Second in the Bloodlands series, Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie, tells the story of the Bender family. Their story is one that I have heard in the past.

They ran a store/inn for travelers and murdered them if they dared to sit in the chair above the trap door to the cellar. While they did rob them of the money/valuables they had on them, it appeared that really they would kill anyone they wanted to, even if they didn't get anything monetarily out of them.

In this story, they were never brought to justice, at least that anyone truly knows. They might have escaped and lived out their lives in other areas of the US, or even France. Or they might have been tracked down by one of the many posse's that formed to find them after the discoveries of the horrors in their cellar. We really will never know what happened to them, and I assume they did escape their captors and blended back into the fabric of society.

Truly fascinating story of a family of serial killers in the 1870's.