“Richard, you’re good,” Bender shot back. “But you’re not always right.”
“My dear boy, your thinking has no structure, no foundation,” came the arch accent. “You pick up your primary ideas from TV shows. You’re like a fart in a bathtub.”
VSMs on the edge of the conversation tittered. A decade after their most famous case, the capture of mass murderer John List, Bender and Walter had become even more nationally prominent in their fields. They had collaborated successfully on Vidocq Society cases, and seemed closer-than-ever drinking buddies and brothers-in-arms. But their teamwork resembled the work of an anvil and hammer; the more productive they became, the more sparks flew.
Bender had taken to telling anyone who would listen that it was he, not Walter, who had the idea to put thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses on John List’s face-a key detail that helped lead to the swift identification and arrest of the killer. Bender claimed Walter was stealing undue credit.
Exasperated, Walter patiently reminded his friend that indeed he had first suggested that List would be wearing thick-rimmed glasses “like mine” to convey power and authority. But he happily acknowledged that Bender had accomplished the crowning work, the “coup de grace,” of finding an old pair of tortoiseshell glasses at an antique store that he put on the bust. They worked perfectly.
“So I suggested the concept, and you made it reality, which some might suggest is the harder and more praiseworthy part. I know it’s hard to follow, but this is called teamwork, and in such instances, credit is shared.”
Fleisher was beaming like a football coach watching his star players beating each other up at practice before a big game. The Case of the Missing Face was one of the most challenging cold cases ever brought before the Vidocq Society, he thought, and they needed this level of passion and commitment to solve it.
It was clear as Bender returned to his South Street warehouse studio in Philadelphia and Walter to his Victorian mansion in the Pennsylvania mountains that the partners would be simultaneously working together and competing, as only they could.
“I think Richard’s got a good profile going, and there’s nobody like Frank in giving name and face to the dead,” Fleisher said. “There’s nothing to go on but if anybody can do it it’s this group, my friends.” He grinned. “The question is: To whom will the bones talk?”
Stripped to the waist in his studio, Bender animated the dead with clay using unknown powers that frightened those who saw him as arrogant, a Dr. Faust making deals with the devil. These people never knew the deep humility that Bender brought to his work. As he began to build up a skull with clay he abandoned all ego, left the moorings of space and time, gave himself utterly to “enter the flow of nature. You start with the eye, nose, and mouth and you keep them all flowing at the same time. Beautiful or ugly, our features were made to harmonize together.” Yet the Girl with the Missing Face was beyond humbling; with no nose, mouth, eyes, cheeks, or chin to go on, he called Hall up and repeated his fear: “This is impossible.” After parts of three days mulling the gaping hole in the center of the skull, he still didn’t know where to begin.
Frustrated, he returned to his high-profile commission sculpture Unearthed. He was sculpting two slaves-a man and two women-from their exhumed eighteenth-century skulls to make a memorial for the African Burial Ground in New York City. Working with a slave skull, he noticed the small sphenoid bone behind the eye was nearly the same width as the nasal bones. The Girl with the Missing Face still had a sphenoid bone and since she was believed to be partly African American… had he stumbled upon a way to gauge her nasal aperture?
He called a Howard University anthropologist working on the Unearthed project; the professor made a series of measurements on other skulls and said, “I think you’re onto something.” So Bender started with the nose. A broad coffee-colored face quickly appeared with soft brown eyes; the bones seemed to be telling him they did not belong to a typical coldhearted prostitute. She was a warm person with the weight of the world on her, Bender thought. It was a wild guess, he admitted, but it was somehow more than that. “I can feel it.”
The unmarked police sedan came out of Manlius, New York, south on I-81, and down into the Appalachian ridge-and-valley country of Pennsylvania. It was a melancholy tumble of twisted forested roads and steep bluestone hills shadowing rocky streams. A hundred miles south, they reached the Biddle House at noon. Richard Walter answered the door himself.
He ushered them into the parlor, seated them in the nineteenth-century chairs. As they laid the case file on the antique cherry table, he offered them a spot of coffee or tea. “Would anyone like cookies? I bake them myself, chocolate chip and gingersnaps, with real butter in the old-fashioned way, and I don’t fool around with the chemistry. They’re quite wonderful recipes.” Lieutenant Kevin Barry and his two officers said they’d love some cookies.
Over steaming coffee, Walter lit a Kool and said, “As a point of fact, there are only about five of us profilers in the world who know what we’re doing. The rest who claim to be profilers are fucking charlatans and frauds.”
The cops grinned. It was true that profilers were getting a bad name in some quarters.
“In truth, I prefer the term ‘crime assessment’ to ‘profiling,’ ” Walter continued. “Now because of all the TV forensic dramas and the amateur hour on the nightly news the public thinks profilers are wizards who come out of caves with their fantastic visions or some Borborygmic grumblings, but you can’t get there from here. The frauds read our stuff and give flip out-of-context assessments like, ‘He’s driving a blue car and hates women.’ It doesn’t work that way. Like anything else, it takes a lot of hard work. We’re talking probabilities and years of experience with similar cases, and analyzing them through the psychological continuum as well as the crime scene continuum.”
Walter tipped his chin and blew cigarette smoke to the ceiling. “Gentlemen, let me explain the case to you in terms of a crime assessment.”
Many factors, he said, including the remote burial of the young woman’s corpse, suggested the victim was a prostitute. Power-driven killers “love to kill prostitutes,” and when they do they dump the body as if disposing of trash. This type of killer typically makes a bold assault to the head, a straight-on attack, and here “we find that the victim’s skull has been smashed, the apparent cause of death.”
The half of a zipper police found near the surface of the grave was a valuable clue. “With this type of killer,” Walter said, “we often find that the clothing of the victim had been forcibly torn off.” According to a police report, four teeth of the zipper were damaged. Detective Keith Hall led the painstaking effort to find and interview the zipper manufacturer and learned that “the damage appears to have been caused by the slider pulling out over the teeth when the zipper was forcibly pulled apart.”
“Given these and other factors and probabilities, it’s highly likely that the killer is in his early to midtwenties, an ex-con, very muscular, lifts weights, macho, emotionally primitive, arrogant, drives a pickup truck, has girlie magazines lying around.”
“As it happens,” he went on, “Updegrove fits the profile. That’s not to say he did it. But it was a guy like him, happy brandishing guns or other weapons-a guy with a criminal record.”
They left with pages of notes, and cookies in freezer bags.
CHAPTER 51. THE KILLER ANGELS
Women around the wealthy, seventy-one-year-old Alabama businessman had a nasty habit of disappearing. So when he called the police to report his second wife missing, he was a suspect. Thirty years earlier, he had murdered his former mother-in-law-strangled and then stabbed the dead woman thirty-seven times with an ice pick-then returned home and told his first wife, “Our life is going to change. I killed your mother.” He had done only thirteen months in a reformatory, then received a partial pardon from Kentucky ’s governor.