Henry Benner lifted the life-sized female dummy off the floor of his garage last week so he could take it to an exhibit at the Hans Herr House, where he is a longtime volunteer.

Let us paint the picture.

Benner walks up his driveway cradling the figure, her arms and legs dangling lifelessly, her dark skirt draping down, her blue eyes, open since 1969, staring up.

The 72-year-old man carefully places the figure into the open trunk of his '94 Mercury Marquis and slams the lid shut.

Did we mention that Benner's driveway is smack-dab alongside the heavily traveled Route 896 in Smoketown?

Uh huh. You can see where this is going.

In fact, you can almost see the face of the startled motorist, the one who watched the unlikely scene unfold while driving by, then turned around, hurriedly drove back to Benner's house, got Benner's license plate number and called 911.

Sgt. Brian Cloonan of the East Lampeter Township Police got the dispatch: An "older, white male" was seen carrying "a child wrapped in a blanket" and was putting the child in the trunk of a car along Eastbrook Road.

By the time Cloonan got to the scene, Benner was innocently driving the dummy to the West Lampeter Township museum.

So the police sergeant knocked on the door of Benner's next-door neighbors, including Vicky and Jared Landis.

"Did you see anything suspicious going on over there next door?" Mrs. Landis says, recalling the conversation. "Do you have much contact with your neighbor?"

Um, Henry?

"He's a nice, older man!" she says.

Over on the other side of Benner's house, neighbor Roy Lefever says, "Police just wanted to know what kind of a person he was. I said, 'He surely didn't put a body into the trunk of his car. He's a retired schoolteacher.' "

After talking to neighbors, who "kind of laughed," Cloonan himself didn't think Benner had put a body into his car trunk. But he was obligated to check out the report.

So Cloonan put out a "be on the lookout" on Benner's vehicle and checked around Benner's house for any signs of a struggle.

Turns out nobody saw a white-haired man driving around in a 13-year-old silver car. So a few hours later, Cloonan returned to the house. Benner was outside watering his petunias and geraniums.

"He was very nice and apologetic," Benner says of Cloonan. "In a way, he thought this story couldn't be true that I put a dead body in the trunk.

"But he did say, 'Is it in the trunk now? I want to see it.' I said, 'No, no, I already took it over.' "

Cloonan called the Hans Herr House, which verified Benner's account about the dummy, a donation from the former Dutch Wonderland wax museum, which closed last year. The museum donated its entire Hans Herr exhibit, which included a seated Hans Herr figure, to the 1719 stone home and Mennonite meeting place.

By the way, Benner transported the larger Hans to the museum in an open trailer. No calls were placed to police about that.

Benner chuckles dryly about his brush with notoriety.

"I think it's hilarious," he says. "I'm an old, retired bachelor."

"Hey," he adds, "I have to give the person who called credit. I'm not knocking that. They were being a good citizen."

Maybe the former Lampeter-Strasburg history teacher should have listened to his sister, who recently stopped to visit Benner and got a glimpse of the female dummy lying on his garage floor.

Benner wasn't home at the time, so she left him a stern note.

"Please move that dead lady," she wrote, "before someone else has a heart attack."

CONTACT US: cstauffer@LNPnews.com or 481-6024