Civil War
Assistant Surgeon
15th Regiment
U.S.C. Infantry

Killed May 1873 Labette County, Kansas
Brother of Kansas State Senator Alexander m. York
Victim of the infamous Bender family/murderers

Note: bio info provided by P Fazzini (#46565936)

"Doctor York left home March 3rd, and was traced on his homeward route till the 11th of March near noon. . . . On Tuesday May 6th, news reached Senator York and his younger brother Edward . . . that strange developments were being made at the Bender place. . . . When Edward York arrived, the men were investigating the cellar. . . . . But his suspicion soon fastened on the plowed ground purpoting to be an orchard. . . . Soon the outlines of a grave were traced . . . and the Doctor's remains taken to Independence." Quoted from "The Bender Tragedy, Dedicated to the Memory of my Husband: Dr. William York, Murdered in Labette County, 1873 by Mary E. York" pages 81-85. Originally published in Independence, Kansas, June 8, 1875, reprinted in December 2018.
NOTE: bio info provided by Contributor: Julie Wollard Trout (47278587)∼Early in the spring, Colonel York from Fort Scott, came riding down the road to the Benders. He was accompanied by 12 men, for he was determined to find out what happened, on this same road, to his brother, Dr. Willliam H. York. The doctor had been missing for two weeks; he had been traced to the tavern, but no further.

The Benders greeted the Colonel and his posse; old Mrs. Bender grumpily; young Bender with a bible quotation; and Professor Kate with a jest, a merry smile, and hey-nonny-no. But they had not seen Doctor York, absolutely not. Sorry, but they couldn't help. So, after looking about a bit, the colonel and his 12 men rode away.

Brooding over the matter, talking with folks in this town and that, and hearing little that was good about the Benders, they came back, ten days afterward. They were too late; the house was deserted; the Benders had fled; leaving their cattle half-dead of thirst.

This time the dismal foul-smelling place was ransacked. Things were queer, no doubt. But there was nothing definite, until Colonel York, looking into the orchard, at the rear, notice some long, narrow depressions in the ground. The place looked strangely like a graveyard.

"Men," shouted the Colonel, "get some spades."

In the first pit, they found--five feet deep-- the naked body of Doctor York. His skull had been bashed in with something like a sledgehammer.

From the other graves, they took the bodies of nine men, a young man, and a little girl. It appeared that the girl had died by suffocation; she had been buried alive.

You see, while guests at Bender's Tavern were entertained by Miss Kate's conversation, the two men lurked in the next room. As soon as the traveler leaned his head back against the curtain, he was brained with a sledgehammer. His body was dragged to the other room, searched, and stripped. His throat was then cut and he was tumbled into the cellar. Here a tunnel led to the orchard, where, after night had fallen, the body was smuggled underground.

Here were the victims; here were the missing travelers; but the gentle Bender's had got away, and they have five days start. You can hear many opinions today, in Kansas, as to what happened to them.

The old-timers have a story that they stick to. They will not admit that the enthusiastic lynching parties which started after the Benders were such sissies as to let them escape. They nod, wink, and say:

"Well, my father would never talk about it--but...

This version of the tale is that when the fugitives were overtaken, they were carrying $7,000 in loot.

After the benders were "laid underground," the spoil was quietly divided among their captors, who took an oath to say nothing. So the fate of the Benders is still a mystery.

Sixteen years later two women were arrested in Michigan and hauled back to Kansas. It was charged that they were Mrs. Bender and Miss Kate. A careful legal investigation proved beyond doubt that they were no more the Benders than they were the Seven Sutherland Sisters.

The whole ridiculous persecution originated with Meddlesome Matty named Mrs. McCann-- a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions.

The person Mrs. McCann said was Miss Bender was really a scrubby old washerwoman named Davis. No one could be more unlike the flashing-eyed Professor Kate, who talked with the dead and cured fits and blindness--with a sledgehammer!

Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine)
25 Feb. 1951
King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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The Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers who lived and operated in Labette County, Kansas, between 1871 and 1873. Nearly a dozen travelers who stopped at their small inn were murdered, and their bodies later found buried on the Benders' property. The family of four disappeared before they could be arrested. Over the years, a dozen different accounts of their fate were theorized or told. The story below—that they were killed soon after they were suspected in the disappearances of eleven people—is just one of those accounts, but this one comes from one anonymous source, and two deathbed confessions by individuals who all said they were involved in the interrogation and execution of all four Bender family members. It was written and published in obscure true crime magazine in 1951, and has since passed into the public domain.

When Osage Township began seriously to worry, about March 1, 1873, over vanishing travelers on the road from Fort Scott on the Missouri line to Independence deep toward the Indian nations, those travelers had been vanishing for about two years. One more was still to vanish, before Kansas and the world would know how these disappearances had come to pass.

In those days news did not travel fast or far, especially news about lost strangers nobody expected to meet, anyway. People were too busy settling.

First there was only a trail leading southwest into Kansas, bitten through the buffalo grass by heavy-rimmed, ox-drawn wheels. As the Civil War spent itself and a new impulse of settlement strove that way, the trail was hardened and widened by much travel into a highway. Wagonloads of settlers trundled in. Here and there on the treeless plain sprang up farmsteads, relieving a monotony hitherto broken only by occasional meager creeks, small knolls, or willow and cottonwood scrub. Osage Township in Labette County, just east of the new village of Cherryvale, was distin¬guished from the rest of the developing country only by the faint color and flavor of mystery.

Many of the sunburnt farmers had served in the Union Army. Their women were plain and industrious, their children shock-headed, barelegged, shrill. These people built their own houses, butchered and smoked their own meat, ground their own flour from their own grain, sewed their own clothing and cobbled their own shoes. They had no theatres, no libraries. Occasionally there was a barn-raising, a revival meeting, a spelling school. Neighbors made much of every trifle of entertainment and sociability.

Leroy Dick was Osage Township Trustee. Among his neighbors were Rudolph Brockman, bluff, jovial and Teutonic; Silas Toles, of shrewd Yankee stock; George Frye and Thomas Jeans, modest and laconic farmers; Maurice Sparks, whose quick temper sometimes fulfilled the implication of his name; and the Bender family, whose roadside home did duty as store, restaurant, and hotel.

Indeed, the Bender place was almost as much a focus of the country community's interest as the little Carpenter Schoolhouse, which rendered extra service as church and meeting hall. Not that the Benders lived pretentiously; their house sat a hundred yards back from the road, simple and well kept, an inartistic oblong of unpainted planks. Behind it stood a stable, a pigsty, a railed barnyard and, close to the back stoop, a well curb with rope and bucket. Flanking all these on the right rose an unusual and grateful sight in that new, bald and semi-arid country, an orchard. The Benders came from Germany, where good nurserymen are bred. They had set out fifty young fruit trees in orderly rows, and cultivated them tirelessly. There was promise of apples, cherries and peaches.

The house was divided into two chambers by a canvas cover nailed to a row of perpendicular studding. Against this makeshift partition stood a heavy table, with benches behind and before. Meals were served there. To one side were ranged shelves and a counter, with a small stock of canned goods, bolts of cloth and simple "notions."

Customers fell easily into talk with the daughter of the house. Kate Bender, acting as storekeeper and waitress, was a bright-haired, rosy girl in her early twenties. An old Kansan still alive in 1930 remembered that her figure was fully and finely curved, and that her red mouth smiled and smiled. He said that she would have been admired in larger and more critical communities than old Osage Township. By all accounts, she was possessed of a sparkling vitality and considerable intelligence. She claimed to be a spiritualistic medium, and had presented séances of delightfully creepy hokus-pokus in the Carpenter Schoolhouse and in Cherryvale, eight miles west. Readily and saucily she joked with any man who glanced her way. Grinning young admirers surrounded her at all the rustic gatherings.

While she gossiped with customers inside the house, their horses were tended outside by her brother John. He was tall and slender, attractive in a somewhat delicate and boyish way. He looked and acted less than his twenty-five years. He laughed even more than Kate did — some neighbors said that John would laugh at nothing at all.

