Title: Hell’s Half-Acre
Rating: 3 Stars
Not often, but I do occasionally venture into the true crime genre. I can’t remember now how I heard about this one.
The story is set in the 1870s in very rural Kansas. The Bender family set up a sparse, crude grocery store and basic lodgings near one of the few roads in the area. The mother and father are quiet and barely speak English. Their son John Jr spoke English well but had a regular nervous laugh. Their neighbors considered him simple. Their daughter Kate was considered to be somewhat of a local beauty with a personality that seemed to veer from pleasant to menacing.
Shortly after they moved to the area and built their house, people started disappearing. Because this was generally a lawless area, cattle rustlers were the suspected culprits. Pressure increased when the physician William York disappeared. He was the brother of Alexander York, a vigorous and politically connected man.
York set up an extensive search party. As various locals began to be questioned, the Benders were mentioned. The Benders were generally unsociable. John Jr’s odd behavior and the disquieting presence of Kate was enough to justify York’s visit to their homestead. Although the interview was unsettling (Kate suspiciously asked York to come back later without his men), York left. Later that night, the Bender family abandoned their homestead and fled to Texas.
When it was discovered that the Benders had left, the searchers came back to their homestead. After noticing fresh mounds of dirt in the orchard, they dug and began finding bodies. The Benders apparent method was to have a victim sit at their table in their cabin. Someone would then beat the victim over the head with a hammer. Ultimately, the victim’s throat would be slashed and the body dropped down through a trap door to a cellar, later to be buried. Although the number will never be known, the Benders were estimated to have killed at least a dozen people.
The discovery of the bodies launched a manhunt. Given the limited financial resources of Kansas and the general lawlessness of the Texas area that the Benders fled to, the search did not go well. In fact, it later turned out that, at one point, one of the searchers was in the same room as John Jr, but never having seen him, was not able to make the connection.
Over the years, there were various rumors about the Benders. Nearly twenty years after the crimes, two women were suspected of being the Bender women and were brought back to Kansas for trial. During the trial, affidavits were produced that proved that they were nowhere near Kansas when the crimes were committed. To this day, no one knows what happened to the Bender family.
The book can be thought of as comprising two parts. The first part covers a quick history of Kansas, the arrival of the Benders, a quick portrait of the murder victims, and the discovery of the bodies. The second half is the pursuit of the Benders.
Because there is so much more documentation, the first half of the book is much richer than the second. The second half, except for the trial of the two women, seems to be conjecture. This is often the problem when trying to write a narrative history around a remote historical event. The author reaches a point where there is simply not enough historical documentation to produce the level of detail required to produce a rich narrative history.
One of the more significant writers of this genre is David Grann. I think that I once remember him talking about his writing process. Imagine there is a sentence in his work that says something like, “On August 25th, 1889, there was a scent of orange and coffee in the air on the warm summer day”. For that one sentence, he consulted a weather history to get the temperature of the day, he consulted a fireman’s map to determine that a coffee roaster was nearby, and he found a daily newspaper that reported that an orange cart had been knocked over on that day. For that one seemingly innocuous sentence, he consulted three distinct sources to validate each fact implicit in that sentence.
Now imagine that he has to do that for all 300 or so pages of his work. The scale of this effort is impossible to imagine. The skill and craft to form a cohesive narrative out of all of these disparate sources is monumental.
Knowing that, I have to cast some suspicion on the veracity of this book. This book contains direct quotes, narrative flourishes, and behavioral quirks (eg Pa Bender regularly spitting off the back of wagon as they’re fleeing) that I can’t imagine has the documentation backing that a writer like Grann would require. Given that, this makes me wonder exactly how much of this is narrative history and how much is just plain old fashioned fiction. Since this is advertised as a narrative history, this confusion leads me to give this a lower rating.
I have to admit that, unknowing at the time that I chose to read this book, I actually do have a personal connection to this history. Independence Kansas (not to be confused with the birthplace of Harry Truman, Independence Missouri) is mentioned several times. In fact, this seems to cover the time when Independence was at its peak. Identified as the place to register land claims, it was apparently one of the more significant towns in the area. Independence was the birth place of my mother. Having visited it a couple of times, I can attest that it is now a sleepy little town that, for the last eighty years or so, is slowly losing population. It’s interesting to read about it during a time in which it was thriving.
I do find nineteenth century true crime history to be interesting. We’re always so wrapped up in our current time. When we read today’s bloody headlines we seem to yearn for those seemingly innocent days of yesteryear. Well, guess what? Those days weren’t so innocent. Independence Kansas in the 1870s is about as far as you can get from the streets of current big cities, but violence seemingly lurks everywhere.
dorkenstein 