The Bloody Benders

The Benders, a German family consisting of a mother, father, son, and daughter, settled just northeast of Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1870. They built a small inn for travelers who, while passing through, would need shelter and food for themselves and their horses. With so many settlers making their way through the relatively young and unsettled state in those days, innkeeping was a lucrative business. But apparently it was not lucrative enough for the Benders. They decided to supplement their income through incredibly treacherous means. When travelers would enter their home, the Benders would position them at a dinner table with their backs to a canvas curtain. While engaged in conversation, usually with the young and attractive Kate Bender, the unsuspecting traveler would be set upon by one of the two Bender men. He would emerge from behind the curtain with a hammer, raining blows down upon the skull of his victim. Then, all four of the Benders would loot any money and possessions on the victim’s person, would slit his throat and mutilate his body, then would dump him through a trap door into a well-like enclosure beneath their house. Later, under the cover of darkness, the body would be removed and buried in the Benders’ orchard out back. After the disappearance of a prominent local doctor in 1873, residents began suspecting the Benders of foul play. The Benders, in turn, up and left, literally disappearing overnight. Soon after, eleven shallow graves were discovered in their orchard. Rumors quickly sprung up that a posse captured and hanged all four members of the family Apparently this was just conjecture, and no such posse found or killed the murderers. Perhaps because of these sensationalistic and widespread claims, the Benders were able to avoid the long arm of the law. In the early 1880s two females thought to be the Bender women were brought from Illinois to Kansas but were released after a short period as it was impossible to prove that they were in fact part of the murderous family from years before. Some rumors say that the Benders were killed by other criminals. Simply put, the fate of the Benders remains entirely a mystery. Today, little remains to remind us of these macabre incidents of Kansas’s past. The inn was destroyed soon after the discovery of the bodies as souvenir hunters combed and dismantled the building. A marker stands on US 169 near the former site of the inn. The marker very accurately proclaims the fate of the Benders as “one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Old West.”