beautiful in all its desolation and made into a great film, you know, a couple years ago, and it's really powerful document. And there's a scene in this novel, which anyone listening to this show, if you have seen the movie or read the book, you know what scene I'm talking about.

It's when the father and the son visit a house in the middle of nowhere and they Find a hatch in the bottom and in a floorboard Okay, kind of hidden away in the floorboards and that hatch leads down to a basement Sort of cellar area and I'm not gonna say what they find there because folks who know Already know and folks who don't know need to see the film for their for their own for their own sake but I could not help, Larry, as I was reading this chapter in your book, I could not help. That scene came to mind over and over and over again as I read about the bloody benders in Kansas.

Let's just dive right into this. You have written about this case before. You say that it is very, very well known, and yet it's also one of the most enigmatic and mysterious cases out of the whole state of Kansas.

Larry Wood 02:36-03:39

So, tell us what's going on here. Well, it's still being researched and written about today. As a matter of fact, as we speak, probably there are a team of archaeologists from the University of Kansas over there right now trying to find artifacts and stuff, uh, you know, that might lend, uh, some more light on what happened and, and maybe even turn up more victims and so forth. But, uh, of course, we're talking about the, the notorious bloody benders of Labette County, Kansas. Uh, Labette County is, uh, Oh, it's just one county over from Missouri and one county up from Oklahoma. So it's in the southeast, definitely in the far, pretty much southeast part of Kansas. This happened close to the town of Cherryvale, although I don't think Cherryvale was even there yet, or if it was, it wasn't very well established. But there was, well,

Ben 03:40-03:42

What time period are we in?

Larry Wood 03:42-06:46

Tell us, kind of set the stage for us. This was in the early 1870s. I started to go ahead and tell you what happened. But first, I think we can kind of flashback to what led up to it. But in March of 1873, Dr. York, a guy named Dr. York, he was a physician, went missing. And he was not the first one to go missing.

There'd been several people in this same area that had just mysteriously disappeared, but it hadn't caused a general uproar until Dr. York disappeared because he came from a prominent family, well-to-do family, influential. And his brother was a state senator. And so his brother started out looking for him, made a trip from Independence, Kansas to to Fort Scott, Kansas, looking for his brother. He found out that his brother had reached Fort Scott, but then he had started back to independence by way of the Osage Mission, which was where the Catholic Church did mission work with the Osage Indians. It's now called St. Paul, a little town called St. Paul.

But anyway, So the doctor set out to retrace his brother's steps, and he got as far as St. Paul and Osage Mission, and he was still alive when he got that far. He had found people that had talked to him and so forth, and he got about halfway between Osage Mission and Independence, and he lost complete track of him. No one seemed to have known anything about where he went. So he finally, he talked to this, uh, one of the places he called that was a family called the benders that ran a little grocery store, kind of a wayside in wayside grocery there along the Osage trail. Uh, and he came away thinking they were kind of weird because like this girl, it was like 16 year old girl named Kate. That's one of the things, a lot of the misconceptions about Kate is I think she was 21. A lot of things that have been written about her say she was 21, 22 years old. She wasn't. She was just a teenage girl.

That's proven by census records. But anyway, Kate, who fancied herself a spiritualist and a psychic, had told the guy that she didn't know where his brother was, but if she'd come back the next day, she would conduct a seance or something and then be able to tell him where he was. And so he came away thinking, well, this is kind of a weird family, but he really didn't suspect them at the time. So he went on back to independence and kind of kind of dropped his investigation because it had led nowhere but dead ends. And then about a month later, this was in early March.

Ben 06:46-08:09

Can I say one quick thing? One quick thing, Larry. Go ahead. I think it's important, as we understand this case, to think about the context of the times. Now, Kansas had only been a state for about 10 years at that point, right? So it had gotten statehood in 1861. And if you think about the fact that statehood, it was a process, you know, The infrastructure of law and order, of justice system, of marshals, of deputies and sheriffs was still – you could not call it fully established, right? There was banditry. There were outlaws on the different trails. And it was absolutely plausible to think that as these solo travelers were making their way from what had formerly been outposts to outposts, any number of things could have happened to them because there just wasn't the security that you would have expected to see, you know, of more fully developed infrastructure. And so, you know, yes, it's a weird family that these search party comes across, but Weird is just weird. And any number of kinds of trouble could have befallen anybody traveling through that region at that time.

