The tiny rooms look pleasant enough, with curtains in the windows, a light overhead, a coffee cake fresh out of the oven. But look closer, because things aren’t what they seem: in one room, a body’s fallen on the floor; in another, a woman lies face-down in a bathtub. The effect is jarring, especially on a dollhouse scale.
These rooms are part of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of miniature rooms created in the 1940s by Frances Glessner Lee whose work in crime investigation and pathology built her reputation as the mother of forensic science.
Born in Chicago in 1878, Glessner (heir to the International Harvester fortune) grew up reading detective novels and true crime stories. She also loved creating miniatures, her most ambitious project being a one-inch to one-foot scale model of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (which her family helped to found) that she created in 1913 as a gift to her mother. The attention to detail (she sketched each musician individually) hinted at the quality of the miniature crime scenes to come.
Since college wasn’t an option for women of her class, Glessner married and on her own studied medical textbooks, and detective and true crime novels, developing a passion for criminal investigation. After raising her children, Glessner divorced her husband and moved to the family estate in New Hampshire.
It was there that Glessner began work in earnest. In 1931, she established the Department of Legal Medicine at the Harvard University Medical School to promote the study of forensics. Two years later, she established the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine, named for a close friend and colleague who was one of the first medical examiners in Boston.
But it was The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death that sealed Glessner’s reputation in the field of forensic study.
In all, Glessner designed 20 rooms that recreated actual crime scenes in miniature. Built on the same one-inch to one-foot scale as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra project, each room is contained in a box with three sides. The bodies, or corpses, are actually porcelain dolls for which Glessner sewed the clothes herself, even knitting the women’s tiny wool stockings.
The fun, if a bit macabre, is in peering into each room to see the details – tiny cigarettes filled with real tobacco; mini bottles of beer knocked over on a floor; fake bloodstains on clothes and walls; even a sewing machine threaded with a doll-sized needle — and trying to figure out which of the details are clues. None of the rooms have a solution; Glessner believed their function was to teach investigative techniques and theory, not solve the crime.
Glessner died in 1962 after being named an honorary police captain in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The Nutshell Series of rooms is still used today to train police detectives and forensic pathologists at Harvard and at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland in Baltimore.