by RICK DANLEY // September 27, 2017
To the list of classic movie quotes — “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” (“Gone With the Wind”); “We’ll always have Paris” (“Casablanca”); “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” (“The Godfather”); “You’re going to need a bigger boat” (“Jaws”) — I’d nominate another.
Here it is: “We only ever found bits of my brother.”
The line comes toward the end of “Bender,” a recently released movie that tells the true story — through the slanted glass of fiction — of the Kansas clan who, in the early 1870s, harnessed themselves to the historical record by becoming the country’s first family of serial killers. The “Bloody Benders” they were called — Old Man Bender, his wife, their grown son John, and daughter Kate.
The family owned two tracts of land in the remote grasslands of Labette County, along the Osage Mission trail, just a few miles north of Cherryvale. They built a small house and a small sod-and-stone barn. East of the barn was an orchard where the old man tended close to 50 small fruit trees. And over the Benders’ front door hung a crudely made sign — “Groceries” — a silent invitation to passersby.
Lonely travelers looking for a fresh meal or hoping to water their horses were known to seek relief at the Bender farm. The tight-knit family of four would invite the travelers in and prepare for them a meal. The visitors were almost always solitary commuters. Although, once, a father paid a visit to the old farmstead with his toddler daughter in tow.
As the story goes, the interior of the Bender home was divided by a canvas partition. The family slept on one side of the curtain and took their meals on the other. Travelers in need of a hot meal were given the seat of honor, a log bench directly in front of the canvas.
Unfortunately for the brittle skulls of the unsuspecting diners, the Benders kept their stash of axes and sledgehammers behind the curtain and would, when the time was ripe, bludgeon their guest before he’d even finished his sides.
It is said that the Benders killed anywhere between 12 and 24 poor wanderers. Of those, eventually 11 bodies were found on the Benders’ property, each one buried in a shallow grave near the family’s orchard.
The execution of a prominent local doctor is what finally drew the attention of law enforcement. But it was too late.
As word of the Bender murders got out, the family’s reputation for hospitality took an understandable dip. Perhaps sensing this, the Benders abandoned their home under the cloak of night and were never heard from again.
MOST OF “BENDER,” which is California-born director John Alexander’s first film, was shot in Kansas in the summer of 2013 — in and around Geary County, Wichita and Junction City. “I could have filmed the movie in California, or on a soundstage,” Alexander told the Topeka Capitol-Journal in a recent interview, “but it wouldn’t have had nearly the same authentic creepiness.” Take that, Kansas.
Battling triple-digit heat and torrential rainfall, Alexander — along with his wife and co-writer J.C. Guest — pressed through production to the finish but then faced the usual hurdles that often accompany editing and distribution.
Finally, in August of this year, the movie was released on DVD and on various online streaming platforms. Thursday’s screening at the Bowlus will mark one of the few opportunities to see the movie on the big screen.
“Bender” stars the great American actor — and longtime friend of Iola’s Keaton Celebration — 93-year-old James Karen. Unfortunately for an actor of his enormous talent, Karen is given very few lines of dialogue. The film depicts the elder Bender as a cranky old goat with a shock of tangled white hair and a permanent glower; a shipwreck of a man whose speaking part is restricted almost entirely to a glossary of grunts and growls. Occasionally, the distemperate patriarch will pound the dinner table and shout something along the lines of “I want pork!” which appears to be a kind of prelude to the coming thump on the head. “I want pork!” Bonk.
Even without much dialogue, Karen — like his great friend and one-time co-star, Buster Keaton — is a magnetic physical presence on screen.
Nicole Jellen, perhaps the film’s true lead, plays Kate Bender. Of the real Benders, Kate was the most sociable. She was said to be beautiful, charming, intelligent. According to historian David Dary, Kate attracted plenty of attention in Cherryvale and the surrounding communities when she printed a newspaper ad in the summer of 1872 declaring her powers to heal all sorts of diseases, including blindness, deafness, “dumbness.” She invited afflicted persons to visit her on the family farm: “14 miles East of Independence, on the road from Independence to Osage Mission one and one half miles South East of Norahead Station.”
While the film delves very little into Kate’s strange life outside the Bender home, Jellen — despite not being from Kansas — injects the role with her own sort of authentic creepiness. Another standout is Buck Taylor. Best known for his role as Deputy Newly O’Brien in CBS’s long-running TV show “Gunsmoke,” the 79-year-old Taylor, whose spurs are as sharp as they were 50 years ago, plays the flinty, clear-eyed pursuer of justice, a man called Sheriff J.E. Stone. Chance Caeden, who can’t be much older than 11, plays the son. This is another fictional gloss on the real story. The actual John Bender Jr. was in his middle twenties during the years in question. The film makes good use of a stable of other excellent, semi-recognizable character actors.
AMONG THIS CAST of talent, most of whom were flown in from a variety of coastal cities, there was at least one native Kansan: Bill Shaffer — longtime station manager and producer at KTWU, president of the Kansas Silent Film Festival, a friend of James Karen, and a veteran contributor to the Keaton Celebration.
Credited as one of the members of the Cherryvale congregation, Shaffer’s is a small role. But if you know where to look, you can see the top half of his head. It is partially obscured by the bonnet of a woman in the pew just before his. Shaffer sits among the crowd of churchgoers in a scene that appears a little past the movie’s halfway point. A few seconds later, you get a pretty good look at the side of his face.
“It’s literally a situation where if you blink you miss me,” laughed Shaffer as he recalled by phone his couple of days on the “Bender” set.
But for Shaffer it was worth it. He was able to reunite, albeit in layers of Western wear underneath a hot August sun, with his friend James Karen, and kibitz with a new friend, Buck Taylor, and he was able to witness up-close the many vagaries of current moviemaking.
One of which was the melancholy, if inevitable, fact of just how much good material gets left on the cutting room floor. He recalled a line from Karen, who, after seeing that the original edit of the film had been heavily slashed to create a shorter version, observed that the movie should actually have been called the “Bloody Benders” — for all the good material that was killed to make it.
But this is the way with every movie, and, running at a crisp 80 minutes, filmgoers in southeast Kansas have, at last, the chance to see this macabre chapter in their history projected onto the big screen.