Larry Wood 08:09-11:42

Right. Yeah. So that's partly why they didn't really get aroused when these other people disappeared, because like you say, there could have been a lot of things that happened to them. But anyway, after about a month or so, he went back. This was in March, early March of 1873. He went back to Independence and kind of dropped his investigation. But then A month later in early April, a neighbor of the Benders was passing by their place and noticed that it looked deserted. There was even like, I think he, on closer inspection, he walked up into the, to the property and on close inspection, he saw that a cow had just basically starved to death, you know, hadn't been fed for, you know, and so then they came back and that's when suspicion really started falling on the Benders that that they were the ones that had been killing these people because they had disappeared real quickly after the doctor had stopped there.

Anyway, they went back to the Bender place and started investigating, and they had these sharp spears, I guess. They found a place out behind the house where the soil looked like it had been freshly disturbed and hadn't been there too long. So they took these spears and started stabbing and they stabbed down below where they, it, one of the, one of the spears, when they went in, it went well below where the plow would have gone, you know, it had been plowed. Uh, but the soil was so loose in other words, it was so loose that the spear went way on down below where it would have been. Been plowed. And so that made him think, you know, there's something else down there below the plow level, you know, so they started digging and sure enough, they found, found his body, found the doctor. doctor's body, Dr. York.

I couldn't think of his last name there for a second. But yeah, they found Dr. York's body. And then the next day they came back and did more investigations and found several other bodies, including some of these people who had previously disappeared that they had not known where. Like one of them was a man and his little girl who had left to go to Iowa to visit relatives and never made it. They found his wagon along the way, but they never found them until now. They found him and his little girl and several other people. Of course, then when they found all the bodies, they also went back to the house and started looking at the house.

It was basically just one big room, but it was divided by partition, kind of a curtain that was halfway divided into two rooms, And there was also a shaft, like you talked about a while ago, a drop place in the floor. And they theorized that how they killed these people was they would stop in at the wayside end to get a drink or whatever, and they would somehow or another get them to sit down on a chair with their back facing the curtain. And somebody from the opposite side of the curtain was hitting them overhead with a hammer to either stun them or kill them.

Then while he was stunned, they would finish it off with, you know, slit their throat or whatever. Then they had this trap door that they just drop them through into kind of a cellar area and then wait till after dark to drag their bodies out into the garden or wherever, where they buried all of them. Uh, that was her theory anyway.

Ben 11:42-12:47

Uh, but anyway, that's something, you know, and it makes you wonder, um, I mean, just that, first of all, the thought of you sit down for a bowl of stew, you know, and last thing you see is some shadow coming up behind you, you know, and then that's, that's it. I couldn't help, but wonder, you know, what about the, um, What kind of street smarts or kind of savvy, you know, do you not have to just, you know, like, I mean, maybe stopping in somebody's home for a bowl of stew, you know, back in those days was way more common than it is. Now, if you were a traveler on the trail, but if there's a blood spatter on that table, man, they must have scrubbed mighty hard to get that sucker out. Repeated blood spatter and a kind of suspicious looking ring around the seat of honor at the table. I mean, I don't know. It chills you to think about the repeated, how many times they did this over and over again.

Larry Wood 12:47-13:23

Well, and all kind, after this happened, after, uh, they started finding these bodies and, and they concluded that it was the benders that had been killing these people, uh, all sorts of people started coming forward, uh, talking about these close escapes they'd had, you know, like this one, one guy said that he, uh, went there and they got him seated in the, in the chair and he turned around and saw somebody with a hammer and, and the guy, Whoever had the hammer immediately started hammering a nail, pretending like he was hammering a nail or something, that sort of thing.

Ben 13:23-13:34

Yeah. I don't think you finish your meal at that point. You know what I mean? Hold on. I think I hear my horse. She needs something. Let me just step outside real quick.

