THE NUTSHELL STUDIES of
FRANCES GLESSNER LEE
Transcribed from
99% Invisible Narrated by
Roman Mars and
Katie Mingle
Section: A
No. 001
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of Baltimore, Maryland 14th
day of
July
,
1940
Name:
Room:
The Kitchen
Number: #
09
The Office of the Chief Medical Statemen t: Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up there for an autopsy. On an average day, they might perform twelve autopsies; on more hectic days, they might do more than twenty. The building is six stories tall, and around 80 people are employed there. All day long, police are coming in and out, people are calling about their deceased loved ones, and the press is calling with inquiries. But there’s one room on the fourth floor that sits apart from the buzz of normal activity in the building. This room feels a bit like an art gallery.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 002
A
It houses the “Nutshell Studies”, which are miniature dollhouse-like dioramas, each one a different scene.
Section: B
No. 031
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of Baltimore, Maryland 2nd
day of
August
,
1972
Name: Room:
The Living Room
Number: #
14
Statemen t:
Police and FBI will come here for a week-long seminar on homicide investigation. While they're there, they’ll hear speakers, they’ll see an autopsy, and they’ll be broken into groups and assigned a nutshell diorama. At the end of the week, they’ll be asked to present their theories of what happened in their dioramas.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 032
B
The seminar that brought these folks here has been happening every year for the past 70 years, and the person who started it is the same person who made the little death scene dioramas. Her name was Frances Glessner Lee, and her work in the field of forensics has shaped just about everything that happens inside the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
B
Evidence: B1
Frances Glessner Lee Pictured rightmost and sitting
No. 033
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 034
B
Frances Glessner Lee would have loved the opportunity to study medicine and go onto college, but her parents were not supportive of that. This was around 1900; women weren’t really going to medical school. Her brother got to go though, and he brought a friend home once by the name of George McGrath, a pioneering medical examiner. McGrath and Lee became great friends, and when he’d come to visit he’d tell her stories about cases he was working on. Lee was just absolutely fascinated. She loved it. Lee came from a wealthy Chicago family and she was supposed to be a proper society lady with lady hobbies, like needlework. Her interest in death wasn’t really encouraged by her family, which meant for years she quietly studied it. She was a voracious reader, talking to experts, getting firsthand experience by going to crime scenes. She then came to realize that people were getting away with murder. Literally.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
No. 035
Section: B Evidence: B2
Documentation of Nutshell Studies Nutshells 1–6
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
No. 036
Section: B Evidence: B3
Firearm Note: pointing away from victim
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 037
B
Police would routinely botch investigations; they would contaminate crime scenes, move bodies, do things today that would be obviously wrong, but at the time they didn’t know any better. Beyond that, the police just didn’t know how to get information from these scenes. They might not realize the significance of a pile of cigarettes or the positioning of a firearm. Autopsies also either weren’t being done at all, or were being done by doctors with no specific training in forensics.
Section: C
No. 046
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of Baltimore, Maryland 23rd
day of
January
,
1945
Name: Room:
The Attic
Number: #
01
Statemen t:
Eventually, Lee’s parents and her brother passed away. Lee was in her fifties, and finally had access to the family money and agency to do what she wanted. In 1936, she gave a bunch of money to Harvard University to establish the first program of legal medicine. The program trained doctors to become medical examiners. In 1945, Lee starts and presides over week-long training seminars for police—the ones that are still going on today. She wanted to teach police, among other things, how to gather clues from a crime scene. Of course, in terms of legalities and time constraints, it was impossible to visit real crime scenes during the training seminars, so Lee decides she would build miniature death scenes for the police to study. Each one would be based on a real death. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 047
C
She would come up with the concept and the design, and her carpenter would drop the blueprints at a scale of an inch to a foot. Lee’s carpenter built the structures and framed the rooms exactly as you would a real-life sized room. Real studs, real doors with real locks that worked. Lee handled all the figures and textiles, the rugs and drapes and tiny clothes on the tiny figures—finally, those society lady skills were being put to use. She would knit the stockings with needles the size of straight pins using a magnifying glass; she could only work for like a few seconds before her eyes would fatigue. The figures in the nutshell also sometimes show rigor mortis (which is a postmortem stiffness of the body) and lividity (which is the way the blood pools or settles in the body after death). Both provide clues as to how and when a person died.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section: C Evidence: C1
Cigarettes and Ashtray
No. 048
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 049
C
The detail in the Nutshells is bordering on obsessive. In one, an ashtray overflows with tiny cigarettes made with real tobacco, hand rolled by Lee herself, each one burned and then stubbed out. There’s a coffee pot, with a strainer inside and real coffee grounds in it. They’re full of extraneous information, cause that’s the way real life is. You go into somebody’s home, they could have a bag of drugs and a weapon over here and have had a heart attack. It may or may not mean anything.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 050
C
Frances Glessner Lee spared no expense on her dioramas. She lavished love onto these brutal crime scenes. Each diorama took about six months and around $6,000 to build—about the same amount of time and money it would have cost to build a real house in the 1940s. Lee felt like if the policemen looked at them and saw any fault or didn’t take them seriously, they wouldn’t learn from them.
She wanted everything to be perfect.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 051
C
Of course, Frances Glessner Lee was always trying to be taken seriously in the all-male world she had entered. She was ultimately both respected and adored by the police that she worked with. The week-long seminars she led were thought to be the best training that homicide detectives could receive. And they’re still thought of that way today. They came to think of her not only as an expert in the field, but also as a mother figure. After Frances Glessner Lee died in 1962, the programs she funded at Harvard (including the week-long seminars) were ended, and the Nutshells were put in storage, possibly headed for the trash. And then, Russell Fisher, the medical examiner in Baltimore and a former student of Lee’s programs at Harvard, stepped in and said “We’ll do it, we’ll do the seminar. We’ll just pick it up here in Maryland.” And they brought the nutshells, which have been used in Baltimore since 1968.
Section: D
No. 054
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of Baltimore, Maryland 30th
day of
May
,
1964
Name: Room:
The Bathroom
Number: #
19
At the end of the Frances Glessner Statemen t: Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation, the attendees present their theories about what happened in each of their Nutshell studies.
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section: D Evidence: D1
a homicide, staged to look like a suicide?
or a suicide, staged to look at a homicide?
No. 055
THE NUTSHELL STUDIES
Section:
No. 058
D
Sometimes the police will come up with their own solutions, and Baltimore medical examiners will just say “that’s not how Frances saw it.” After they present, they get to find out the actual solutions. But Baltimore guards the Nutshell secrets like the recipe for Coke, or the code for the Google search algorithm, because they are still valuable secrets. As long as the solutions aren’t easily searchable, the Nutshells are still great tools for teaching homicide investigation.
And that is something that the Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland takes very, very seriously.
COLOPHON
Book Designed By: Class: Location:
Maggie Chuang
Form & Function
Semester:
Fall 2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Typefaces: Adobe Garamond Pro (Robert Slimbach) Pitch Medium (Klim Type Foundry)
Paper:
Mohawk Via Smooth Warm White 80T
Images:
The Renwick Gallery Corinne May Botz Susan Marks via Smithsonian Mag Harvard Associates in Legal Medicine