Although Bender has said that he does not “fight to get every case solved,” he clearly is unafraid to add to his docket.  Bender, along with psychologist Walter, and a and a retired U.S. Customs Special Agent, Bill Fleischer, founded a group of law enforcement personnel who meet each month in Philadelphia to discuss long-unsolved cases.

In many instances, they've made productive suggestions for a new tack in an investigation.

For example, in the ten-year-old stabbing death of a fast food restaurant night manager, a member of the group asked whether the knife handle had been checked for DNA.  No, that had not been done. Ten years earlier, the technology was expensive and not always available.  Now detectives could take a fresh look.  In the case of a barefoot murder victim, a suggestion from the group that authorities look for suspects with foot fetishes gave investigators a new path. Eventually, they found that a security guard with a compulsion about women's sneakers was the killer.

It all began at a regular weekly lunch meeting between two longtime friends.

“For years,” said Bender, “I'd talk to Bill [Fleischer] about some case I couldn't get moving because it wasn't getting handled.  One day I said I would love to start an organization where we could just say, ‘Forget the bureaucracy.  Let's get this job done.’

So then Richard Walter came in and we met at Day by Day restaurant, and Bill said, ‘You know I think we should start this organization, but we should include the bureaucracy, because how else are we going to get information?  We need that intelligence.’  So we went back and forth that whole afternoon until the restaurant closed.  We agreed to start it, and Bill came up with the name.”

Eugene Vidocq (CORBIS)

He called it the Vidocq Society, based on an ingenious French police spy from the eighteenth century.  Eugene Francois Vidocq had once been a criminal, and according to legend, he talked his way onto the police force by engineering an escape.  He persuaded the Parisian police that because he was known to the criminal element as one of them, he could easily mingle and acquire information for arrests.  Vidocq was such an effective informant that even those who were arrested did not suspect him. Eventually, Vidocq’s underworld peers caught on to him. But Vidocq continued his work, but now he used disguises.

In 1811, Vidocq started the Surete, an elite undercover unit that rapidly gained international fame.  Today, Vidocq is considered the father of modern criminal investigation.

Bender’s Vidocq Society has grown to several hundred members, including some from abroad.  The society has even taken on a case as their own; one that remains unsolved.  The discovery of the body haunted the patrolman who found it.  Years later, when the cop joined the Vidocq Society, he brought the mystery with him.

On February 25, 1957, on the outskirts of northeastern Philadelphia, a young man following a rabbit found a body wrapped in a flannel blanket.  Investigators estimated the blond Caucasian boy to have been between the ages of four and six.  He was malnourished and had been badly beaten. Even so, someone had recently -- and clumsily -- trimmed his nails and hair, and hair clippings clung to his body.  With the time of death uncertain, the cause was determined to be severe head trauma from multiple blows.

There were clues, but they led nowhere, and years passed without resolution.  Many investigators, moved by the age of the victim, continued to search on their own time.  One officer found some circumstantial evidence that linked the boy to a foster family, but it was insufficient to prove anything.

Then early in 1998, the Vidocq Society adopted the case, rechristening “the boy in the box” as America's Unknown Child. The boy's remains were exhumed for DNA testing and then reinterred in a new place with a headstone the Society bought.

Bender studied the case for months and created a bust that he believed would resemble the boy's father.  It was published in several places in the hope that someone would know a person with similar features who once had a son. The killer is still not known.