Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Frances Glessner Lee, the only daughter of John and Frances Glessner, was born in Chicago in 1878. She lived in Glessner House from 1887 until her marriage in 1898, having three children before her divorce in 1916. Eventually, Frances Glessner Lee moved permanently to the Glessner's summer estate in New Hampshire where she remained until her death in 1962.

Frances Glessner Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed honorary captain in the New Hampshire state police. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. In the 1940s and 1950s, she built stunningly detailed dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases to train detectives to assess visual evidence. She called these teaching tools the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, inspired by the police saying: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell."

Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen dioramas are engaging and shocking visual masterpieces. Built on a scale of 1:12 , they each display an astounding level of precision: pencils write, window shades move, and every detail -- a newspaper headline, a bloodstain on the rug, an outdated wall calendar, a cartridge casing -- becomes a potential clue to the crime.

The dioramas have been photographed and published, along with a captivating essay on Lee by Brooklyn photographer Corinne May Botz in "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" (Monacelli Press, 2004). Ms. Botz offers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a master criminal investigator.

Upon Frances Glessner Lee's death, friend Erle Stanley Gardner and author of the Perry Mason novels wrote her obituary. In it he wrote "Captain Lee had a strong individuality, a unique, unforgettable character, was a fiercely competent fighter, and a practical idealist."