by Gordon Kerr
The ‘iron gag’ was the most feared of all the punishments. The prisoner’s arms were tied behind his neck and a gag was attached to his tongue and his hands. The slightest movement tore at the gag, ripping the prisoner’s tongue and causing intense pain.
The ‘hole’ was a pit, dug under the cellblock, reserved for the most difficult of inmates. They were kept there sometimes for weeks, receiving only a daily ration of one cup of water and one slice of bread.
Although disease was rife at Eastern State, insanity rapidly became the most common illness. It became so common that doctors invented causes, the most popular of which was excessive masturbation. If it was not masturbation, it was put down to their genes. Of course, it was horrific isolation that was the real cause.
Eastern State became the most famous prison in the world and had many visitors, not all of whom were impressed by what they were shown. English writer, Charles Dickens, was horrified when he was given a tour in 1845. ‘The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong,’ he wrote. He went on to describe it as a ‘torturing of the mind that is much worse that any physical punishment that can be administered’.
Escape attempts were generally unsuccessful. In 1926, one group dug a tunnel 10.5 m (35 ft) long before being caught. In 1945, another group dug a tunnel that extended beyond the wall. They were apprehended a few blocks away from the prison. In 1932, William Hamilton was serving dinner in the warden’s apartment. When the warden left him alone for a few minutes, Hamilton tied together some bed sheets and climbed out of the window. He was not recaptured until 1937, when he was returned to the same cell he had left five years previously.
Solitary confinement was finally abandoned in the 1870s, and Eastern State became an ordinary prison. It was reformed in 1913, when its numbers had risen to 1,700 and it had become dangerously overcrowded. By 1970, it was in a state of disrepair, and it was decided it would be too expensive to renovate it yet again.
It was abandoned and became a National Historic Monument, used in films such as Twelve Monkeys and TV ghost-hunting programmes. It lies empty now, apart from the many ghosts, which are said to wander its crumbling corridors.
The Bloody Benders
Bender Family Log Cabin, Kansas, USA
When police and souvenir-hunters finally finished decimating the site of the infamous Benders' log cabin, all that remained was a hole in the ground that was once the cellar. The cabin itself and the outbuildings had gone, but, according to locals, ghosts of the Benders' many unfortunate victims continued to haunt the area.
She was around eight years of age and the report in the Kansas City Times recorded the discovery of her body: ‘The little girl had long, sunny hair and some traces of beauty on a countenance that was not yet entirely disfigured by decay. One arm was broken. The breastbone had been driven in. The right knee had been wrenched from its socket and the leg doubled up under the body.’ Most gruesome of all was the discovery that none of her wounds had been serious enough to kill her, meaning only one thing; she had been buried alive. And she was not the only horribly disfigured body they uncovered during those grisly few days.
The Bender family had come to Kansas, like many other pioneers, after the ousting of the Osage Indians from south-east Kansas freed up large swathes of land for homesteaders. Consisting of John Bender Sr, his wife – Ma Bender, son John Jr and daughter Kate. The Bender family were part of a large group of ‘spiritualist’ families that settled in western Labette County. Sixty-year-old John Sr settled his family on a 65 hectare (160 acre) plot that was handily positioned on the important and busy Osage-Mission Independence Trail. They constructed a small, one-roomed cabin, partitioned by a large piece of canvas into living quarters at the back and a store at the front where they sold a few essentials and served meals to hungry travellers.
John Bender Sr was a bear of a man with a huge beard and deep-set eyes. Mrs Bender, an unfriendly woman, with an impenetrably guttural accent like her husband, claimed she was a medium and that she could converse with the dead. She also claimed to be able to cast spells. Daughter Kate’s English was as good and she was a handsome, auburn-haired 23 year-old who, like her mother, claimed to possess psychic powers. She distributed leaflets advertizing her skills at curing illnesses and gave lectures about spiritualism.
