The Murder Room

At fifteen he was a supremely gifted artist. His teachers whispered enviously about his talent. Strangely though, the city kid was obsessed with Norman Rockwell. Rockwell’s paintings of an idyllic small-town America on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post were Frank’s windows to another world. That world was tangible and close. Frank’s neighborhood was only a few miles up the Delaware River from the landmark Curtis Publishing Company building in Philadelphia, where the Post was published, overlooking Independence Hall. He loved the Rockwell covers: Father in his best suit happily watching Mother serve a Thanksgiving turkey on a white tablecloth to a rosy-cheeked, all-American family; the runaway boy on a diner stool, all his belongings on the end of a stick wrapped in red cloth, seated next to the blue-suited cop; the baseball umps calling the game for rain.

They were happy images, and he preferred them all to the images of his own life: his father going off to work in the factory and coming home smelling of the machines he fixed; his father descending to the basement to hand- sew the big canvas sails for rich men’s yachts. Lying in bed at night listening to the gunshots fly, hearing and feeling one slamming the side of his brick row house. His father drinking too much and hitting him. His father hitting and hitting and hitting him.

He’d dreamed of hitting his dad back all those years. Each hit forced the boy’s anger one level higher until it was ready to explode. He’d lifted weights, carefully planning The Punch that would set things right and release the anger once and for all. He was amazed when his father gave him new respect, and he could concentrate on his gifts, his entrance to that other world.

Frank had extraordinary powers and gifts. He was not a student of English or mathematics. He didn’t have a graceful mind, but a mind full of grace. The hands to draw, paint, and sculpt the beauty around him, the eye to see. He started drawing in art classes when he was five years old and had never stopped. And he seemed to possess a third eye, a talent that even when young he knew not to talk about. Sometimes it seemed he could see past and future. Yet with all his abilities, the boy’s anger persisted.

Not long after he knocked his father out cold, Frank, a high school sophomore, won a gold medal in a citywide student art exhibit at a Gimbels department store. In a dream scenario for a young artist, his work was discovered by Walter Stuempfig, a notable realist painter of the midtwentieth century whose oils were compared to Edward Hopper and the Old Masters. Stuempfig offered Frank $5 for his painting and encouraged him to seek a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the famed school that graduated Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt, where Stuempfig had taught for forty years. But Frank, touchy as a water moccasin, grew angry when he never saw the $5 from Stuempfig. Then some of his exhibited paintings were never returned to him, and in a fury he swore off the academy, an art scholarship, and the art world entirely. “I wanted to do art, but I didn’t want it hanging on someone’s wall.” He escaped into the Navy, where, aboard ship, he discovered he had his father’s mechanical talents but obsessively sketched the men he worked with in the engine room.

Back home two years later, facing poverty, he landed a job as a commercial photographer at George Faraghan’s studio at Nineteenth and Arch. Slim with light hazel eyes and curly blond hair, Frank was an artist with the rugged body of a lightweight boxer, a photographer of models and a model himself. He also had a lust for life and an intuitive grasp of the art of seduction. Women threw themselves at him like confetti.

He modeled for the Philadelphia Inquirer fashion section hanging out the window of his own 1947 Plymouth with girls hanging all over him; in Reader’s Digest he dressed as a horned devil posing as the checkout boy for a Miss America contestant.

“I was like a kid in a candy shop. Plus I’d meet girls in bars and other places. I had sex constantly. I never really tried at it, to be honest. Single women, married women, they picked me up as often as I picked them up; it was all chemistry. I had sex in a lot of cars.”

The blond photographer offered a full service to models: composites, head shots, and zipless sex. One day, bored, he wrote down all his trysts on a pad of paper, recalling all the bodies if not the names. He’d had sex with 165 different women. He was twenty-six years old.

Shortly after making The List, a friend introduced him to Jan Proctor, seventeen years old, a slim, pretty, blond go-go girl who’d run away from home in the suburbs and was living alone in the city. Jan had a child, baby Lisa, but didn’t know who the father was. When she’d left home, she’d stolen all the money in her father’s wallet and left Lisa for her parents to raise.

