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.
Walter scowled. What had Bender—the same age as him—accomplished to deserve such crowning recognition? Others thought it was odd. It was strange hearing Frank look back fondly on his career when he was smack in the middle of it, fresh from one of his greatest cases, Colorado Jane Doe. Strange, too, when Fleisher introduced “my great friend Frank Bender” in an emotional speech that summed up their decades together, and then gave Frank a sloppy bear hug. No one burned with more passion for the work than Bender, the all-night iron horse. No one lived more in the moment and less in memory.
After the speech, Bender, Fleisher, and Walter walked together out onto the patio overlooking the river. The founders were joined by other men in tuxedos, with cigars and port, Cockburn’s Special Reserve, and women tippy in high heels and gowns with light throws. The autumn evening was unseasonably warm. They stood looking out at the river rolling by in darkness. Pushing the bank, it looked joined to the flat landscape, the rough stitching between two states.
Frank said, “I feel great right now. And it’s now that counts, right?” His smile, like his voice and his eyes, was electric, joyful.
His partners nodded. “Yeah, sure, Frank. It’s great.” They knew. Some others knew but Frank had not wanted to share it widely.
Frank Bender was dying.
Walter stared at Fleisher, who laughed nervously. “Yeah, it was a last-minute thing. We weren’t going to give Frank the award, but then we found out he’s dying. We gotta give it to him.”
Walter glared. Bender roared with laughter.
In recent days he’d learned that he had pleural mesothelioma, the cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. The cancer was extremely rare, a thousand times rarer than lung cancer caused by heavy smoking. Only about one in a million people worldwide developed it. And it was deadly.
Mesothelioma took twenty to fifty years to develop after exposure. Bender was exposed to asbestos in the Navy, having fled the art establishment and an art college scholarship, knowing only that he didn’t want his art to hang only in museums. The Navy had offered to make him a photographer, but he refused. He wanted to work in the engine room, a mechanic like his dad, although he still couldn’t stop pencil-sketching the other mechanics. He spent three years in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the engine room of the destroyer escort U.S.S.
The cancer filled his torso. “It’s bigger than a baby’s head,” the doctor said. The image made him feel bitterly miraculous, like he was giving birth to his own death. Radiation could ease the pain, but it wouldn’t save him. Chemotherapy could shut down his kidneys. “Surgery would be fatal,” Bender said, “because the cancer is already around my heart and lungs like a spiderweb. I have no options.”
Shaken, he had taken his partners into his confidence. He asked Fleisher to read the medical reports for him and give his impression. “It looks very grim, Frank,” Fleisher said sadly. Then Fleisher let out a small laugh.