Travellers on the Mission-Independence Trail were seeking to establish a new life for themselves out west and, consequently, often carried large sums of money to buy land. It was noticed that a number of them were disappearing. They seemed to reach the Big Hill Country of south-eastern Kansas and simply vanish.
Of course, these were wild times and communications were far from good, but, even so, people began to worry and wary travellers began to avoid that part of the trail.
Ten people were known to have disappeared, including a well-known doctor from Independence, William H York, who had set out to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a father and his daughter. They had left Independence en route for Iowa in the winter of 1872, but had simply vanished from the face of the earth. Dr York began his search in spring 1873, stopping at numerous homesteads to make enquiries. However, his search had proven fruitless and he was preparing to return to Independence on 8 March. He never arrived home.
The locals were also becoming worried and a meeting was convened to discuss the disappearances. Shortly after this, however, a passing neighbour noticed that the Bender homestead looked deserted. Indeed, the animals had not been fed and the cabin had been stripped of anything useful. It looked, in fact, as if the family had left in a hurry. Furthermore, there was a disgusting smell in the air.
A trapdoor in the cabin floor was discovered, leading to a 1.8 m (6 ft) deep hole in which was found clotted blood, the source of the stench. Locals began to dig the earth under the cabin, having moved the entire structure to one side in order to do so. However, they found nothing. They then began to investigate the land around the cabin, where they had more success.
The first body was that of Dr York, who had been buried face down after his skull had been smashed and his throat cut. It did not end there. The next day, nine more bodies were dug up, including a woman and the little girl, and body parts were also found.
Rewards were offered for the capture of the ‘Bloody’ Benders, as they became known. Dr York’s brother put up $1,000 (£500.00) and the Governor of Kansas, Thomas Osborn, offered $2,000 (£1000). Meanwhile, the sensational news of the murders spread like wildfire and thousands turned up at the Bender Cabin, including newspaper reporters from all over America.
It was not even as if the Benders had gained great riches from their horrific acts. In fact, it was estimated that the most they had been able to steal from their victims was around $4,600 (£2,300), a few horses, a pony, a couple of wagons and a saddle. Some of the people they killed had nothing at all to offer. Therefore, where motive was concerned, it could only be assumed that they had killed their victims for the sheer thrill of it.
Some men managed to escape and they came forward with their stories. One told how Kate had threatened him with a knife after he had refused to sit with his back to the curtain because of the disgusting, and frankly suspicious, stains that covered it. He fled, as had a Catholic priest who spotted one of the Bender men hiding a hammer.
A manhunt was launched and the Benders were found to have boarded a train to the town of Humboldt. At Chanute, however, John Jr and Kate changed trains, heading for Dennison in Texas. Meanwhile, John Sr and Ma Bender were thought to have headed for St. Louis.
There were sightings of Ma Bender and Kate for years and, in 1889, two women resembling them were arrested in Detroit and extradited to Kansas. The case against them was eventually dropped, however, due to lack of evidence.
The truth about the family’s real identities emerged only later. John Bender Sr. was actually John Flickinger, who had originated from either Germany or Holland. It was reported that he had committed suicid
e in Lake Michigan in 1884. There were those who claimed, however, that he had actually been killed by his wife and daughter after running off with their ill-gotten gains.
Mrs Bender is thought to have been born Almira Meik in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. She had had a series of husbands and several children, all of who died suspiciously, perhaps as a result of a blow with a hammer.
John Jr turned out not to have been related to any of them. His real name was John Gebhardt, and it emerged that he was involved in a relationship with Kate who was not, after all, his sister. It is said that whenever she became pregnant with his child, she would give birth and then kill the baby with the family’s murder implement of choice – a hammer.
Sing Sing
Ossining, New York, USA
The name 'Sing Sing' is thought to be derived from the Native American phrase 'Sint Sinck', which translates as 'stone upon stone'. Sing Sing correctional facility was originally named 'Mount Pleasant' when it opened in 1828, but life at the prison was anything but.
