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Frank Bender, a commercial photographer turned sculptor and forensic artist, has an uncanny ability to discern how someone looked from their skeletal remains. Bender has put this unusual talent to work to help with the identification of numerous murder victims and the solving of at least nine murders.

A commission by the Philadelphia Police Department in 1977 required him to recreate the likeness of a woman who had been shot three times in the head and dumped near the airport. Bender’s sensitive rendering of her likeness led to the identification of a missing Phoenix woman, Anna Duval.

Bender’s forensic facial reconstruction work has been featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes and profiled in the book, “The Girl with the Crooked Nose,” by Ted Botha. In 1989, America’s Most Wanted commissioned Bender to produce a bust of John List, a New Jersey accountant who killed his wife, mother and children, then disappeared. Bender’s challenge was to imagine how List would look after 18 years as a fugitive. The bust that Bender produced led to the identificationof List by a neighbor in Colorado within two weeks after the television program aired. John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Bender’s bust had launced the television show as a force in apprehension of criminals.

Now Bender is looking death in the face in a different way. The 68-year-old self-taught artist who served in the Navy during the late 1950s and early 1960s, has been diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of lungs. Mesothelioma is associated with breathing asbestos dust, and Bender worked around plenty of it in the engine room of the destroyer escort Calcaterra. Asbestos was commonly used in ships in that era.

“I not only worked with asbestos, I slept with it,” Bender told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The navy is processing a disability claim for Bender.

Bender told the newspaper that surgery would be fatal because the cancer is already around his heart and lung like a spiderweb. “Radiation might ease the pain, but it’s not going to save me,” he said.

Check out Frank Bender’s paintings and sculpture

Read the Philadelphia Inquirer column

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