The Lake Charles Echo

The Weather (Capture).
Some eight years ago, in Kansas, a family named Bender, consisting of old John Bender and his second wife, and his son John and daughter Kate, by a previous marriage, became notorious on the discovery that their house was a slaughter pen for human victims, whose bodies were found buried around the house. No less than eight or ten bodies of men, women and children were thus unearthed at once, and with the exception of two young children who had been evidently buried alive the murdered persons had their skulls crushed and their throats cut. It turned out that the house was ostensibly a hotel or tavern, that a single sheet formed the partition between the two main rooms, that the unsuspected traveler was made to sit at the dining table in such a position that his head would occasionally press against that cloth partition, behind which one of the murderers, with a heavy hammer, would crush the victim's skull, then the body would be dragged to the edge of a trap door in the floor, where the throat was cut and the blood allowed to run into the earthen cavity beneath, when the body would be robbed and thrown into that cavity until a shallow grave was dug in the yard, into which, at night, the body was conveyed and buried.
A few hours before this horrid discovery the entire Bender family disappeared, and, the bodies of several of their victims being identified, immense rewards were offered for the capture of the assassins. The press of the entire country reeked for several weeks with details of the Bender massacres, but gradually the horror faded from public view. A few days ago an old man and his wife were arrested in or near Kansas, and it is reported, have confessed that they are the veritable old John Bender and his wife. Other and later reports, however, deny this, and state that within forty-eight hours after the discovery of the buried bodies of the Bender victims a party of citizens captured all four of the Benders while fleeing from Kansas, made them stand up in a row, and shot them to death with rifles, young Kate Bender, who confessed that she did all the throat cutting, coolly looking into the muzzles of the presented rifles, and telling her executioners to "shoot and be damned."
We will know all about the facts soon.