The state of New York has executed more people in the past 75 years than any other state in America – probably more than 600 – and the centre for those executions has been Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Ossining, some 48km (30 miles) north of New York City. The prison was constructed near a village also bearing the name Sing Sing, derived from the Indian ‘Sint Sinks’, that translates as ‘stone upon stone’.
The New York executioner’s job is a demanding one, and not just because so many inhabitants of the great city commit capital crimes. He is also executioner for Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut, sometimes dispatching convicted criminals in more than one state in the space of a day.
Edwin Davis was Sing Sing’s first executioner, at a time when the executioner enjoyed the euphemistic job title of ‘electrician’. Davis was in charge when the first criminal to occupy the electric chair, William Kemmler, was executed at Auburn Prison, in August 1890. Kemmler had got drunk and killed his girlfriend with an axe, but the execution went badly. After the current was switched off, Kemmler was still very much alive, and a number of witnesses fainted. Another 2,000 volts were shot into his body, rupturing blood vessels under his skin and setting his body on fire. In all, the execution took eight minutes, and one observer commented, ‘They would have done better using an axe.’
In the 19th century, many executions took place in New York on Bedloe’s Island, better known now as the Statue of Liberty. But once the decision had been taken to establish Sing Sing as the execution site for New York, a new death house had to be built. It cost a staggering amount for the time, $268,000 (£134,000). Separate from the main prison buildings, it was entirely self-sufficient with its own kitchen, hospital and a room for carrying out autopsies. It was ready by 1917 and, from then on, New York’s unfortunate condemned were sent to what became known as the ‘Big House’ to prepare to meet their maker.
It was there that Davis carried out Sing Sing’s first execution by electricity in July 1891. Harris A Smiler was followed in rapid succession by three other condemned men in the newly installed electric chair. But multiple executions were not uncommon, and on 12 August 1912, he executed seven men in less than an hour at Sing Sing. He also executed Martha Place, the first woman electrocuted in America, in 1899.
John Hilbert took over when Davis eventually retired, in 1914, and executed 140 people in New York, Massachusetts and Kansas. However, Hilbert’s mental well-being was damaged by the job and he suffered from depression. Once, he fainted half an hour before he was due to execute two men. Hilbert retired abruptly, just before an execution in 1926, and was replaced by 52-year-old Robert G Elliot. Tragically, Hilbert shot himself.
Robert Elliot was a pragmatic individual, and he approached his work as just a job that someone had to do. ‘I’m just an ordinary human being,’ he once said, ‘I’m no more responsible for killing these men than the judge or jury.’ Nonetheless, he was a victim of press stories suggesting he was something of a social outcast and a recluse. Among the 387 men and women he executed, until he retired through ill health in 1939, were a number of infamous criminals – Sacco and Vanzetti and Bruno Hauptman, killer of the Lindbergh baby, among them.
The remainder of Sing Sing prison was not exactly paradise on earth. It had been commissioned in 1825 when an upstate New York prison warder, captain Elam Lynds, was given the job of finding a location for a new prison and building it. He embarked upon the construction using 100 inmates from Auburn prison, who built the prison from scratch in desperate conditions.
The design was for 800 cells, stacked one on top of the other, four cells high in a building 145m (476 ft) long. The cells were tiny – 2.1m (7ft) long by 1m (3ft) wide and 1.98m (6ft 7ins) high. The building was completed in 1828.
The system utilized at Sing Sing was similar to that in a number of other US prisons. Lynds had himself encapsulated it when working at Auburn, where the silent regime was invented. ‘The [prisoners] are not to exchange a word with each other under any pretence whatever; not to communicate in writing. They must not sing, whistle, dance, run, jump, or do anything that has a tendency in the least degree to disturb the harmony or regulations of the prison,’ he wrote.
