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