You're heading west with big dreams of staking your claim to one of those parcels of land promised in the Homestead Act.

You're carrying everything you own, which was never much, but that's all going to change.

Now you've made it as far as southeastern Kansas, and you're tired, oh, bone tired, looking for a spot to lay your head, if only for a night.

Word has it, there's a family up the road yonder there that takes in travelers.

Nothing fancy, just a simple cabin over in Lebet County.

They say the daughter talks to the dead, but you know how folks like to gossip about their neighbors.

And abeds a bed, especially out here on the prairie,

where a person could ride for days on end and not encounter another human soul.

Just go on up the roadways and ask for the Bender's Place.

And then?

Amen.

Hope to God you make it out alive.

And they got a small beam of light against the mirror. I don't know. Amen. Hope to God you make it out alive.

They make out a small beam of light against the mirror.

True, weird stuff.

They call the 30-year stretch between 1970 and 2000, the golden age of serial killers in America, which is actually pretty twisted, isn't it?

Experts on the subject credit that golden age to the phenomenon of urbanization.

Urbanization combined people living right on top of each other with a trend toward ever-increasing anonymity, and that created the perfect hunting ground for a predator, lots of potential victims,

most of whom had little to no contact with each other. Because that so-called golden age of

serial killers coincided with mass media and spawned a list of monsters with now marqueen names,

it's tempting to think that serial killers are a modern invention.

They're not.

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