The Murder Room (7 page)

As he grew older, he grew angrier.

The police came to his house, a five-bedroom split-level, and talked to his father. They were tired of pulling the doctor’s youngest out of scrapes, and now this. How could this happen in such a nice neighborhood, to such a good family?

Billy was still laughing. “It was just a BB gun.” He grinned. “So I shot him in the ass, big deal. I was just trying to graze him.”

The police were not amused. Billy was “ just a kid,” but teenage ruffians were no longer seen in the nostalgic, “boys will be boys” light of earlier generations.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared youth crime, the new scourge of “ juvenile delinquency,” to be a national emergency brought on by family disruptions from the war and a general decline in morals. Parents fretted over traditional values under assault from rock music, materialism, and movies like James Dean’s
Rebel Without a Cause.
A Roper Organization survey showed Americans were more worried about youth crime than open-air atomic testing, school segregation, or political corruption.

Something was wrong, very wrong, with the sons of the new affluent America. William Heirens, from a wealthy suburban Chicago family, had collected guns at thirteen, was accepted to the prestigious University of Chicago, and became a serial killer at seventeen, scrawling in lipstick on the mirror of one of his three victims, “Stop me before I kill again!” Seymour Levin was no longer simply the neighborhood bogeyman. Psychologists said he was an example of the new, especially depraved breed known as “constitutional psychopathic inferiors”; CPIs were human monsters nobody understood, except they shared insatiable resentments and no conscience. This new generation was more violent and depraved than Al Capone’s shooters and the worst criminals of the 1920s and ’30s.

Billy’s struggles in school intensified. He was spending all his time holed up in the basement reading detective comic books. His teachers frowned upon this; it was extremely troubling in a young boy. Detective comic books were thought to be a major cause of juvenile delinquency, a theory made popular by German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, a disciple of Freud. His 1954 best seller,
Seduction of the Innocent,
led to U.S. congressional hearings to censor the comic book industry. Wertham said that comic books filled with sex and violence turned boys into murderers.

But Billy was obsessed with cops and robbers. His favorite book was
The Great Detectives,
the true-life adventures of the dozen most famous sleuths in history. He admired Scotland Yard detective Robert Fabian, the “Protector of the Innocent”; Treasury agent and Capone nemesis Elmer Lincoln Irey, “The Man Who Couldn’t Be Fooled.” But he was especially fascinated by the flamboyant Eugène François Vidocq of nineteenth-century Paris, “The Magician of Disguise.”

Vidocq was a baker’s son born in 1775 in the south of France, survived the French Revolution as a teenager, just escaped a beheading, and during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte became the lawman hero of Paris, the swashbuckling “father” of modern criminology.

Even more interesting to Billy, Vidocq had been a rowdy, fearless teenager nicknamed
le Vautrin,
“Wild Boar.” He’d killed a man at thirteen, robbed his parents at fourteen to leave home and eventually join the Army, where he fought constantly. In the Army Vidocq defeated fifteen men in duels, killed two, and deserted after striking an officer. But nothing stopped him. Vidocq was a notorious killer, con man, highwayman, prison-breaker, womanizer, and spy before turning himself into the mirror of all Western detectives. Billy was taken by one of history’s great figures of transformation and redemption.

At seventeen, college was out of the question for Billy. He planned to join the Army, where he could “get in fights all the time and get away with it.” In the future, he saw himself facing two choices: “I’ll either go to jail or become a cop.”

Billy’s favorite TV show was
The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor
. It starred his father’s look-alike Matt Holbrook as police captain, leading three brave detectives standing for truth and justice in a large, unnamed city. The three detectives spent all of their time tracking murderers, thieves, and other lawbreakers. They were all passionate in their search for truth—a truth they could believe in.

They were all good friends.

T
he second boy balled his fist, cocked the bicep he had been developing for just this moment, and swung a roundhouse upper-cut that crashed into his father’s skull. That’s how he’d imagined it. He’d pumped iron at age fifteen for just this moment. He was rippling with new muscles and confidence, determined his father would never hit him again without consequence. He was relieved when the old man backed down.

