"Death in a Nutshell: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death"

In the 1940s, the New Hampshire police asked Frances Glessner Lee, a millionairess with an interest in forensics, to construct crime scene dioramas. The “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” models, which featured working doors and lights, were used to train would-be investigators in the science of sleuthing (the Baltimore PD still uses the sets). In addition, Lee founded the country’s first forensic pathology program at Harvard and inspired Angela Lansbury’s brainy blue hair Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. Writer Bruce Goldfarb, also an assistant at the Maryland medical examiner’s office, delivers an illustrated lecture on Lee and her work.