The Bender Family were from Labetter County, Kansas, around the years of 1870, or 1871. There were two German immagrants at the head of the family. The father, John or Old man Bender, and the mother Ma Bender. The son, John Jr., and the daughter, Katie. Katie was the smart one. It's said that John Jr. is actually from the mothers previous marriage.

He and Katie were rumored to be having a relationship. They built a small building along one of the main roads. A curtain hung in the building to make it have two rooms....one for sleeping and one for a roadside business. There was a sign above the door that said Groceries, but they would also serve meals and rent space to sleep for the night. Katie would romanticize the guests with her charm, so the family could murder them. They would kill the travelers that had a lot of money. Katie would convince them to stay for dinner, and sit with his back to the curtain. With them sitting there, either Old Man, or John Jr., would take a sledgehammer and bash in the guys skull.

They would throw the body out of a trapdoor in the back of the house into a pit below. At night they would take the body out of the pit and bury it in the orchard behind the house. They kept doing this for about a year and it was thought that they took 10,000.00 from their victims. They killed a man named William York, and done the same procedure in disposing of his body, but a few weeks later, A.M. York came looking for his missing brother. A.M. York stopped briefly at the Benders Inn, and noticed that something seemed odd. He sent another search party to the inn to check things out, and he wasn't the only suspicious one either.

A neighbor noticed that the Benders had abandoned their home fast, even leaving a valuable group of livestock behind. The search party found blood in the pit behind the house, and decided to look even more at the Bender residence. The rain had settled the ground, and the searches found spots of dirt that was the size of graves. The first grave dug up was the body of William York. Eight bodies in all were recovered. Seven of the bodies were men, and one was a baby that was buried alive under one of the men that was it's father. The Benders were never found, but stories say that they were tracked down and killed before they left Kansas. Other stories say that they made it to Michigan, and even some say Texas. But the truth is....they disappeared without a trace.