Their sessions are never open to the public, but for the first time the inner workings of this cloistered group are exposed in The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases, by former Inquirer staffer Mike Capuzzo (Penguin, $26), due out on Tuesday.
Capuzzo introduces readers to the Vidocq founders: former FBI special agent William L. Fleisher, criminal profiler Richard Walter, and forensic sculptor Frank Bender. All three are slated to appear with him at a panel discussion Wednesday evening at Friends Select School, 17th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
The book is at once terrifying and satisfying, revealing gruesome details of cases. Some will be familiar.
Vidocq case No. 55, for example, was that of Marie Noe, the Kensington woman who killed her eight children between 1949 and 1968. Vidocq also consulted on the 1984 murder of Deborah Wilson, a Drexel University student whose killer was a foot fetishist.
Fleisher says he was at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., in 1970 when he came across the memoir of an obscure 18th century Frenchman - a criminal turned crime fighter whose exploits inspired characters in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
His name was Eugene Francois Vidocq.
A master of disguise, Vidocq is credited with inventing indelible ink and introducing the science of ballistics into police work. But he was noted too as a philanthropist who worked on behalf of crime victims.
Fleisher was determined to form a modern-day cold case squad that would use the latest advances in forensics - and name it for Vidocq.
Membership is limited to 82, Vidocq's age at his death. And the society accepts cases only from law enforcement, not from victims' families, says Frederick A. Bornhofen, who chairs the Vidocq board.
