Post by boxman on Jul 29, 2011 7:54:18 GMT -5
IIRC, Frank Bender and his forensic skills were one of the inspirations for the series. He has passed away yesterday, at age 70:
www.philly.com/philly/news/20110729_Sculptor_Frank_Bender__70__helped_bring_many_to_justice.html
Posted on Fri, Jul. 29, 2011
Sculptor Frank Bender, 70, helped bring many to justice
BY JOHN F. MORRISON
Philadelphia Daily News
morrisj@phillynews.com 215-854-5573
FRANK BENDER, who helped identify hundreds of victims of violence and bring many of the perpetrators to justice over a long career as a forensic sculptor, was confronted by his greatest challenge that fall of 2000.
He had to sculpt a face where there was no face.
The skeletal remains of a woman had been found in a wooded area of Manlius, N.Y., a town near Syracuse. The skull was a shell and there was no face.
Told it was impossible to create something out of nothing, Bender rose to the challenge. He loved a challenge, and often used not only his artistic, but his self-proclaimed psychic powers, to bring off the impossible.
That he was able to construct the slain woman's head, which led to her identity and, eventually, the capture of her killer, was one more piece of evidence that Frank Bender deserved his international reputation as the man who could bring the dead back to life.
He died yesterday at age 70 of cancer - the disease that was supposed to have killed him more than a year ago.
"He had a whole extra year than anyone had anticipated," his daughter, Vanessa, told the Inquirer. "And he had a pretty good year."
Gaunt and a mere shadow of the once-robust, muscular ex-boxer he had been, Bender accepted in person the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he once had studied, on May 13.
"He used his artwork to promote social justice and applied his imagination and technical skills to help solve brutal crimes," said Academy president David R. Brigham.
Bender hoped that the subject of the last head he sculpted, that of a woman whose body was found in December 2001 near Easton, would be identified before he died. It wasn't to be.
He said he believed that his strong desire to see her identified had kept him alive so long.
Bender was a frequent guest on TV's "America's Most Wanted," and was written up in major publications in this country and abroad.
His large studio on South Street was littered with sculpted busts of the dead, photos, weapons, books, artwork and other memorabilia that might have reminded a visitor of some of the more macabre exhibits at the Mutter Museum.
He sculpted not only the victims of violence, but mummies, historical figures and a death mask for St. John Neumann.
He boiled rotting heads, sometimes infested with flesh-eating beetles, using bleach and a dash of Borax, in the same pot he used for cooking.
"I make a mean chicken in this pot," he once said.
He traveled to Juarez, Mexico, in 2003 and '04, to reconstruct the heads of several slain women, a dangerous trek in which he believed he was drugged and his life threatened, partly because he suspected the police were involved in some of the killings.
Among the cases that made Bender famous was the capture of John List, who methodically killed his wife, mother and three children in Westfield, N.J., on Nov. 9, 1971, then disappeared for 18 years.
Bender used photos of List in his early 40s to construct a bust showing what he would look like after 18 years.
Using the bust, and the description from profiler Richard Walter of what List would be like and where he might live, authorities arrested him on June 1, 1989, in Virginia.
He was convicted of five murders and given five consecutive life terms. He died in prison in 2008 at the age of 82.
The same magic resulted in the capture of notorious killer Hans Vorhauer and Robert Nauss, a leader of the Warlocks outlaw motorcycle gang. They escaped from Graterford state prison together in November 1983 by hiding in a breakfront they had made in the prison workshop.
Their captures after years on the lam were made possible by busts created by Bender showing what they would look like when they aged.
In Voorhauer's case, he predicted that the killer would have dyed his hair blond. Cops laughed at that idea, but when he was arrested, sure enough, his hair was blond.
In the case of the woman with the missing face, Bender at first threw up his hands. He couldn't do it, he decided. But there was that challenge that continued to intrigue him.
The case had been brought to the Vidocq Society, the Philadelphia-based organization of retired investigators that specializes in cold cases that Bender cofounded, by Keith Hall, 25, a Manlius police officer.
The woman probably had been slain in the late '80s, and her remains found by a hunter on Nov. 29, 1997. Hall was determined to find her killer. The first step had to be to identify her. That's where Bender came in.
As described in the book, "The Murder Room," by Michael Capuzzo, Bender consulted experts, including an anthropologist at the Smithsonian, and all told him to forget it.
But while working on the skull of a slave he was sculpting for the African Burial Ground in New York City, he noticed that the sphenoid bone behind the eye of the slave was the same width as the nasal bones. The Girl With the Missing Face still had a sphenoid bone.
Bender had the key he needed to rebuild the missing face. Photographs of his reconstruction were distributed to law-enforcement agencies throughout the country.
Another Manilus police officer recognized the face as that of Lorean Quincy Weaver, a prostitute who disappeared in 1986 after she had been seen getting into a car with a carpenter named Roland Patnode.
When Patnode was picked up for parole violation in September 2001, he was shown the photograph of Bender's bust. His eyes filled with tears and he exclaimed, "She's my ghost!"
