FRANK BENDER IS A SPOOKY DUDE, and not only because he knows what your skull looks like. It's spooky how his answering machine invites you to leave a message for "the recomposer of the decomposed," and it's a little spooky how he returns your call from his claw-foot bathtub. It's spooky how air pistols and handcuffs dangle from the pot rack in his kitchen, and it's definitely spooky how he made a plaster-cast replica of his friend Rebekah's vagina. It's spooky how he talks, and it's even spooky how he listens. But the spookiest thing about Frank Bender is also the thing that's made him a legend in the field of law enforcement: Frank Bender sees dead people.

Sorry, but he does. Frank is a forensic sculptor. He does facial reconstructions--busts of human heads based on nothing but a defleshed cranium--to help cops identify anonymous bodies. He doesn't use computers. He has no formal training in medicine or forensics or anatomy. He uses his hands and his tools and his sculpting materials, and he makes his best guess at what he thinks--what he feels, really--the victim might have looked like. He does use a facial-tissue-thickness chart, which tells him roughly how much clay to apply to the different parts of the skull. But the chart shows averages, and every head is different. "There's no rule on how to make an ear," Frank says.

Usually the skull is all he has to work with, but sometimes there will be a few clues: a strand of hair, a piece of jewelry, the mangled frame of the victim's glasses. Once, he successfully conjured a victim's likeness from a skull that was barely a skull at all anymore. "There was no zygomatics, no nasal aperture, no maxillae, no eye orbits," Frank says. Not that he's bragging. Over his twenty-eight-year career, Frank's busts have led to twenty-five positive IDs. He's worked for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, the FBI, the Mexican government, Interpol.

And it's not always dead bodies. Some of Frank's biggest cases have been manhunts. Working with old photos and whatever information is available about the fugitive, Frank will add twenty years to his face and intuit how he would disguise himself. Would he wear glasses? A beard? Would he have long hair or short? Dyed or natural? Where would he live? City or suburbs? How would he dress? In 1989, Frank made a bust of John List, a New Jersey accountant who'd slaughtered his mother, his wife, and his three kids in 1971, then disappeared. Frank sculpted a suit and tie on List because "the guy wore a suit and tie when he mowed the lawn." Then he placed a pair of thick, dark-brown glasses on his face, reasoning that "he would want to look more astute, more in control than he really was." America's Most Wanted aired a photo of the bust, and eleven days later, the FBI picked up List in Richmond, where he'd married again and begun a new life under an assumed name. He was working as an accountant. Guess what type of glasses he wore?

When you ask people in law enforcement to explain how Frank Bender does what he does, they speak of his intense interest in human nature. They mention his compassion for the victims. They point to his talent as a fine artist, his uncanny ability to read bones for clues. But really, the essence of what they're saying is this: Frank Bender has a sixth sense.

ONE SATURDAY last November, I visited Frank in his home and studio on a South Philly block in midgentrification. We hadn't met before, but we'd spent plenty of time on the phone. Frank loves the phone. He's on the phone when I arrive, and it rings all day long: his clients, like Tom McAndrew of the Pennsylvania State Police, who hired Frank to conjure the face of a dead man whose body had been dumped in a fifty-gallon drum and set on fire; his wife of thirty-four years, Jan, whom he met when she was a teenage runaway dancing in a go-go bar; his girlfriend, Carolyn, who's coming over later. Jan knows all about Carolyn, by the way. She knows about Joan, too, Frank's assistant and "second wife." And she knows about Rebekah. And she's fine with it. As a character declares in Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway, "An artist creates his own moral universe."

Frank wraps up his call and greets me with a slightly cross-eyed grin, a silver tooth gleaming from the corner of his mouth. He's sixty-two, but he's lean and powerfully built. He has a snow-white, cartoon-devil goatee. He looks like Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. As he sizes me up (at least two beats longer and far more intensely than is customary), it occurs to me that he's trying to visualize the contours of my skull. It also occurs to me that in this age of contrived eccentricity, it's refreshing to meet a genuine eccentric.

Frank's studio is a converted butcher shop; Jan's strawberry iMac sits on a shelf in what used to be the meat locker. Artwork is everywhere: watercolors, photographs, a nude caricature of Frank with a skull tucked under his arm and a Diggleresque hard-on between his legs (a self-portrait, I'd assumed, until Frank told me the painting is Rebekah's). So are artifacts from his forensic work: a citation from the police department in Manlius, New York; an America's Most Wanted card with Frank's "stats"; bones; busts.

He hands me a steaming mug of sweet tea and gestures to a white plaster cast of a girl with an asymmetrical face, her left ear poking through a curtain of thick, wavy hair. "There's a harmony to form," he says. "Whether a person is beautiful or ugly, that harmony follows through. Since her features are so exaggerated, I figured her ears would follow."

