18 tiny deaths, p.1
18 Tiny Deaths, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by Bruce Goldfarb
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Cover images © Frances Glessner Lee and Alan R. Moritz working on furnishings for the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death ca. 1948. Photograph by Gil Friedberg. From the Department of Legal Medicine Records, ca. 1877–1967 (inclusive). M-DE06. Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Collection of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Courtesy of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Baltimore, MD
Internal design by Danielle McNaughton
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For Bridgett, Kaya, and Quinn
The investigator must bear in mind that he has a twofold responsibility—to clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty. He is seeking only facts—the Truth in a Nutshell.
—Frances Glessner Lee
CONTENTS
Key Characters
Introduction
1. Legal Medicine
2. The Sunny Street of the Sifted Few
3. Marriage and the Aftermath
4. The Crime Doctor
5. Kindred Spirits
6. The Medical School
7. The Three-Legged Stool
8. Captain Lee
9. In a Nutshell
10. Murder at Harvard
11. The Decline and Falls
12. Postmortem
A Note from the Author
Reading Group Guide
Notes
Further Reading and Resources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
KEY CHARACTERS
THE GLESSNER FAMILY
John Jacob Glessner
Sarah Frances Macbeth Glessner—Wife of John Jacob Glessner, known as Frances Macbeth
John George Macbeth Glessner—Son of John Jacob and Frances Macbeth Glessner, known as George
Frances Glessner Lee—Daughter of John Jacob and Frances Macbeth Glessner, known in childhood as Fanny
GLESSNER FAMILY FRIENDS
George Burgess Magrath, MD—Harvard classmate of George Glessner, medical examiner for the Northern District of Suffolk County
Isaac Scott—Designer, craftsman, and artist who made furniture and decorative objects for the Glessners
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL
James Bryant Conant—President of Harvard University, 1933–1953
C. Sidney Burwell, MD—Dean of Harvard Medical School, 1935–1949
Alan R. Moritz, MD—Chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine, 1937–1949
Richard Ford, MD—Chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine, 1949–1965
OTHERS
Roger Lee, MD—Prominent Boston internist and personal physician of George Burgess Magrath and Frances Glessner Lee, to whom he was not related
Alan Gregg, MD—Director of the Medical Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, in charge of funding projects to improve medicine
Erle Stanley Gardner—Bestselling author of Perry Mason novels
INTRODUCTION
Judy Melinek, MD
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED FRANCES GLESSNER Lee’s dioramas as a young doctor in 2003, when I traveled to Baltimore to interview for a position at the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The chief, Dr. David Fowler, asked if I had seen the Nutshell Studies. I told him, honestly, that I had no idea what he was talking about. Fowler then escorted me into a dark room and switched on the lights. Pushed into a corner, some hidden under sheets to keep the dust off, were a bunch of little boxes, and inside those, enclosed in plexiglass, I discovered a precious and intricate world of violence and death.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are miniature death scenes. I scrutinized them. In one of the tiny rooms, I noticed the dotted pattern on the tiled floor and the incredibly precise floral wallpaper. Another showed a wooden cabin with a kitchen and bunk beds. There were snowshoes in the attic, a pot on the counter. I played with dollhouses as a girl and would regularly beg my father to drive us to the miniatures store hours away from our home in order to purchase supplies for my own tiny world, but I had never seen dollhouses this sophisticated before. To make plates for my dolls, I would pop out the plastic liner inside bottle caps. The plates in the Nutshell Studies were made of porcelain. Porcelain! The labels on the cans stacked on the kitchen shelves and the headlines on the newspapers were legible. I couldn’t stop peering at the details.
Among those details, of course, were the blood spatters on the wallpaper, the grotesquely charred remains of a body on a burned bed, a man with a purple head hanging from a noose. These were no ordinary dollhouses. This was not child’s play. What was I looking at? Who made these? And the most compelling question: What had happened here, in each of these stories frozen in miniature?
