Have you heard of Frances Glessner Lee?
allow me to introduce a real one straight from the problematic fave files!
A few weeks ago, This American Life re-ran an episode from 2018 with the Tracy-bait title “Crime Scene.” It opens with an interview between host Ira Glass and a medical examiner from Michigan who makes the provocative and, to my mind, accurate metaphorical claim that “every crime scene is a novel.” Glass responds with the glib, and to my mind, misinterpretive follow-up that the radio show would focus on “crime scenes and the novels that led to them” (emphasis mine, obviously, it’s an audio format). But that’s not what M.E. Dracovic said! He didn’t describe crime scenes as the culmination of a complicated plot, but rather that the scenes were complicated narratives in and of themselves. That more interesting and complicated interpretation rhymes with the work of one of the most unlikely of forensic pioneers: mid-twentieth-century artist, scientist, and the first female police captain in the United States: Frances Glessner Lee.1
Lee’s biography seems straight out of Agatha Christie, or Sherlock Holmes, of whom she was a devoted fan. She was born a wealthy heiress in 1878 and grew up in Chicago in a household one historian described as “pathologically private.” Her parents refused to let her attend college, and she was married, unhappily, at 19. She divorced her husband in her 30s and she and her three children were supported by her father. In middle age, with her children grown and her overbearing father (she referred to him as her “jailor”) and brother dead, Lee came into her own. Beginning in the 1940s, she paired a hobby popular among wealthy women—dollhouse building and miniature making2—with one that was decidedly not—her lifelong interest in the field of crime scene investigation and what would come to be called forensics—by creating twenty “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death”: miniature dioramas depicting crime scenes.
Lee was obsessive in her creation of and attention to detail:
She handcrafted half-smoked cigarettes filled with real tobacco and knitted tiny stockings with straightpins. Minuscule pencils are filled with real lead and the locks on the doors and windows really work. The scenes come accompanied by fictitious police reports and witnesses’ statements written by Lee herself, as well as solutions, with each death classified as an accident, suicide or murder; eleven of the twenty victims are women.
Lee created the Nutshells to train police at the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University—a program she helped found. Because forensic science was such a new discipline, detectives frequently botched investigations by mishandling, missing, or tampering with evidence. Lee’s dioramas were meant to serve as a rehearsal space for police to learn how to read and interpret clues. And in fact, they are still in use in that capacity at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.3 In this way, Lee’s work troubles the divide between true crime and crime fiction. The scenarios she depicts are fictitious, but they are meant to correspond to and effect change in real criminal cases.
My interest in Lee’s work extends beyond artisanal skill and focuses instead on the crimes she chose to illustrate. The miniatures are at a precise scale of one-inch to one foot, but their scale also operates conceptually: one isolated crime to represent a bigger social world. In her historical study The Rise of True Crime, Jean Murley locates the beginning of modern American true crime writing in the 1950s, nearly ten years after the creation of the Nutshell studies. However, several of the criteria Murley identifies as modern can be found in the way Lee framed her dioramas. To wit:
Murley’s conventions of “modern true crime”:
Sensitive to context
Depicts the social contexts and ordinary life details of both victims and killers
Preoccupied with certain kinds of crimes—domestic, sadistic, or sexual murders
Though it’s true they are not representative of real crimes, Lee’s Nutshells not only include these “modern” criteria but also demonstrate a decided interest in the way violence seems to center on women and the poor. By creating visual composites of actual crimes, Laura J. Miller writes “Lee added her own details to specific crimes to make the stories more universal,” and in so doing, indicted the larger social world she was replicating in miniature as one particularly hostile to marginalized groups. A Smithsonian article accompanying the 2017 public display of the nineteen surviving Nutshells at the Renwick Gallery notes:
The exhibition also highlights the subtly subversive quality of Lee’s work, especially the way her dioramas challenge the association of femininity with domestic bliss . . . also evident is her purposeful focus on society’s ‘invisible victims,’ whose cases she championed. Lee was devoted to the search for truth and justice for everyone, and she often featured victims such as women, the poor, and people living on the fringes of society, whose cases might be overlooked or tainted with prejudice on the part of the investigator. She wanted trainees to recognize and overcome any unconscious biases and to treat each case with rigor, regardless of the victim.
Lee’s Nutshell studies required that investigators consider the whole life of the victim, not just their death, in order to find the truth of the crime. In her instructions for how to review her models, Lee wrote “He4 should look for and record indications of the social and financial status of the people involved in each model.” Her crimes deliberately took place in domestic settings such as attics, bedrooms, bathrooms, parlors and kitchens.
And again, eleven of the victims are women. Bruce Goldfarb, who oversees the collection, argues that the Nutshells reveal not only a pedagogical but an ethical message in her choice of victim: “They’re people who are sorta marginalized in many ways . . . They’re prisoners and prostitutes [sic]. And these are people who don’t usually have their lives documented in art. Frances felt that every death is important and every death deserves a thorough scientific investigation.” Even seventy years later, these marginalized people are often overlooked in true crime texts. One of the progressive interventions twenty-first century true crime has achieved is delivering stories that focus on victims that are overlooked both in life and in death, and it seems Lee was anticipating this welcome shift in focus. Sort of.
Which brings me to why Lee is a “problematic” fave. She put not only her significant talents and resources but also her faith directly in the police to deliver justice for and to the marginalized victims her Nutshells represented. And as we all know, oftentimes such faith is misplaced. Additionally, all of Lee’s victims are white. Both of these blind spots are probably due to the racial and class privilege she, a wealthy white woman, enjoyed her whole life.
So what to do with the Nutshells? I would situate them as in the same family as true crime texts that demonstrate an unexamined faith in the justice system’s capacity to “get it right,” but with a progressive interest in exposing institutional biases in that system, and a commitment to representing the disproportionate violence done against women, that was radical for her time. And here’s one more Nutshell for the road:
This video from Vox gives a great overview of the 2017 Smithsonian exhibition if you’re now as obsessed as I am!
Buckle up: she’s an obsession of mine, so this might be a long one.
Lee and fellow miniature-maker Narcissa Niblack Thorne (these names tho) are second only to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on my list of real-life friends I wish I could have hung out with. I was lucky enough to see nine of the exquisite Thorne rooms on a trip to Knoxville, and read the first of the YA novels that use the dioramas as inspiration. Call to action: we need a) a biopic/limited series about the Thorne/Lee friendship and b) novels based on the Nutshells!
If you achieve “clearance” from the Maryland Medical Examiner’s office, you can privately view the Nutshells. It goes without saying that this is one of my lifelong ambitions.
And it would have been a he.