The Girl with the Crooked Nose: A Tale of Murder, Obsession, and Forensic Artistry

by Ted Botha

Overview

MORE THAN THIRTY MURDERS, NINE FUGITIVES, AND ONE OBSESSED MAN

In this thrilling and fascinating account of Frank Bender and his work, readers will be drawn into the cases he has solved, the intricacies of his art, the colorful characters he encounters, and the personal cost of his strange obsession. Through breathtakingly realistic sculptures, Frank Bender reconstructs the faces of the missing and the dead based in part on forensic science, and in part on deep intuition, an uncanny ability to discern not only a missing face but also the personality behind it.

His skills have led to the solving of many murders and other serious crimes, and have given faces to the victims, including the infamous case of the feminicidios—in which hundreds of murdered women were found outside Juarez, Mexico.

With a conclusion as shocking as its story is gripping, The Girl with the Crooked Nose will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

“A compelling glimpse into a gruesome profession.”—Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman

“Frank Bender is one of the unsung hero's of crime detection . . . In an original and highly readable nonfiction thriller, this book brims with authenticity and the complexities of crime-solving procedurals . . . [A] fascinating story of a brilliant forensic artist’s quest to solve some of the most baffling murder cases ever. It is exceptional crime writing that is timely and informative.”—Tucson Citizen

“Action-packed . . . Botha’s work relays Bender’s surprising conclusions about the case and imparts more information about reconstructing the faces of the dead than most readers will expect.” —Booklist

“[A] crackling account of a quirky, maverick forensics artist, Frank Bender, and his largely successful efforts in facial reconstruction of murder victims . . . What is extraordinary is Botha’s writing, with his unerring depiction of Bender’s painstaking work and the eventual unraveling of the brutal crimes it solves . . . The tales in this book accurately capture the dark motives and complexities of senseless murder, and even the most savvy true crime reader will not be able to resist the author’s insightful storytelling.”—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425246832
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/03/2012
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 8.54(h) x 1.02(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ted Botha is the author of Mongo: Adventures in Trash, Apartheid in My Rucksack, and the novel The Animal Lover. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, and Outside. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The Nightmare
June 2003

Frank was used to the bad dreams. They came with the strange hours and the heads. It was a trio that he had learned to live with ever since the murder of Anna Duval.

The dreams returned at random, like old acquaintances—the man hanging in the tree, the boy tied up and strangled and burnt and shot through the temple, the man cut in half by a train—especially when he was working on a new case.

It was very early. He had come to bed only at two A.M., after working on a skull that he had just gotten from the New York police. He could hear Jan breathing faintly next to him. Boy lay at his feet while Guy, black and haughty, was barely visible on top of the video recorder in the corner,
his eyes the only thing that gave him away.

Frank knocked his knee against the side table as he got up. Boy shifted slightly and then settled back into place. Frank turned to see if he had woken Jan, but she hadn’t moved.

He pulled on a pair of boxer shorts. He looked good for a man who had just turned sixty-two—a flat hard stomach from years of exercising his abs by hanging off the sofa, skin tanned from cycling along the banks of the Schuylkill River, an eagle tattoo on his sinewy left forearm that he’d gotten in the navy. He resembled the English actor Patrick Stewart with a goatee, or, in his more serious moments, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Over the years he had cultivated a habit of trying to appear mysterious by bending his head forward slightly so that he looked at a person through his eyebrows. If it worked on men, it made women uncomfortable.
But as soon as he smiled, the jig was up. His mischievous grin was infectious, and most people couldn’t help liking him.

He had immortalized the grin in a life-size self-portrait that he’d painted several years earlier. Anyone standing close enough to it would see the silver tooth near his upper right incisor—that is, if they weren’t first struck by another part of his anatomy. Not only was Frank naked,
but he had done his penis in 3-D.

The unframed painting was propped up against a wall near the entrance to his studio door, which meant that anyone who came in—
friends, FBI agents, artists, journalists, policemen, criminal profilers,
U.S. Marshals, even his grandchildren—had no choice but to see Frank and his penis. It was as much a joke as his statement to the world: Here I
am. Take me or leave me.

