You imagine the scene and smile. It is perfect to become the seed of a script that ends up winning an Oscar. You, along with dozens of other male criminology students in the room, are greeted by a woman in her 50s who looks like an endearing grandmother. You go to the next room and in it you find a doll house which, they order you, you have 90 minutes to examine. “They sent me here because they told me it would be a training visit,” you protest internally.
When you look at the recreation you begin to perceive the macabre aura of the event. The mental image of what a toy house must be is broken inside you when you see that the cloth and porcelain romper is a headless prostitute thrown on the bathroom of a room to which over the years, you notice, the same squalor that has characterized the life of its guest has been attached.
There’s more: one thing catches your attention, just one of hundreds. Some lines drawn in chalk on the miniature ironing board in the corner of the room. They mark the price that the utensil must have had when they bought it several years ago. You look at the whole and the level of detail The entire room is such that you start to get dizzy from the puzzle you have to solve. But there is no room to be stunned.
The strange grandmother at the beginning had already warned you: you have 90 minutes and there is not a single one to lose.
Frances Glessner Lee, dollhouses and the true origin of CSI
Frances Glessner Lee, whom we know today as “the mother of forensic science,” he didn’t have it easy to get to where he did. If it were not for a concatenation of circumstances, it is likely that this police branch would have lost one of its most valuable and, of course, curious pedagogical milestones that we have known.
Born in Chicago in 1878, Lee was the daughter of John Jacob Glessner, owner of the successful International Harvester company. Motivated by her childhood and teenage readings of Sherlock Holmes, she longed to dedicate herself to the exciting world of homicide investigation. At the end of the 19th century, the typical thing for society ladies was not to go to Harvard and then dedicate themselves to solving crimes, but get married and start a family. They forced this on him when he was 20 years old.
He divorced and waited for his father and brother to die so he could inherit the family fortune and finally be able to make his own decisions. In all that time his concerns never went away. He studied criminology in Boston, He donated part of his inheritance to Harvard to open a brand new forensic medicine department there and he got to work. At 52 years old.
Throughout her life, Lee founded the Harvard Medical School and served as an advocate for absolute rationalization in police investigation. among many other thingsbut the great work of his life was another: his Limited studies of unexplained deathsa series of 19 dioramas or small miniature doll houses that represented complex crime scenarios that would be analyzed by future students of Criminology or Forensic Investigation.
As a socialite, Lee used her money and social skills to make your way into the world of men and convince them to participate in your proposal. The cottage seminar by day, opulent parties at the Ritz Carlton by night.
Fourteenth State Police Homicide Investigation Seminar, November 17-22, 1952, at the Department of Forensic Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Read to the right. Harvard Medical Library and Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
Complete photograph of your death: every object around you counts
If something stands out all the biographies of Lee It is his unhealthy passion for detail. The passages about his works are an endless collection of nouns and adjectives. The cans of food in the cupboards, the fogged-up mirrors, the half-peeled potatoes, the overflowing ashtrays, the unmade beds, the open oven faucets, the pieces of wood under the nails, the violet stains observable on the subject’s face.
The backyards and fire escapes hidden from view of investigators and that Mrs. Lee ordered from specialized carpenters just so that no element of the room imagined in her mind escaped her control. Only one thing escaped him: it is not possible to distinguish rigor mortis in a doll.
For all this only Lee can know how many months or years was able to dedicate to each of the jewels in his gloomy collection, which cost as a result of 3,000 or 4,000 dollars of those of that time piece by piece and that involved both work and love: all the textile elements that we see in the dioramas were made by her herself.
The Bounded Studies are not only a pedagogical tool, but also a theoretical proposal on the tangible, material aspect that surrounds the reality of human death. As if each object, each frayed blanket and each photograph on the front page of the newspaper that has the figure of a murdered man at its feet, also became part of the same concatenation of events that led to his death. Pure chaos theory applied to forensic architecture.
As we have learned later, the houses became so complicated that many students were not able to find the appropriate solution as to how the hypothetical crime had occurred, but rather that they were simply left unable to give a single answer.
A pedagogical legacy still to be resolved
Of the 18 dioramas that Mrs. Lee made, we only know the answer to 13 of them. Over the years, no one has been able to solve five of these simulations that are still considered some of the most arduous homicide scenes in history. Its creator took the secret of those five rooms to the grave: she agreed if the participant proposed the correct solution, but she never gave the solution to the cases on her own.
Writer Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the character Perry Mason and who has dedicated many of his novels to the researcher who imbued his stories so much, said: “the person who examines these models can learn more about circumstantial evidence in an hour than he would learn by studying it in the abstract for months.”
In addition to her biographies and the Department of the National Organization for the Promotion of Forensic Science that is named in honor of her, the doctor has been revered and remembered in tribute to her work in the csi series and in A Crime Has Been Written, whose main character, Jessica Fletcheris a direct inspiration by Lee.
The Bounded Studies broke the mental schemes of many criminology students from the classes that passed between 1936 and 1945. In 1966, Harvard closed the department, but the dioramas, at be sent to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Officecontinue to be used for forensic seminars for young university students. With new students and, now, students, who will continue to marvel at how much they can learn about their darkness.
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