One April morning in 1948, Annie Morrison was discovered face down on the ground beneath her second-story porch, a wet rag and a wooden clothespin at her side. A medical investigator determined that she had fallen from the porch by accident, but an undertaker later discovered that she’d been shot in the chest. The bullet was the same calibre as a revolver owned by her husband, Harry Morrison. Harry denied having murdered his wife; according to a statement to the police, he had been sitting in the kitchen when he heard “a sort of noise,” and went outside to find the laundry blowing in the breeze and an empty chair tipped against the railing.

Homicide detectives and forensic investigators have puzzled over the Morrisons’ porch for almost seventy years. The scene is one of the many miniature dioramas that make up the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, which the pioneering criminologist Frances Glessner Lee created as teaching tools. Lee based the scenes on real homicides, accidents or suicides; by the nineteen-fifties, when she was a millionaire heiress in her sixties, with three children and five grandchildren, she and her assistants had completed twenty. The models, made by hand at a scale of one inch to one foot, include a blood-spattered interior, in which three inhabitants have been shot to death; the parlor of a parsonage, in which a young girl in a white dress and red ballet shoes lies on the floor with a knife lodged in her gut and bite marks on her body; a rooming house, in which a woman has drowned in the bathtub; and a country barn, in which a man hangs from the rafters.

Lee made her Nutshells with staggering specificity, in order to “make you stop and see that it could be the smallest detail that turns a case,” as Timothy Keel, a major-case specialist with the F.B.I., who studied the Nutshells when he was a homicide detective in the Baltimore City Police Department, told me. The Morrisons’ duplex includes a porch swing and miniature garbage cans filled with tiny hand-hewn beer cans; Lee also knitted the laundry hanging from the line, sewed Annie Morrison’s gingham dress and shamrock apron, and placed the doll in a crater of splattered dirt. “It is extremely interesting to note the effect of these models on the students,” Lee wrote. “At first glance, they are impressed mainly by the miniature quality—the doll house effect—but almost immediately they enter into the reality of the matter and completely lose sight of the make-believe.”

Today, academic and law-enforcement programs use life-size rooms and role-playing or employ virtual-reality re-creations of crime scenes for training, but Lee’s Nutshells remain a gold standard. “It doesn’t matter that they are set in the forties,” Keel said. “The science and psychology of death-scene investigation still apply.” The recent spate of true-crime documentaries, such as “The Staircase” and “The Jinx,” have taken as their premise that, for all of our advancements in forensic science, it is the imprecision of the human mind that most often derails justice. As Lee wrote in 1952, “far too often the investigator ‘has a hunch,’ and looks for and finds only the evidence to support it, disregarding any other evidence that may be present.”

Surprisingly, Lee, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and a patron of the arts, seems to have understood better than most the narrative nature of death. Born in 1878, she came of age as advancements in ballistics, toxicology, and fingerprinting offered new avenues for crime detection. In 1881, an assassin named Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield, who later died, an event that Lee’s mother recounted in her journal. (As an adult, Lee amassed an extensive collection of manuscripts and photos related to crimes and trials, which includes a photograph of President Garfield’s spine taken post-autopsy and poems written by Guiteau as he waited to be executed.) As a child, Lee read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and learned to silversmith, paint, and crochet; her mother was a keen craftswoman, and the family’s house on Chicago’s Prairie Avenue was decorated in the fashionable Arts and Crafts style. The Glessners regularly dined with friends, including the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who helped design the grounds of the Rocks, the family’s fifteen-hundred-acre summer home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Lee aspired to study medicine, but, in 1897, after a grand tour of Europe, she made her societal début, and, a year later, at age nineteen, married Blewett Lee, the law partner of one of her brother’s friends. It was a terrible union and, in 1906, with three children, they separated. Lee fought for a divorce and, in 1914, left for Santa Barbara. The filmmaker Susan Marks, who has interviewed Lee’s grandson and great-grandchildren for a forthcoming film about Lee, hired several researchers and an archivist to locate her personal papers, but they were never found.

When Lee returned to the East Coast, she split her time between Boston and a cottage at the Rocks, before she opened an antiques shop with her daughter, Frances, in the early nineteen-twenties. Later, following the death of her brother, George, from pneumonia, and of her parents, she took over the management of the dairy farm her father had started at the Rocks.

During these decades, one of Lee’s closest friends was George Burgess Magrath, who had been a classmate of her brother’s at Harvard, and became one of the country’s first medical examiners. In 1921, Magrath, an early practitioner of ballistics, helped convict Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had murdered two people during a bank heist, by matching bullets retrieved from one of the victims to Sacco’s pistol. He was also the author of several papers in which he argued against politically elected coroners, who often had no medical experience or legal training, and proposed that only medical examiners should investigate sudden or suspicious deaths. In 1931, Lee, who had received a generous inheritance from her late uncle, George B. Glessner, gave two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found a new Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School and to endow a chair of legal medicine, a position that Lee insured went to Magrath, a man “who practically created his profession,” she said. In 1934, she donated her collection of manuscripts to create the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. The department officially opened in 1938, and included new training tools such as plaster casts showing “the peculiarities of certain types of injuries” and “wounds made by various types of bullets and powders,” as well as “mounted specimens, in various stages, of the insect life sometimes infesting human remains,” as Lee wrote in 1952.





1 / 5 Chevron Chevron Photograph Courtesy Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Baltimore, MD / Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Frances Glessner Lee, Three-Room Dwelling (detail), about 1944-46.

In 1943, twenty-five years before female police officers were allowed out on the beat in their own patrol cars, the New Hampshire State Police commissioned Lee as its first female police captain and educational director. Lee, troubled that patrolmen and detectives rarely knew how to secure a scene for the medical examiner or to identify circumstantial evidence that might prove valuable in a forensic investigation, imagined a seminar where policemen from around the country could visit the Department of Legal Medicine and learn from its staff. “Since visual studies of actual cases seem a most valuable teaching tool, some method of providing that means of study had to be found,” she wrote.

Lee and her carpenter, Ralph Mosher, and later his son, Alton, made the Nutshells at a workshop at the Rocks. Inside the dioramas, minuscule keys rest in the door locks, lights turn on, and hand-rolled cigarettes, less than a millimeter thick, rest in ashtrays. Pencils fabricated from toothpicks contain real lead. Lee sewed the curtains, designed the wallpaper, and painted miniature portraits for décor. She used pins and a magnifying glass to knit clothes, and a lithographic printing method to reproduce minuscule newspapers. In 1953, Popular Mechanics dispatched a reporter and photographer to shadow Lee in her workshop. The article described the way postage-stamp-size shingles were “split with a razor-like tool” and “carefully nailed to a small wall section” to mimic cedar-shake siding on a house, and how a sliding gadget—a kind of miniature vice—was “specially built to hold a bit in place during cutting of a tiny baseboard molding.” Benzedrine inhalers, tiny tubes of amphetamine that could be purchased over the counter, Lee noted, with “a little red paint and remodeling” make “excellent fire hydrants for a city street.” In a 1945 letter to a colleague at Harvard Medical School, Lee said that she was “constantly tempted to add more clues and details” but that she restrained herself so that the Nutshells wouldn’t get too “gadgety.”