Cocked head, wide grin, upper right incisor glinting.

Frank walked from the bedroom into the studio, which was flooded by a full moon shining through the skylight. The luminescence lit up the rows of heads that either looked down from several shelves along the eastern wall or stared up from the floor, at least three dozen bodyless saints and devils.

Yvonne Davi took up a corner near Rosella Atkinson, who was next to
James Kilgore, the last member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Ira
Einhorn was situated comfortably far from Brad Bishop and the 5,300-
year-old man. Near the front of the studio was the icy-eyed Hans
Vorhauer, a version of whom Frank had done in concrete to show off the man’s pitted skin. John List hid behind Anna Duval, who looked slightly shocked under her ten-dollar wig, as if Frank had sculpted her a split second before the bullets had entered the back of her head.

Some of the busts were unpainted, identified even before Frank had a chance to add their skin tone or the color of their corneas. Other busts had almost too much color, like the girl with green eyes, sculpted when
National Geographic was trying to track down the peasant from
Afghanistan who had become one of its most famous cover girls.

The heads that hadn’t been identified—at least not yet, or not that
Frank knew of—were usually known by an epithet that he or the police had given them, one that came with the manner or location of their death. The Boy in the Bag. The Girl in the Sewer. The Burnt Boy. The
Girl in the Well. The Man in the Dumpster.

The victim Frank had dreamed about tonight, The Girl in the
Steamer Trunk, was inconspicuous between all the others on the shelves,
smaller, darker. She had braids that Vanessa had helped him with. Her body had been found dumped under a Philadelphia bridge in the winter of 1982.

Editorial Reviews

There is a bewildering, frustrating quality in Botha's crackling account of a quirky, maverick forensics artist, Frank Bender, and his largely successful efforts in facial reconstruction of murder victims. The steady, no-nonsense approach of the author (Mongo: Adventures in Trash ) is marred by the herky-jerky sequences of the narrative as he switches from Bender's hit-and-miss past triumphs to a monumental murder case south of the border in the sordid Mexican area near Ciudad Juárez, where about 400 women have been raped, tortured and killed. National and international recognition of Bender's uncanny skill grows, but the psychological toll wears on his home life and his interaction with authorities. What is extraordinary is Botha's writing, with his unerring depiction of Bender's painstaking work and the eventual unraveling of the brutal crimes it solves. Although Bender is not successful with every case, including the epic Mexican serial killings, the tales in this book accurately capture the dark motives and complexities of senseless murder, and even the most savvy true-crime reader will not be able to resist the author's insightful storytelling. 16 pages of photos. (May 13)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

The real-life saga of Frank Bender, who unexpectedly rode a commercial photography career to a parallel gig reconstructing the faces of unidentified murder victims and suspects. Now in his mid-60s, Bender calls Philadelphia home, yet his work with clay and other materials on behalf of law-enforcement agencies has taken him to dozens of locales. Botha (Mongo: Adventures in Trash, 2004, etc.) cuts back and forth between Philadelphia, where Bender labors in his studio, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua, across the border from El Paso, Texas, where Bender is helping police identify dozens of the young women murdered year after year dating back to 1993. The chronology jumps around, with 1977 serving as one of the key years. New at ceramics and collaborating with Philadelphia medical examiners, the self-taught, intuitive Bender almost immediately helped solve the cold case of an unidentified murdered woman who turned out to be Anna Duval. Bender's painted clay cast, photographed and distributed to law-enforcement agencies, caught the attention of a New Jersey policeman who realized it looked like the picture of a former Philadelphia-area resident who had moved to Arizona, then went missing. Early success gave Bender confidence to continue his new occupation, and law-enforcement agencies reason to seek him out. Although the book fits into the true-crime genre, it is as much a biography of Bender. Botha examines his marriage and extramarital affairs, his fathering skills, his friendships and his financial ups-and-downs in addition to documenting cases solved, cases unsolved and the arcane techniques of facial reconstruction. Readers given to queasiness may find the gory details excessive, butfans of crime-solving procedurals will love it. Agent: Luke Janklow/Janklow & Nesbit

Kirkus Reviews