THE LEGACY OF THE BUST
Frank Bender died in 2011 at the age of seventy, having built a career in forensic sculpture that included the John List bust but also a range of other cases — reconstructions of unknown deceased individuals, age-progression work on other fugitive cases, and consultations with law enforcement agencies in both the United States and internationally.
His work on the List case became one of the reference points for the subsequent development of forensic age progression as a discipline. The success of the bust — not as a guarantee of identification, but as a tool that generated a viable lead — demonstrated that systematic, informed artistic age progression could provide something that standard photographs of aged fugitives could not: an image of what the person looked like now, rather than what they had looked like then.
Subsequent developments in digital technology made some of this work more precise — computerized aging algorithms, facial recognition software, the ability to process large amounts of photographic data about how specific features change over time in specific populations. But the fundamentals of the Bender approach — use the existing photographs, apply knowledge of how faces age, incorporate case-specific information about the individual’s likely lifestyle and choices, build the most accurate possible representation of the present-day face — remained the template.
The three-dimensional quality of the Bender bust was also significant. A two-dimensional photograph or drawing presents a face from one angle. A three-dimensional sculpture can be photographed or displayed from multiple angles, giving viewers multiple perspectives on the face in question and increasing the chances that any given viewer will find the angle that matches their memory of a specific person.
The bust worked because it was close to accurate, and it was close to accurate because the people who built it — Bender, O’Donnell, Walter — were working from solid evidence and sound judgment. The serendipitous element was that the judgment proved right. There is no version of the story where a bust that looked nothing like the actual sixty-three-year-old List would have generated a useful tip.
Forensic tools generate useful results when the tools are well-made. The List bust was well-made.