HELL’S HALF-ACRE
The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier
By Susan Jonusas
Illustrated. 345 pp. Viking. $28.
In spring 1873, some 75 men on horseback began scouring the Osage Mission Trail in Kansas, looking for any trace of a local doctor named William York. After several weeks, the search party reached a dilapidated farmstead that had recently been abandoned by the Bender family.
“The ground is clogged with weeks of relentlessly bad weather and the scent of rain-soaked wood fills the air,” Jonusas writes. “Beneath it lies a second smell. Like the other members of the party who are veterans of the Civil War, Leroy Dick knows that it is the smell of death.” There were eight bodies buried on the property, some bearing signs of violence. One of them was York’s.
As Jonusas says, those who ventured west during the 19th century faced innumerable threats to life and limb. “There were myriad bizarre accidents to fall foul of,” she writes. “People sliced their feet open chopping wood, fell beneath the feet of angry horses and maimed one another with unreliable firearms.” Some froze to death; others succumbed to snakebite, disease or starvation. And a few truly unlucky souls, like York, were lured to the Benders’ squalid cabin in Labette County, Kan., where they were swiftly, and gruesomely, dispatched.
Though the Bender clan is a familiar one in the annals of serial killer lore, the most lurid details we know about them may be inaccurate, thanks to the embellishments of 19th-century newspapers. Jonusas, who parsed archival records in order to craft this riveting reconstruction, is especially good at dismantling some of the most salacious rumors surrounding the Bender daughter, Kate. Was she a “young woman of repulsive appearance” or a “buxom, good-looking country girl”? (The newspapers could not make up their minds; The Times called her a “red-faced, unprepossessing young woman.”) Was she a passive bystander or the one who slit the men’s throats?
“Kate’s place at the forefront of interest in the family is unsurprising,” Jonusas concludes. “Just the possibility that she was a violent criminal made her an irresistible point of discussion.”
THE FAR LAND
200 Years of Murder, Mania & Mutiny in the South Pacific
By Brandon Presser
327 pp. PublicAffairs. $30.
H.M.S. Bounty, long the stuff of pop-culture legend, vanished in 1789, when Fletcher Christian and other crewmen overthrew their captain, William Bligh; commandeered the vessel; and sailed to parts unknown in the South Pacific with their Tahitian brides. Their fate wasn’t discovered until 1808, when the captain of an American merchant ship anchored just off Pitcairn Island heard a local oarsman speaking “crisp and proper English.” In “The Far Land,” the travel writer Presser describes his own trip to Pitcairn, which is still populated by descendants of the mutineers.
He arrived in 2018 via multiple airplanes and a cargo ship to a hot, humid island populated by a large number of Polynesian rats, spiders the size of a human hand and two quarreling, intermarrying clans, the Christians and the Warrens — 48 people, all told, who lived in decaying houses without doors, practiced their own version of Adventism and had a distressing penchant for tinned meat. Presser later told a friend: “It was like … a trailer park at the end of the world.”
In alternating chapters, Presser juxtaposes a history of the mutineers against the even darker tale of the more recent Pitcairn inhabitants, especially the men, who developed a culture of underage sexual predation that led to seven of them being charged with molestation and rape in 2004. By his own admission, Presser “became obsessed with combing through the earlier chapters of the island’s history in an attempt to isolate the pivotal moment that inspired such depravity.” As a result, the book sometimes feels like a bizarre mash-up of an 18th-century adventure novel and the darkest episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” imaginable.
Ultimately, the tale of what has happened on Pitcairn over the years is “the oldest one in the book: the ineffable quest to return to paradise,” Presser writes. “We can travel to the farthest recesses of the planet, but we are never truly able to escape ourselves.”
BLESSED ARE THE BANK ROBBERS
The True Adventures of an Evangelical Outlaw
By Chas Smith
264 pp. Abrams Press. $26.
The Courson family — missionaries, megachurch pastors, religious broadcasters — formed a sort of “gilded evangelical Christian Camelot” in Southern California in the late 1960s, Smith explains in the first chapter of “Blessed Are the Bank Robbers.” Equal parts true crime, memoir and bank-heist how-to, it’s the story of his cousin Danny, the “Floppy Hat Bandit” and Courson grandson who, Smith says, “has to be within spitting distance of the U.S. record for bank robberies.”
Danny, drowning in gambling debts, held up his first bank in 2006. Soon he hit another, then another. The endorphin high of gambling was quickly supplanted by the endorphin high of committing crimes. “Who would dare step away from the table in the middle of a hot streak?” Smith writes. “Who would dare leave potential millions behind when the odds had crumbled, when fate had chosen a victor?” Danny robbed 19 banks in six weeks before he was caught and sent to prison; when he was released almost eight years later, he picked up the habit again.
When Smith veers away from the main story with chapters like “A Brief History of Bank Robbery in America,” the narrative sputters. But as soon as he tacks back to the Coursons, and Danny in particular, it revs up again. Some of the energy comes from Danny’s spirited correspondence — letters mailed from prison, emails sent through an encrypted Swiss account while he was on the lam. There’s even the text for a PowerPoint Danny created called “How to Make a Living as a Serial Bank Robber” (sample slide: “Dyed money can be cleaned with brake cleaner and industrial detergent”).
Most interesting is the way Smith plumbs their shared history looking for clues to Danny’s life. At one point, he remembers how their families would gather to watch swashbuckling missionary slide shows that featured their fathers’ experiences in places like the jungles of Nicaragua and Honduras. “The seed of Cousin Danny’s bank robbing,” he believes, was likely planted during those long evenings watching the “bigger-than-life Courson adventure we were all living.”
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