The Mother of Forensic Science

Speaker 1:
Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Diamond For the Humanities and Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. From Virginia Humanities this is Backstory.

Ed Ayers:
Welcome to Backstory, the show that explores the history behind the headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman:
And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers:
If you’re new to the podcast each week, along with our colleagues Brian Balogh and Nathan Connolly, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Joanne Freeman:
Now we’re going to start the show with something very tiny.

Rachel Monroe:
In one of these, she called them, “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” and in one of the nutshells there’s a woman who is drowned in a bathtub in a poor boarding house room.

Joanne Freeman:
This is author and journalist Rachel Monroe.

Rachel Monroe:
You might assume looking at it on the surface, “Oh, this woman, maybe it was a drug overdose and she drowned in the bathtub,” but if you look at it more closely there are clues that could lead you to believe that actually this looked like an overdose but was actually a murder.

Joanne Freeman:
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death were miniature models made in the 1940s by a fascinating little known woman named Frances Glessner Lee.

Rachel Monroe:
The idea was to train police officers to not make assumptions and to look for those details that would reveal what had actually happened.

Joanne Freeman:
Lee had been interested in the work of miniatures for some time but it took a while for her to blend this hobby with her interest in murder.

Rachel Monroe:
She’s really a fascinating and a difficult woman. She grew up, she was born in the tail end of the 19th Century and she grew up in a very wealth family in Chicago. She was expected to be a society woman so she got married about when she was, I believe she was 20, and was expected to just be a wife and a mother and maybe find a charitable cause that she would give benefits for but to mostly lead a domestic life and she did that for a long time but in mid-life when she came into the bulk of her inheritance she found a field that became pretty much the passion that defined the rest of her life, which was what was then known as legal medicine. It’s close to what we would now call forensic science. Basically the scientific investigation of crimes or the use of scientific methods to investigate crimes.

Joanne Freeman:
So basically as you just suggested she’s freed because she comes into her inheritance which gives her the freedom to investigate and find something that interests her but the question, the obvious question to ask here is, how did she find her way to murder and I guess as you said what we would now call forensic science? How did she come across that?

Rachel Monroe:
Well it’s interesting to think about because if she had had her way she probably would have gone to school for nursing. Her family considered that inappropriate for a woman to get an education in that way and so instead she … She did have this preoccupation with the body, with science, with how the body worked or failed to work. So I think that was part of her fascination. She also became friends, she was family friends with this really colorful character named George McGrath who was the medical examiner for Boston at the time and he was this very flashy guy. She, Frances Glessner Lee and McGrath just really hit it off and he would tell her all these wild stories about autopsies he’d done, cases he’d investigate and she would just listed raptly and find it incredibly fascinating.

Joanne Freeman:
Now I would assume, so I would assume that this world or the realm and this field is probably pretty male at this point. Is this particular person, did he smooth her transition or her comfort in easing her way into that kind of world?

Rachel Monroe:
Yeah, very much so because this was at the time a really, a new and emerging field, the idea that you would use science and medicine to investigate suspicious deaths. Most counties in the United States were, if somebody died the person who would investigate the death would be a coroner and coroners often had no medical training at all. It was an elected position. It might just be the local somebody, the local mailman or something. So the idea that you needed to investigate deaths scientifically was new so it was this emerging field and McGrath was really key. The other big help of course was her money and she put it to good use. She ended up founding, donating the money that would establish a Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard which was the first department of legal medicine in the United States. She ran into some difficulties there because I think she had a different idea of maybe what her role would be than the university did. She really wanted to be hands on, she gave them these very elaborate lists of experiments she wanted them to do, she had a lot of suggestions of programs for study, she wanted to host events and invite people to lectures. The university clearly had kind of hoped she was the nice old lady who was just going to give them money and get out of the way and that was really very much not her personality.

Joanne Freeman:
Now let me ask, I know at some point she becomes interested in miniatures so maybe first describe what miniatures means. I mean, I gather it was a real fad.

