The New York Times told its worldwide readers that a producer at America ’s Most Wanted had asked “Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor, and Richard Walter, a criminal psychologist,” to help capture the fugitive mass murderer. For the previous eighteen years, “dozens of FBI agents and investigators from Union County, New Jersey, found no trace of Mr. List in the United States or overseas.” Bender’s bust led to List’s arrest in eleven days.
John Walsh, the host of America ’s Most Wanted, was widely quoted crediting Bender’s List sculpture for launching AMW as a phenomenon. “I call Frank with the tough cases,” Walsh said. Bender’s legacy as a crime-fighting artist was secure.
The Times described his work in admiring detail. “Studying photographs of Mr. List when he was in his mid-40s, Mr. Bender imagined how he might look in 1989, his face sagging with time,” the newspaper wrote.
But the sculptor was apoplectic when he read the next sentence in the Times: “Mr. Walter theorized that Mr. List would still be wearing horn-rimmed glasses, to make him appear successful.” Although the newspaper had gotten it mostly right, Bender grew more determined to extinguish Walter’s small but important contribution from the record. He talked about suing media organizations that made the same mistake. “Frank, are you nuts?” Walter replied.
But the thin man let his own fires tamp down. “If he’s nuts, he’s our nut. Frank’s my partner, for better and often for worse.”
Just a month before the Vidocq banquet, on September 10, Bender’s thirty years of forensic work came full circle. John Martini, the mob hit man and serial killer who murdered Anna Duval at the Philadelphia airport in 1977, Bender’s first case, died in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, also the jailhouse of John List.
Martini, seventy-nine, New Jersey ’s oldest death row inmate, was confined to a wheelchair, ill, obese. Depressed, he told his attorneys in 1991 that he wanted to drop appeals and be put to death rather than eat bad prison food and live in “horrible” conditions. The week before he was to be executed, a nun working as a prison chaplain got him to change his mind, and the execution never occurred.
The long suffering of Marilyn Flax, the widow of business executive Irving Flax, kidnapped and murdered by Martini in 1989, reminded Fleisher of the passion that still drove him to help America’s victims of crime, who still were often victimized by the justice system as well.
For years the widow was afraid to go to the bank where she withdrew their entire $25,000 savings to pay the ransom to Martini (who shot her husband anyway). She had negotiated with the kidnapper herself, a “horror,” looked into his ice-cold eyes at the drop-off. For years she slept three hours a night, terrified Martini would fulfill his threat to “have somebody kill me.”
She still wore the first diamond pendant her husband gave her, kept his pajamas, socks, and ties in a dresser in her bedroom, carried the first note he ever sent her, “Miss you already.”
“We were madly, madly in love,” she said of her husband. “I couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning to see him. He felt the same way.” When she realized she would never have the satisfaction of seeing Martini die by lethal injection, she wrote him a letter on death row.
“You took away the love of my life,” she wrote. “They say God is a forgiving God… but I am certain that Heaven’s doors are not open to you. Just to think that your soul will be tormented forever and ever-what a comfort that gives me. Enjoy hell.”
Walter and Bender were still tight as warring brothers. They had gone up to Manlius, New York, together to be honored at the Manlius Police Benevolent Association banquet for joint work in solving the murder of Lorean Weaver, the Girl with the Missing Face. After the banquet, they celebrated at the crowded hotel bar in what seemed a competition to drink the most vodka. At four in the morning, they were the only two standing. Later, they lectured together to a high school criminal justice class in Manlius taught by Kathy Hall, wife of detective Keith Hall (who’d first called Bender and the Vidocq Society in on the case, and received the Vidocq Society Medal of Honor for his work).
As he talked to the students, Walter realized that despite their differences he and Bender shared a rare bond, a sense of mystery. Bender told the students the trick to “putting a face on a faceless skull” was to feel the invisible harmonies in the universe. Walter told them, “Once you have crawled inside the soul of the criminal and heard some of the just evil people do, it has an effect. It can put the cold water to innocence. There’re lots of things if I didn’t have to know, I’d rather not.” The thin man said that when one faced these things as he and his partner did, when one acknowledged true evil, life became very precious.
“Remember, life is grand,” he told the students. “Life is wonderful!”
It wasn’t long before Bender was telling everyone he met that Walter had named the wrong suspect in the Manlius murder.
At the podium Fleisher called for quiet. It was time.
In past years, the Vidocq Society had also honored the famous forensic anthropologist William Bass, for founding “The Body Farm” at the University of Tennessee, which revolutionized the study of human decomposition; FBI special agent John S. Martin, America’s top Soviet spy catcher, who investigated the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Meridian, Mississippi; and Dr. Henry Lee, who investigated the JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson murders, and O. J. Simpson’s alleged slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
The first two winners this year were Vidocq Society stalwarts.
Philadelphia district attorney Lynn Abraham was known for unflinching toughness and integrity and her relentless pursuit of French fugitive killer Ira Einhorn. Haskell Askin, one of the nation’s top forensic dentists, had worked on a string of major cases from the Megan Kanka trial to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Abraham spoke movingly about her determination to become a lawyer after medicine, her first choice, was denied to her as a woman and a Jew. Askin, to the surprise of those who hadn’t seen him lately, had gone from a hearty man in the prime of a brilliant career to a frail, smiling, wistful man at the podium, shrunken by terminal cancer. Surrounded by family and friends, he thanked his VSM colleagues with courage and humor and the air of a noble farewell.
It was the first surprise in an evening of unexpected revelations.
Finally, Fleisher bestowed the Vidocq Society’s highest honor, the Halbert Fillinger Lifetime Achievement Award, reserved for an illustrious forensic investigator at the end of a long career.
The award went to Frank Bender.
Frank Bender thanked his late mentor, Hal Fillinger, for introducing him to corpse No. 5233 in the morgue thirty years ago. He said it was a shock to feel the cold gray flesh-“You know I like bodies warm.” He grinned, his silver incisor winking in the lights, and there was laughter.
The tuxedo couldn’t conceal Bender’s fit boxer’s body or sense of vigor. Sixty-eight years old, balding with a white goatee, he looked like a man at least a decade younger, the envy of younger men, capable of chasing muggers and drawing justice for years to come. His eyes gleamed with energy, like a bulb too bright for the fixture. He looked like a man women would always love.
He said he felt the great forensic pathologist was with him, watching him now. Fillinger had said, “Once you get bit by the forensic bug, you’re hooked forever. And he was right.” Looking back on his career, Bender loved being a part of the Vidocq Society because it gave him a feeling of camaraderie he had experienced only once before, in the Navy.
He wanted to do more with Vidocq; there weren’t enough cases that needed his art. He always wished he could do more.
He smiled again and thanked everybody, and the applause rang through the great hall. They were still cheering him when he sat down. He was Frank, a cad among moral men, a hero among mortals, the incarnation of the wild Vidocq, and they loved him. He could say anything to them.