She's one of the women of Juarez. Frank has just returned from Mexico, where he sculpted five busts for police working on the Juarez murders. Over the past ten years, nearly a hundred women have been kidnapped and killed in "sexual homicides"--homicides with a sexual element, often rape--perpetrated in and around Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Most of the victims are between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, and many are factory workers who come to Juarez from all over Mexico to reap the meager benefits of NAFTA. If you believe the authorities--and a lot of people don't, but more on that in a moment--there have been ninety-two sexual homicides since 1993. Forty-one of those cases have been "solved," meaning the police think they know who did it, but so far there's been only one conviction. An Egyptian named Abdel Latif Sharif was found guilty of a single murder in 1999.

So who killed the others? No one knows. And so everyone knows. It's a single diabolical serial killer. It started with one serial killer and led to copycats. It's for snuff films in Japan. It's to harvest organs for sale in the U. S. It's the work of Satan himself (or at least the narcosatanicos, who worship him on earth). It's the idle sons of Mexico's ruling elite, doing a little sport killing.

"It's not any one thing," is Frank's opinion. "It's open season on women."

Whoever is behind the killings, no one--not even the Mexican authorities--disputes that the official response was shameful back in the mid-1990s. Girl's body was found in the desert? Must have been a whore, or maybe it was drug related. Girl didn't show up for work three days straight? Ah, she probably just quit her job and went home to Chiapas or Oaxaca or Chihuahua City or wherever. Anyway, we're overworked and understaffed. Plus, no one with any juice seems to have noticed, so leave us the fuck alone.

In the past few years, though, the debate has sharpened, even as the judiciales have pumped money and resources into solving the crimes, and the atmosphere of distrust has curdled to the point of dysfunction. Amnesty International is applying pressure. So is the press. Victims' families fear the police. And the police are on the defensive, constantly fending off charges of apathy, incompetence, corruption--and that's on a good day. Stronger accusations include tampering with evidence, torturing suspects to coerce confessions, even doing the killings themselves.

INTO THIS SLOPPY scenario walked Frank Bender last October. He spent four weeks in a well-lit room at the Hotel Lucerna, working virtually around the clock, driven by a steady soundtrack of classical, Dixieland jazz, and the blues. He stopped only to eat and sleep and read by the pool for an hour a day. He produced five busts. And one of them is this girl here, the girl with the crooked face, whose body was found outside Juarez, her remains completely skeletalized after several weeks' exposure to the elements and animals.

This is a white plaster copy; the finished, painted sculpture stayed in Mexico. Frank made the extra copy because he's especially proud of this one. Notice how her chin drops a bit on the left. Observe the pronounced rightward slant of her nose. And see how her mouth tilts up in the left corner? "When I first saw the skull," Frank says, "I thought, What a wonderful head this is gonna be."

Frank Bender has never not been an artist. Born and raised in Kensington, a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood, he drew as a kid, studied art in high school, then passed on a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after a few unpleasant run-ins with the art world. A stint in the Navy followed, then work as a commercial photographer. One day in late 1975, he found himself at the Philadelphia morgue, and the pathologist on duty showed him a body. She's unidentified, the pathologist told Frank. Well, Frank said, I don't know her name, but I can tell you what she looked like. Show me, the pathologist said, and that's how Frank got started.

"When I kinda stumbled upon this forensic venture, I said, That's my turf. That's where I belong. This isn't going to hang on gallery walls. I feel right about this. This is where I'm going to put my energy. And I can give my gift back to the people instead of to art collectors."

Sometimes Frank's words seem a little too rehearsed, a little too media-friendly, and this is one of those times. Which is not to say he's being insincere. When Frank says he works for the people, I believe him. And this strikes me as pretty unusual for an artist, especially one who craves attention as much as Frank does. Nor does he seem particularly dark or brooding, which seems even more surprising given the grisly world in which he works. On the contrary, he seems quite content. Well-adjusted. Sunny, even. As for his tendency toward self-promotion, look, a guy's gotta make a living, right?

Which is what he was doing in Juárez as he set to work on the girl with the crooked face.

He began, as he always does, with his camera, photographing the skull from all angles. (Later, when it's covered with nonhardening clay, the photos will come in handy.) Then, aided by his facial-tissue-thickness chart, he placed little rubbery nubs--white pencil erasers, basically--in twenty-one spots on her head and face. Then he began to sculpt, layering the soft clay, pinching here, chiseling there, following the height of the nubs (and his own muse) to shape the contours of her lips, the arc of her forehead. Next came a synthetic-rubber mold (applied with a paintbrush), followed by a hard plaster mother mold (so the synthetic rubber holds its shape). These molds are made in two parts--one for the front of her head, the other for the back--separated by a thin aluminum shim. Next he removes the rubber and plaster molds, removes the clay-covered skull, reconnects the two mold halves with a bungee cord and duct tape, flips the mold upside down, and pours gypsum plaster into the neck aperture. Forty-five minutes later, the bust is dry. Then he begins to sand, file, fine-tune, and, finally, paint. "It's never too late to make a change," Frank says.

