The Nutshell Of Unexplained Deaths
The story of Frances Glessner Lee and her macabre dollhouses
Introduction
In the 1940s to 1950, Frances Glessner Lee built extremely detailed dollhouses. However, unlike the pleasant dollhouses that amused children, these dollhouses were macabre displays of death and homicide. They were called the Nutshell of Unexplained Deaths, and this is its story.
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In a nutshell
Frances Glessner Lee was born to a wealthy family in 1878. Despite the limitations for women in her time, Lee went on and contributed immensely to the emerging field of forensic science. She did this by making intricate and detailed dioramas, called the Nutshell of Unexplained Death.
Up until the 1940s there was no official way to train homicide officers to do case work and find clues in a crime scene. As a result of this often cases would go unsolved. Frances Glessner Lee aimed to change this, and she did this by making dioramas of crime scenes. The fascinating part about these dioramas was the details. Each part was carefully made, the cans on the shelves were labeled with known brands of the time, you could open and close a blind, and you could see blood patterns on the floor and walls. The bodies would be posed suggestively with blood and discoloration of the skin, to suggest theories of murder or suicide. It was by all means an accurate depiction of what one might find in a crime scene.
There was no solution hidden inside the dollhouse. You could not understand who did it, or what happened by simply looking at the dioramas. The idea was to observe, and systematically build theories. The scenes were meant to teach officers to build an intuition for detecting clues in a crime scene.
Even today, the dollhouses are used to train officers and they represent Frances Lee’s dedication to advancing forensic science.
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