The Murder Room

Transferred to St. Mark’s in 1962, Sabadish molested her for two more years, then started abusing her ten- year-old brother, Bill Henis. Sabadish’s assaults on the siblings occurred at the rectories at St. Mark’s and St. Michael’s, the priest’s home, his car, and his mother’s home, often weekly.

“I hated the guy and I was afraid of him,” Henis said. “He didn’t like kids. He’d slap you around, call you stupid. You never knew what would set him off. . . . Sabadish said this is how he showed his love for me. He’d always give me candy. The glove compartment of his car was always filled with it. He’d tell me candy fairies had put it there.”

Sabadish didn’t live to see his secret exposed. After serving as chaplain of the Norristown church, he was appointed in 1994 to the fifteenth parish of his career, as the parochial vicar of St. Stanislaus in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, before retiring. He died in 1999 at the age of eighty-one. He was eulogized by another priest as a man who “touched countless souls, especially those of children.”

Fleisher remained confident the VSMs were right, and the police had missed it. “It was the priest all along,” he said. “The guy was a monster.”

Forty-seven years after her murder, the Carol Ann Dougherty murder case remained cold.

As the great hall filled, a crowd formed around Bender. The sculptor was, as he often had been, the man of the moment. His ID of Colorado Jane Doe, which would make national news, helped crack the oldest case the Vidocq Society had ever worked on in the field.

Fleisher had just learned that the Boulder County sheriff ’s office had identified the unknown corpse found by hikers along the banks of Boulder Creek on April 8, 1954, as Dorothy Gay Howard, an eighteen-year-old blond woman reported as missing from Phoenix, Arizona.

VSMs had worked the case since 2004, when the sheriff ’s office reopened it. The Vidocq Society sent two nationally renowned forensic scientists to exhume Jane Doe’s grave—VSM Dr. Walter Birkby, a forensic anthropologist at the Human Identification Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, and forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Froede, the former U.S. Defense Department chief medical examiner.

Dr. Birkby had appeared in the Discovery Channel documentary Mummies: Frozen in Time, and been part of a scientific team that uncovered the remains of Colorado cannibal Alfred Packer and the five gold prospectors he killed and ate in 1874 (their bones showed “an insatiable hunger”).

Jane Doe’s grave had collapsed in half a century, crushing the skeleton, and forcing the two VSMs to work painstakingly for two days recovering her remains. Dr. Birkby spent three to four weeks at the Human Identification Laboratory just piecing together the many shattered pieces of the woman’s skull before Bender could build a face on it. Bender’s bust appeared on America’s Most Wanted, adding to an avalanche of publicity that prompted Michelle Marie Fowler to contact the sheriff ’s office, saying she thought Jane Doe was Howard, her great-aunt. A DNA sample from another great-aunt—Roberta Marlene Howard Ashman, a surviving younger sister of Howard—matched the DNA that Drs. Birkby and Froede had recovered from the grave. The mystery that had haunted the family was over, Ashman said. They could “begin the journey of healing and closure that has eluded our family for the past fifty-six years.”

Howard’s ID was so new that the Boulder sheriff ’s office would not announce it until three days after the Vidocq ball, in a press release that didn’t mention the Vidocq Society by name. But Boulder sheriff ’s detective Steve Ainsworth—the lead detective on the case—said, “Frank gave Jane Doe a face and a personality. The likeness was uncanny.”

Bender seemed to grow more amazing as the years went by. Yet this evening was shadowed by the fact that his wife was too ill to attend. Her cancer had come back. Jan believed her husband’s love and divine intervention had allowed her to beat the prognosis for more than a year. But recently she had quit her job as a law firm receptionist. The exhaustion and pain were too much. She was planning for hospice care. Doctors did not expect her to live another year. Bender was trying to remain positive. “Jan’s beat it once, and the doctors couldn’t explain it. If miracles can happen once, they can happen again.”

Joan, his longtime Girlfriend No. 1 and art assistant, was his date for the evening. Tall and blond, with her hair done up over a black dress, she looked on with tenderness and pride as he received a stream of well-wishers and kudos.

Bender still felt the loss of legendary medical examiner Hal Fillinger, the old lion of the Vidocq Society who died in 2006, and who had launched Bender’s career in the Philadelphia morgue in 1977. In those thirty-two years, Bender’s forensic art had changed the face of American crime and criminology. The FBI, after years of slighting Bender and experimenting with computer forensic busts, had returned to old-fashioned art by human hands—to doing it like Frank did it.

His powerful assist to the marshals in bringing in their number one Most Wanted fugitive in 1987, Cosa Nostra kingpin Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, had shaken up the Joseph Colombo crime family in New York City. Persico was the older brother and right-hand man of Carmine “The Snake” Persico, the godfather of the Colombo family.

On September 12, 1989, two years after his arrest, Allie Boy died of cancer of the larynx at the age of sixty- one while serving a twenty-five-year sentence at the federal correctional facility in Lompoc, California.

Mass murderer John E. List, whose capture two decades earlier brought Bender international notice, had also recently died in prison. On March 21, 2008, List, an inmate at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, succumbed to complications of pneumonia. He had enjoyed the largesse of New Jersey taxpayers until the ripe old age of eighty- two.

List lived eighteen years behind bars, nearly the same amount of time he spent as a fugitive. He outlived the family he murdered by thirty-seven years. In a 2002 television interview with ABC’s Connie Chung, List said he killed his family out of fear they would be destroyed by debt and fall away from their Christian beliefs. List prayed aloud for their souls as he laid the bodies of his wife and children under the Tiffany dome skylight in the ballroom. Walter pointed out that if List had simply sold the Tiffany, he could have erased his debts instead of his family.

Until his death List corresponded monthly with the ninety-three-year-old Lutheran pastor he knew as a young man, who believed God had forgiven List for killing his wife, mother, and three young children. The Newark Star-Ledger begged to differ. “If the hell John List so strongly believed in exists, surely he is there today.”

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