On a winter night in 1975, an art student named Frank Bender visited the Philadelphia city morgue for an impromptu figure-drawing lesson. It was an experience that changed his life.

A lifelong artist and struggling young photographer, Bender was fresh out of the Navy and using his military benefits to study the finer points of his trade at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.

The school didn't offer anatomy classes for night students, so when a friend who worked in the medical examiner's office offered to let him into the morgue for an up-close look at the human form, Bender agreed.

The bodies he discovered there were like nothing he or his fellow art students had ever seen. And while he didn't learn much about anatomy that night ("the bodies were all torn up — it was nothing like an art book"), he did discover something incredible: He could envision the faces of the dead.     

"My friend introduced me to [coroner] Halbert Fillinger, and he showed me an unknown woman that they couldn't identify," Bender recalled in a recent telephone interview from his home studio in Philadelphia.

Found near the Philadelphia airport with three gunshot wounds to the head, the body was so badly decomposed that its features were indistinguishable, and fingerprinting was not an option.  The usual methods — dental records and DNA samples — yielded no clues. Although Bender had never before seen the woman, he could picture her face.

"[Fillinger] asked me if I knew anything about forensics, and I said, 'I don't even know what that word means,'" Bender recalled.

Bender created a bust of the woman as she had appeared in life. The bust was photographed and given to the media, and the body was later identified as 62-year-old Anna Duval of Phoenix.

A remarkable career — what Bender calls "putting faces on the dead" — had begun. In the 32 years since, he has worked for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, the FBI, the Mexican government, Interpol, the Roman Catholic Church and private scholars. He's reconstructed the faces of mummies in Egypt and helped to put several criminals on the most-wanted lists — and many other murderers, besides — behind bars.

"I don't keep track of how many IDs I've made. I don't even know how many teeth I have left in my head," he said. "I can just tell you that there have been a lot."

Some of Bender's forensics-based artwork will be on display in the Rothman Gallery of the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College from Thursday, March 13, through Sunday, April 13, in a show titled "Art and Crime," a joint exhibit featuring the works of Bender and lithographer José Luis Cuevas.

Bender typically begins his work by researching a case, reading the pathology reports and examining articles that may have been found with the body. Then he studies the skull. Here's where his job can get downright grisly: While the skull usually arrives clean and dry, he sometimes has to deflesh it himself.

This does not faze him.

"It wasn't anything I was prepared for or knew anything about," he said. "All of a sudden, I was flipping over bodies, scooping out skulls, and I just jumped right in."

When the skull is ready, he makes a cast of it, filling in features with layers of modeling clay. It is a highly intuitive process.

"I look at the skull, and I just know what they look like," he said. "There's a harmony in nature — a harmony of form and color. If one movement of a dance or one note of music is wrong, you know it. The same is true with form."

When Bender has finished with the clay, he makes a mold of the bust out of rubber and plaster, which he sands, polishes and paints.

His subjects have included 18-year-old Rosella Atkinson, whose body was discovered in 1987 by a group of boys playing football behind a Philadelphia high school. "Her family got in touch with me after the ID," Bender said proudly. "They still send me Christmas cards."

In a particularly challenging case out of Manlius, N.Y., Bender built a full, detailed bust with only a fragment of a skull for reference.

"That was the ultimate test because all I had was the back of the skull," he said. "I took the aesthetic of the forms, brought them forward, created a sculpture and got an ID, and it led them to the killer of three women."

Over the years, he also helped convict longtime fugitives, such as Colombo crime family boss Alphonse Persico, by studying old photos and creating busts of what he believed they would look like in present day. The likenesses have been uncanny: Bender predicted that drug lord Hans Vorhauer would bleach his hair blond, and that the bearded murderer Robert Nauss would be a clean-shaven man who lived in the suburbs. He was right.

Bender's most famous case came to him in 1989, when he helped police find John List of Westfield, N.J., who had killed his mother, wife and three children in their Victorian mansion, and had been a fugitive for 18 years.

With the help of old family photos and information about List's hereditary traits and past eating and drinking habits, Bender sculpted a bust that showed a visibly aged List wearing a suit and thick-framed glasses. The bust was shown on the popular TV crime series "America's Most Wanted," and 11 days later, the FBI apprehended List in Virginia, where he had been living as a suit-coated accountant who, amazingly, wore thick-framed glasses.

Bender said he can't explain how he envisions his subjects in such great detail; he only knows that, for him, forensic art is a deeply personal practice.

"I work from the actual skulls of the victims, so it is a firsthand experience," he said. "I have to feel it. I have to live the experience.

"You're working with these people who were senselessly murdered and discarded like trash. I am one of the last people to represent them, and they all have their personal attachment with me. It's emotional."

To purge those emotions, he paints watercolors. "It's like I'm unloading the images from the case. I have to do that so I can go on to the next project with a clean palette," he said. "It helps to keep my sanity."

Some of his watercolors will be on display at the F&M exhibit, which will include the busts of List and Atkinson and the sculpture he fashioned using the skull fragment.

"I always make two castings when I work. One I keep to look at while I'm painting the other one," Bender said. "The plasters you will see in the show are rough, right out of the mold, with no fine-tuning."

Bender sounds nothing like the creepy sort of fellow who, one imagines, would spend his free time poring over human remains. In fact, he is a gregarious guy who enjoys model train sets and seems to be genuinely satisfied with his career and his life.

"I helped the government get some of the most wanted fugitives in the country," he said with pride. "It's my contribution to society, and it also fulfills my creative need. You give and you get."

At a gallery reception Friday, April 4, Bender will present a slide lecture about forensic reconstruction and his work with law enforcement. For more information, call the Phillips Museum at 291-3879.