Murder in the doll’s house: Frances Glessner Lee and the making of modern forensics – ABC News
They might resemble doll's houses, but with their blood-splattered walls, charred furniture and figurines in various states of decomposition, these miniatures are far from child's play.
Created by Frances Glessner Lee, an American socialite born in 1878, the tiny murder-scene dioramas revolutionised the study of crimes and helped give rise to the CSI-style investigation we know today.
"Everything that we have come to know and expect in that kind of crime scene investigation can ultimately be traced directly to Lee and her work," forensic investigator Bruce Goldfarb, who has researched Lee's life, tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
"Were it not for her, forensic medicine would not have emerged in the United States as it did."
Lee was born in Chicago into a rich family, and raised as a "young woman of influence".
She wasn't expected to go on to further study or to have a career. But a home education offered her knowledge of the domestic arts, sciences and literature, and she became a voracious reader.
From an early age, she developed a knack for miniatures, creating in her youth a mini-orchestra, with 90 musicians dressed in formal clothing. Their instruments were so lifelike, some could even be played.
It was an early sign of Lee's obsession with detail.
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Later in life, at the age of 52, Lee was introduced to the world of forensic medicine via a medical examiner friend, George Burgess McGrath.
McGrath shared stories of high-profile unresolved criminal cases, and it piqued her interest.
Lee discussed McGrath's cases with him while he explained the impact of poisons on the body and patterns of injury. She observed post-mortems in an autopsy room, and began reading more and more on criminology and forensic science.
It wasn't long before Lee began putting her artistic skills to new use. She created her first miniature crime scene in the late 1930s, based on a case McGrath had investigated.
That led her to create a series of dioramas, compact enough to fit on a table-top, each depicting the scene of a real unsolved murder.
Lee's detail is incredible: heads are finished with wigs; torsos and limbs are filled with sawdust, cotton and sand; a body in rigor mortis is stiffened with wire; porcelain skin is carefully painted.
There are tiny tin labels, lifelike ropes and curtain tassels, books with printed pages, and interiors of unrelated apartments that can be spied through windows.
Each diorama, including the furniture, the clothing and the figures, was custom made, mostly by hand, and took around five years and a huge amount of money to create.
"Each one of these dioramas cost about what it costs to build an actual house," says Mr Goldfarb, whose book detailing Lee's life and work is called 18 Tiny Deaths: the Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics.
"She did go into extreme detail, to depict rigor mortis and decomposition and those sorts of things, and fill these dioramas with detail just like a real scene."
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Up until the 1930s and 40s, police in the US were ill-equipped for scientific homicide investigations, Mr Goldfarb says.
"The problem was that until the middle of the 20th century, there was no training for police officers' in-depth investigation and forensic investigation. So police did things for lack of knowing better," he says.
"They might pick up a weapon or put the finger through a bullet hole ... [or] walk through blood, fold back bloody sheets."
Lee's 3D crime scene recreations became a new and effective way for police officers to practise the observation of crime scenes.
In 1945, Lee established a training seminar at Harvard University to train police officers.
There they could learn about such things as "blunt force injuries and sharp force injuries and drownings and poisonings", Mr Goldfarb says.
"The most critical component of an investigation, arguably, is the scene itself, because everything begins right there," he says.
"Police are the first responders [so] it's very important for them to recognise clues, to see things that may be significant evidence, so that it may be preserved and then processed and interpreted correctly.
"But the most important thing is to not compromise anything. And that's what the [dioramas] were for.
"What better way to observe a scene, then not be able to walk into it. You're forced to look at it. And that's the purpose that they serve."
Rather than offer clues towards one clear answer, the scenes in Lee's crime scene recreations point to a range of possibilities.
"Each one of them has all sorts of red herrings. They are all purposefully ambiguous," Mr Goldfarb says.
Entire bodies are rarely visible. Faces are obscured. There's no autopsy report.
"You're left with only partial clues ... so any sort of hypothesis is just conjecture. That's part of the purpose of them, to just make you think," Mr Goldfarb says.
Incredibly, the week-long training seminar Lee introduced at Harvard Medical School in the 1940s continues today.
Now called the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar on Homicide Investigation, it's at a forensic medical centre in Baltimore.
And more than 70 years on, her dioramas collectively known as the Nutshell Studies are continuing to help people learn to solve crimes.
"They're still valuable as teaching tools because there's still no substitute for observing a three-dimensional object," Mr Goldfarb says.
"There's no other medium that comes close. There's no virtual reality or anything that comes near to matching what you can observe through a diorama."
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Murder in the doll's house: Frances Glessner Lee and the making of modern forensics - ABC News