A man hanging from a rope in his barn. This is the so-called “Nutshells,” death scene created by 20th century heiress, scientist and artist Frances Glessner Lee, the “godmother of forensic science,” who made these dioramas of real-life cases to help future investigators do more accurate forensic crime analysis.
Frances Glessner Lee was born in 1878. The Chicago heiress was interested in pathology and crime from a young age, and in 1943, became the first female police captain in the U.S. She began building the Nutshells in the 1940s, and also helped establish Harvard’s forensic pathology program, where the dollhouse pieces were housed before going to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on an indefinite loan.
Before Lee’s work there was virtually no training for homicide detectives. In 1945, she began the seminar that still occurs annually with the curriculum mostly unchanged. Every crime scene investigation television spinoff – from “CSI: Miami,” to “Hawaii Five-O” and NCIS – can be traced back to Lee’s work.
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| Frances Glessner Lee, the “godmother of forensic science,” at work on her Nutshells |
For investigators, the goal of studying the Nutshells is not to guess the cause of death. Instead, Lee wanted them to learn how to properly and thoroughly examine a case. Her system was different; instead of treating cases like a whodunit, it was “all about knowing what evidence to collect and having a systematic approach.”
Source: These gruesome dollhouse death scenes reinvented murder investigations
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