This Serial-Killing Family Terrorized the American Frontier

Hell’s Half-Acre tells the story of the grisly murders committed by the Bender family during their time spent in Labette County, Kansas, in the early 1870s. The family—an older couple, Ma and Pa, and younger couple Kate and John—killed at least 11 people before fleeing the state, leaving a trail of horror in their wake. When their crimes were uncovered, news of the murders gripped the nation and would not leave the newspapers for decades after the initial discovery. Drawing on extensive archival material, Hell’s Half-Acre explores the motives behind the murders, the lives of the victims, and the high-stakes race to catch the Benders that took detectives into some of the most dangerous places in America.

In the first of these excerpts, the townspeople search the Bender cabin for the first time, where they make a gruesome discovery. In the second, it is a year earlier, and two boys come across the body of one the Bender’s earliest victims, William Jones, while out fishing in a local creek.

Labette County, Kansas

Tuesday, May 6, 1873

In a valley 14 miles east of Independence, a party of 75 men on horseback pick their way through the mud. Mist not yet burned off by the sun moves adrift on the breeze, clinging to them like a second skin. For weeks they have been searching for Dr. William York, a beloved local physician who disappeared on the trail around the time the first signs of spring broke through the winter-hardened landscape. They steer their horses toward a cabin less than ten feet from the trail, where they are greeted by Leroy Dick, the local official in charge of the search party whose cousin is also missing. Dick tells the men that the property has been abandoned. Billy Tole, the wiry farmhand who alerted Dick to the desertion of the cabin, shuffles uneasily in his saddle. He looks to the stable, where two men are busy removing a dead calf to make space for their own animals. Beyond the stable is a small, well-kept orchard. The ground is clogged with weeks of relentlessly bad weather and the scent of rain-soaked wood fills the air. Beneath it lies a second smell. Like the other members of the party who are veterans of the Civil War, Leroy Dick knows that it is the smell of death.

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The men split into groups and the hunt for the source of the smell begins. Some head to the stable, others to the cabin. The cabin is a modest one-story structure, sixteen feet by twenty-four feet and wholly unremarkable. Inside, a single room is divided by the canvas sheet from a wagon. Dick yanks the makeshift curtain aside and is engulfed in a cloud of filth. It settles to reveal a sparsely furnished living space inhabited by insects that retreat into crevices at the fall of heavy boots. The cabin has been empty for some time, but it is clear that the occupants left quickly, taking only the essentials needed for travel. Toward the back of the room, the scent of decay is stronger. A Bible with a cracked spine lies discarded near a straw mattress pulled aside to reveal a trapdoor. Grasping the leather strap nailed to the wood as a handle, Dick throws the door open and the smell leaks into the cabin. It sticks in the throats of the search party. Beneath the men a dark void opens.

Silas Tole, Billy’s older brother, volunteers to descend. He is a rancher and used to the smell of animal carcasses, but down in the cellar he struggles to breathe. The floor is a slab of sandstone, reddened by unnatural stains. When Silas crouches to investigate further, he finds that the soil surrounding the slab is damp. Hoisting himself from the pit, he tells the group that they will have to move the cabin to gain better access to the cellar; that there is definitely something buried beneath the slab. Pale faced, the men vacate the building with expressions that send a murmur of disquiet through the others waiting outside. Dick gives the instruction for the cabin to be moved.

Men tie ropes to horses and pulleys, dislodging the cabin from its foundation and exposing the rancid contents of the pit to daylight. Excavation of the site corrupts the spring afternoon with the smell of earth and sweat. As they dig, the men discard layers of clothing and wipe dirt across their brows. News of the events unfolding reaches local towns, and the afternoon brings with it curious spectators who arrive on foot and by wagon. Beneath the slab the soil reeks of human decay and the men take turns shoveling the dirt. There is still no sign of a body.

When Billy Tole points to a team of horses pulling a buggy at full gallop, Leroy Dick recognizes the man behind the reins as William York’s younger brother, Edward. Ed York is a bright but volatile man whose grueling search of the landscape has left him desperate. Beside him is Thomas Beers, a private detective hired by the York family, eager to make a name for himself. Beers knows the area well; he has been investigating William’s disappearance for the preceding month and has come to a grim conclusion. The two men climb down from the buggy and join the proceedings.

