CHERRYVALE, Kan. (KWCH) – A remote spot north of Cherryvale is the site of an investigation. Long dead are the victims along with the perpetrators, but alive still is the mystery of a 150-year-old case.
It sits in a field owned by Bob Miller of Independence, who bought it at auction in 2020.
“I thought, well, maybe I’ll just throw a bid in and see what happens. I got over there, and I threw a bid in and got caught up in the bidding process,” said Miller. “Ended up with the property. I bought it for the historical reasons first; I figured it wouldn’t be the worst investment ever made second. It has turned out to be just fine.”
The story of the Bloody Benders is one Miller has heard for a long time, visiting the former museum in Cherryvale dedicated to the serial-killing family with a replica of the famous cabin. It was complete with a staged murder scene. It’s a story that’s hard to forget.
“Cherryvale had a museum, and they had a replica cabin of the Benders back in the 1960s and 70s. I visited that and was really intrigued with their story. Unfortunately, they sold that museum off about 1980, and the story has gone underground for the last 45 years, but it’s always stuck in my head,” said Miller.
That’s what intrigued Miller when this land came up for sale. Walking it, he often comes away with a bit of its past. He has sealed bags with broken bits of pottery, glass and rusted nails. It’s what’s left of a location with a lot of curiosity to go along with it.
Miller said, “My goal is to find out where was the cabin and the cellar. Where was the Osage trail, the burial grounds, the grave sites, the wells? Try to add to the story.”
The Bloody Benders
It was the early 1870s in the Kansas prairies—a frontier then. Miller said people were traveling to claim a little piece, costing $1.25 an acre.
It’s where the Bender family settled. There were the two older Benders and their kids, John Jr. and Kate. They build their home, a cabin 16 by 24, just off the Osage Trail. A heavy canvas divides the house in two. It sat on a little more than 160 acres.
Miller said the family would welcome the weary travelers on the trail with a place to sleep and a meal. In those days, 20 miles a day was a good pace. The theory is as the traveler would sit down for a meal, the family would strike.
Mike Wood with the Cherryvale Museum said, “Somebody behind this curtain would hit them in the head, but as you can see, it was a very small home.”
Miller added, “The father would or the son but lean around the canvas and whack them in the head with a hammer in the right temple in the back of the head to kill them. Then they would slit their throat, in many cases so deep and if you can get the idea of what a Pez dispenser looks like, that’s about how bad it was from what we read, and then they would bleed them out in the cellar through the trap door and then bury them at night. So the whole process was a real planned out staged event.”
The motive, Miller said, was likely money and the value the travelers had with them, animals and carts. He said they targeted those traveling alone and from outside the area.
One of the things Miller’s been researching is the victims. There are at least 11 people the Benders are thought to have killed.
“One story is that George Longcor. He had a child, and the child died. They had a second child, and the mother died after birth. So he was taking his little girl, who’s about two years old, up to some relatives in Iowa to raise, and he stopped by the Bender place, and they both were killed and found in the same grave. He was also a neighbor of the Ingalls family, which is the Little House to Prairie fame, southwest of Independence.”
The disappearance of Dr. William York in early 1873, who was from southwest of Independence, drew greater suspicion to the Benders. Dr. York was on his way home after visiting family in Fort Scott. He was the brother of a prominent state senator. The brother organized a posse and hired a private detective. Their search closed in on the Benders.
Miller said, “This was kind of like a black hole of the day. And it was starting to arouse suspicion that the Osage trail was a dangerous place to travel.”
Miller said the Benders didn’t stay long after that. Miller added there are many questions about what happened to them. He said some stories say the Benders got on the train in Thayer, about 10 miles north of their cabin and vanished. There are stories of them returning to Germany or France, while others say the posses got them and killed them.
“We just really don’t know; it’s one of the mysteries that we have, and of course, there are enough mysteries out here on this property we’re trying to unravel,” Miller said.
Renewed Search
To find answers about what the ground might have been hiding for 150 years, Miller contacted the KU Department of Anthropology. That’s where Assistant Teaching Professor Dr. Lauren Norman works, and one of the people brought onto this case to do archaeological research. With such a large property, the first step was determining where to dig.
