The Murder Room

always 1895.” Notable members included Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, science-fiction writers Isaac Asimov and later Neil Gaiman, and Rex Stout, creator of the Nero Wolfe novels.

Like the Baker Street Irregulars, the purpose of the Vidocq Society would be strictly fraternal, Fleisher said. Working or retired, detectives could catch up with old friends or make new ones and stretch their minds on fascinating unsolved cases. It would be a social club for detectives.

Fleisher was even happy to admit people who were not law enforcement professionals if they brought a unique talent to forensic inquiry.

Walter frowned at that. He wanted no part of amateurs.

• CHAPTER 20 •

BUSTED

In the fall of 1990, as Bender and Walter hurtled over the dark Pacific on a flight from San Francisco to Australia, the artist couldn’t remove his eyes from the stewardess. He’d never taken such a long flight and he was ebullient; his career was soaring. The John List case had propelled him to superstar status as an international forensic artist, hailed for works of genius on the front page of The New York Times. Now he’d been invited to give a week of forensic lectures in Adelaide and Sydney with Walter and FBI agent Robert Ressler. His first appearance before the international forensic community would be alongside two of the most renowned profilers in the world. Things couldn’t be going better.

But it was a long flight, and Bender’s mood rose and fell and finally went into a free fall at 30,000 feet. The truth was, he told Walter, that it was his first long trip away from his wife in their twenty years together, and he was filled with worry. He had called her from all their airport stops, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, to tell her he loved her.

He was still finding it hard to believe, but his wife had recently informed him their marriage was officially on the rocks. Not with Wife No. 2, as some friends referred to Joan, but with Jan—the original pretty blonde, the rock of his life.

“Jan’s talking to a lawyer about divorce,” he said glumly, staring out over the black ocean.

“As your friend, I’m trying to act surprised,” Walter said tartly.

“I know, I know. I never thought it’d come to this. Jan’s the center of my life. I’ve always had affairs, but I made a mistake. I had the wrong kind of affair.”

“Yes, of course,” Walter said sarcastically. “I see.”

Bender didn’t seem to be listening. “. . . Jan thinks the celebrity stuff is going to my head. I can’t help it if my work attracts attention.”

In the modern media age, Bender was becoming better known in his time than Michelangelo was in his. People magazine asked him to sculpt the bust of one of the “25 Most Intriguing People” of 1991—Otzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old hunter found in a glacier at 11,000 feet in the Italian Alps with a stone arrow in his back and a knife in his hand, on the losing end of the first known European murder. Ahead of the scientific proof, Bender gave the Iceman short hair because “it just felt right.” The Sonnabend Gallery in New York City made him the featured artist in an exhibit with the work of Andy Warhol called “Monster,” Ronald Jones’s installation about crime. From photographs of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis, he sculpted an old woman, imagining that she had survived the death camps. “She had a beautiful singing voice,” he told the Associated Press. “She sang for Mengele. Then he shot her. It was the most moving experience of all the work I’ve done.” Now it wasn’t just Philadelphia newspapers calling; it was Time and Newsweek and Match in Paris, movie producers, Hollywood agents, and celebrities on the phone, in addition to the coroners, city cops, grizzled private eyes, models, photographers, reporters, cranks, quacks, collection agencies, and jealous husbands who had long burned up the wires on South Street.

Jan wrote in her diary that her husband was no longer the young, humble, devil-may-care artist who talked about being a voice for the dead who had no one to speak for them. He was on the phone with journalists and Hollywood and TV people day and night. “He talks about himself all the time,” she wrote.

Things came to a head after they’d been fighting for weeks and months, with long, bitter silences and the tension building. On top of everything else, Jan was tired of being broke and poor. The week that John List was captured, a Time magazine writer had said that Frank Bender was more famous than the president of the United States. Bender’s nearly forty forensic sculptures, which occupied most of his time for more than a decade, had produced spectacular results—but each bust paid only about $1,000, sometimes more, sometimes much less. Sometimes nothing at all. Meanwhile, Frank’s steady money from commercial photography withered. Jan took a job as a perfume tester at Strawbridge & Clothier department store, and a second job as a law-firm receptionist. Frank found part-time work repairing nicked and damaged tugboat blades, diving underwater in the polluted Delaware River—with his extraordinary hands, he was brilliant at feeling the flaws in total blackness. They sold their belongings, including Frank’s last motorcycle and his van, to keep going.

The bottom fell out recently, Frank said, when he was lying in bed one morning and Jan started screaming.

“Are you fucking Laura Shaughnessy?” Her shouting echoed through the old meat market, reaching the ears of their daughter Vanessa.

Frank was fed up with Jan’s cold, dismissive attitude. “Yes, I am,” he said nonchalantly. “Now can I go back to sleep?”

“Might I suggest,” Walter said dryly, “that that was the wrong thing to say?”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Walter glared at him.

“I’ve got to restore The Balance,” Bender said quietly and with reverence, as if it were a lost artifact of The Knights Templar. “I violated The Balance.”

Walter raised his eyebrows. “Your idea of balance is Karl Wallenda’s. I don’t know anybody else outside Dubai who lives with so many women.”

The fact was that Joan, Bender’s No. 1 Girlfriend, wasn’t the problem. Jan liked Joan. In return, Joan adored Jan and respected her unassailable status as The Wife.

Jan didn’t even mind the rotating cast of young women—waitresses, artists, art photographers, single women, separated women, and other men’s wives—who served as her husband’s Girlfriends Nos. 2 through 5 depending on Bender’s needs and the oscillations of the moon. And she recognized that the deeper he explored death in his art, the greater his lust for young and nubile life. Jan was the power behind the throne; none of it threatened her.

Bender was accustomed to raised eyebrows about his domestic arrangements, but he cared neither about what others did in their own lives nor what they thought of him. Frank and Jan sought marriage counseling several times over the years for financial and other problems, but Bender’s girlfriends never came up in their sessions. Adultery wasn’t an issue. “It works for me and it works for Jan. She needs her space and I need mine. I don’t want some psychologist telling us how to live our lives. It’s a whole bouillabaisse, a mix of everything that makes us what we are. I’m an artist, but the fact I went to art school is the least important part of me. A gift is a delicate thing and you don’t want to throw it off.”

But Laura Shaughnessy was different. They met through a woman sculptor friend with whom Bender had once shared studio space. He agreed to do promotional photographs for Laura and her handcrafted leather apparel, never expecting a lovely young woman with long, lustrous red hair and a musical laugh who returned his stares with compound interest. “Laura had the hots for me immediately,” Bender said. As he tells it, it wasn’t his idea. But a beautiful young woman throws herself at you, what are you going to do, say no?

She asked him on a date Bender couldn’t refuse—a museum exhibition on Hollywood special effects, including classic Hitchcock horror artifacts that enchanted Bender: the miniature town from The Birds and the dead mother in the rocking chair from Psycho . Soon they were sleeping together, and Bender had a wonderful time. “Who wouldn’t?” Laura took him to a beach house with friends on the Jersey Shore, then to a friend’s cottage in Maine. They laughed over red wine and the taped-over bullet hole in the window of a South Philly restaurant famous for mob hits. He reveled like a Dionysian god at her