The Murder Room (54 page)

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 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.