Dr. Norman said, “We’ve been using historical records. We’ve been talking with the Kansas Historical Society to try to pinpoint on the location that we think where the homestead might have been, where the barn might have been, and where a well even might have been before going out there. Especially with the concentration of artifacts that have been coming up, we had a pretty good idea of where we wanted to put the survey.”
This past summer, a colleague of Dr. Norman’s – Dr. Blair Schneider at the Kansas Geological Survey – and students from KU went out to complete archaeological remote sensing. That data will help Dr. Norman determine where to dig, which is planned for May 2024.
That work helped narrow the search area from 160 acres to just three or four.
“What we’re kind of interested in is if we can see if there’s a footprint for the homestead itself. If there was a trash pit. Archeologists are really interested in trash. It tells us a lot about people and what people throw away. We’re interested in if there’s an outhouse or two on the property and if there’s a well. These are the kind of repositories where things collect that would people would have been living there,” said Dr. Norman.
She explained doing digs is a low and meticulous process. When they do the dig next spring, she said students and potentially volunteers will be working in meter-by-meter pits. Dr. Norman expects to go down about a foot or two. She said this search won’t just be looking for items left but also the context of them.
“We aren’t just interested in the artifacts that we get out. If we were, we could take a backhoe and then just get all the artifacts, but we’re interested in the context. So half or more of archaeology is about where those artifacts are found in relation to other artifacts,” said Dr. Norman.
“That tells us things about the people that were there, how they organized their lives, what they might have been eating in relation to everything else, how they might have interacted on that landscape. And so we need to record everything and every place it comes from, so archaeology is pretty slow. It’s very labor intensive.”
For the Benders, she’s interested in how the historical record – what was written in newspapers and magazines of the time – compares to what they find. Also to get a better idea of what life was like then.
“Archaeology will allow us to talk a little bit more about the every day rather than the sensational aspect of the Benders, like how did they fit into the community they were in,” said Dr. Norman. “What did that look like?”
However, she said this search could be impacted by what happened after the Benders left this site, referred to as site formation processes.
Dr. Norman said, “We know that it’s only been farmed for the last 80 years. So that’s been plowed a little bit. That doesn’t impact things too much, but the biggest impact will probably have been these tourists who were so interested in these kinds of really gruesome events that they really flocked to the site to see what was happening.”
Thousands of people from as far as New York are reported to have come to the Benders’ home and land. Within a few weeks, the place was stripped bare.
Miller said, “People just came out here in droves, and they’re all looking for a piece of history, souvenir, so to speak, and they rip the cabinet apart, took the stones, pieces of wood, everything. Everything was stripped, and within a few weeks. You couldn’t even tell essentially where things were outside of some holes that were still in the ground.”
The Impact
For Miller and those working on the search, the hope is to tell a more complete story of the Benders.
He said, “One of the purposes of buying this land in the first place is to unravel some of these mysteries and add to the story, add to the history, maybe rewrite history. We don’t know what we’ll end up with. You don’t know until you really excavate.”
He also hopes this will benefit the local community, tourism, or other projects around the Benders.
That’s a potential outcome Dr. Norman listed. She said another exciting part for her is the opportunity it provides students to learn about this work and impact a Kansas story.
“A lot of our work at the University of Kansas is beyond Kansas itself. So this is a really good opportunity to focus on that. It’s also a really good opportunity to focus on kind of a recent time period where people are very interested, and local students that I talked to know about the Benders and have visited the area and know this as part of their history. To go back and get into it and bring new information about a story that’s so well known is really exciting for them and then for me to allow them to do that,” said Dr. Norman.
It’s expected to be a few more years until this work is complete. The archaeological dig Dr. Norman and her students will complete in May is planned to last two weeks to a month. The items and information collected will then be studied. That will take a few years. Next summer, Dr. Schneider is planning more remote sensing work.
Miller said, “We just want to find out what has the ground been hiding for 150 years.”
Copyright 2023 KWCH. All rights reserved. To report a correction or typo, please email news@kwch.com
