This past weekend I stopped into the Mutter Museum to see a bust by renowned forensic sculptor Frank Bender. I had just finished reading The Girl With The Crooked Nose, which describes Bender's ability to create eerily accurate faces from the skulls of nameless victims of violence. Bender, who died last summer at the age of 70, also helped nab several fugitives from justice by making age-progression busts based on photographs. The bust I viewed is of a young woman later identified as Rosella Atkinson, whose skeletal remains were found on the edge of a Philadelphia football field. Bender nicknamed her "The Girl With Hope" and depicted her almost exactly as she looks in a photograph, with her proudly raised chin. (Long before The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series, Bender identified his subjects with "girl" nicknames that he felt identified some key characteristic about them. He once explained that the term "girl" wasn't dismissive, but was instead a way of acknowledging how tragically short the lives of many of the women he tried to identify were.) Atkinson, whose killer confessed to her murder years later, was identified by family members who saw her bust on display at the museum.
The news this week that Philadelphia's unsolved murder rate is scandalously high added even more poignancy to the loss of Bender. Fortunately, the members of the Vidocq Society, master criminologists who welcomed Bender into the fold, remain on the job.



