Writer tells true story of artist who solved 9 murders

In his most unusual, fascinating book, Ted Botha, a prominent journalist, has written the true story of Frank Bender, a self-taught artist who has solved nine murders and helped find numerous criminals through his mystical talent for sculpting faces on skulls.

Don't let that scare you off. This is good stuff, meticulously researched and written with flair.

The key theme Botha develops is the mystery of the killing of 400 young women in the Mexican border town of Juarez, beginning in 1993. Those who have studied the cases call it feminicidios. When Mexican authorities asked for help from the United States, they sent Frank Bender, who carefully reconstructed the faces of the unidentified murder victims.

Bender used both accepted forensic techniques and intuition to breathe life — and even some personality — into these formerly fleshless busts. It was both scary and frustrating for him to work amid a culture of corruption and violence, but he pressed on. In spite of threats on his life, he produced eight busts with faces he believed looked like the women he had never seen.

He felt drawn to one skull especially, the one he called "The Girl With the Crooked Nose."

"Working on a case like this keeps you scrambling," said Botha during a phone interview from his home in New York City.

"I didn't know the difference between a pathologist and an anthropologist. I was a babe in the water, not a big forensics person. Thank God, Frank's wife, Jan, kept everything he did over the years in files and videos. I had to wade through it all. Some cases went nowhere or had no resolution."

He remembered one gory case concerned a body exhumed from a Pennsylvania field on a very rainy day. "What I wrote in the book pretty much followed the account Frank gave, either in person or on CDs. I knew quickly that I wanted to focus on Mexico. I was pretty sure that one little guy from Philadelphia was not going to find a solution to 400 murders. In Frank's opinion, the authorities were pursuing the matter just for show," Botha said.

Because Mexican law has been undergoing some reform, these cases were given a higher profile, Botha said. "But it was especially difficult because Frank didn't know either the system or the language. I kind of liked the fact that he had been unable to resolve these cases. It said a lot that the society sat back and just let it happen."

As a person, Botha found Bender "artless, not highly educated, but his instincts were spot on. He never became a professional. What he did shows that the average guy might have a really good nose for solving a crime. He was also very brave to have done it."

Botha was sure that Bender was excited about his doing the book, because on many levels he wanted the story told. "There is so much sculpting that people do individually with no praise at all," Botha said.

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