The Murder Room (20 page)

They would meet quarterly over a hot lunch at the Officers’ Club to discuss cold murders. Nate Gordon, the esteemed polygraph operator, proposed that membership be restricted to eighty-two men and women in honor of Vidocq’s life span of eighty-two years. (Born in rural Arras, France, July 23, 1775, a baker’s third son, Vidocq died in Paris on May 11, 1857.) The proposal was quickly accepted. Membership would be a “rare privilege” extended to the top forensic specialists in the world, and endure for life. No one could apply; one had to be invited through sponsorship by an existing member, and approved by a vote of a board of directors that included the commissioner and deputy commissioner. A single blackball would sink a candidate. The eighty-two charter Vidocq Society Members would be formally known as VSMs.

Their meetings would exude the elegant, privileged, old-world atmosphere of a Victorian men’s club. Coffee and iced tea would substitute for brandy, cigars were verboten, and talented women and men of all races would be enthusiastically welcomed as members; it was a different time. But they were not shy about making the club exclusive; one had to be a renowned crime-fighter to even be considered. It would be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.

There was an air of whimsy about the Vidocq Society. Among the many previous dining-and-mystery societies that sprang up, mostly in New York or London, the most famous was the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1935. The Irregulars meet for dinner in New York City to discuss Sherlock Holmes in a jovial atmosphere where “it is 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.

I
n 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—Ötzi 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 family estate in New Jersey, the gated compound with mansion, Olympic-size pool with brick bathhouses for men and women, golf course, boat slip on the lake. “She had this fur coat, really nice expensive fur coat, and I made love to her in it in the living room of her parents’ house one day. I love doing it anywhere, over the kitchen table, not just with her. I like spontaneous combustions.”

Bender had a theory that the source of his creativity and happiness was following his heart’s desires. Bender was convinced that once artists lost touch with their uninhibited lust for life, they fell out of step with the dance of the universe. He feared he would lose his ability to hear the dead, his intuitive mastery of forensic art. He had a finely tuned sense of The Balance.

“So let me get this straight,” Walter said. “You can’t be a great artist unless you can sleep with whomever you want.”

“Well, The Balance is important to my work.”

“Right.”

But then Laura did something no other girlfriend of Bender’s had ever done. She became extremely possessive of him. “She wanted me to leave Jan and Joan and drop any other girlfriends. Said she didn’t like Jan and Joan.” Joan didn’t like Laura much at that point, either. Jan was furious; her husband had finally reeled in a woman who—God forbid—wanted Bender all to himself, and she was starting to think,
She can have him.
Bender was still enchanted with the affair, but his lovely young woman and his new stardom had tilted his world, and he felt like he was flying off into space.

Bender brooded across the Pacific about his imperiled marriage. But at Adelaide, the first stop, he began to feel better. He couldn’t afford the hotel room Walter had booked for him, so the profiler agreed to share a room. It didn’t bother him in the least that the room had no heat. Meanwhile, Walter was coming down with pneumonia, which made him more annoyed than usual with his traveling companion.
I’ll never do this again,
he thought.
He’s a pain in the ass. He thinks it’s clever to be unreliable
.

In Sydney, Bender was again bursting with optimism. Even Jan had agreed the trip was a great career opportunity. After the List triumph, he’d been looking for bigger gigs with the feds, Interpol, and Scotland Yard, and now here he was lecturing on criminal personality profiles and crime scene assessment on a program with Ressler, whom he’d been eager to get to know. Bender spoke on the first day of the conference to the prestigious Association of Australasian and Pacific Area Police Medical Officers. He was a big hit and made a great impression on Ressler. Then he told Walter he was headed to Bondi Beach. Walter reminded him it was a four-day forensic conference. But Bender said he couldn’t stand being around “a bunch of fuddy-duddies at a conference” when he could hang out at a famous topless beach.

Bender sat on the sands looking out at the dramatic sweep of the Sydney beach. He was in paradise: The sun was high, the bikinis cut low, and he had three whole days, all expenses paid, to work on his tan. He talked to everyone who went by—about the shark net, the killer riptide, the hermit in the rocky cave, the record number of bikinis. (Bondi Beach holds the Guinness World Record for the largest swimsuit photo shoot, of 1,010 bikini-clad women.) Soon he became known as “that famous American artist” and “the guy who caught John List.” He met a lot of cute women. Things were looking up.

On the third day of the conference, he came back to the hotel to find a message from Philadelphia. “Your wife rang!!!” read the note at the front desk. “At 4:07 P.M. . . . the marshals’ office rang her to let you know they have caught Nauss. He apparently was living in suburbia with a wife and children and they knew nothing about him.”

Jubilant, Bender told Walter the exciting news. “Rich, they caught him in Michigan, just like you said they would. And he was clean-shaven, just like I said.”

“This is good,” Walter said.

Bender said he needed to get back to the United States immediately. Walter said he understood, thinking to himself,
It’s a good thing he’s going, because I’m on the verge of killing him.