The parents were seen less often. Occasionally, the father left his work in field, stable or orchard to serve a customer or greet a neighbor. William John Bender was nearly sixty, with coarse gray hair and a bulky thickness of body. He stood six feet tall for all the stoop in his powerful shoulders. From under straight brows his dark eyes gazed steadily. He, too, liked to joke, and his German accent made his jokes seem funnier than they actually were.

The mother was the only sober-faced Bender. She looked older than her husband, unhealthily fat, with thin, iron-gray hair combed severely back from a frown-seamed forehead. She spoke almost no English and seemed shy, even dour, to strangers. Usually she stayed in the rear apartment behind the canvas, with the stove and the family's beds. By Osage Township's standards, she was a good cook.

These four Benders were to be by far the most widely celebrated dwellers in their community. Their country home, with the canvas partition and the table and the counter, with the barn and the orchard, soon became familiar, by word of mouth and by steel engravings, to a great part of the world.

Why, it began to be asked solemnly as the year 1873 began, did travelers disappear from the road between Fort Scott and Independence?

One man of that region was no admirer of the Benders. John Rader — Happy Jack, they called him — rode into Cherryvale one day, and he did not look or sound happy. To a group of friends in front of a store, he said that riding up to the Bender house in the early evening he had seen Kate through a window, and she was wearing no more clothes than would, in the idiom of the community, dust the keys of a fife. Nor was Kate flustered by Happy Jack's frankly admiring stare. She had waved for him to come in! And what had he done? Well, he'd done what any real man would do. He had dismounted, tossed his reins to the waiting John, and entered. Disappointingly enough, Kate had hurried on her clothes in the intervening few seconds, and the old folks had come into the front room. They'd made Happy Jack welcome, he'd eaten supper there, and what with one thing and another he'd announced he'd stay the night. They made him a pallet on the floor of the front room.

All this sounded hospitable of the Benders, protested Rader's friends, and some of them chuckled. But not Happy Jack.

He had gone to sleep. Then he had wakened — someone was stopping a team outside, talking to old William John Bender. Then, of a sudden, the sound of a heavy blow, and a yell like a man's last sound on earth. Quiet. Moments of quiet. Finally, the Benders, all of them, had stolen into the front room and stood around Happy Jack's pallet, listening to see if he was awake. Understandably, he had not dared to move. When they left, he lay awake all the rest of the night, and he had ridden away before breakfast.

His rueful face drew a round robin of laughter. His friends comforted him. The Benders do any killing? Shucks, they'd been teasing poor Happy — the Dutch idea of fun.

To support that theory, someone spoke of an old woman's experience in the Bender home the year before. She had been visiting there, and Kate had grabbed up a knife and screamed that spirits were telling her to kill. The old woman had run for the door, but the Benders did not pursue. They only laughed, the way they must be laughing right now at Happy.

"Well, I don't like those jokes," announced Happy Jack Rader. "They can play them on somebody else."

If the Benders were pranksters, they seemed to be good citizens. During the first week of March, 1873, William John Bender and his son attended a meeting called at the schoolhouse by Township Trustee Dick. Representatives of various families crowded the benches, bearded, roughly-dressed, serious-faced men. Dick, presiding, spoke of several inquiries from the east, about travelers who had dropped out of sight in the Osage Township Country.

"It's been charged that we've got criminals here," he said.

Maurice Sparks challenged that from a front bench. Nobody had the right to suspect the township folk without proof. A man is innocent, said Sparks, until he is proven guilty. A neighbor snickered, and Sparks grew angrier.

"If anybody doubts me," he said, "he can come and search my farm. I'm not hiding anything."

"Neither am I," said the elder Bender from where he sat with his son. "Search my farm, too."

Several made the same offer, but Sparks was not through talking. He urged the organization of a company of vigilantes. "Law-abiding men must stand together for protection," he said.

Again several listeners approved his suggestion, and among these were the two Benders. But the meeting broke up without any definite action being taken. There would be another meeting soon, promised Leroy Dick.

Meanwhile, Dr. William York, a physician who lived in Independence to the southwest, was coming to Osage Township.

