The 48 Hours episode “Paradise Lost” investigates the 2010 death of Wall Street genius John Bender. After making up to $500 million by the time he was in his early 30s, John Bender and his wife Ann Bender moved to Costa Rica. They built a home in the rain forest in the Boracayan nature reserve. It was an unusual house – a circular four-floor building without walls and lit by approximately 400 lamps that were custom made of stained glass. Ann said John thought the lamps would brighten her outlook on the world. Both Benders suffered from depression. So much so that John and Ann tried injections of spring water to cure themselves. On January 8, 2010, Ann says John killed himself with a gun in their bed. She told 48 Hours, John thought “the world would be better without him.” But prosecutors charged Ann with his murder.
Hours after John’s death, Ann was rushed to the hospital. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Carlos Lizano, met her there and said Ann was “in and out” of reality. He also said she wasn’t physically capable of killing John. “Ann could not even hold a fork” at the time. A friend who visited Ann at the hospital says she weighed 84 pounds and looked like “someone who had just walked out of a concentration camp.” Ann Bender was hospitalized for the following seven months under Lizano’s care. Now, eight years after John’s death, Ann is facing her fourth murder trial as there is no prohibition against double jeopardy in Costa Rican law. The date of the fourth trial has not yet been set. 48 Hours airs Saturdays at 10pm on CBS.
