GREEDY, TROUBLED & MURDEROUS SON
Tobacco heiress & daughter die in car bombing; thanks to forensics, unhappy child is quickly convicted in Fla.
Early on July 9, 1985, a posh neighborhood in Naples, Fla., was rocked by two blasts that were clearly not caused by firecrackers left over from Independence Day celebrations.
They came from a Chevrolet Suburban parked in front of the estate of Margaret Benson, 63, the heiress to a tobacco fortune. Benson, her son, Scott, 21, and daughter, Carol Lynn Kendall, 40, were sitting in the vehicle when it exploded into a giant, orange fireball.
Margaret and Scott, seated in front, died instantly. Carol’s door was still open, and the blast threw her from the vehicle.
Two men ran from a nearby golf course and pulled her away from the wreckage. She would survive, but the burns and wounds scarred the former beauty-contest contestant for the rest of her life.
Another son, Steven Benson, 33, who had traveled from his home in Fort Myers, was in his mother’s house at the time.
The family had planned to look at some property, a possible site for a new home that Margaret wanted to build. As they were about to leave, Steven said he had forgotten something and had to go back into the house for a minute. The car exploded before he returned.
Dozens of fragments were recovered from the vehicle and surrounding area by officers using wire strainers and magnetic gloves to sift through the dirt.
They found metal pieces from a pipe, a fragment of a circuit board, a switch, and four 1.5 volt D-cell batteries, which packed enough power to detonate a bomb, wrote Michael Mewshaw in “Money to Burn:
The True Story of the Benson Family Murders.”
Experts from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives determined that the pipe bombs were about a foot long, with end caps screwed in to seal black or smokeless powder.
Pieces of the end caps that survived offered a clue—the imprints of the letters U and G, pointing to the manufacturers Union Brand and Grinnell.
The medical examiner’s assessment of the corpses suggested one bomb was in the console between the driver and the front-seat passenger. Margaret’s left side and Scott’s right were mutilated.
Another bomb appeared to have been placed under the front seat.
As scientists examined the fragments, detectives probed the Benson family background. They found a saga that drew comparisons to “Dallas,” the era’s popular prime-time soap about the dirty dealings of the filthy rich.
Margaret’s father was Harry Hitchcock, founder of Lancaster Leaf, of Lancaster, Pa., which he built into the world’s largest cigar and chewing tobacco business. Although she came from great wealth, Margaret chose to marry a handsome but poor Army Air Corps pilot, Edward “Benny” Benson, during WWII.
After the war, Hitchcock gave his son-inlaw a position in the firm. Benson worked hard and was highly successful, further growing the company.
Benson died in 1980 at 60. After his death, Margaret moved to Florida, and spoiled her children with cash and lavish gifts.
The press aired the family’s miseries, starting with Scott.
Early reports called him Margaret’s adopted son, but later reports revealed he was her grandson. At 18, Carol had a baby out of wedlock. Her parents adopted him and kept the truth a secret, even from the boy.
By his 20s, Scott, whose ambition was to become a tennis star, was prone to fits of rage and hooked on nitrous oxide and other drugs. He spent time in a psychiatric ward after threatening to have his guard dog tear Margaret to bits.
But suspicions quickly turned to Steven, partly because of his bizarre behavior after
the murders. Carol said her brother didn’t try to help as she was lying on the ground near the flames. Also, the van he used for work was parked nearby and was spattered by Margaret’s blood and bits of bone. Steven kept driving the van without washing off the gory residue.
He also had failed at every job he held and business he tried to start. Investigators believed this gave him a powerful motive to knock off the other members of his family — greed. With his relatives gone, he’d be the sole heir to his mother’s $10 million estate.
In the end, the bombs themselves led to his arrest. In a hardware store, police found an invoice for a pipe purchased shortly before the murders. A palm print on the invoice was a match for Steven’s.
At his trial, which started in July 1986, prosecutors presented evidence showing that Steven had stolen more than $100,000 from Margaret. He was “frittering away his mother’s money,” the prosecutors said.
They said that Margaret found out and threatened to cut him from the will.
Defense lawyers tried to shift the focus to Scott, saying that his drug habit put him on the wrong side of narcotics traffickers who were behind the bombing.
The jury deliberated for 12 hours and found Steven Benson guilty of killing his mother and nephew. The verdict could have meant the death penalty, but the jury recommended life in prison. He got two consecutive life sentences, with a possibility of parole in 55 years.
Behind bars, Benson continued to behave like a spoiled child, spewing out grievances about the food, other inmates, corrections officers, and anything else that offended him.
On July 3, 2015, an inmate murdered Steven Benson.
The weapon was as simple and deadly as the bombs that had killed his family — a homemade knife plunged into his brain.
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