fluently with a German accent. John was prone to laughing aimlessly, which led many to consider him a "half-wit." Kate Bender, who was around 23, was cultivated and attractive and spoke English well, with little accent. A self-proclaimed healer and psychic, she distributed flyers advertising her supernatural powers and her ability to cure illnesses. She also conducted séances and gave lectures on spiritualism, for which she gained notoriety for advocating free love. Kate's popularity became a large attraction for the Benders' inn. Although the elder Benders kept to themselves, Kate and her brother regularly attended Sunday school in nearby Harmony Grove. The Benders were widely believed to be German immigrants. No documentation or definitive proof of their relationships to one another, or where they were born, has ever been found. John Bender, Sr. was from either Germany, Norway, or the Netherlands and may have been born John Flickinger. According to contemporary newspapers, Elvira was born Almira Hill Mark (often misreported as "Meik") in the Adirondack Mountains; she married Simon Mark, with whom she claimed to have had 12 children. Later she married William Stephen Griffith. Elvira was rumored to have murdered several husbands, but none of these rumors was ever proven. Kate was purportedly Elvira's fifth daughter. Some of the Benders' neighbors claimed that John and Kate were not brother and sister, but actually husband and wife. Contemporary descriptions From those who knew them and have written about the Benders: "The old man was a repulsive, hideous brute, without a redeeming trait, dirty, profane and ill-tempered." "Old Mrs. Bender was a dirty old Dutch crone. Her face was a fit picture of the midnight hag that wove the spell murderous ambition about the soul of Macbeth." "Young Bender, seen when excited, recalled the grave-robbing hyena at once to mind." "Kate proclaimed herself responsible to no one save herself." She professed to be a medium of spiritualism, and delivered lectures on that subject. In her lectures she publicly declared that murder might be a dictation for good; that in what the world might deem villainy, her soul might read bravery, nobility, and humanity. She advocated "free love," and denounced all social regulations for the promotion of purity and the prevention of carnality, which she called "miserable requirements of self-constituted society." She maintained carnal relations with her brother, and boldly proclaimed her right to do so in the following words found in