Larry Wood 13:34-17:12

Take off. But anyway, of course, the next thing after this was they, of course, started trying to find the vendors, started looking for them, the vendors. But the problem was that the vendors had had almost a month head start, because apparently from the looks of things, they had disappeared just almost immediately after Dr. York had visited, because people were starting to get suspicious. And so that was their clue to leave. So they had a whole month to make their getaway before anyone really even started after them. They traced them to Thayer, Kansas, where they had abandoned their wagon that they I think it was in April the 6th. So it was just a matter of three or four days from the time that Dr. York had visited until they had abandoned their wagon in there. So they probably left immediately almost and caught a train to Humboldt. And then from there, they don't really know where they went. So that's one of the big mysteries of the whole thing is they were never found and they Had a lot of false bender sightings. They even found a couple of women in Michigan back in like in the 1880s, you know, to 15 years later and brought them back to Kansas to stand trial, but they were acquitted. They, they claimed that it was, uh, Kate and her mother, but it wasn't, you know, they, they proved that they, they weren't the benders. So they never really did know what happened to the benders. Some people thought they had made it back to Germany. They were originally from Germany. They were. A German family, that kind of takes me back to what I started to say a while ago. We need to kind of flash back. The Benders were a German family. It consisted of a man, his wife, a son who was about mid-twenties, and then Kate, who was just a teenager, 16, 17 years old. All of them, except Kate, had been born in Germany.

They left Germany and went to France where Kate was born. Then they came to, uh, the United States don't know for sure exactly when, but they were listed in the, uh, Decatur, Decatur County, Illinois census in 1870. And that's where, that's where I first was able to kind of, uh, you know, prove that some of these, uh, wild stories about Kate were not true. You know, cause like I said, they, they all. Most of the stories, you know, said that she was the leading spirit of the family and that she was 21, 22, maybe 23 years old. And, uh, that she was the one that was kind of behind all this. Well, she was only 16, 17 years old, you know, uh, because in the 1870 census, she was only 13 years old. Yeah. Uh, and she had been born in France. The census showed that she had been born in France now just in recent months, just two or three months ago, a man published a new book about the vendors. Uh, and he went into a lot more genealogical research than I did. He traced them on, not only back to Illinois as I did, but he traced them clear on back to France and to Germany and found all the, the, uh, shipping records where, or the, uh, I don't know, passenger list where they first came to America and so on. And so, you know, he has done a lot of genealogical research on them. But I don't know that he really lent any much more. lied on the murders themselves, you know what happened to them.

Ben 17:12-17:45

There's an interesting element here which you write about, which I thought just bears mentioning because of their ancestry. The older generation, the parents had accents and didn't speak as much English. But you write that Kate actually spoke near, well, she spoke perfect English, but more importantly, She spoke it almost without an accent. So she would have been able, for any of these Americans passing through, she would have been able to make them feel comfortable in a way that the others might not have.

Larry Wood 17:45-18:17

That's probably why people said she was the leading spirit of the family, because she was the one that did most of the communicating with outsiders. She could speak fluent English. I think she also spoke some French and some German. She wasn't born in Germany, but she grew up in a German family, so she learned German. She learned a little French because that's where she was born and lived there probably until she was three or four years old, and then came to the America at an early enough age to become fluent in English.

Ben 18:19-18:29

And it's funny, you know, you say to speak with outsiders, I think we could just as easily substitute the word victims for outsiders.

Larry Wood 18:29-18:34

Outsiders from her family. Well, you know, the family was- It does raise the question.

Ben 18:36-18:58

Yeah, it raises the question of motive here. And I mean, you suggest that with a couple of them, a couple of these cases, you know, this is pure highway robbery with a little murder thrown in, you know, to, you know, for good measure, get rid of the evidence, so to speak. Were there any other instances based on what we know about the victims in which there could have been more than just robbery as a motive?

Larry Wood 18:59-19:55

Not that I know of. As far as I know, they were all strangers to the benders. I know the man and his little girl, for instance. The little girl apparently was not slashed with a knife or hit with a hammer. Apparently, they just might have even buried her alive. They don't know exactly how. Suffocated her anyway, somehow or another, and then killed her rather than slashing her throat or hitting on her head. Apparently, he had quite a bit of money with him because they were leaving to go to Iowa, making a long trip. Most of the victims did have some money with them, but of course, they wouldn't know ahead of time how much money they had probably before they killed them. They just killed them hoping they did have money probably. That's my theory. I think most of them, the motive was robbery.

