The Serial Killer Files (25 page)

The Bender family consisted of the sixty-year-old patriarch, John (generally referred to simply as “Old Man Bender” in historical accounts), his wife, known only as “Ma”—just forty-two years old but with the cold-eyed, wizened looks of a hag—a hulking dim-witted twenty-seven-year-old son, John, Jr., and a daughter named Kate, a young woman in her early twenties who, by default, was considered the brains of the operation. Though Kate has gone down in legend as a red-haired temptress, she appears to have been a ruddy-faced, mannish-looking female who held seances under the name “Professor Miss Katie Bender” and claimed to be a faith healer.

Sometime around 1870, the Bender family arrived in Labette County, Kansas, and built a home along a lonely stretch of road a few miles south of the railway town of Cherryvale. The dwelling was little more than a one-room log box, sixteen by twenty feet in size. The interior was divided in half by a canvas curtain. One side served as the family’s living quarters. The other was turned into a rudimentary inn, where a traveler could get a hot meal or drink or a bed for the night. Some visitors, however, got much more than they bargained for.

The Bender shanty

(Kansas State Historical Society)

The Benders, it turned out, were really running a frontier murder-and-robbery operation. When a prosperous-looking traveler showed up, he would be ushered into the dining area and seated at the table with his back to the canvas divider. While Kate beguiled him with some dinnertime conversation, her father or brother would be lurking on the other side of the curtain with a sledgehammer at the ready.

When the unsuspecting guest leaned his head back against the curtain, the hammer would come crashing down, shattering the back of his skull. The body would then be dragged into the bedroom, where it would be robbed, stripped, and dumped through a trapdoor into the cellar. There, his throat would be slit for good measure. Later, the body would be taken out and buried in the pasture.

The dreadful truth about the Benders came to light in the spring of 1873 when a physician named William York left Fort Scott on horseback for his home in Independence and never showed up.

Retracing his route, a posse led by York’s brother eventually happened on the Bender place. The Benders denied all knowledge of the missing Dr. York. A few days later, however—fearing that they were under suspicion—they pulled up stakes and fled. When word got around that the Benders had absconded, the posse returned to the farm and made a horrific discovery. In the pasture were seven shallow graves containing the corpses of eight human beings. Seven were grown men (including Dr.

York). One was an eighteen-month-old girl, who had been traveling with her father. The Benders hadn’t bothered to brain her. They had simply tossed her into the pit with her father’s mangled corpse and buried her alive.

Angry posses scoured the prairies for the fugitives. To this day, no one can say for certain what became of the Benders. In her memoirs, however, Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame writes that her father was one of the men who went out in search of the Benders. Though he never spoke about the experience, she deduced, from the grim expression on his face when he returned from the manhunt, that the posse had in fact caught up with the four Benders and dispensed well-deserved frontier justice.

At the same time that the Bloody Benders were running their lethal roadhouse in Kansas, Boston was being terrorized by the depredations of a juvenile psychopath named Jesse Harding Pomeroy. The crimes of the Boston “Boy Fiend” (as the newspapers dubbed him) began in late 1871, when the sadistic twelve-year-old lured a string of children to various remote locations, where they were stripped, flogged, and tortured with knives and sewing needles. Arrested in late 1872, he was sent to a reformatory but managed to win a discharge after only eighteen months. Just six weeks after his release—while working in a shop run by his mother—he killed a ten-year-old girl and hid her body in the cellar. Five weeks later, he lured a four-year-old boy to a lonely stretch of marshland and savaged his body with a penknife, slashing his throat, stabbing his eyes, and nearly severing his genitals. Arrested in April 1873, the fourteen-year-old Pomeroy was convicted and sentenced to death—a judgment that ignited a bitter two-year controversy over the morality of hanging a minor. The sentence was ultimately commuted to life in solitary confinement, a punishment that many people felt was even harsher than death.