What they were allowed to do, however, was work, and prisons contracted out labour to private companies. At Sing Sing, they made furniture, carpets, tapestry, shoes, bedding, cigars and cut stone, working ten hours a day. Of course, the money earned mostly went back into prison funds, but large amounts also bolstered the incomes of prison warders.
Punishment was brutal and regular at Sing Sing. In 1864, it is reported, of 796 inmates, 613 received some form of physical punishment. These punishments were cruel in the extreme. One of the worst was ‘The Bath’, which was used for decades. The miscreant was tied to a chair and a shield was attached to his head that allowed water to rise up over his chin and mouth. The water could be dropped from a great height onto the prisoner’s head. Solitary confinement was also regularly dished out, as was the punishment of being ‘bucked’. In this, a wooden bar was inserted between a prisoner’s arms and legs while he was seated. The bar was then hoisted onto a stand and the prisoner was left hanging upside down.
Beating and flogging were common. One inmate described a lashing he had witnessed in the prison yard in the middle of the 19th century. The victim was lashed 133 times, the skin on his back being shredded by the whip. When he complained, the guard approached him and dealt him a blow across the mouth with his cane, ordering him to be quiet.
Food was scarce and poor – inmates received two eggs a year. In this atmosphere of despair and hopelessness, suicide was common. Being sent ‘up the river’, as a trip to Sing Sing was called, usually meant you would not be making a return journey.
Around 1900, there were a number of changes at Sing Sing. The hated lockstep where prisoners had to walk in line close together, was abandoned, as was the striped uniform. More windows were installed and inmates were given greater access to the exercise yard. However, Sing Sing was in a bad way, and it was not until the arrival of an enlightened warder from upstate New York, Lewis E Lawes, in 1919, that things improved.
Lawes found a prison in a state of chaos, suffering from decades of abuse and neglect. Money was missing from the prison bank account and there were even prisoners missing. A head count of male prisoners came up with only 762, when there should have been 795. Of the 102 female prisoners who should have been there, he counted only 82. There was no record whatsoever of one prisoner’s admission or stay. It was decided he must have been a volunteer, and he was released.
Lawes began a campaign of modernization with new buildings, a chapel, a library and a mess hall.
In 1943, the old cellblock was finally closed. It had been home and place of death to some of America’s most notorious villains – Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, the head of Murder Inc.; Charles Becker, the first American policeman executed for murder; Albert Fish, serial killer
and cannibal; Charles Chapin, (‘The Rose Man’), a former New York City newspaper editor, who served life for murder; Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed for spying for the Soviet Union; Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, electrocuted there for the murders of 12 people; Willie Sutton, the bank robber; Carl Panzram, the prolific serial killer; George C. Parker, the con artist who sold the Brooklyn Bridge; Frank Abbandando, former member of Murder Inc. and Louis Capone, former member of Murder Inc.
Lizzie Borden
92 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts, USA
Today, 92 Second Street, Fall River, is a well-known first-class bed and breakfast owned by Lee-Ann Wilbur and Donald Woods. The couple have turned their property into a museum, encouraging visitors to explore the Borden family murders and form their own opinions about the guilt or innocence of prime-suspect and folk legend: Lizzie Borden.
AJ Borden’s body lay on its right side on the sofa, where he had sat down to have a nap after coming home from work. His feet still rested on the floor and his head lay inclined to the right. His face had received 11 blows from something sharp and heavy. It was not a pretty sight. One eye had been cut in half and hung out of its socket and his nose had been sliced off. There was blood everywhere – on the sofa, on the floor and dripping from a picture on the wall.
Upstairs, in a bedroom, they discovered AJ’s wife, Abbey. She had been dealt 19 blows from behind that had crushed her skull. She was covered in congealed blood.
It was the morning of 4 August 1892, a swelteringly hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the only people present in the house at the time of the murders were AJ’s daughter, Lizzie – Abbey was her stepmother – and a servant, Bridget Sullivan.