Ben 19:56-20:43

Yeah, well, I think there's, it's safe to say there's a special place in hell for folks who go around killing kids, you know what I mean? Wherever the benders ended up, you know, we can assume they had another destination waiting for them at the end of that particular journey. Now, you're right that the disappearance is what makes this case so compelling, because really all the leads just I mean, the trail goes cold, right? I mean, just ice cold. And that's a little unusual because we would have known, you know, train schedules in those days, you know, there's a number of things we could have done, you know, I guess to chase it up. But is there any possible lead out there that you have encountered that holds any water?

Larry Wood 20:46-21:49

I don't think so. They, they had, uh, all kinds of, like I say, false sightings and people, you know, supposedly side them in tech, Texas and, and first one placed in another. And then a few years after the, the benders disappeared, the men started coming forward. Some of them on their deathbeds saying that they had been among the posse that had overtaken the benders and killed them just South of the Oklahoma line. So South of Kansas, Oklahoma line. and buried them near the grand river. And for a while, I even kind of fell for that because, you know, why did so many people come forward saying that that's what happened if it didn't really happen, you know, but there's a couple of flaws in that story. For one thing, the big one is that the, like I said before, the vendors had a 30 day headstart. There's no way that they would have hung around within 20 or 30 miles of where they killed, killed all these people. you know, waiting to be overtaken and killed. That just doesn't make sense that they would have done that.

Ben 21:49-21:58

And the other thing– Because they would have had to re-provision. They would have had to, you know, get food and be near cities to, you know, outfit their horses and all that kind of stuff. I mean, any number of things, right?

Larry Wood 21:58-22:50

Yeah. And the other thing is that all the people who were in the position to know about the the case said that that was, you know, they said those were all just lies, just canards. Anybody coming forward saying that the vendors had been overtaken and killed. For instance, Dr. York was one of the ones that, you know, discounted that idea. And the governor of Kansas who had put out the proclamation and the one, you know, offered the award and they wanted poster, you know, he said that wasn't true. So, yeah, it was just, I don't know why anyone would want to Another thing, you know, another problem with that theory is if that really did happen, why did they wait till they were on their deathbed to come forward? You know, because they would not have been, they would not have been thrown in jail and they would, would, would have been greeted as heroes probably, you know? Right.

Ben 22:50-23:29

Right. So, last question I guess I have for you, because this is in the wind. They're gone. There's no trace of them at this point. It is just such a captivating story. Last question I have for you is whatever became of the actual old homestead there. Now, you had this kind of funny thing where once the bodies are discovered, you have a crowd of a thousand people swarming the area. And I think, good Lord, you know, like, Talk about ruining a crime scene. You got a thousand people like tromping all over the place. But that being said, what's the status of the homestead today? You mentioned an archaeological dig?

Larry Wood 23:29-24:20

Yes. Of course, the old cabin itself is no longer there, but they do know where it was. And for the last two summers, last summer and this summer, they've had an archaeological team from the University of Kansas, or Kansas University, down here doing, I have not been out to see it, but they've been doing an archaeological dig, trying to come up with artifacts or any kind of clues that maybe turn up more victims than they previously knew about, and trying to identify all the victims and that sort of thing, and maybe shed light somehow on the crimes themselves. But So it is still a current event in this area.

Ben 24:20-24:45

It's a question mark, not a period at the end of that sentence, and it will remain so for many years to come. But it is a Fascinating story, Larry, and as grisly as it is, we appreciate your shining some light on it. Just always sit with your back to the wall, folks. Just as a rule.

Larry Wood 24:45-24:50

Follow the lead of Wild Bill Hickok. He didn't do it that one time.

Ben 24:52-25:10

I tell you, I tell you. Well, look, it has been such a pleasure having you here on Crime Capsule these last couple of weeks with us and taking us through some of the the truth. Your book is is truth in advertising, murder and mayhem. You know, we got it both. Yeah. Mayhem in Southeast Kansas.

Larry Wood 25:10-25:12

Yeah. Yeah.

Ben 25:12-25:21

Well, thanks, Ben. I sure do appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Keep us posted and we'll we'll love to have you back on. Okey doke. All right. Talk to you soon.