Growing up in the tough Philadelphia river ward, Frank saw a headline in the
Bulletin
about the child found in a box in Fox Chase, only four or five Philadelphia neighborhoods to the north. He noticed a poster of the dead boy. But he didn’t have the luxury of thinking about anything but his own survival.

At fifteen he was a supremely gifted artist. His teachers whispered enviously about his talent. Strangely though, the city kid was obsessed with Norman Rockwell. Rockwell’s paintings of an idyllic small-town America on the covers of
The Saturday Evening Post
were Frank’s windows to another world. That world was tangible and close. Frank’s neighborhood was only a few miles up the Delaware River from the landmark Curtis Publishing Company building in Philadelphia, where the
Post
was published, overlooking Independence Hall. He loved the Rockwell covers: Father in his best suit happily watching Mother serve a Thanksgiving turkey on a white tablecloth to a rosy-cheeked, all-American family; the runaway boy on a diner stool, all his belongings on the end of a stick wrapped in red cloth, seated next to the blue-suited cop; the baseball umps calling the game for rain.

They were happy images, and he preferred them all to the images of his own life: his father going off to work in the factory and coming home smelling of the machines he fixed; his father descending to the basement to hand-sew the big canvas sails for rich men’s yachts. Lying in bed at night listening to the gunshots fly, hearing and
feeling
one slamming the side of his brick row house. His father drinking too much and hitting him. His father hitting and hitting and hitting him.

He’d dreamed of hitting his dad back all those years. Each hit forced the boy’s anger one level higher until it was ready to explode. He’d lifted weights, carefully planning The Punch that would set things right and release the anger once and for all. He was amazed when his father gave him new respect, and he could concentrate on his gifts, his entrance to that other world.

Frank had extraordinary powers and gifts. He was not a student of English or mathematics. He didn’t have a graceful mind, but a mind full of grace. The hands to draw, paint, and sculpt the beauty around him, the eye to see. He started drawing in art classes when he was five years old and had never stopped. And he seemed to possess a third eye, a talent that even when young he knew not to talk about. Sometimes it seemed he could see past and future. Yet with all his abilities, the boy’s anger persisted.

Not long after he knocked his father out cold, Frank, a high school sophomore, won a gold medal in a citywide student art exhibit at a Gimbels department store. In a dream scenario for a young artist, his work was discovered by Walter Stuempfig, a notable realist painter of the midtwentieth century whose oils were compared to Edward Hopper and the Old Masters. Stuempfig offered Frank $5 for his painting and encouraged him to seek a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the famed school that graduated Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt, where Stuempfig had taught for forty years. But Frank, touchy as a water moccasin, grew angry when he never saw the $5 from Stuempfig. Then some of his exhibited paintings were never returned to him, and in a fury he swore off the academy, an art scholarship, and the art world entirely. “I wanted to do art, but I didn’t want it hanging on someone’s wall.” He escaped into the Navy, where, aboard ship, he discovered he had his father’s mechanical talents but obsessively sketched the men he worked with in the engine room.

Back home two years later, facing poverty, he landed a job as a commercial photographer at George Faraghan’s studio at Nineteenth and Arch. Slim with light hazel eyes and curly blond hair, Frank was an artist with the rugged body of a lightweight boxer, a photographer of models and a model himself. He also had a lust for life and an intuitive grasp of the art of seduction. Women threw themselves at him like confetti.

He modeled for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
fashion section hanging out the window of his own 1947 Plymouth with girls hanging all over him; in
Reader’s Digest
he dressed as a horned devil posing as the checkout boy for a Miss America contestant.

“I was like a kid in a candy shop. Plus I’d meet girls in bars and other places. I had sex constantly. I never really tried at it, to be honest. Single women, married women, they picked me up as often as I picked them up; it was all chemistry. I had sex in a lot of cars.”

The blond photographer offered a full service to models: composites, head shots, and zipless sex. One day, bored, he wrote down all his trysts on a pad of paper, recalling all the bodies if not the names. He’d had sex with 165 different women. He was twenty-six years old.

Shortly after making The List, a friend introduced him to Jan Proctor, seventeen years old, a slim, pretty, blond go-go girl who’d run away from home in the suburbs and was living alone in the city. Jan had a child, baby Lisa, but didn’t know who the father was. When she’d left home, she’d stolen all the money in her father’s wallet and left Lisa for her parents to raise.

