to walk like that fugitive. he didn t just re-create the bust. he didn t just from an artistic standpoint, he studied it like a scientist. 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. like in the case of john 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,
viewers. but convincing america s most wanted proves to be only half the battle. we had done some computer enhancements of john list s 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.
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john list had been taken years before the murders. what would he look like almost 20 years later? the john list murder case would now enter the highly specialized world of forensic sculpting. i had been involved in the battle for missing children s rights for years since the murder of my son in 1981, and i had come across frank bender over the years as a renowned forensic reconstruction artist. forensic sculptor frank bender reconstructs faces to help police track down aging fugitives or identify decomposed bodies. part art, part science, part intuition. i work with physical anthropologists, i work with dentists, pathologists, detectives. america s most wanted asked frank bender to add 18 years to the face of john list.
was when he killed them years before. nearly 20 years after the brutal murder of his entire family, a jury found john list guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison. john emile list will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, evil and horror. i was just thrilled that the merger then between psychology and sculpture worked. it was an invaluable tool in making a determination of how the guy would probably look. and it was just uncanny as to how close the sculpture was to the actual man. i really paid attention to i think as much information as i had about john list and what he was about. i truly believe it wasn t for frank bender, john list would still be at large.