Giving them a face

David Stout has an article in The New York Times about evidentiary reconstruction:

For decades, Frank Bender has stared at human skulls, handled them, even boiled scraps of flesh off them. He has done this to shape clay busts in the hope of giving names to rotting corpses and skeletons found in woods or alleys or abandoned houses. He has also studied old photographs of fugitive killers, then sculptured busts embodying how they might look years later. His work has helped the authorities capture several notorious criminals who may have thought they were safe in their new lives.
Now Mr. Bender, one of the most respected of a small breed of forensic sculptors, is completing one more case: trying to help investigators identify a woman whose decomposed remains were found by a deer hunter in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania in December of 2001.
“Every time I work on one, it’s my favorite,” Mr. Bender said recently in his Philadelphia studio, a converted butcher shop. But this one is special. It will be his last, and his seventieth birthday, last Thursday, was almost surely his last. Mr. Bender entered hospice care this month for pleural mesothelioma, a terminal cancer of the chest cavity.
There is no indication how or when the woman died. Thomas A. Crist, an anthropologist who examined the badly decomposed remains for the Northampton County coroner’s office in 2001, says she was 25 to 40 years old (most likely 30 to 35) and of European descent, though subtle characteristics of her molars also suggested an African background. Nationwide computer searches based on dental records and the woman’s DNA failed to turn up a match. A search of missing-reports also went nowhere.
“This case has perplexed me for years,” said the county coroner, Zachary Lysek, who was a local police officer for eight years before becoming coroner in 1992. So, this spring, Pennsylvania investigators turned to Mr. Bender.
Dr. Crist, who teaches at Utica College in New York, and has been a consultant for the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office, said he greatly respects Mr. Bender’s work and is fascinated by “his insights into the detailed characteristics that make each person’s face unique.”
When Mr. Bender measures a forehead and the distance from, say, eye socket to nostril hole, he starts to see a face. From statistics and experience, he surmises how thick the tissue must have been, the shape of the nose, the fullness of the lips. But there is more to it, as this case demonstrates.
Perhaps, a visitor suggested, the woman was a drug addict or prostitute who had dropped out of conventional society. The fact that she has been unidentified all these years pointed to such a background. Right?
Wrong, Mr. Bender said. The extensive dental work, including a root canal and crowns, suggested that she’d had resources, sophistication, self-esteem. Maybe, he said, “she got a divorce, was feeling her oats, wanted to start a new life, and just met the wrong guy.”
Mr. Bender’s bust has her head tilted slightly upward, as if in aspiration, her eyes seeming to gaze at the horizon. Why, he was asked, did he leave a tiny opening between the lips, as though she was about to say something? “I don’t know,” Mr. Bender said with a shrug. “It just works.”
Mr. Bender trusts his intuition. In 1987, the Philadelphia police asked him to help identify the remains of a young woman found in a field behind a high school. In his mind’s eye, Mr. Bender saw her yearning for a better life. “The girl looking up for hope,” he called her, and shaped her face accordingly, with her head tilted up. The police had no luck showing the bust while canvassing the neighborhood. They gave it back to Mr. Bender, who donated it to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The organization, founded in 1787 and believed to be the oldest professional medical organization in the country, put the bust on display. A few weeks later, a woman viewed the bust and recognized her grandniece Rosella Atkinson. Remarkably, a photograph of the girl shows her head tilted up, as Mr. Bender had imagined her. (The conscience-stricken killer eventually confessed.)
Mr. Bender, who paints and has worked as a photographer, got his start in forensics by accident. In 1977, while taking evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he went to the medical examiner’s office for his anatomy studies. He saw the decomposed body of a woman who had been found near the Philadelphia airport. After studying her shattered skull, he started to get a sense of what she must have looked like. So he did a bust of her. After the bust was publicized, the woman was identified as Anna Duvall, 62, of Phoenix. Not long afterward, John Martini, a mob hit man, was convicted of shooting her in the head after she flew to Philadelphia to confront him for defrauding her in a real estate deal. (Mr. Martini, who was implicated in three other murders, died in prison in 2009.)
The case that made Mr. Bender famous was that of John List, a struggling accountant who shot his mother, wife, and three children to death in their Westfield, New Jersey home in the fall of 1971, then vanished. In 1989, Mr. Bender was asked by the producers of America’s Most Wanted to sculpture an older John List. After studying photographs of the younger man, Mr. Bender used the clay to show a face sagging with age.
A woman watching television in Richmond, Virginia recognized her churchgoing neighbor, who called himself Robert Clark, wearing just the type of thick-rimmed glasses Mr. Bender had put on the bust. The police arrested the man, who proved to be Mr. List; he was convicted of the murders in 1990 and died in prison in 2008.
Mr. Bender’s bust of the woman found in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania in 2001 was unveiled on 19 April at the fine arts academy in Philadelphia. It has been publicized in the area, so far without results. (A website is dedicated to the case, which is still officially classified as suspicious.)
Mr. Bender says he has done several dozen sculptures for law-enforcement agencies over the years, and that most led to an identification, an arrest, or both. Each bust takes him about a month, and he charges an average of about $1,700 a work. He does not use a computer, he says emphatically; a computer cannot capture personality.
Mr. Bender’s final days are being chronicled in a documentary by Karen Mintz, a filmmaker based in Lambertville, New Jersey. The title is taken from Mr. Bender’s own description of himself: The Recomposer of the Decomposed.
Despite his disdain for computers, they can recreate people in three dimensions as well as two, and they are here to stay. So is there any real need for Mr. Bender’s blend of science and art?
Douglas H. Ubelaker, president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, says there is. Computers can do many things, Dr. Ubelaker said, like giving a sculptor a better idea where to place the “depth markers”, which resemble cigarette filters or pencil erasers and help him in shaping a face. “But there will always be a need for a skilled artist to bring it home,” said Dr. Ubelaker, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He called Mr. Bender’s reputation “sterling”.
Mr. Bender blames his stint in the engine room of a Navy destroyer decades ago for his cancer, which typically shows up many years after exposure to asbestos. He still enjoys the company of his friends, including people from the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based volunteer organization founded in 1990 that investigates unsolved crimes. (Mr. Bender was a co-founder.) “I have no fear of dying,” he said, adding that he was sure his wife, Jan, who died of non-smokers’ lung cancer last year, was waiting for him in the afterlife. After all, he said, “we’re not just flesh and bone.”