Now she wanted to stop hustling drinks as a stripper and become a model; she needed a composite. She was smart, sassy, and had grown up in the same neighborhood as Frank, in the riverside row houses of old blue-collar Kensington.

Frank was in love.

It was 1968, the summer of love, and “Jan was wild,” Frank recalls. “She was into everything—sex, drugs, you name it.” Wild enough, he figured, to satisfy his gargantuan sexual appetite.

They married a year later on Halloween as a lark, egged on by a friend. Halloween was the perfect day to consummate their hell-raising lifestyle. After the church wedding, the reception started at the notorious 7A bar in Kensington, birthplace of the city’s legendary K & A burglary gang and a block from serial killer Gary Heidnik’s future “House of Horrors.” It ended with the cops chasing the booze-laden wedding party around the tombstones at Laurel Hill Cemetery, where Frank had moved the party out of sentiment. He’d once dug graves for his uncle. To memorialize his marriage, he painted an eerie Gothic scene of the sexton’s cottage at night fronted by snow-dusted tombstones.

Marriage to Jan was a stabilizing influence. They had a child, Vanessa, and bought a dilapidated warehouse that had been a butcher’s shop and meat market in the nineteenth century. Frank never stopped having affairs during this period of domestic bliss, but he had a lot fewer of them. “After I got married, it wasn’t that many women.” As he matured, his conquests evolved from weekly trysts with faceless strangers to several good friends. “Any affairs I had were with girls, women, who believed in me like I believed in them; we supported each other. It wasn’t like a one-night stand. Jan said it was like I was bonding with my good friends, bonding with sex. She always encouraged me to have a girlfriend or two. She always liked to be able to spend some time by herself. She’d want me out of the house for a few days.” Jan insisted only that Frank bring his prospective girlfriends by the house for drinks and her blessing. “Jan would say, ‘I like her, bring her by anytime,’ ” Frank said. “I would never bring a woman into the house that Jan didn’t get along with.”

She didn’t even mind when Frank brought home Joan, a tall, buxom blonde, younger than Jan, as his art assistant. Joan in time also became Frank’s accountant, business manager, Girl Friday—and girl Tuesday night, when she made love like clockwork in the artist’s house. “Jan really likes Joan,” Frank explained. “She’d say, ‘Why don’t you and Joan go down to the shore for a couple of days?’ ” Jan seemed relieved to find such a steady, capable woman to help satisfy her husband’s voracious career and sexual needs. For her part, Joan respected Jan’s role as the queen of the household and Frank’s wife. But she was bitterly jealous of the many lesser girlfriends.

But real life intruded quickly into the newlywed romance. Jan’s parents dropped her daughter Lisa, now six years old, on the Benders’ stoop with all her clothes and medical records and said, “She’s yours. We’re getting a divorce.” Now “the biker momma and go-go girl was the ultimate mother,” Frank said. “She put her heart and soul into raising the kids and taking care of the house.” But with two children to feed on a modest freelance photographer’s income, the family was broke all the time.

Frank began to study at night to recover his art career, taking free evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy, paid for by the Veterans Administration. He studied painting and drawing with the renowned artist Arthur DeCosta, who urged him to do some sculpting to better understand the human form. It would help all his creative work. But Frank struggled with sculpting facial proportions. The academy didn’t offer free night classes in anatomy, and he couldn’t afford to pay for day classes, so he reached out to his friend Bart Zandel, who fingerprinted corpses at the city morgue. Frank offered to shoot a model’s composite for one of Zandel’s favorite strippers if the fingerprinter would give him a tour of the morgue. Zandel agreed.

Frank arrived at the two-story morgue on University Avenue with a sketch pad and calipers in his knapsack. He was excited. He would learn anatomy by studying the human body up close, flesh, bones, and organs revealed, much as his hero Michelangelo once did. Banned by sixteenth-century church authorities from working with dead bodies, Michelangelo procured a key from a friend to the church basement morgue, and spent nights with a candle and a butcher knife studying how the body was assembled.