Murder in the Dollhouse

BEFORE THERE WAS "CSI," there were the remarkable crime-scene miniatures of Frances Glessner Lee, an heiress who grew up to be known as the patron saint of police detectives by making deadly serious play with dolls. It was not a future anyone would've predicted for her. Born into a wealthy Chicago family in 1878, Lee was forbidden to seek a college education and resigned herself to the life of a respectable upper-class woman. But after a divorce and the death of her parents, she began teaching herself police forensics and was reborn in the 1930s as one of America's foremost proponents of integrating modern medical science into homicide investigation.

In 1945, Lee helped launch a seminar in legal medicine at Harvard, where police officers from around the country would gather to hear lectures and hone their powers of observation on 19 meticulous crime-scene models she created at her New Hampshire estate. She became the first woman member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Legislation she promoted eventually led to reforms in the coroner systems of seven states.

The Harvard program shut down in 1967, four years after Lee's death, but her models remain safely in custody at the Baltimore Medical Examiner's Office, where they are still used to teach detectives. It was there, three stories above the morgue, that New York-based photographer Corinne May Botz discovered them seven years ago."

They brought together all these things I was interested in: gender, home, fear, space, sexuality," recalled Botz, 27, in a recent phone interview. And so she began taking pictures: not in the cold, empirical black-and-white typical of crime-scene photography, but in eerily lit color and at a close range that allows the viewer to enter the 1:12 scale models as Lee instructed her detective-students to do -- by imagining themselves six inches tall.

Gathered together in her new book, "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" (Monacelli), Botz's photographs highlight Lee's uncanny attention to detail. In order to serve as effective teaching tools, the models had to be as realistic as possible -- "Truth in Nutshell," as Lee put it. Every moving part works, from the window shades to a tiny whistle. The Nutshells -- so named by Lee, who never referred to them as dollhouses -- also hold some autobiographical clues. The idyllic painting of a country house hanging over the fireplace in one model, for example, depicts Lee's own house -- an image of the kind of bourgeois respectability the lower-middle-class victim might have aspired to.

In Botz's view, it's no accident that most of the victims in these dioramas are female. Botz sees Lee as a kind of conflicted pre-feminist who never quite reconciled her scientific ambitions with her inherited assumptions about a woman's place. While she handed the construction of the Nutshells off to a carpenter, Lee insisted on making all the dolls herself, knitting them tiny socks with tiny needles before plunging tiny knives into their abdomens or stringing them up with carefully knotted nooses. Once the models were completed, Botz writes, emphasis shifted from the victim to the detective, to "the powers of observation and the solution to the crime." In the meantime, "Lee stood off to the side of the room, watching the burly policemen as they examined her delicate, deadly creations."