Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier
By Susan Jonusas

The crime:

The Bender family – consisting of Ma and Pa Bender, daughter Kate and son (or son-in-law) John – ran a trailside inn during the early 1870s in Kansas. Some who checked in never left. After being brained with a hammer and having their throats cut they were robbed of whatever cash and valuables they had and their bodies buried in a nearby orchard. As suspicions mounted over the number of disappearing travelers in the area the Benders fled to parts unknown. They were never apprehended and their ultimate fate remains a mystery.

The book:

The Bloody Benders, as they were later designated, are famous frontier figures, but what Hell’s Half-Acre brought home to me was how little about them is actually known. In large part this is because they were never captured and made to stand trial, with a full public hearing of the evidence against them. As it is, we don’t know where they came from or where they went, if John and Kate were siblings or married, or if John was a half-wit or just someone who behaved in an odd manner and giggled a lot. Susan Jonusas doesn’t definitively answer any of these questions in this full account, but I think that’s because they’re probably unanswerable now.

This is not for a lack of contemporary reporting. The Benders were big news back in their day. But newspapers had more flexible standards then, as Jonusas notes in her Introduction:

. . . nineteenth-century newspapers can be unreliable, as proven by the wild variations in the number of victims attributed to the Benders, with some claiming the number as high as 150. Along with embellished figures come misspelled names, seemingly random locations, and widely varied physical descriptions of the Benders themselves.

So we are left with these same basic questions. How many people did the Benders kill? Can we just go off the number of bodies dug up in the orchard? No, because they disposed of at least one other victim in a nearby river. What did they look like? Even among those who knew them descriptions varied quite a bit and there was no “paper of record.”

Like the frontier rumor mill, regional newspapers were a mixture of fact, hearsay, and complete fiction. Out-of-state newspapers that could not afford or be bothered to send reporters to Labette County pooled information from local articles, selected the narrative they liked best, and reprinted it as fact.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what to think of when Jonusas says that the Benders regularly appear in top 10 lists “where they routinely secure the top spot above other murderous families.” What other murderous families have there been? I couldn’t think of any. I did a quick search for some of the lists Jonusas might have had in mind (none are mentioned in the notes) and found several, but they mainly consisted of couples or other pairings, which I categorize as folie à deux and not families. The only other “family” I saw mentioned was the Sawney Bean clan, who were figures out of Scottish folklore (that is, not real). Would you include the Manson “family” in such a list? Or mafia crime families as serial killers?

This may seem like a minor point, but it gets at the historical uniqueness of the Benders. There’s nothing else quite like them in the annals of true crime, at least that I’m aware of. The serial killer family is more likely to be encountered in crime and horror films like Bloody Mama, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes, along with all of their descendants (House of 1000 Corpses, et al.).

And Jonusas does give Hell’s Half-Acre a good squirt of horror-movie juice. The Bender cabin is evoked as the kind of place that did in fact creep a lot of guests out (including a few who only narrowly escaped). I did think, however, that in several places she crosses over a line in trying to make the proceedings more novelistic. There are scenes she describes where the only people present are members of the Bender family and I don’t see how she has any idea what they were doing, saying to each other, or thinking. I appreciate this being a good read, but there are still rules when it comes to writing non-fiction.

Otherwise, I’d fully recommend this as being a decent look at the case. Some of the historical material, like the fad for spiritualism, are worked into the mix well, though I felt the final chapters wandered off a bit into the trial of a pair of women who were falsely accused of being Ma and Kate Bender.

Noted in passing:

The question of how smart criminals are is one that gets a lot of attention from true crime writers. I think a lot of this is driven by media representations. Here’s something from my review of The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter and David Everitt that I think is on point:

What undercuts the expertise of the profilers even more is the fact, amply demonstrated (it seems to me) by the case histories in these volumes, that most serial killers aren’t very bright. Contra the FBI’s profiling program, that found the mean IQ for serial killers to be “bright normal,” and Schechter and Everitt’s conclusion that “serial killers tend to be smart,” the best that can be said for the best of them is that they were able to live functional double lives. Smart people don’t think they can get rid of bodies by cutting them up and flushing the pieces down the toilet. And yet this is how both Dennis Nilsen and Joachim Kroll were caught. Again we can blame Hollywood for the entirely fictional figure of the serial killer as cunning genius and criminal mastermind – someone like Hannibal Lecter who can lecture on Dante and play the Goldberg Variations from memory. In the real world some of the most successful serial killers, like the cretin Ottis Toole or the degenerate Wests, were borderline retarded.

But underestimating the intelligence of criminals can also be a trap. Think of Eliot Spitzer’s remark about how most crooks are stupid, just before his own fall. Or how, as described in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Constance Kent, who everyone seemed to think was just a stupid girl, initially got away with murdering her step-brother, even fooling the great detective Mr. Whicher himself.

A similar dynamic was at work with the Benders. When Alexander York, who hadn’t followed up on suspicions of the Benders earlier, digs up his brother’s grave he sees “only his own obstinate refusal to believe that the Bender family was clever enough to commit such an atrocious crime.” And years later, when newspapers speculated on the fate of the family, it was thought by some that they must be dead because “They were simply too stupid to have evaded the authorities for so long.”

Attitudes like this confuse me. I’m never sure what people mean when they describe someone as being either smart or stupid. Intelligence takes many different forms – from book learning to social skills and mechanical proficiency. And it can be put to infinite uses. Were the Benders stupid or cunning in their criminal careers? Were they clever and resourceful or mostly just lucky in evading the law? Surely it’s a mix of all of the above. My sense is that Kate was not only the scheme’s honey trap but its directing intelligence. How clever she was is impossible to say now, but I wouldn’t underestimate her.

Takeaways:

In strange settings, always sit with your back to a wall. That way no one can sneak up behind you.

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