Dr. York was a jaunty, confident young man, who had formerly lived in Fort Scott. In February he had visited his old home, where his lawyer brother, A. M. York, was a substantial citizen. Now he was returning to Independence, and on March 9 he paused at an Osage Township farm to ask the sort of question that recently had vexed Leroy Dick and Maurice Sparks. Had anyone seen or heard of his neighbor G. W. Longcohr? Longcohr, with his little daughter, had gone to visit in Iowa some months previously, and people were wondering why he never wrote.

No. Nobody could give any information about Longcohr, sorry. Say, it was getting on for noon, wouldn't Dr. York alight and take potluck with the family?

"No, thank you," said the doctor. "I'll stop at Bender's for dinner, and tonight I'll sleep at Cherryvale."

He gathered up his reins and urged his fine saddle horse on toward the Benders', and into oblivion.

Six weeks passed. Leroy Dick may have thought about another township meeting, but did not call it. Along the road traveled something that had the aspect of an avenging army.

For in Fort Scott, Dr. York's brother wondered about him, even as Dr. York himself had wondered about Longcohr. And Attorney A. M. York was not the man to sit still at home and do his wondering about a vanished kinsman.

A. M. York was forty-five years old in 1873, had served as state senator, and owned a substantial amount of property. He was a man of position and reputation in Fort Scott. A dozen years ago he had gone to the Civil War as a second lieutenant, and for courage and ability had risen to the rank of colonel, commanding a regiment of Negro infantry in the Army of the Frontier. His figure was erect and stalwart, and the mature ruggedness of his features was accentuated by a thick beard, dark and curly. To Independence he rode in mid-April, made inquiries about the brother who had never ridden home, and then started back toward Fort Scott. With him rode fifty friends and neighbors of the lost doctor. They carried weapons.

They paused to speak to residents of Cherryvale. Hadn't Dr. William York planned to spend the night of March 9 there? But nobody in Cherryvale remembered seeing the young doctor. On the morning of April 24, they rode into Osage Township. Bearded Colonel York — they were calling him colonel and sir, as if he were at the head of a military unit — stopped at house after house to ask about his brother, with all his followers listening in their saddles. He'd been seen in Osage Township, eh? And what was the name of those people with whom he was planning to eat dinner? Bender, was it? It surely was.

Into the Bender yard they rode, and bunched up there like a cavalry patrol.

Young John Bender met them at the front door. One account says that he had been reading a Bible, and stood with it closed upon a finger to mark the place. He answered Colonel York's questions.

Dr. York? Dr. William York, a nice-looking young fellow on a nice- looking horse? Sure enough, Dr. York had eaten there at noon on March 9. Kate had served him, and she would remember that attractive guest. Leaving the Bender place — yes — it must have been at Drum Creek, yonder across the road, a small stream rimmed and tufted with scrubby trees, that Dr. York had been killed.

"I was there not long ago," said John, "and shots were fired at me."

"Shots?" repeated Colonel York. "Who fired them?"

"I never stopped to see," smirked John, plausibly enough. "But you protect me, Colonel, and I'll take you there and show you."

Colonel York beckoned to several of his party. They followed John to the banks of Drum Creek, and John pointed to a cottonwood trunk. Colonel York bent down from his saddle to see. Those holes looked like the marks of bullets. …

"A grave!" John Bender almost yelped, pointing.

The men sprang from their horses, gathering at the mound. It bulged upward, the length and width of a man. At York's crisp order, two cantered back to bring spades and picks from the house. Then they dug. John Bender, helping, forgot to giggle. A spade grated horribly on bone, and a man exclaimed nervously. Carefully they scraped the earth from white ribs, tagged with rotting flesh. Colonel York gazed stonily, his mouth thin in his beard.

"It's only a hog," said one of the diggers.

The skull had turned up on a shovel, long-jawed, shallow-craniumed, the skull of a beast. They covered it again, and rejoined their party in the Bender yard.

The other members of the family had come out on the stoop — William John mystified, his wife uncomprehending, Kate pleasurably excited by the presence of so many men. Colonel York entered the house, with some of his party, and sat at the table. He told his errand. Kate listened with every evidence of sympathy and concern.

When he had finished, she raised her eyes to the roof beams. "I am a spiritualistic medium," she said slowly. "Perhaps I can help you, Colonel York."