Heiress Plotted 19 Grisly Crimes. Investigation Underway.
This became as clear as a bloody footprint to me last week, as I walked through “Murder Is Her Hobby” at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American
Art Museum, an exhibition of 19 miniature crime scenes created by Frances Glessner Lee in the 1940s and ’50s as training tools for police investigators.
“If you’re one of the first women,” Ms. Smith said of Lee’s involvement in the field, “you
probably had to have somebody — some gentleman at the time — invite you to the table.
The Nutshells are not only ingenious devices for the instruction of crime scene examiners, they are a body of imaginative work
that would have established any artist’s career and place in art history.
The models, meticulously handcrafted by Lee, are known as ‘‘The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.’’ Nearly all are owned by the Harvard Medical School
and on loan from the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where they live, and continue to teach, some 70 years on.
We can all point to that in our careers.” Something of an anomaly when she started out in the 1980s, Ms.
Smith now directs a department of 56 crime scene scientists that she estimates is 70 percent women
Magrath, who would later become the Medical Examiner for Suffolk County in Massachusetts, showed respect for her interest in legal medicine
and forensic science and made important introductions.
The husband’s statement: He left on an errand, came back, the door was locked, he
saw “what appeared to be” his wife through the window and called the police.
