a criminal's mind

a collection of known serial killers, what they did, who their victims were, and their stories.

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Bloody Benders–Escape

Detectives following wagon tracks discovered the Benders’ wagon, abandoned with a starving team of horses with one of the mares lame, just outside the city limits of Thayer, 12 mi (19 km) north of the inn. It was confirmed that in Thayer the family bought tickets on the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad for Humboldt. At Chanute, John Jr. and Kate left the train and caught the MK&T train south to the terminus in Red River County near Dennison, Texas. From there they traveled to an outlaw colony thought to be in the border region between Texas and New Mexico. They were not pursued as lawmen following outlaws into this region often never returned. One detective did claim later that he had traced the pair to the border where he had found that John Jr. had died of apoplexy. Ma and Pa Bender did not leave the train at Humboldt, but instead continued north to Kansas City where it is believed they purchased tickets for St. Louis, Missour.

Several groups of vigilantes were formed to search for the Benders. Many stories say that one vigilante group actually caught the Benders and shot all of them but Kate, whom they burned alive. Another group claimed they had caught the Benders and lynched them before throwing their bodies into the Verdigris River. Yet another claimed to have killed the Benders during a gunfight and buried their bodies on the prairie. However, no one ever claimed the $3,000 (2009: $53,000) reward.

The story of their escape spread, and the search continued on and off for the next fifty years. Often, groups of two traveling women were accused of being Kate Bender and her mother.

In 1884, it was reported that John Flickinger had committed suicide in Lake Michigan. Also in 1884 an elderly man matching Pa Benders description was arrested in Montana for a murder where the victim had been killed by a hammer blow to the head committed near Salmon, Idaho. A message requesting positive identification was sent to Cherryvale but the suspect severed his foot to escape his leg irons and bled to death. By the time a deputy from Cherryvale arrived, identification was impossible due to decomposition. Despite the lack of identification, the man’s skull was displayed as that of “Pa Bender” in a Salmon saloon until prohibition forced its closure in 1920 and the skull disappeared.

On October 31, 1889 it was reported that a Mrs Almira Monroe and Mrs Sarah Eliza Davis had been arrested in Niles, Michigan (often misreported as Detroit) several weeks earlier for larceny. They were released after being found not guilty but were then immediately re-arrested for the Bender murders. According to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, the daughter of one of the Benders victims Mrs Frances E. McCaun, had reported the pair to authorities in early October after tracking them down. Their identities were later confirmed by two Osage township witnesses from a tintype photograph. In mid October, Deputy Sherriff LeRoy Dick, the Osage Township Trustee who had headed the search of the Bender property, arrived in Michigan and arrested the couple on October 30 following their release on the larceny charges. Mrs Monroe resisted, declaring that she would not be taken alive but was subdued by local deputies. Mrs Davis admitted that Mrs Monroe was Ma Bender but claimed that she herself was not Kate but her sister Sarah, she later signed an affidavit to that effect while Monroe continued to deny the identification. Deputy Sherriff Dick, along with Mrs McCaun, escorted the pair to Oswego, Kansas where seven members of a 13 member panel confirmed the identification and committed them for trial. Originally scheduled for February 1890, the trial was held over to May and the county subsequently dropped the charges and released both after their attorney produced a marriage certificate indicating that Mrs Davis had been married in Michigan in 1872, the time when several of the murders were committed. A number of researchers question the ready acceptance of the certificates authenticity and suggest that the county was unwilling to accept the expense of boarding the two women for an extended period.

  • 10 August 2011