Hell’s Half Acre
Susan Jonusas Scribner £16.99
Kansas, 1871. People keep disappearing. In one way it goes with the territory – this is pioneer country and tensions are still high after the Civil War, not to mention ongoing disputes with indigenous Indians. Land grabs, blood feuds and plain old thievery could explain why so many travellers have vanished. All the same it is odd. The men who disappear are solid, respectable types.
Fast-forward a couple of years.
The townsfolk of Osage have noticed that the Bender family (below), German immigrants, have done a bunk. They always seemed standoffish, but was there something more sinister going on? Digging underneath their filthy cabin, the townsfolk find at least 11 bodies.
In this grisly true-crime saga, Susan Jonusas retells the story of America’s first serial killers. ‘The Bloody Benders’ have long held a top spot in the mythology of the
Wild West, and even today feature on true-crime TV shows. Jonusas looks at the evidence again, excluding the more fanciful gossip around this odd family.
She is very good at painting a picture of hardscrabble life on the prairie. The thousands of European settlers who headed West for a better life may have been dirt poor, but they were also enterprising, hopeful and committed to doing the right thing. Jonusas is also very good at describing the creepy behaviour of the family, who lured travellers to their inn with the promise of a meal and a bed, before whacking them over the head with a hammer and cutting their throats.
Jonusas is less good at untangling the Benders’ motives. Were they primarily after their victims’ valuables, or was it the act of killing that turned them on?
Most frustrating of all is that no one knows what happened next. It is pretty clear that the Benders fled by train to a town called Humboldt but, after that, they disappear. For the next two decades there were sightings all over the West and numerous cases of mistaken identity. Possibly the real Benders were murdered by vigilantes. Or perhaps they simply lived an outlaw life with all the other train robbers and cow thieves of the
Wild West.
It is not Jonusas’s fault that she cannot answer these questions, but it does mean that the book lacks the kind of big reveal that true-crime aficionados crave.