Frances Glessner Lee: The Heiress Who Built Dollhouses of Death

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Frances Glessner Lee was born in Chicago in 1878 into the International Harvester fortune and raised to run a household. Her brother went to Harvard while she was taught at home. A childhood bout of tonsillitis, first mistreated and then cured by surgery, left her fascinated by medicine, and she spent summers in the White Mountains of New Hampshire following country doctors on their house calls. Marriage, three children, and a divorce in 1914 came first. Only after she inherited the family money was she free to follow the interest she had carried for decades.

This episode traces how she and her friend George Burgess Magrath, a Boston medical examiner, set out to replace untrained elected coroners with medical professionals. In 1931 she endowed the first Department of Legal Medicine in the country at Harvard, then designed the training herself. Her answer to detectives who could not read a room was the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, introduced in 1945: twenty dioramas at 1 to 12 scale, each a meticulously staged scene of murder, suicide, or accident.

• Coroners of the era were often local politicians with no medical training who moved weapons, rolled bodies, and trampled evidence.
• Each diorama cost between $3,000 and $4,500 to build and included working mousetraps, rocking chairs that rocked, and calendars with correct dates.
• Trainees had 90 minutes to study one scene without touching it, catching details such as a cherry red victim in a room where the stove was off and the windows open.
• In October 1943 she was appointed a captain in the New Hampshire State Police with full authority, and became the first woman in the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
• Eighteen of the twenty models are still used in homicide seminars at the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.