The U.S. Marshals Service has consulted Bender several times. He's offered them both drawings and sculptures of fugitives, such as accused murderer Ira Einhorn, mob underboss Alphonse Persico, and a pair of escaped prisoners, Robert Nauss and Hans Vorhauer.

Nauss, a former leader of the Warlocks motorcycle gang, had been convicted of the 1977 murder of his 21 year-old girlfriend, a Philadelphia beauty queen.  Although  the girlfriend’s corpse had never been found, a witness at Nauss’s trial claimed that Nauss had displayed her body in his garage.  Twelve years after the murder, in 1989, Nauss escaped from Philadelphia's Graterford Prison with Hans Vorhauer, a maker of illegal drugs.  Vorhauer, who had a genius IQ, knew how to cover their tracks.  He also knew how to alter the duo’s appearance. Their method of escape demonstrated Vorhauer’s resourcefulness. He built an armoire inside the prison and then had himself and Nauss shipped out in it.

When imminent capture eluded the authorities and it became clear that the fugitives had likely changed their appearance, the task force sought help from Bender. Allen Kurtz from the Philadelphia Police Department had seen Bender's talents, so he introduced the artist to Dennis Matulewicz of the U.S. Marshals Service, who was supervising the effort.

“We had Nauss's Warlock pictures from before the time of his incarceration,” said Matulewicz, “and his intake picture at the prison, all of which were several years old.  We wanted Frank [Bender] to give us an updated look so we'd know what to be looking for on the street.”

Bender took on the project.  “I thought Nauss would be clean-shaven, short-haired and living in suburbia,” he recalled, “because he'd come from a good family. In fact, he couldn't come from a better family. I felt that even though he was an outlaw biker, if he ever left that element, he'd go back to what he'd known.” 

Matulewicz remembers feeling bemused.  “That was the first time we'd worked with Frank [Bender], and he came up with this idea of a clean-cut guy. We didn't know about that.  Bikers were bikers were bikers, but this was also during a time when some bikers were catching on and realizing that if they looked more respectable, they wouldn't stand out as much.  Nauss knew there was a national manhunt on for him, so he'd also know that a clean-cut guy wouldn't attract as much attention as a biker would.”

Bender also brought in psychologist Walter in to offer a profile. “He agreed with me,” Bender recalled. “He also said that Nauss would be in Michigan, and that's where he was. And when they caught him, he was clean-shaven, with short hair and living in suburbia, but he was still dealing drugs.”

Bender also correctly predicted that Vorhauer would dye his brown hair blond.

“Police were surveilling the area where his girlfriend lived,” Bender related, “and they thought they'd seen him twice but believed that he hadn't seen them.  I said to myself that he had the highest IQ of any prisoner who'd entered the Pennsylvania state prison system and was equally street-smart.  He was seen once without a cap, and then with a baseball cap, so I figured he'd change the color of his hair, and he'd make it blond, because it would work with the color of his skin.  So I made a drawing like that, and that's what he'd done.”

Explaining his success, Bender said, “I take all kinds of minutiae into consideration and put it all together.  I'm good at profiling people visually.” 

Bender is always quick to note that he is a member of a team, his insights do not spring solely from his mind. In fact, while he was working on the Vorhauer case, Bender’s teamwork paid off for someone else. He was asked to reconstruct a face from a skull found in a cornfield in Lancaster, Pa.

After the clay mold was all but finished, Det. Paul Schneider from the task force came to talk to him.  They chatted about the new sculpture, and then Schneider left and went over to the Pennsylvania State Police barracks. They mentioned that they had a missing person, Edward G. Meyers.  They showed Schneider a photo and he replied, “Not only do I know him, I just saw his bust in Frank Bender's studio.”  It turned out that the head the police had given him was their missing person.