He confessed to killing Lorean in a struggle after they had had sex in his pickup truck.
Richard L. Fleisher, former FBI and U.S. Customs agent, once said of Bender, "It's sacrilegious for a veteran investigator to think this way, but what he does goes beyond science and rationalism. Frank is the ultimate secret weapon for law enforcement."
Walter, Fleisher and Bender founded the Vidocq Society, named after Eugene Francois Vidocq, a brilliant 18th century French detective, in 1990.
Over the years, Bender, who grew up in the rowhouse neighborhood of Kensington, worked a number of jobs, from commercial photographer and artist's model, to repairing tugboat propellers in the murky depths of the Delaware River.
He served in the Navy from 1959 to 1961, where he was exposed to asbestos.
He blamed that exposure on the pleural mesothelioma, with which he was diagnosed in late 2009.
Frank was studying art on a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when a teacher suggested he take up sculpting to better understand the human form.
He needed models to work from, and what better place to find them than the city morgue, he figured.
He enlisted the help of a friend, Bart Zandel, who fingerprinted corpses in the morgue, to take him on a tour.
He hadn't gone far into what turned out to be a nightmare world of bloated and disfigured bodies when he decided he had made a big mistake. He wasn't going to learn anything there.
But he became fascinated by the body of a middle-aged woman who had been slain and dumped in a field near Philadelphia International Airport.
Part of the head had been blown away by gunshots and the body was too damaged to be identified.
The Medical Examiner's Office had given up hope of finding out who she was.
But Bender saw something the others hadn't seen.
"I know what she looked like," he announced.
Working nights, Frank made a plaster cast of the skull, and a photograph of it was distributed to East Coast police departments. A New Jersey detective compared it to a circular from the Chicago police of a missing woman named Anna Mary Duval. The mystery was solved.
Her killer turned out to be a professional hit man named John Martini who had lured Duval to Philadelphia on the pretext of a real-estate deal, then took her money and killed her.
He was convicted and imprisoned.
Bender became a forensic sculptor at a time when he didn't know what the word forensic meant. He had to look it up.
Some stability came into Bender's freewheeling life when he married Janice Proctor, a teenage go-go dancer who had run away from home. They married on Halloween in 1970.
Frank was devastated when Jan was diagnosed with nonsmoker's lung cancer, which caused her death on April 21, 2010, at the age of 61.
Recently, Frank contacted an old friend, Frank Dufner, a retired U.S. Customs special agent who is a member of the Guardians of the National Cemetery at Washington Crossing. Frank wanted to know if he could be buried there.
He also told Dufner what he wanted on his tombstone: "I am with Janice and the dead I represented, resting in eternal peace."
Services are pending.
www.philly.com/philly/news/20110729_Sculptor_Frank_Bender__70__helped_bring_many_to_justice.html
Posted on Fri, Jul. 29, 2011
Sculptor Frank Bender, 70, helped bring many to justice
BY JOHN F. MORRISON
Philadelphia Daily News
morrisj@phillynews.com 215-854-5573
FRANK BENDER, who helped identify hundreds of victims of violence and bring many of the perpetrators to justice over a long career as a forensic sculptor, was confronted by his greatest challenge that fall of 2000.
He had to sculpt a face where there was no face.
The skeletal remains of a woman had been found in a wooded area of Manlius, N.Y., a town near Syracuse. The skull was a shell and there was no face.
Told it was impossible to create something out of nothing, Bender rose to the challenge. He loved a challenge, and often used not only his artistic, but his self-proclaimed psychic powers, to bring off the impossible.
That he was able to construct the slain woman's head, which led to her identity and, eventually, the capture of her killer, was one more piece of evidence that Frank Bender deserved his international reputation as the man who could bring the dead back to life.
He died yesterday at age 70 of cancer - the disease that was supposed to have killed him more than a year ago.
"He had a whole extra year than anyone had anticipated," his daughter, Vanessa, told the Inquirer. "And he had a pretty good year."
Gaunt and a mere shadow of the once-robust, muscular ex-boxer he had been, Bender accepted in person the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he once had studied, on May 13.
"He used his artwork to promote social justice and applied his imagination and technical skills to help solve brutal crimes," said Academy president David R. Brigham.
Bender hoped that the subject of the last head he sculpted, that of a woman whose body was found in December 2001 near Easton, would be identified before he died. It wasn't to be.
He said he believed that his strong desire to see her identified had kept him alive so long.
Bender was a frequent guest on TV's "America's Most Wanted," and was written up in major publications in this country and abroad.
His large studio on South Street was littered with sculpted busts of the dead, photos, weapons, books, artwork and other memorabilia that might have reminded a visitor of some of the more macabre exhibits at the Mutter Museum.
He sculpted not only the victims of violence, but mummies, historical figures and a death mask for St. John Neumann.
He boiled rotting heads, sometimes infested with flesh-eating beetles, using bleach and a dash of Borax, in the same pot he used for cooking.
"I make a mean chicken in this pot," he once said.
He traveled to Juarez, Mexico, in 2003 and '04, to reconstruct the heads of several slain women, a dangerous trek in which he believed he was drugged and his life threatened, partly because he suspected the police were involved in some of the killings.