During the hours that pass, Ed teeters at the edge of delirium, vexed by the imprint of slaughter without any answers. He has walked the orchard, checked the stable, stared into the empty pit. Beers watches him closely, worried that the young man’s desperation might slip into violent rage like it has before. Ed disappears inside the cabin, away from the eyes of the detective and the crowd. Though its contents have already been rifled through by inquisitive hands, Ed decides to search for himself. It is not long before he discovers a bridle wedged haphazardly behind the grocery counter and recognizes it as belonging to his brother. He thinks of William’s pregnant wife, Mary, and her three little children who wait back home in Independence, anxiously waiting for news of their missing loved one. Tucking the bridle into his overcoat, he surveys the rest of the room and notices that the clock on the counter has stopped. It has not been wound for three weeks.

Outside, the last of the daylight dissolves across the prairie. Leroy Dick chews with agitation on the end of his pipe and listens to the mundane chatter of the search party. He looks to the cabin. When Ed emerges, he extinguishes the pipe. Ed has his gaze fixed on the orchard, where evening shadows fall on irregularities in the surface of the soil. Walking slowly to the spot with the disturbance, Ed calls for the detective. He indicates the area at his feet. Around them the chatter gives way to silence as a small congregation forms in the orchard. Detective Beers slides the ramrod from his rifle and passes it to Ed.

Taking a deep breath, Ed plunges the ramrod into the soil until its downward path encounters matter too soft to be soil. Grasping the rod with white knuckles and a rising nausea, he feels it dislodge from something not quite solid buried roughly four feet below the surface. Ed knows he is shaking and wishes that his eldest brother, Alexander, who is also eager for news of William, had come to the cabin in his place. Steadied by the firm hand of the detective on his shoulder, Ed draws the rod from the earth. With it comes the sharp, pungent odor whose source has plagued the search party all day. In the last of the light, Beers can make out five more areas among the saplings where the ground is disturbed.

Ed stares at the base of the rod. It is slick with human viscera.

Big Hill Creek, Kansas

October 1872

On an autumn morning filled with the promise of a cold winter, two brothers gathered their fishing equipment and set off for Big Hill Creek. The sky was bright and vast and they argued over biscuits they had for breakfast as they walked. Well trodden and used alike by local townsfolk and those traveling farther west, the stretch of the Osage Mission Trail leading to the water was easy to follow and pockmarked with mud. As the boys approached the creek, they diverted from the path and headed for the undergrowth, a dense tangle with enough branches at eye level to dissuade anyone unfamiliar with the area from entering. The older boy pushed the brushwood aside with his fishing rod and disappeared into the thicket. Younger than his brother by several years, the second boy followed, stopping when he noticed rags in the branches of a wild plum tree. Clothing hanging in the bushes was not uncommon on the frontier, but a dark stain on the fabric and the stillness of the morning air frightened him. He could not see his brother. Birds moved in the corner of his vision, skewering insects that had grown fat on the long, hot summer.

Picking his way closer to the rags, the boy could see it was part of a woman’s dress. There was a streak of dried blood across the chest. The smell was rusty and sweet. Beyond it, deeper in the brush, was a shirt like the ones he and his brother wore when their mother dressed them for Sunday school at Harmony Grove. Looking down toward the water, he could make out the shape of his brother watching the creek, with his hands gripped tightly around the fishing rod. Calling out, he scrambled past the dress, eager for a reply. The older boy chewed at his lip and stared into the water where the body of a man drifted lazily in the current, bathed in the early morning light. They stood together in silence.

“He’s dead?” said the younger boy. He meant it as a statement, but it came out like a question and left him feeling foolish. His brother poked at the body with his fishing rod and a stream of bubbles spilled out from beneath its neck. He poked it again, but the rod wasn’t strong enough to roll the body; it just lay in the water gurgling. His little brother screwed up his nose and squatted in the mud, eyes fixed on the dead man’s socks.

“We gotta walk back,” the older boy announced after several minutes of further contemplation. He figured the man didn’t have any valuables on him, so it was best to tell their father and let the sheriff deal with it. He cuffed his little brother on the back of the head as he made his way back up the bank.

“Reckon we should take the dress,” the younger boy’s voice was shaking. He stopped and turned around. The rags twitched in the breeze.

“So they believe us.”

His brother shrugged dismissively. “I ain’t carryin’ it.”

The two boys trudged the mile back to their homestead in silence. The younger clutched what was left of the dress against his chest and stared at his brother, whose face was grim and unreadable. It was the same gray expression the boy saw on the faces of the men an hour later when they heaved the body from the creek. He watched from farther up the bank as they turned the dead man over and laid him on a sheet. In the water the body had discolored and bloated. A deep laceration across the throat gaped unappealingly, and the boy spat into the river to stop himself from vomiting.

