Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor whose work — haunting, three-dimensional faces in clay — helped identify the forgotten dead and apprehend the fugitive living, died on Thursday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 70.

The cause was pleural mesothelioma, a rare cancer that attacks the outer lining of the lungs, his daughter Vanessa said.

An elfin man whose bald head, fierce gaze and Vandyke made him look like a pocket Mephistopheles, Mr. Bender was among the best known of the country’s handful of forensic sculptors — an unusual craft that stands at the nexus of art, crime, science and intuition.

Mr. Bender was almost entirely self-taught, for he never anticipated a career in forensic sculpture. Who, after all, envisions a life in which skulls, sent by hopeful law enforcement agencies, arrive periodically in the mail? (Usually the skulls had been denuded and cleaned, though not always, and luncheon visitors to Mr. Bender’s home-cum-studio occasionally arrived to find one bubbling away in a pot on the stove.)