One of Frank Bender's many haunting sculptures.

Longform pointed me to a fascinating 2008 Telegraph article about the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based organization, made up of volunteer law-enforcement professionals, many of them retired, who meet for lunch once a month and solve cold cases that have baffled local police across the country.

A founding member of the Vidocq Society who’s not a detective is the artist Frank Bender, who discovered an unlikely gift for crimefighting many years ago while studying anatomy at a morgue. An excerpt:

“Bender, 67, is a small, animated man with a snow-white beard and a constant twinkle in his eye. He now works as a sculptor and watercolorist, but at one time or another has been an advertising photographer and a commercial diver inspecting the hulls of tugboats in Philadelphia harbour. He fell into catching criminals by accident:  In 1975 he was taking evening courses in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. To help him see ‘in the round’ he started attending sculpture classes, but there were no anatomy lessons available to evening students, so a friend in the medical examiner’s office offered to let him sit in on some autopsies to learn about the human form. ‘I go to the morgue. He shows me around. Bodies had been cut up, burnt. They had this one woman,’ Bender says, ‘her whole body was decomposed, they didn’t know what she had looked like or who she was.’

The woman had been shot in the head, the bullet smashing her skull open, but Bender told his friend, ‘just out of conversation’, that he could show him what the woman had looked like, and recreate the features of her face in a sculpture.

‘I just knew what people looked like,’ Bender tells me when we meet at his studio. Five months later the woman was identified from Bender’s bust as Anna Duval, an Arizona woman who had come to Philadelphia to collect money on a property deal that had gone sour. She had been executed by a Mafia contract killer who would not be convicted of the murder for another 20 years.

Bender had discovered an apparently intuitive gift for facial reconstruction and, as word spread of his success, was called first to work on more ‘skull-to-face’ cases; later, he began creating aged renderings for the FBI and Federal Marshals Service to help them find fugitive criminals.”