Built in 1887 on the near south side in what was then Chicago’s most desirable neighborhood, the forbidding Glessner residence was by all accounts a happy home. Mr. and Mrs. Glessner were devoted to each other, according to the docent who led a recent tour of the house, now a museum. Though wealthy, Mr. Glessner went to the office every day, and despite her role as a society wife, Mrs. Glessner was an industrious woman who busied herself with beekeeping, embroidery, and silversmithing. Two of their three children, George and Frances, survived into adulthood, and Frances, born in 1878, inherited her mother’s talent and creative drive. Long after raising her own three children, Frances began what she called the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” miniature dioramas that replicate scenes of brutal crimes on a precise scale of one foot to one inch.
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Corinne May Botz stumbled on Frances Glessner Lee’s 18 miniature re-creations, now housed in Baltimore, while working on a video about women who collect dollhouses. Lee would have recoiled in horror to hear that term applied to her projects, which were intended not to acclimate girls to a comfortable domestic life but to train policemen in the nascent field of “legal medicine.” Captivated, Botz recognized in these tableaux the loving attention paid equally to stockings and food containers, blood spatters and slit throats. Fourteen of Botz’s photographs of the “Nutshell Studies” are now on view at the Glessner House Museum.
Working with a carpenter, Lee created crime scenes that were pastiches of many different cases–an approach that made the reconstructed narratives more intricate and interesting. Lee knitted the stockings for one unfortunate corpse with needles the size of straight pins; all of her miniature pencils and stereoscopes and mousetraps worked despite their size; and wallpaper wasn’t plastered to the walls in one sheet but trimmed into sections and glued on exactly as it would have appeared in someone’s home. Her travels were devoted to finding miniature items that could be modified to suit her needs. In her studio, she and the carpenter would reenact murders so that she could determine the precise angle of a fallen hat. These studies were used to teach the police officers in her seminars how to respect the integrity of the crime scene and how to look for both the obvious and the obscure. Were the liquor bottles empty or full? Were the breakfast dishes out or put away? Why was there a dishpan in the bedroom? Trainees were asked to spend 90 minutes observing the scenes in minute detail, then formulate a theory of the crime. In the days before DNA testing and international fingerprint databases, police investigators had little to rely on but their own observation and deductive reasoning.
Where: Glessner House Museum, 1800 S. Prairie