Even while the argument over Pomeroy’s death sentence was raging, Boston was stunned by another serial murder case. On May 23, 1875, a pretty five-year-old girl named Mabel Young, who had just attended Sunday school at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, was lured into the belfry by the twenty-four-year-old sexton, Thomas Piper. He promised to show her his pet pigeons. Once he had her alone in the tower, Piper broke her head open with a cricket bat brought to church that morning for precisely that purpose. When the little girl’s body was discovered, suspicion immediately alighted on Piper. He was already a suspect in another brutal murder, that of a young female servant named Bridget Landregan, whose skull had been crushed with a makeshift club during an attempted rape two years earlier. First proclaiming his innocence, Piper finally confessed not only to the killings of Mabel Young and Bridget Landregan but to two other unsolved homicides: the December 1873 rape-murder of a young woman named Sullivan, who had been savagely bludgeoned with a club, and a nearly identical assault seven months later on a young prostitute named Mary Tynam. The “Belfry Murderer”—as Piper came to be called—went to the gallows on May 26, 1876.

callout 32

Jesse Pomeroy kills 10-year-old Katie Curran in this illustration from an 1875 crime pamphlet (Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations) Twenty years later and on the opposite side of the continent, another belfry murder would send shock waves through America. On the morning of April 13, 1895, several San Francisco women arrived at the Emmanuel Baptist Church on Bartlett Street to decorate it for Easter. Spotting a strange, reddish brown trail leading to a closed-off storage closet, they opened the door and recoiled in horror at the sight of a horribly violated corpse. The victim was twenty-one-year-old Minnie Williams. Her clothes had been ripped off and her underwear shoved down her throat with a stick. She had been slashed to death with a silver table knife—her wrists severed, her breasts cut to ribbons. The broken-off blade of the murder weapon still protruded from her chest. A subsequent autopsy revealed that she had been raped after death.

The following day—Easter Sunday—policemen searching the church for more evidence made another horrifying discovery: the nude and bloated body of eighteen-year-old Blanche Lamont, who had vanished ten days earlier. Her killer had strangled her with his bare hands, then, as in the case of Minnie Williams, committed necrophiliac rape.

Theodore Durrant carries a victim to the belfry

A suspect was quickly identified and taken into custody: Theodore Durrant, a handsome and charming young medical student, who still lived at home with his parents and served as assistant superintendent of the church Sunday school. His three-week trial in September 1895 was a nationwide sensation and drew dozens of swooning, female groupies, one of whom—dubbed the “Sweet-Pea Girl” by the press—brought the handsome young psycho-killer a daily bouquet of the flowers. Despite his protestations of innocence, the jury took just five minutes to convict Durrant, who was hanged, after several postponements, on January 7, 1898. Such was the public’s antipathy toward the so-called Demon of the Belfry, even after his death, that his parents had a hard time finding someplace to dispose of his body, and finally had to transport it to Los Angeles for cremation.

Dr. H. H. Holmes by Rick Geary

Horrific as Durrant’s crimes were, they were easily surpassed by the most infamous medical monster of his day, Herman Mudgett, aka Dr. H. H. Holmes, one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Though he confessed to twenty-seven murders of men, women, and children, Holmes is suspected of many more—possibly several hundred. Most were committed in the notorious “Horror Castle” he erected in a suburb of Chicago during the time of the great 1893 World’s Fair.

At around the same time that Holmes was overseeing the construction of his nightmarish building, another homicidal physician, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, was busily poisoning a string of prostitutes in London. Besides medical training and a taste for serial murder, Cream shared something else with H. H.

Holmes. Before moving to London, Cream had committed murder in Chicago—a crime for which he had received a life sentence, though (unaccountably) he was released after only ten years.

As a poisoner of five prostitutes, Cream wasn’t nearly as lethal as female contemporaries like Sarah Jane Robinson, who killed eleven known victims, including her husband, sister, and five children. Dr. Cream won everlasting notoriety, however, with his dying claim—cut short when he plunged through the trapdoor of the gallows—that he was Jack the Ripper.

Recommended Reading

Thomas S. Duke, Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) Martin Fido, The Chronicle of Crime (1993)

Carl Sifrakis, The Encyclopedia of American Crime (1982) Colin Wilson, The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2 (1980)

The Whitechapel Horrors

Jack the Ripper holds a special place in true-crime history for two reasons. First, the infamous butcher of London’s East End ushered in the modern age of serial lust-murder. And second, he spawned a spate of books and documentaries, a veritable genre unto itself that has supplied a seemingly endless string of theories purporting to solve this grisly, unsolved case.

Even though many so-called Ripperologists have claimed to have identified England’s most notorious murderer, the bare facts of the case tell us virtually nothing about who the Ripper actually was. What we do know is that he went about his work with unbridled savagery and instigated a citywide panic, qualities that would characterize all of the most celebrated serial murder cases that would follow.

The murders occurred between August and November of 1888. According to most accounts, there were five victims in all. All were prostitutes, as would be the case with so many future serial killers. The first victim, Mary Anne Nichols, was found with both her throat and abdomen slashed. As ghastly as this killing might have seemed at the time, it was mild compared to what would happen to the Ripper’s other victims. On September 8, the killer nearly decapitated Ann Chapman, then carved open her stomach and yanked out her intestines. At the end of the month, he murdered two women in one night. It seems the Ripper was interrupted and had to flee while in the middle of mutilating Elizabeth Stride, but he took his time with Catherine Eddowes, cutting off pieces of her face, disemboweling her, and making off with her kidney. His final victim was Mary Kelly, killed on November 9. In the process of carving her from head to toe, he removed her nose and the skin covering her forehead, pulled out her entrails, nearly amputated one of her arms, and skinned her thighs.

Most of the information we have about the Ripper—negligible as it is—comes from a series of letters he wrote to a news agency and a local vigilance committee. The most famous of these, signed “From Hell,”

revealed that his crazed appetites were not confined to murder and mutilation. The letter writer enclosed half of Eddowes’s kidney and described how he had fried and eaten the other half.

The murders ended with the Mary Kelly atrocity. After that, the Ripper seemed to disappear without a trace.

Quickly, theories emerged about who the mystery killer really was. Some believed he was a doctor, in particular a man named Dr. Stanley. The idea was that only a man with surgical skill could have taken apart the victims with such precision, though it’s a little hard to understand how someone could confuse the ravaged remains of Mary Kelly with the work of a gifted surgeon. A butcher could have done as well. Which brings us to another theory, that the Ripper was actually a shochet, a Jewish ritual slaughterman. Other people disputed the very idea that the Ripper was a man, saying that the killer might have been a deranged midwife, a Jill the Ripper. Perhaps the most fanciful theory proposed that

the murders were the work of an agent of the Russian tsar’s secret police as part of an effort to make the English police look ineffectual.

The Whitechapel Horrors

A general rule of thumb in murder investigations is that the chances of finding the culprit diminish after the first couple of weeks; by that time, the thinking goes, the killer’s trail starts to go cold. Undaunted by this piece of conventional police wisdom, authors continued to assert that they have discovered the definitive solution to the Ripper case over a hundred years after the final murder.

A book in the 1970s pointed the finger at Queen Victoria’s grandson, Edward, the Duke of Clarence. In 1993, Hyperion published The Diary of Jack the Ripper, the alleged journal of the killer, a Liverpool cotton merchant named James Maybrick. The authenticity of the diary was discredited by a prominent document expert. The most recent exposé came in 2002 under the hopefully definitive title of Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed. In this highly controversial work, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell implicates a post-impressionist painter named Walter Sickert. Sickert’s name had come up before in other Ripper speculations, but Cornwell went further by turning to the science of DNA identification to prove her case. The DNA samples came from letters, both those written by the killer and those written by Sickert. However, the results of the DNA tests did not conclusively single out Sickert. They only indicated that the DNA residue could have belonged to Sickert—and thousands of other people. For the time being, Cornwell’s assertion will be definitive only until the publication of the next book that purports to solve the ultimate true-crime riddle for once and for all.

Recommended Reading

Paul Begg, The Jack the Ripper A–Z (1996)