Skulls and faces: Investigations and the pursuit of justice for women in Juarez

Frank Bender once slept with the skulls of murdered women in the comfy quarters of Ciudad Juarez’s Hotel Lucerna. An expert forensic artist with an international reputation for solving cold murder cases, Bender was under contract with the Chihuahua state government to reconstruct and paint the faces of anonymous female murder victims.

“I started imagining these women alive,” Bender said of the skulls during a recent phone interview. “They almost started interacting to me like they were on a metro together on their way to work in the morning. They started like getting a life of their own at that point.”

Invited by his friend Robert Ressler, the famed FBI serial killer profiler, Bender touched down on Mexican territory at a forensic sciences conference held in Chihuahua City in August 2003. There Bender met Jesus Jose “Chito” Solis Silva, Chihuahua’s state attorney general at the time, who in turn introduced the U.S. artist to then-Gov. Patricio Martinez. A surprised Bender was asked by Martinez to come to Chihuahua to help identify femicide victims.

After some haggling, during the fall of 2003 Bender was put up in the Hotel Lucerna on Ciudad Juarez’s Paseo del Triunfo de la Republica and given five skulls to work on by the Chihuahua State Attorney General’s Office (PGJE), the agency in charge of investigating and solving the femicides.

Bender’s Ciudad Juarez experiences are recounted in his biography, "The Girl with the Crooked Nose," written by New York City-based author Ted Botha and published by Random House. Although the book chronicles Bender’s life and work in the United States, and details the veteran artist’s key role in successfully indentifying murder victims and in capturing elusive fugitives, a good portion of the story deals with Ciudad Juarez.

Bender’s background as a budding child artist, creative adult photographer and an astute observer of the human species made the American a promising pick for the Ciudad Juarez probe despite his lack of familiarity with Mexico and the Spanish language, according to author Botha.

To guide his work, Bender studied women he saw in Ciudad Juarez’s streets -- their hair styles, make-up, skin tones and other defining traits that would assist him, in his own words, with harmonizing the face with the skull. “It’s like music or dance,” he said. “You get one note wrong or one step wrong, you can feel it, you can see it and you can change it to go with the flow of the others.”

The Philadelphia resident had no idea what he was stepping into across the Rio Grande. Practicing a difficult trade even under the best of circumstances, Bender underwent a rude awakening in Ciudad Juarez. He soon stumbled across a Mexican police “investigation” in which recovered male and female body parts were mixed and important files missing. He even later compared the insecure evidence room in the old state police academy with a “pig sty.” The building had been burgled and files stolen after Ressler was brought on the scene by Chihuahua state authorities in 1998, Bender learned.

Bender’s impressions of the state of the femicide investigation were made long after former Women’s Homicides Special Prosecutor Suly Ponce assured reporters that the PGJE had cleaned up its much-assailed act.

While he was in Ciudad Juarez, Bender worked closely with the PGJE’s Manuel Esparza Navarette, another ex- special prosecutor who also served as the state law enforcement agency’s liaison to the FBI and acted as media spokesman. Esparza was eventually named by former federal Special Prosecutor Maria Lopez Urbina as among numerous Chihuahua law enforcement officials who had been remiss in the femicide investigations.

Bender hit it off well with the English language-fluent Esparza, but the U.S. contractor quickly grew alarmed by inconsistencies and strange happenings that marked his first Ciudad Juarez stay. Early on, for example, Bender learned that the PGJE openly called supporters of victims’ relatives like Amnesty International “the enemy.”

Unknown to Bender as he painted evenings away with the skulls, the state police night shift commander in Ciudad Juarez, Miguel Loya, and other officers employed by the PGJE were at the height of their alleged involvement in the infamous “House of Death” ring that kidnapped and executed victims -- mainly men but reportedly a woman and a child as well -- for the Juarez drug cartel.

One evening, Bender and Ed Barnes, a reporter for Fox News, were taken by PGJE personnel to a restaurant for a dinner that turned into a vomit-filled stupor. Bender charged he and his globe-trotting buddy were drugged by an unknown sedative likely slipped into the two men’s margaritas.

The incident happened at the especially sensitive moment for the Mexican government. A U.S. Congressional delegation led by Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) was in town, touring
places where women’s bodies had been dumped and speaking to residents. Much to the reported dismay of Chito Solis, Barnes, meanwhile, was attempting to interview the mothers of femicide victims. In at least two instances, Barnes was informed by mothers that policemen were implicated in their daughters’ disappearances.

After weeks in Ciudad Juarez, Bender came to a disturbing conclusion: Chihuahua state police officers, the same public servants charged with solving the women’s murders, were likely behind numerous rapes and killings.

Bender based his hypothesis on conversations with Chihuahua state policemen who revealed to him sex parties attended by fellow officers. He heard how a couple parties were raided by Chihuahua state cops who did not know “their own people were there.” No legal action resulted against the policemen, Bender said, adding the sex parties could have been initiation rites for soldiers and policemen into the ranks of organized crime.