Crouching to examine the corpse’s head, the coroner’s top lip curled at the ferocity of the injuries. Fragments of the skull were lodged in a grayish pulp that had once been the brain. The man sighed and swallowed with some difficulty, gesturing to his companions. They rolled the body in the sheet, but the smell seeped through the fabric. The boy watched as the men worked quickly to fix the corpse to the back of a horse. His brother collected the remainder of the clothing strewn in the undergrowth and bundled it into a saddlebag. The coroner thanked him with a nod. When the group set off to Independence, the head lolled unpleasantly inside the sheet and the boy wondered if it might fall off before they reached the town. He was proud that he and his brother had found the dead man and, several days later, couldn’t hide his disappointment when the clerk of the general store told him they had not even been mentioned in the papers.

The brutal nature of the murder and the unceremonious way the man had been disposed of unsettled the citizens of the surrounding counties. The newspapers rallied against the “hellish, foul and barbarous” crime, demanding vengeance be enacted on the as-yet-unknown but “inhuman perpetrators.” Both The Kansas Democrat and The Osage Mission Transcript ran the coroner’s report in the hope that someone would recognize the victim and come forward to identify him:

Five feet eight inches high, heavy built, light complexion, light hair, small whiskers on his chin, hair sandy mixed with gray, slim long nose, very sharp near the point, eyes close together and about 40 years old. Deceased was dressed in common laborer’s wear, brown tweed coat, check overshirt, then a black and white flannel undershirt, and then a white undershirt; white flannel trousers, blue jeans, blue socks, without shoes or boots, with nothing of any kind in his pockets or on his person to identify him.

On Oct. 8, an inquest was held in which it was declared the blow to the head had crushed the right side of the skull, and whatever life the man had left in him leaked out with the blood from the neck wound. It was also supposed that the body had become wedged in the depths of the water, where it remained for six days before the boys made their grisly discovery.

Shortly after the description of the dead man appeared in the papers, Martha Jones paid a visit to the coroner, where, after a short interview, she identified her husband. In the last weeks of September, William Jones had left his young family on their new farm in Montgomery County to continue his work on a schoolhouse in Osage Mission. When he prepared to return home, he had with him $250, $150 of his own savings and another $100 loaned to him by a colleague with the promise that it would be repaid. He intended to stop at the land office en route and pay off the remaining debt, so that he might surprise his family with the news that the farm was secured.

As the days shortened and frost gleamed among the tallgrass, Martha had become concerned that her husband had fallen ill on his homeward journey. She left her children in the care of a neighbor and traveled to Independence; learning that William had never passed through the town, she began to grow increasingly distressed. Martha read the papers and made inquiries, quickly finding that the townspeople were willing to gossip about the mystery but less willing to join her on a physical search. When she opened the paper on Oct. 17, the small amount of hope that William would return to her alive was extinguished. The coroner’s report was an exact description of her missing husband. Left a widow with three children too young to work the land and a homestead on which she owed

$250, Martha had made her way to the coroner’s office heavy with the pain of loss.

William was a man with a good and honest reputation, and many were touched by the plight Martha and the children had been left in by his murder. The community, at a loss for suspects and eager to exert vengeance on behalf of the family, fixed its eyes on R. M. Bennett, the farmer unfortunate enough to own the land on which the body had been found. Bennett demanded that a committee revisit the site for further investigation. He claimed that he heard the sound of a wagon in the early hours of the morning when it was supposed the body had been dumped. In the days following the identification of the body, a committee returned to the site, where they discovered remnants of a wagon track that doubled back where the undergrowth became impenetrable. Taking the opportunity to reinforce his innocence, Bennett pointed out that the track indicated the wagon had a distinctive feature: one of the back wheels was dished the wrong way from carrying loads that were too heavy. Not only did it set the tracks apart from those of other wagons in the area, it gave the vehicle a discordant rattle. Bennett had taken note of it the night he heard the wagon because the noise it made was so unique. To his relief, Bennett did not own a wagon with this particular trait. Begrudgingly the committee cleared him of involvement and the suspect list once again ran dry.

The winter of 1872 came in bursts of biting cold spells that stilled the waters of the creek, where the boys continued to fish by cracking holes in the ice. In the mornings they walked an extra mile downriver to keep the bend where they had discovered William Jones out of sight. When they passed it, the younger offered the smallest of nods to the soul of the dead man. His brother ignored him.

On her homestead, Martha worked to prepare the children for winter without their father and listened to the growing rumors that other men had disappeared on the Osage Mission Trail. She did not join the conjecture about the vanished travelers that filled saloons and grocery stores. The newspapers did not report the disappearances because there was no explicit evidence of foul play. The death of her husband loomed large in the imagination of the county, but Martha did not have energy to expend on wondering who the perpetrators were. She could only wait. It would be six months until she knew what had really happened.

From Hell’s Half-Acre by Susan Jonusas, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Susan Jonusas.