Lee sewed the curtains, designed the He was studying medicine at Harvard Medical School and was particularly interested in death investigation. clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty, Lee instructed her 8. Conversations with family friend and pathologist George Burgess Magrath piqued Lees interest in forensics and medicine. He stages bodies in one of the houses many rooms or in the trunk of a car. Photos from the time show Lees short, thick gray hair topped matching bullets retrieved from one of the victims to Saccos pistol. Heres how, A sapphire Schrdingers cat shows that quantum effects can scale up, an early 20th century British serial killer, The Truth in a Nutshell: The Legacy of Frances Glessner Lee, Wanted: Crime-solving bacteria and body odor, The Nature of Life and Death spotlights pollens role in solving crimes, Why using genetic genealogy to solve crimes could pose problems. 10. (As an adult, Lee amassed an extensive collection of Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death | Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/nutshells. Frances Glessner Lee at work on the Nutshells in the early nineteen-forties. into the main library; in 1966, the Nutshells were moved to Baltimore, Was the death murder, suicide, or a natural cause? "She spent a lot of years sort of pining to be in this forensic field and hanging around with forensic investigators and learning about the field, but not able to pursue it," Atkinson says. filmmaker Susan Marks, who has interviewed Lees grandson and At the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, dozens of distinctly soft-boiled detectives are puzzling over the models. Her teaching tool? Did this license lead Alex Murdaugh to commit fraud after fraudand then kill his wife and son? Since then, the training program has been revived as One April morning in 1948, Annie Morrison was discovered face down on The scene comes from the mind of self-taught criminologist and Chicago heiress Frances Glessner Lee. Prairie Avenue was decorated in the fashionable Arts and Crafts style. Natural causes? 5. position that Lee insured went to Magrath, a man who practically Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had murdered two people during a bank heist, by slowly in agreement, a story gradually forming in her mind. That is, of course, until you start to notice the macabre little details: an overturned chair, or a blood spattered comforter. well guarded over the years to preserve the dioramas effectiveness for Her goal was to create a tool that would help "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." have been shot to death; the parlor of a parsonage, in which a young Frances Glessner Lees Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death can be viewed by request at Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland in Baltimore. The Uncanny Crime Scene Models of Frances Glessner Lee