When this bust was nearly complete, he received a visit from Manuel Esparza, the investigations coordinator for the sexual-homicides task force. Immediately, Esparza thought he recognized the bust as a girl he'd been looking for. In fact, he thought he'd identified her once before, but the DNA results had come back negative. Now Esparza believes that the DNA may have been contaminated, and he wants to run new tests.

"The problem is, the family won't acknowledge that it may be their daughter," Esparza says, even though they seemed to recognize her when they came to view the busts, and even though they've been back at least three times. Esparza was elusive when I pressed him on why they wouldn't want to provide a second DNA sample and at least try. Frank attributes it to ingrained (and not unjustifiable) distrust of the police, plus a measure of parental denial. Whatever the reason, Esparza says, "We need the family's cooperation."

Here's how Frank remembers their visit: "When the mother and the father and the sister came in, the father had some kind of plaster, or maybe flour, all over him. He may have worked at the cement factory--I don't know. But you could tell he had just come from work, and you could tell they were hardworking people. There were four of the five heads there, but they only went up to the head with the crooked face, only up to her. They didn't even bother to look at any of the others. And the way they were going up to her--not the father so much, but the mother and the sister--and touching the bust, caressing the hair, touching the chin, feeling the nose, it was almost like they were saying their goodbyes to her. I don't think that they have it in themselves at this point to let go, to say that final goodbye. I think that's why they keep coming back, to just caress her one more time. Because they know that once they say it's her, they won't be able to come back anymore."

FRANK GETS about $1,200 to $1,700 for his busts--not nearly enough to live on, since he averages only two a year. He does bronze memorials and odd jobs to "support my art habit." He's also a cofounder of the Vidocq Society, a group of cops, FBI agents, wound-pattern analysts, forensic pathologists, polygraph experts, explosives experts, criminal profilers, and other specialists who assemble once a month to try to solve cold cases. There are eighty-two members--one for every year in the life of Francois Vidocq, the French criminal-turned- detective who's credited with introducing forensics to police work. In 1997, Danny DeVito's Jersey Films optioned the story of the Vidocq Society for almost $1.3 million. Frank's cut was 25 percent, which enabled him to make good with the IRS (but that's another story altogether).

At the moment, though, Frank is hoping to continue to help Manuel Esparza on the Juárez cases. There are nineteen more bodies to identify, nineteen numbered bags of bones that once belonged to someone. If Esparza can locate the funds to bring him back again, Frank wants to do them all.

THE CASE OF THE GIRL WITH THE CROOKED FACE: HOW BENDER BUILT THE HEAD OF ONE VICTIM OF THE NOTORIOUS "SEXUAL HOMICIDES" OF JUAREZ.

{1}

The neck aperture of one of the five skulls Bender worked on in Juarez. He studies and photographs each skull from all angles before applying clay.

{2}

These white nubs indicate the tissue thickness on various positions of the skull. Bender uses a chart that shows average thicknesses, then adjusts for each head.

{3}

Note how the tilt of the mouth, turn of the nose, and asymmetrical chin on this bust (which is made of plaster mixed with fiberglass) are reflected in the skull in frame 2.

{4}

The painted and finished bust, which Mexican authorities have shown to friends and families of missing girls, hoping someone will recognize her.

Busted

» Over nearly three decades, Frank Bender's work has led to the capture of nine fugitives and the positive identification of twenty-five bodies. Here are four examples.

John List Probably Frank's most famous case. In 1971, List, a churchgoing accountant from Westfield, New Jersey, murdered his wife, his mother, and his three children. Then he went on the lam. Eighteen years later, America's Most Wanted asked Frank to make an age-progression bust. Frank believed that List would choose heavier, thicker-framed glasses than he originally wore, so he picked up a pair at an antique shop around the corner. The scar on List's neck is from a mastoid operation he'd undergone shortly before his disappearance, and so Frank consulted plastic surgeons on how such a scar would heal over time. Eleven days after the America's Most Wanted broadcast, the FBI picked up List in Richmond, where he was remarried, active in the Lutheran church, and employed as an accountant.

Edward Myers This body was found in a cornfield in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1986. When the bust was nearly complete, Frank received a visit from Paul Snyder, a detective with whom he was working on a separate case. Later that day, by coincidence, Snyder was shown a missing-person flyer of twenty-one-year-old Edward Myers.

Rosella Atkinson In late 1987, a group of boys were playing football behind Central High School in Philadelphia when one of them tripped over the decomposed body of an eighteen-year-old girl. Atkinson wasn't identified until more than a year later, when her aunt saw the bust in an ad for an exhibition of Frank's work. The case was never solved.

Linda Keyes When a hunter found this body in 1980 on a hilltop farm in Slatington, Pennsylvania, it had been deteriorating for nineteen months. A single lens was found near the bones, so Frank found frames that fit it. He also noticed that the skull showed an overbite, which is reflected on the finished bust. After her father saw a photo of the bust in the Allentown Morning Call, the victim was identified as twenty-three-year-old Linda Keyes. Police never solved the case.

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