“You got to prove yourself to work for these people,” Bender contended. “So they have these wild parties and rape and kill a woman and then earn their keep in the cartel.”

Bender’s hypothesis has a lot in common with one propounded by Brazilian anthropologist and organized crime expert Rita Laura Segato, who observed territorial marking, cryptic messaging and criminal in-group bonding in the Ciudad Juarez femicides.

If Bender and Segato are on target, their theories could provide clues to why the bodies of murdered women were found planted near the former state police academy in Ciudad Juarez as well as in the vicinity of the Chihuahua state police headquarters outside Chihuahua City. Most recently, a murdered woman was found near the PGJE’s Ciudad Juarez offices after Mother’s Day this year.

Bender’s sex party revelations are not entirely new. El Paso author Diana Washington Valdez and Mexico City writer Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez both have reported about the existence of such orgies in the past. But coming from an insider, Bender’s information adds extra credence to an aborted line of investigation.

It could also help explain the now seemingly-forgotten Hector Lastra affair of 2004, a scandal which erupted when the official in charge of screening murder investigations for the PGJE was arrested for running a teenage prostitution ring that allegedly catered to prominent businessmen. Lastra was released on bail and disappeared from public view.

In a 2006 interview, Guadalupe Morfin, who was winding up her stint as President Vicente Fox’s special anti-violence commissioner for Ciudad Juarez, said she considered Lastra affair a critical lead that needed to be thoroughly investigated. Morfin was appointed a federal special prosecutor for crimes against women and human trafficking by the Calderon administration earlier this year, but it remains to be seen if the Lastra affair will be revisited in any meaningful way. According to the Mexico City-based Cimac news service, Morfin’s new mandate excludes cases defined as falling under the rubric of “organized crime.”

In his biography, Bender raises questions about the role of a U.S. citizen, Stephen L. Slater, in the femicide probe. A former New Mexico state policeman and an ex-director of the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy, Slater had enjoyed a long relationship with Chihuahua Gov. Martinez dating back to the early 1990s. Serving as a public safety advisor for the Mexican politician, Slater was asked by Gov. Martinez to take over the femicide investigation in 2003.

Bender calls Slater “the mystery man,” whom he never saw in his office.
Contacted by phone, Slater defended his work and the efforts of Chihuahua state policemen under his direction. Acknowledging he “called the shots” in the femicide investigation for several months in 2003, Slater said he was sensitive of his role as a U.S. citizen in a Mexican law enforcement issue, especially one which was receiving growing international scrutiny. Consequently, Slater tried to keep as low a profile as possible, he said.

According to the veteran ex-cop, he pulled out all the stops to get to the bottom of the femicides. For this reason, Slater enlisted the aid of Ressler and Bender, among others.

“We did our very best, I swear we did,” Slater insisted. “I’ve spent a lot of time in my life thinking about the homicides.” Now retired, Slater said the probe was making some headway before cases suddenly got “cold” or were taken out of his hands. Deciding he could make no further progress, Slater resigned and moved back to the U.S.

Bender also left Ciudad Juarez with a bitter after-taste in his mouth. Looking back, he said the professional disarray he encountered was no accident, but a system of “chaos by design” to protect the criminally powerful.

The 67-year-old artist decided he at least accomplished something positive during multiple trips: his facial reconstructions led to the identifications of three victims, he added, making the tense work worth all the trouble and danger. Especially inspiring for the American, were the ordinary women who recognized Bender from news photos and approached him in restaurants to say they were praying his work would help solve the femicides.

“It was so genuine, so from the women’s hearts, I could not refuse. I mean, I could not wait to get back,” Bender remembered. Asked if he would return to Ciudad Juarez to help identify other unidentified femicide victims, Bender replied with a resounding, “Yes!”

If the forensic sculptor and artist were to return to Ciudad Juarez today, he would find a city even more violent than the one he experienced during 2003-2004. Since the beginning of the year, nearly 600 people have been murdered, including at least 31 women, according to local press accounts. Women and young girls have been slain in gangland-style shootings, in acts of domestic violence and in sexual assaults.

In many ways, though, not much has changed at all in the border city. Illegal drugs flow through the neighborhoods, posters of the latest missing young woman haunt downtown and the PGJE is still in charge of a growing stack of unsolved murder cases that, with each passing year, could expire under the statute of limitations.

Biographer Botha has his own take on Bender’s involvement in the Ciudad Juarez saga. Botha compares Bender to a hapless actor who walks onto a big, mean stage unprepared for the cruel drama others have cooked up. “But you know, he had this indomitable spirit and this naivete, and this kind of dedication to solving a crime if he could,” Botha said. “He kind of blundered in there and did what he had to.”

The Ciudad Juarez experience left an indelible mark on Bender’s spirit. On the artist’s website, watercolors of foreboding shadowy scenes and haunting pink crosses give the viewer a taste of Bender’s memories of Ciudad Juarez.