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. 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.
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 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
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,
front entranceway and there is a ballroom. six people live at breeze noel, john list, a mild-mannered church-going accountant and his wife, helen, and their three children, patty, john jr. and 13-year-old frederick. also living with the family was list s 85-year-old mother, alma. we hear music playing in the ballroom. the inside of the house was coom. you could tell the heat hadn t been on. there wasn t much furniture at all. there were still things in cardboard boxes and stuff stacked up against the wall. you could see the light fixtures were the old type that came out of the wall. they had no shades or covers on them. you could see some of them burnt out. some of them were ready to burn out because they were flickering back and forth. that s what these people saw when they went around the house. so we go to the left of the, i guess it would be like a small
a difficult situation. that was obvious to some of the neighbors. except for patty. she was rebelling. she got into theater and with that got into witchcraft, which horrified her father. at that point, from his perspective, she was headed straight towards eternal damnation. and john list was coming under intense pressure from another corner as well. john list had a financial problem. there is no question about that. his mortgaged the house to the hit. he had trouble keeping jobs. he had been unemployed for long periods of time. he also had a problem, obviously, dealing with people. it s one of the reasons he would lose his job. he just wasn t a people person. he would work in finance and where a personality was a necessary part of your job and he couldn t function. john list s financial problem