apple serial number mystery solved forensic

#Apple serial number mystery solved forensic plus
#Apple serial number mystery solved forensic professional

With nerve and cunning, she played a clever game and won.

Her long-term financial security was the real goal. While writers have portrayed her as a knife-wielding temptress, perhaps Katie was actually a shrewd businesswoman with bigger fish to fry than chasing men around a desolate shack. More than any other member of the Bender family, Katie has drawn the greatest curiosity. spirited horses, wagons, buggies, harnesses and valuables there to sell. With the lawless Osage reservation near the eastern boundary of Labette County, John Jr. Next, he cut the victim’s throat before dropping him into the cellar through the trapdoor. Then Pa would strike a blow from behind the canvas divider. Inside the dirty one-room shack divided by a wagon sheet, the unsuspecting visitor ate his dinner with his back against the brown-stained curtain. Flirtatious daughter Katie, in her early 20s, likely encouraged the men to brag about how much cash they were carrying. Historians believe travelers who lodged at the Benders’ inn confided to their hosts over dinner about their interest in buying land.

#Apple serial number mystery solved forensic plus

During their two-and-a-half years in Kansas, the Benders stole an estimated $4,500, plus made an unknown amount from the sales of the victims’ horses, buggies and wagons. Why did the Benders commit these atrocities, making them among the first known American serial killers? Money. Two of these same detectives followed John and Katie’s tracks to El Paso, Texas, near Mexico’s border, but they ran out of time as well as leads. Louis, Missouri, where the trail went cold. Newspapers from New York to San Francisco to Paris, France, trumpeted the horrible news from Kansas, but in the end, the Benders seemed to have evaporated.

#Apple serial number mystery solved forensic professional

Professional and amateur sleuths alike took up the trail. Thomas Osborn posted a $2,000 reward for the capture of the Benders Dr. In addition, the wagon tracks near those bodies were of a peculiar design matching the tracks on the Bender wagon. Then neighbors remembered finding additional bodies on the prairie the past winter that had been mutilated in much the same fashion. The ghastly discovery of eight bodies, including the corpse of a little girl, plus the bloody, stench-filled cellar, told the grim tale. With the Benders gone, neighbors searched their property. Shortly after this visit, the family skedaddled their wagon was found abandoned in nearby Thayer. York’s brother Ed, an Army colonel living in Fort Scott, set out to find his missing brother.Īfter interviewing other families in the area, the colonel and his posse galloped into the Bender yard. William York went missing, an intensive search began. Neighbors became suspicious of one another, even to the point of organizing a vigilance committee. During winter, when the ground was frozen, the family dumped mutilated bodies miles away on the snowbound prairie or tossed them during spring thaw into a local creek.īetween 1871-73, reports of missing travelers began filtering throughout the community. Victims with split skulls or slit throats were dropped into a pit under the house, then dragged outdoors after dark and buried in the garden. Their tiny, 16-feet-by-24-feet wooden shack had been built as a house of horrors, complete with a trapdoor under the kitchen table. The family provided lodging where unsuspecting travelers became a grotesque statistic in the Bender apple orchard. From October 1870 until April 1873, a German family consisting of Ma and Pa Bender and their two grown children, quiet John and vivacious Katie, ran a murder inn seven miles northeast of Cherryvale in Labette County. One of the most intriguing mysteries of the Old West concerns the disappearance of the Kansas murder family known as the Benders.