Now she wanted to stop hustling drinks as a stripper and become a model; she needed a composite. She was smart, sassy, and had grown up in the same neighborhood as Frank, in the riverside row houses of old blue-collar Kensington.

Frank was in love.

It was 1968, the summer of love, and “Jan was wild,” Frank recalls. “She was into everything—sex, drugs, you name it.” Wild enough, he figured, to satisfy his gargantuan sexual appetite.

They married a year later on Halloween as a lark, egged on by a friend. Halloween was the perfect day to consummate their hell-raising lifestyle. After the church wedding, the reception started at the notorious 7A bar in Kensington, birthplace of the city’s legendary K & A burglary gang and a block from serial killer Gary Heidnik’s future “House of Horrors.” It ended with the cops chasing the booze-laden wedding party around the tombstones at Laurel Hill Cemetery, where Frank had moved the party out of sentiment. He’d once dug graves for his uncle. To memorialize his marriage, he painted an eerie Gothic scene of the sexton’s cottage at night fronted by snow-dusted tombstones.

Marriage to Jan was a stabilizing influence. They had a child, Vanessa, and bought a dilapidated warehouse that had been a butcher’s shop and meat market in the nineteenth century. Frank never stopped having affairs during this period of domestic bliss, but he had a lot fewer of them. “After I got married, it wasn’t that many women.” As he matured, his conquests evolved from weekly trysts with faceless strangers to several good friends. “Any affairs I had were with girls, women, who believed in me like I believed in them; we supported each other. It wasn’t like a one-night stand. Jan said it was like I was bonding with my good friends, bonding with sex. She always encouraged me to have a girlfriend or two. She always liked to be able to spend some time by herself. She’d want me out of the house for a few days.” Jan insisted only that Frank bring his prospective girlfriends by the house for drinks and her blessing. “Jan would say, ‘I like her, bring her by anytime,’ ” Frank said. “I would never bring a woman into the house that Jan didn’t get along with.”

She didn’t even mind when Frank brought home Joan, a tall, buxom blonde, younger than Jan, as his art assistant. Joan in time also became Frank’s accountant, business manager, Girl Friday—and girl Tuesday night, when she made love like clockwork in the artist’s house. “Jan really likes Joan,” Frank explained. “She’d say, ‘Why don’t you and Joan go down to the shore for a couple of days?’ ” Jan seemed relieved to find such a steady, capable woman to help satisfy her husband’s voracious career and sexual needs. For her part, Joan respected Jan’s role as the queen of the household and Frank’s wife. But she was bitterly jealous of the many lesser girlfriends.

But real life intruded quickly into the newlywed romance. Jan’s parents dropped her daughter Lisa, now six years old, on the Benders’ stoop with all her clothes and medical records and said, “She’s yours. We’re getting a divorce.” Now “the biker momma and go-go girl was the ultimate mother,” Frank said. “She put her heart and soul into raising the kids and taking care of the house.” But with two children to feed on a modest freelance photographer’s income, the family was broke all the time.

Frank began to study at night to recover his art career, taking free evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy, paid for by the Veterans Administration. He studied painting and drawing with the renowned artist Arthur DeCosta, who urged him to do some sculpting to better understand the human form. It would help all his creative work. But Frank struggled with sculpting facial proportions. The academy didn’t offer free night classes in anatomy, and he couldn’t afford to pay for day classes, so he reached out to his friend Bart Zandel, who fingerprinted corpses at the city morgue. Frank offered to shoot a model’s composite for one of Zandel’s favorite strippers if the fingerprinter would give him a tour of the morgue. Zandel agreed.

Frank arrived at the two-story morgue on University Avenue with a sketch pad and calipers in his knapsack. He was excited. He would learn anatomy by studying the human body up close, flesh, bones, and organs revealed, much as his hero Michelangelo once did. Banned by sixteenth-century church authorities from working with dead bodies, Michelangelo procured a key from a friend to the church basement morgue, and spent nights with a candle and a butcher knife studying how the body was assembled.

But as soon as Zandel began leading him through the windowless rooms filled with a cold, sickly sweet air, Frank knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

All around him, bodies on metal tables were grotesquely swollen by disease, shorn by knives and bullets,