Lee, Frances Glessner (1878-1962), was an American heiress who founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Lee is also credited with advancing the field of forensic science (legal medicine) by reconstructing crime scenes in dollhouse form to use in training police and medical investigators.
Frances “Fanny” Glessner was born in Chicago on March 25, 1878. She was the daughter of industrialist John Jacob Glessner, who helped found International Harvester (now Navistar International Corporation). Frances Glessner was raised in a privileged household. She and her brother, George, were educated at home by private tutors because of George’s poor health. At the age of 18, she was sent on a 14-month “Grand Tour” of Europe. In 1898, she married Blewett Lee, a lawyer. The couple had three children, but the marriage did not last.
Frances Lee developed an interest in creating miniatures in 1912 when she crafted a scale model of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a birthday gift for her mother. The tiny diorama consisted of 90 miniature musicians, all in formal dress with their various instruments, sheet music, and music stands. Lee would later use her passion for creating miniatures for fighting crime.
Lee had a close friendship with her brother’s college friend George Burgess Magrath. Magrath became chief medical examiner of Suffolk County in Boston and a lecturer in legal medicine at Harvard Medical School. His stories about real-life death investigations fueled Lee’s interest in forensics. He encouraged her to help develop a program at Harvard to train death investigators. Lee used her wealth to help establish the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard, with Magrath as its first chair. The department was one of the first of its kind in North America. Lee also donated a collection of 1,000 books and rare manuscripts to the department. The collection became the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine (now part of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine). Lee later presented the department with a $250,000 endowment.
Lee’s gifts also established the Harvard Seminars in Homicide Investigation. Lee presided over the seminars and was typically the only woman in attendance. Law enforcement officers of all ranks as well as coroners and other professionals would spend a week learning the art of crime scene investigation during the biannual seminars.
In 1943, the New Hampshire State Police named Lee to an honorary position as a police captain. She was the first woman in the United States to be appointed a state police captain. Captain Lee, as she was called, created a series of 18 miniature crime scenes known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Lee based the Nutshell dioramas on elements taken from real court cases. The dioramas have been used since the 1940’s as part of the seminars Lee started at Harvard, to train state police officers and others in analyzing physical evidence during investigations. In the mid-1960’s, her miniatures and the training seminars were transferred to the office of the chief medical examiner of the state of Maryland in Baltimore. Lee died on Jan. 27, 1962.
