The Godmother of Forensic Science
Frances Glessner Lee (1878 – 1962) was a Chicago society dame who had a hobby that was quite unusual for women of her era: solving crimes and helping advance the science of forensics. To that end, she developed a training system for homicide detectives that she called Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths, parts of which are still in use today. She is considered the godmother of forensic science.
Frances Glessner Lee was the daughter of an industrialist who became fabulously wealthy from investing in International Harvester. As a young girl, she got hooked on Sherlock Holmes stories, and dreamt of growing up to become a crime solver. She wanted to attend college, but her family would not permit it. She was also discouraged from pursuing her interests in forensic pathology.
Her dreams did not die, however, and after the death of her father and then her brother, she inherited the International Harvester fortune at age 52. Now a millionaire heiress and society dame, she eschewed splurging on lavish parties for debutants, tycoons, and other society types. Instead, she made a sizeable endowment to the recently established Harvard Department of Legal Medicine – the country’s first such institution.
In addition to her financial generosity, Glessner Lee hosted week-long seminars for homicide detectives, prosecutors, and other investigators, to train them on crime investigation techniques. Her methodology, Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths, consisted of 20 true crime scene dioramas, that she personally reproduced in painstaking detail on dollhouse scale.
Her dioramas were complete with working doors, windows, lights, and minute details all the way down to tiny food cans and miniature mousetraps. Students were then given 90 minutes to study the scene, then try and solve the crime based on their observations. For her efforts, she was made an honorary captain in the New Hampshire State Police. 18 of her dioramas are still in use for training purposes.
