Recomposing lifes details from scraps

He has also studied old photographs of fugitive killers,then sculptured busts embodying how they might look years later. His work has helped the authorities capture several notorious criminals who may have thought they were safe in their new lives.

Now Bender,one of the most respected of a small breed of forensic sculptors,is completing one more casetrying to help investigators identify a woman whose decomposed remains were found by a deer hunter in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania in December 2001. Every time I work on one,its my favourite, Bender said in his Philadelphia studio,a converted butcher shop. But this one is special. It will be his last,and his 70th birthday on June 16 was almost surely his last. Bender entered hospice care this month for pleural mesothelioma,a terminal cancer of the chest cavity.

There is no indication how or when the woman died. Thomas A. Crist,an anthropologist who examined the badly decomposed remains in 2001,says she was 25 to 40 years old (most likely 30 to 35) and of European descent,though subtle characteristics of her molars also suggested an African background. Nationwide computer searches based on dental records and the womans DNA failed to turn up a match. A search of missing-reports also went nowhere. So this spring Pennsylvania investigators turned to Bender. When Bender measures a forehead and the distance from,say,eye socket to nostril hole,he starts to see a face. From statistics and experience,he surmises how thick the tissue must have been,the shape of the nose,the fullness of the lips. But there is more to it,as this case demonstrates. Perhaps,a visitor suggested,the woman was a drug addict or prostitute who had dropped out of conventional society. The fact that she has been unidentified all these years pointed to such a background. Right? Wrong,Bender said. The extensive dental work,including a root canal and crowns,suggested shed had resources,sophistication,self-esteem. Maybe,he said,she got a divorce,was feeling her oats,wanted to start a new lifeand met the wrong guy. Benders bust has her head tilted slightly upward,as if in aspiration,her eyes seeming to gaze at the horizon. Why,he was asked,did he leave a tiny opening between the lips,as though she was about to say something?

I dont know, Bender said. It just works. He trusts his intuition. In 1987,the Philadelphia police asked him to help identify the remains of a young woman found in a field behind a high school. In his minds eye,Bender saw her yearning for a better life. The girl looking up for hope, he called her,and shaped her face accordingly,with her head tilted up. The police had no luck showing the bust while canvassing the neighbourhood. They gave it back to Bender,who donated it to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The organisation,founded in 1787 and believed to be the oldest professional medical organisation in the country,put the bust on display. A few weeks later,a woman viewed the bust and recognised her grandniece Rosella Atkinson. Remarkably,a photograph of the girl shows her head tilted up,as Bender had imagined her.

Bender,who paints and has worked as a photographer,got his start in forensics by accident. In 1977,while taking evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia,he went to the medical examiners office for his anatomy studies and saw the decomposed body of a woman who had been found near the Philadelphia airport. After studying her shattered skull,he got a sense of what she must have looked like and he did a bust of her. After the bust was publicised,the woman was identified as Anna Duvall,62,of Phoenix. Not long afterward,a mob hit man,was convicted of shooting her in the head after she flew to Philadelphia to confront him for defrauding her in a real estate deal.

Benders bust of the woman found in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania in 2001 was unveiled on April 19 at the fine arts academy in Philadelphia. It has been publicised in the area,so far without results. (A Web site,www.solvethiscoldcase.com is dedicated to the case,which is still officially classified as suspicious.) Bender says he has done several dozen sculptures for law-enforcement agencies over the years,and that most led to an identification,an arrest or both. Each bust takes him about a month,and he charges an average of about $1,700 a work. He does not use a computer,he says emphatically; a computer cannot capture personality.

His final days are being chronicled in a documentary by Karen Mintz,a filmmaker based in Lambertville,New Jersey. The title is taken from Benders own description of himself: The Recomposer of the Decomposed.