(From New York Times article) FRANCES GLESSNER LEE, a Chicago heiress, provided for just about every creature comfort when she fashioned 19 dollhouse rooms during the 1940's. Miniature corpses — bitten, hanged, shot, stabbed and poisoned — are slumped everywhere. The furnishings show signs of struggles and dissolute lives; liquor bottles and chairs have been overturned; ashtrays overflow. Mrs. Lee, a volunteer police officer with an honorary captain's rank whose father was a founder of the International Harvester Company, used her ghoulish scenes to teach police recruits the art of observation. She called her miniatures the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a saying she had heard from detectives: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." At her thousand-acre estate in Bethlehem, N.H., she set up a workshop called the Nutshell Laboratories. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. After endowing a new department in legal medicine at Harvard, she created the Nutshells as classroom tools, packing them with tiny but detectable clues: lipstick smears on a pillowcase, a bullet embedded in a wall. "The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall," she suggested in her curriculum notes. The Nutshells now reside at the office of the Maryland state medical examiner in Baltimore, where they are still used in seminars. The pint-size death scenes share the hall with enlarged copies of technical articles with headlines like "Suicide Using a Compound Bow and Arrow" and "Pathogenesis of Vertebral Artery Occlusion."
Mrs. Lee based her tableaus on true stories, but changed the names of victims, suspects and witnesses. The pseudonyms sound ominous: Homer Cregg, Wilby Jenks, Sergeant Moriarty. She also gave each diorama a creepy name: Burned Cabin, Unpapered Bedroom, Dark Bathroom. Some of the furniture was store-bought, made by companies like TynieToy. Other objects were fashioned by Mrs. Lee, who was adept at turning jewelry charms into tchotchkes and straight pins into knitting needles. A carpenter built the dioramas, adding back stairwells and yards even though students would barely be able to see them. Before contorting the dolls into their death throes, Mrs. Lee lovingly knitted stockings and beaded moccasins for them.
Mrs. Lee's own motivations are the subject of some speculation. Was she trying to subtly draw attention to domestic violence, then a neglected subject? Was she escaping the stifling conventions for wealthy women of her time?
Jennifer Doublet of Los Angeles, an architect who has written a scholarly essay on Mrs. Lee, said this week in an e-mail message: "For me there is perhaps nothing more satisfying in the Nutshells than the subversive pleasure of seeing the world of male detectiving blown wide apart by the macabre depiction of domestic violence in the precious, controlled, female space of a doll's house."
Or was Mrs. Lee rebelling against the opulent interiors of her childhood? She grew up in a fortresslike Chicago mansion designed in the 1880's by the Romanesque Revival architect H. H. Richardson. It is now a museum called Glessner House. Her parents, John J. and Frances Macbeth Glessner, sent their son, George, to Harvard but wouldn't let their brilliant, imperious daughter attend college. In 1898, at age 20, Frances married a milquetoast law professor named Blewett Lee. Three children and 16 years later, they divorced. The future Captain Lee retreated to New Hampshire, where she dabbled in antiques dealing. George introduced her to a Harvard-trained medical examiner named George Burgess Magrath. His gruesome casework intrigued Mrs. Lee, who once wrote in a letter, "This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life."
In addition to underwriting a department at Harvard that hired Dr. Magrath, Mrs. Lee organized lavish parties during its criminology seminars. An $8,000 set of dinnerware was set aside for this event at the Ritz-Carlton for crowds of adoring policemen, who gorged themselves on caviar, foie gras and filet mignon. "She gave hours of careful consideration to the seating arrangements, to the floral decorations and to the program," wrote Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason mysteries, in a 1962 obituary about Mrs. Lee.