Among the cases that made Bender famous was the capture of John List, who methodically killed his wife, mother and three children in Westfield, N.J., on Nov. 9, 1971, then disappeared for 18 years.
Bender used photos of List in his early 40s to construct a bust showing what he would look like after 18 years.
Using the bust, and the description from profiler Richard Walter of what List would be like and where he might live, authorities arrested him on June 1, 1989, in Virginia.
He was convicted of five murders and given five consecutive life terms. He died in prison in 2008 at the age of 82.
The same magic resulted in the capture of notorious killer Hans Vorhauer and Robert Nauss, a leader of the Warlocks outlaw motorcycle gang. They escaped from Graterford state prison together in November 1983 by hiding in a breakfront they had made in the prison workshop.
Their captures after years on the lam were made possible by busts created by Bender showing what they would look like when they aged.
In Voorhauer's case, he predicted that the killer would have dyed his hair blond. Cops laughed at that idea, but when he was arrested, sure enough, his hair was blond.
In the case of the woman with the missing face, Bender at first threw up his hands. He couldn't do it, he decided. But there was that challenge that continued to intrigue him.
The case had been brought to the Vidocq Society, the Philadelphia-based organization of retired investigators that specializes in cold cases that Bender cofounded, by Keith Hall, 25, a Manlius police officer.
The woman probably had been slain in the late '80s, and her remains found by a hunter on Nov. 29, 1997. Hall was determined to find her killer. The first step had to be to identify her. That's where Bender came in.
As described in the book, "The Murder Room," by Michael Capuzzo, Bender consulted experts, including an anthropologist at the Smithsonian, and all told him to forget it.
But while working on the skull of a slave he was sculpting for the African Burial Ground in New York City, he noticed that the sphenoid bone behind the eye of the slave was the same width as the nasal bones. The Girl With the Missing Face still had a sphenoid bone.
Bender had the key he needed to rebuild the missing face. Photographs of his reconstruction were distributed to law-enforcement agencies throughout the country.
Another Manilus police officer recognized the face as that of Lorean Quincy Weaver, a prostitute who disappeared in 1986 after she had been seen getting into a car with a carpenter named Roland Patnode.
When Patnode was picked up for parole violation in September 2001, he was shown the photograph of Bender's bust. His eyes filled with tears and he exclaimed, "She's my ghost!"
He confessed to killing Lorean in a struggle after they had had sex in his pickup truck.
Richard L. Fleisher, former FBI and U.S. Customs agent, once said of Bender, "It's sacrilegious for a veteran investigator to think this way, but what he does goes beyond science and rationalism. Frank is the ultimate secret weapon for law enforcement."
Walter, Fleisher and Bender founded the Vidocq Society, named after Eugene Francois Vidocq, a brilliant 18th century French detective, in 1990.
Over the years, Bender, who grew up in the rowhouse neighborhood of Kensington, worked a number of jobs, from commercial photographer and artist's model, to repairing tugboat propellers in the murky depths of the Delaware River.
He served in the Navy from 1959 to 1961, where he was exposed to asbestos.
He blamed that exposure on the pleural mesothelioma, with which he was diagnosed in late 2009.
Frank was studying art on a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when a teacher suggested he take up sculpting to better understand the human form.
He needed models to work from, and what better place to find them than the city morgue, he figured.
He enlisted the help of a friend, Bart Zandel, who fingerprinted corpses in the morgue, to take him on a tour.
He hadn't gone far into what turned out to be a nightmare world of bloated and disfigured bodies when he decided he had made a big mistake. He wasn't going to learn anything there.
But he became fascinated by the body of a middle-aged woman who had been slain and dumped in a field near Philadelphia International Airport.
Part of the head had been blown away by gunshots and the body was too damaged to be identified.
The Medical Examiner's Office had given up hope of finding out who she was.
But Bender saw something the others hadn't seen.
"I know what she looked like," he announced.
Working nights, Frank made a plaster cast of the skull, and a photograph of it was distributed to East Coast police departments. A New Jersey detective compared it to a circular from the Chicago police of a missing woman named Anna Mary Duval. The mystery was solved.
Her killer turned out to be a professional hit man named John Martini who had lured Duval to Philadelphia on the pretext of a real-estate deal, then took her money and killed her.
He was convicted and imprisoned.
Bender became a forensic sculptor at a time when he didn't know what the word forensic meant. He had to look it up.
Some stability came into Bender's freewheeling life when he married Janice Proctor, a teenage go-go dancer who had run away from home. They married on Halloween in 1970.
Frank was devastated when Jan was diagnosed with nonsmoker's lung cancer, which caused her death on April 21, 2010, at the age of 61.
Recently, Frank contacted an old friend, Frank Dufner, a retired U.S. Customs special agent who is a member of the Guardians of the National Cemetery at Washington Crossing. Frank wanted to know if he could be buried there.
He also told Dufner what he wanted on his tombstone: "I am with Janice and the dead I represented, resting in eternal peace."
Services are pending.
