Everyone in the search party thought they were guilty and wanted to hang them on the spot. There was a back and forth, with Ma Bender claiming that the woman was a witch who had poisoned her coffee, and Kate Bender offering to help use her psychic powers to help York find his brother. After a woman fled the Bender cabin, claiming that Ma Bender threatened her with knives, York arrived with an armed search party. The thing that made William York’s case different was that his brother was a Kansas state senator, the kind of person with the resources to launch a proper search and investigation. York had set out in search of another missing man, who had left with his daughter to build a new life near Osage, never to be found again. Sure, there were some locals who had disappeared mysteriously, but there wasn’t enough evidence to point a finger at the Benders. Except for prickly attitudes, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. They were by most initial accounts a normal, if exceedingly private, immigrant family of either German or Dutch origin, running a B&B out of the front of their large cabin and farm compound. Daughter Kate fancied herself a psychic healer and attended church regularly with her brother, John Jr. The parents rarely interacted with other townspeople, leaving their children to act as social ambassadors. His wife, known simply as Ma, was the bitter matriarch of the clan, having such a sour disposition that she was known as “She-Devil” to the locals. He wore a heavy beard and had the face of someone who almost never smiled. Just seventeen miles south of Independence, where Wilder and her family all wished each other good night before bedding down in the evenings, was the town of Osage, the home of the Benders. Theirs is the story of the domestication of violence, of how the dark and malevolent is less likely to exist in the grimace of some supervillain in a top hat, and more in the strange smell coming from your neighbors’ basement. It’s the story of how a disturbed family ran a bed and breakfast almost solely for the purpose of finding fresh murder victims. The Bloody Benders, as they were known, are as deeply woven into the fabric of American identity as sports, jazz, drug wars, highways, and labor strikes. There’s no better example of how inseparable American dreams of a pristine past and American nightmares of domestic violence than the tale of the Bender family. Forget the lawlessness, the murderers, the rapists, the lynchings, and the starvation. Forget the fields of rotting Buffalo corpses, ghost towns, and Indian villages wrecked by disease. If that were our only artifact from the time and place - 19th-century Kansas - the nostalgia would be heavy and inescapable, like a black hole from which neither doubt nor complexity can escape. Perhaps it’s most fully realized literary manifestation is in the Little House on the Prairie books, in which Laura Ingalls Wilder describes a painfully simple pioneer culture of Sunday school and log cabins. The hardworking, plainspoken and resilient men building their own personal paradises alongside the hardy and simple women is an archetype that we desperately cling to. The American Prairie, breadbasket of our continent and epicenter of plainspoken American purity, is a sort of “safe space” in our cultural memory. In the collective myths of our past we try especially hard to cover up the ugly side of our national character. David Lynch’s pristine American suburbs, where one day you find a human ear in a field and the trap door opens under you, revealing a shadow world of drugs, violence, and insanity that had always been there, waiting for you. The glitzy fun of disco humming along inside of decaying and crime-riddled cities. You think of the jet-setting smooth jazz of the sixties and realize that it’s chained, somehow, to the lynchings and church bombings of the South. You can’t think of the summer of love without thinking of Manson. Think of our saccharine pop music, our amusement parks, our elevation of youth to a nearly moral condition.īut just as prevalent, and definitely more profound, is our national penchant for pairing the gum-drop with the blood-stained. The radiance of our culture shines in a complacent and mindless cheeriness over the entire world. One of the more interesting aspects of American culture is how deeply wedded innocence and violence are.
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