At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors with jackrabbit stew and a sledgehammer to the skull.
In time, their apple orchard gave up its secrets—a burial ground for their mutilated victims, each stripped of their possessions. The devilish enterprise on “Hell’s Half-Acre” would earn the Bloody Benders an undying place in the annals of American infamy. But it was the mysterious fate of eldest daughter, Kate that would make them the stuff of mythic campfire prairie tales.
Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie is part of Bloodlands, a chilling collection of short page-turning historical narratives from bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter. Spanning a century in our nation’s murderous past, Schechter resurrects nearly forgotten tales of madmen and thrill-killers that dominated the most sensational headlines of their day.
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[Five years after moving with his relatives to the Big Woods of Wisconsin, Charles Ingalls – a pioneering spirit with a self-described ‘wandering foot’ and a hunger for wide-open spaces – packed his wife and small children into a covered wagon and headed west for the Indian Territory of south-eastern Kansas]
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(Amazon Original Stories, 28 June 2018, ebook, 80 pages, Prime Reading)
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I enjoyed this second dose of gruesome true crime from Harold Schechter and Amazon Original Stories. I enjoyed this a little more than The Pirate. I liked the fact the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie fame lived close to where the murders took place. This appealed to me for some reason. Morbid much. This is an engrossing, suitably gory tale of serial murder and horror. The newspaper extracts and photographs enhanced my enjoyment.
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