Showing results for "The Prairie" in Murder

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.

On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s front lawn and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker. Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story.

Gruesome Illinois is a collection of true-life stories, most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book - such as the Monmouth ax murders - have ever made it into print, except maybe in musky, old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph.