By: Elijah Buck
We’ve all watched a movie where a murder has occurred and it’s up to someone (and their friend) to go and investigate the case. Whether this is a classic Sherlock Holmes or some movie that is coming from Bollywood, it’s easy to think that the clues that are set out in these movies are pain-painstakingly obvious to solve.
However, in the day to day world, a murderer is not going to write out who their next victim is–instead we have the roles of forensic scientists and investigators whose goal it is to go out to crime scenes and use the various objects and evidence to go and track who committed the crime.
But how do we train people of this profession? You can easily look and track a trail of blood, but when it comes to hard cases where the crime has been thought-out, how do we train these people to look at every corner of the case to find out what happened?
One such thing that these people look at is Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. These miniature scenes are something that are commonly shown to people who are going through school to become a forensic scientist, and in many cases are used to help them observe what has gone on in the fake crime scene.
In her life, Frances Lee created twenty dioramas of crime scenes to show and help those in training learn to observe more obscure details that were in the scene of a crime. She was inclined to do this due to the frequent overlooking of information that crime scene investigators missed in crime scenes, making it harder to piece together what happened. When she first constructed these scenes she made twenty, however, today only nineteen still stand. These scenes were particularly detailed and–beyond common belief–were not used as a test to figure out what happened. Instead, they were testing the perception of those who would investigate these scenes.
Some of these details were tiny, one such was in the scene titled “Three Room Dwelling” The detail in this went as far as seeing that there were potatoes in the sink, to seeing that the 1940’s gas oven was on, and conveyed that the body of the dead woman in the room was killed in the process of making dinner. This was to show that there was not a suicide, as many might think, as the door and window of the small house were locked, and there was newspaper shoved under the front door, pointing to a suicide. These details were tiny and these dioramas were used not to solve the murder but to teach to observe situations first.
Now, nineteen of these remain and are often used to teach people going into these professions. They are commonly shown at different museums and places of study around the country, and she is commonly seen as the mother of forensic science. Without these many investigators and forensic scientists today would most likely miss many objects and clues within a crime scene, which lays with the fact that she is the person who has made to most major difference to forensic science basics within the last decade.