Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

Renowned attorney Kenneth Freeman, one of the tough Jewish guys, had walked the Philly police beat with him as a young man; Freeman went off to law school and encouraged Fleisher to attend the FBI Academy. Another tough Jewish guy, Customs special agent in charge Dave Warren, Fleisher’s boss, had helped bring him over from the FBI and its endless transfers so Fleisher could settle in Philadelphia.

Farther down the table, and back in time, was Fleisher’s Philadelphia tribe, the men he’d grown up with or served with at the police department. Short, wisecracking medical examiner Halbert Fillinger, who went to homicide scenes in his vintage fire department vehicles, had arrived in his red Thunderbird with the HOM-HAL plates. There was city homicide captain Frank Friel, legendary investigator of four thousand murders. “Frank’s the best man on a murder I’ve ever known,” Fleisher said.

The Philly cop family was as tight as any mob.

Only Fleisher’s cofounders, Walter and Bender, weren’t part of the family. Many of the Philadelphians had worked with Bender, but all knew Walter only as a Midwest forensic psychologist whose brilliance and temperamental nature seemed to match Bender’s. With their booming laughter and preternaturally gleaming eyes-one lit with mania, the other darkly glittering with mockery-the men flanking Fleisher seemed as ethereal as apparitions, shadowy extensions of Fleisher. They were loud, outlandish; they broke the code.

Yet Fleisher seemed to have an unspoken communion with the strange men at his side. “I’ve always had a taste for characters and eccentrics,” he said. A taste that came from his father, who enjoyed the company of gangsters, second-story men, showgirls, and assorted figures on the borderlands of darkness.

Before lunch was served, Fleisher got down to the business of creating the Vidocq Society. He introduced his cofounders, then briefly described the swashbuckling Vidocq, the society’s name-sake, and his many accomplishments.

Special Agent Dufner, once Fleisher’s partner in Customs, chuckled. So that’s where he picked up that trick. One winter day in 1980, they were investigating a major theft of TVs and microwaves from cargo containers when Fleisher found a footprint in the snow. He went to the store to buy plaster of paris and made an impression. “A lot of the guys in the office were laughing-you’ve gone too far, what’s this, Perry Mason?” Dufner said. “But we made about twenty arrests, and one guy gave himself up because we had his Converse sneaker impression. Fleisher was one of those guys who knew everything. I thought, FBI agent, Philly PD, I can learn a lot from this guy.”

Led by Fleisher, the men at the long table quickly hashed out the details of their new fellowship. They quickly chose a commissioner (Fleisher) to lead them, along with a deputy commissioner-an immodest organization model also used by the New York City Police Department, the Hong Kong Police, and the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard).

They would meet quarterly over a hot lunch at the Officers’ Club to discuss cold murders. Nate Gordon, the esteemed polygraph operator, proposed that membership be restricted to eighty-two men and women in honor of Vidocq’s life span of eighty-two years. (Born in rural Arras, France, July 23, 1775, a baker’s third son, Vidocq died in Paris on May 11, 1857.) The proposal was quickly accepted. Membership would be a “rare privilege” extended to the top forensic specialists in the world, and endure for life. No one could apply; one had to be invited through sponsorship by an existing member, and approved by a vote of a board of directors that included the commissioner and deputy commissioner. A single blackball would sink a candidate. The eighty-two charter Vidocq Society Members would be formally known as VSMs.

Their meetings would exude the elegant, privileged, old-world atmosphere of a Victorian men’s club. Coffee and iced tea would substitute for brandy, cigars were verboten, and talented women and men of all races would be enthusiastically welcomed as members; it was a different time. But they were not shy about making the club exclusive; one had to be a renowned crime-fighter to even be considered. It would be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.

There was an air of whimsy about the Vidocq Society. Among the many previous dining-and-mystery societies that sprang up, mostly in New York or London, the most famous was the Baker Street Irregulars, founded in 1935. The Irregulars meet for dinner in New York City to discuss Sherlock Holmes in a jovial atmosphere where “it is always 1895.” Notable members included Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, science-fiction writers Isaac Asimov and later Neil Gaiman, and Rex Stout, creator of the Nero Wolfe novels.

Like the Baker Street Irregulars, the purpose of the Vidocq Society would be strictly fraternal, Fleisher said. Working or retired, detectives could catch up with old friends or make new ones and stretch their minds on fascinating unsolved cases. It would be a social club for detectives.

Fleisher was even happy to admit people who were not law enforcement professionals if they brought a unique talent to forensic inquiry.

Walter frowned at that. He wanted no part of amateurs.

In the fall of 1990, as Bender and Walter hurtled over the dark Pacific on a flight from San Francisco to Australia, the artist couldn’t remove his eyes from the stewardess. He’d never taken such a long flight and he was ebullient; his career was soaring. The John List case had propelled him to superstar status as an international forensic artist, hailed for works of genius on the front page of The New York Times. Now he’d been invited to give a week of forensic lectures in Adelaide and Sydney with Walter and FBI agent Robert Ressler. His first appearance before the international forensic community would be alongside two of the most renowned profilers in the world. Things couldn’t be going better.

But it was a long flight, and Bender’s mood rose and fell and finally went into a free fall at 30,000 feet. The truth was, he told Walter, that it was his first long trip away from his wife in their twenty years together, and he was filled with worry. He had called her from all their airport stops, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, to tell her he loved her.

He was still finding it hard to believe, but his wife had recently informed him their marriage was officially on the rocks. Not with Wife No. 2, as some friends referred to Joan, but with Jan-the original pretty blonde, the rock of his life.

“Jan’s talking to a lawyer about divorce,” he said glumly, staring out over the black ocean.

“As your friend, I’m trying to act surprised,” Walter said tartly.

“I know, I know. I never thought it’d come to this. Jan’s the center of my life. I’ve always had affairs, but I made a mistake. I had the wrong kind of affair.”

“Yes, of course,” Walter said sarcastically. “I see.”

Bender didn’t seem to be listening. “… Jan thinks the celebrity stuff is going to my head. I can’t help it if my work attracts attention.”

In the modern media age, Bender was becoming better known in his time than Michelangelo was in his. People magazine asked him to sculpt the bust of one of the “25 Most Intriguing People” of 1991-Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old hunter found in a glacier at 11,000 feet in the Italian Alps with a stone arrow in his back and a knife in his hand, on the losing end of the first known European murder. Ahead of the scientific proof, Bender gave the Iceman short hair because “it just felt right.” The Sonnabend Gallery in New York City made him the featured artist in an exhibit with the work of Andy Warhol called “Monster,” Ronald Jones’s installation about crime. From photographs of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis, he sculpted an old woman, imagining that she had survived the death camps. “She had a beautiful singing voice,” he told the Associated Press. “She sang for Mengele. Then he shot her. It was the most moving experience of all the work I’ve done.” Now it wasn’t just Philadelphia newspapers calling; it was Time and Newsweek and Match in Paris, movie producers, Hollywood agents, and celebrities on the phone, in addition to the coroners, city cops, grizzled private eyes, models, photographers, reporters, cranks, quacks, collection agencies, and jealous husbands who had long burned up the wires on South Street.