Rachel Monroe:
Yeah, you have just some really gorgeous examples in the early 20th Century of doll houses, I guess is what they would be called often, it’s hard not to call them doll houses because they’re little small houses often with dolls in them but Frances Glessner Lee found that an insulting and diminishing term so I try to avoid using it but just these small models of domestic scenes and so a lot of the ones that were made in the early 20th Century are more traditional than the ones that Frances Glessner Lee ended up making. You had wealthy women making these gorgeous, elaborate palaces, kind of fairy palaces with hundreds of rooms and they could get really elaborate with real running hot and cold running water some of them had or tiny elevators but Frances Glessner Lee took it in a different direction. She did make these very beautiful, precise miniature rooms. She had a carpenter who worked with her full time on them and they have all the little details like the tiny cans of soup and tiny mouse traps but every single one has within it a dead doll.

Rachel Monroe:
The idea was that she wanted to use these models to train police officers in how to scientifically investigate a crime scene so each of the dolls was dead either through murder, accident or suicide or natural causes and there were clues, tiny little clues embedded in each of the models that could help you if you studied it properly with the correct attention you could figure out what happened but often it wasn’t necessarily, the scene wasn’t necessarily what it appeared on first glance so she was very concerned that police officers without this training in scientific investigation would just look at a scene and go based on their intuition, which of course would involve their biases, their stereotypes.

Joanne Freeman:
So Rachel, I gather that you have some letters dating back to January of 1944 when Lee was first coming up with the idea for her models. Could you read some of that for us?

Rachel Monroe:
Yeah so she, at this point she’s collaborating with and corresponding with the head of the legal medicine department at Harvard just trying to get some thoughts from him about how some potential cases that she might make models from. This is from her letter.

Rachel Monroe:
“You will note from the above that I have in prospect or completed two hangings, two shootings, two assault with blunt weapon, one natural cause, one drowning, one found dead, one arson. I do not know yet how that gentleman was killed, am open to suggestions, and one poison. I need more traffic accidents, also another shooting or two, a stabbing, more poisonings, carbon monoxide and a couple puzzling found deads. Would a couple of drownings be possible or are drowned bodies too damaged and disfigured for representation?”

Joanne Freeman:
Rachel says these letters are indicative of the excitement and enthusiasm Lee had for a subject matter that’s so, well, morbid. Today the nutshells belong to the Maryland Medical Examiner but Rachel found a way to see them in person.

Rachel Monroe:
I love small things and I kind of also love macabre things so I was like, “I have to see these. They sound incredible,” and they really are. They’re so strange because they are at once totally cute and totally sinister. You can see the really precise care that she has put into them. There are things like there’ll be a little wall calendar, a tiny little wall calendar on the wall and every month is in there, like every day, every month. The tiny little mousetrap actually works, it’ll snap closed, and the dolls that are in them that are dead, some of them are quite gruesome. She painted their faces, some of them, the discoloration that would indicate how long they’d been dead for. Sometimes there are wounds, they’re just really fascinating. The other thing that’s fascinating about them is that each of them is this kind of puzzle of what really happened but the solutions are not public. There are a few of them who, the kind of answer of what really happened, three or four of them have been made public but they’re still actually in use. There are still seminars that happen every year where police officers come and use them as a training tool.

Rachel Monroe:
The secret can’t get out. So it’s actually in some ways a really frustrating experience because you look at them and you’re looking at this scene and there’s one that’s the largest one is called a three room dwelling and it’s a cute little suburban house, charming little kitchen but there’s three dead dolls in it. A mom, a father and a baby and they’re all really bloody. You look at it and you’re trying to figure out, “Is this a murder suicide? Did somebody break in?” And you really want that closure, I think, that you’re used to finding at the end of murder mystery books or murder mystery TV shows and it’s not, you don’t know, it’s not there, which I think in some ways prolongs the fascination.

Ed Ayers:
Thanks to our models, Frances Glessner Lee is often referred to as the mother of forensic science so I guess you could say her obsession with true crime really paid off. For the rest of us, a fascination with murder might just lead to extra hours on the couch binging Netflix shows like Tiger King or podcasts like Serial. Today, true crime has become synonymous with these new forms of media but over the decades, Americans have found fascination, repulsion and sometimes even comfort in true crime stories.