bender works with teams of specialized doctors and law enforcement officials to perfect john list s characteristics, right down to a scar that he had behind his right ear. list, i went to the university of pennsylvania and met with some of the top rhinoplasty surgeons in the country. and dr. bartlett told me how the mastoid operation was done back then and how the scar would look after, like, 18 to 20 years. so reaching out to different forensic experts like this, talking to other law enforcement people, part of that team work, all that those bits and pieces of information come back to me are pieces of my visual puzzle that come together to make this work. but there are still some obstacles to overcome. now what made the john list bust more of a challenge than any other fugitive i ever worked on was the fact that i was only
i said, let me see. he showed me. i said, that s the pair, right there. take them. they re yours. within four weeks, bender creates what he hopes is a perfect likeness of john list today. but is it? i feel very confident when i finished the bust. i took the bust down to america s most wanted and mike linder and the team involved with the list case all gathered around the bust in the conference room. people were confident as far as the rendering, the technical end of it. yes, it looked realistic. but as far as did it look like john list, no one knew. i m just a piece of dirt stuck here in a rut. ever since that ol broom dumped me here. oh, oh. oooh! will love ever come my way? oh my!
picture. and, again, i didn t think they were too good. we didn t know how we were going to do it. we weren t sure how we can re-create it. we didn t know what are we going to do with an 18-year-old photograph. and that s where i thought of frank bender. frank bender is a forensic sculptor in philadelphia. and a personal and professional friend of john walsh. when a skull was found, frank bender would volunteer his own time, hundreds and hundreds of hours, to try to re-create the skull, what face was on that skull. and i knew he was good. cops said he was great. so john list was an incredible challenge. bender s assignment is to build an age progression bust of john list, showing him as he might look nearly two decades after the killings. frank just jumped at the challenge. he had a long history with me. i think being the artistic creative person but being the good soul he was, he said, you know, wouldn t it be something if i did something to catch this guy? mike linder, th
given frontal views. there was no side, no three-quarter view of john list available to me at that time. so i was able to take the frontal view and determine by highlights and shadow how the nose would be formed. the final task, john list s eyeglasses, a real guessing game for which bender seeks some professional advice. well, the psychologists told me that he wouldn t be wearing contact lenses. i thought about the glasses and i thought about john list and what type of person would john list become? he wanted to give this image he was much more successful than he really was. with that in mind, frank bender goes shopping. i went to the little antique shop around the corner and said to bill who owns the antique shop, do you have any old glasses? he said, yeah, i have a basket full. i went through the whole basket and there wasn t anything like what i was looking for. he said, wait, i have a couple more in this drawer.