I had come to the interview in Baltimore after two years of training as a forensic pathologist at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Part of my education there included going to death scenes with the medico-legal investigators from the office and learning what to look for at a scene and what I might find at the scene that would help inform my final determination of cause and manner of death in the sudden, unexpected, and violent stories we were tasked by law with investigating. This is how you learn death investigation anywhere—through on-the-job training.
Still, there was always something uncomfortably voyeuristic about entering someone’s home unannounced and going through their medicine cabinet, trash cans, and refrigerator as a part of the process of trying to find out why they were lying dead on the floor. The investigators at the New York City OCME were certified professionals, and they told me where to focus my attention and what to look—and smell and listen and feel—for. The medicine cabinet would hold evidence of the decedent’s ailments. A big bottle of antacids could mean they suffered from gastrointestinal problems, but they could also be a clue pointing to undiagnosed heart disease. Prescription drug bottles might indicate whether those medicines were being used as directed, underutilized, or abused. The wastebasket might have unpaid bills, eviction notices, or an abandoned draft of a suicide note. The refrigerator could be full of food or empty except for a single vodka bottle. If the food was fresh, so was the body, most likely. If it was rotting…then it could help us confirm the degree of decomposition we were observing in the decedent, in an effort to hammer down the time of death. Everything at a death scene is part of the story, and it is the details I would find there that mattered most. I couldn’t interview the patient. The surrounding environment was the medical history I would rely upon the next day, in the morgue, when I would perform the forensic autopsy and add those findings to the findings from the scene. As my mentor, the late Dr. Charles Hirsch, long-serving chief medical examiner for the city of New York, taught all of us who were fortunate enough to work for him, the autopsy is only part of the death investigation.
It was during my autopsy training in New York that I also learned the scene findings weren’t necessarily revealing. They could be irrelevant. They could be misleading. At the scene, the gun in the dead man’s hand and the witness who said that he was depressed suggested a suicide; but in the morgue, the absence of powder burns or stippling on his bare skin told me the gun had to have been fired from at least thirty inches away. He was murdered, and the scene staged to look like a suicide. The dead woman in her apartment appeared to have died peacefully in her sleep. The next day, in the morgue, her naked dissected body showed the deep bruises under the unblemished skin of her neck, and the petechial hemorrhages in the whites of her eyes were witness to homicidal strangulation. I learned what you see at the scene can inform what you see in the morgue, but it cannot replace it
.
Peering into the unique and incomparable scenes encased in the Nutshell Studies, I was taken back in time to a period in history when death investigation was beginning to emerge as a scientific discipline, and doctors were just starting to challenge the primacy of coroners and police detectives in distinguishing criminal acts from other types of deaths. Here was the work of both a gifted artisan and a medical expert, joining her skills to create something more than science and deeper than art. The exhibits were designed to be functional, educational, and fully decipherable—but the interpretation of each scene could change based on the medical information provided by autopsy findings. There is something about peering into a room from above, at dolls rather than at moving, living people (or their no-longer-moving, no-longer-living bodies) that allows you the time and space to train your eye, that makes you notice the details. I realized the Nutshell Studies were my on-the-job training with the New York OCME death investigators, but in miniature. The skills I learned from those investigators in life-size apartments and homes, businesses and construction sites, could be honed here, too, from many types of scenes at once, and in minute detail. I was awed by the time and effort it must have taken to create such elaborate, complex, and perplexing scenarios, and at how much could be gleaned from close observation of them.
When I first viewed those dioramas, stashed away in the back room of the Baltimore OCME’s office, they had been in storage for years, and they were not in the best shape. Their only pupils seemed to be the staff of the medical examiner’s office, who occasionally brought in visitors to look at them as historical curiosities. There was no way for the public to see them. As far as I knew, despite their age and condition, they were still being used for training death investigators. Still, it seemed to me a sad fate for such a remarkable body of work.
In subsequent years, and with the dedicated attention of Bruce Goldfarb, an administrator at the Baltimore OCME and the author of this book, Frances Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death have been repaired, renovated, and preserved. They were displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in 2017 and 2018, and they have been publicized in books and magazines and on the internet. This book is a culmination of years of historical research using primary sources, including the papers of Frances Glessner Lee herself. It is the story of how one stubborn, intelligent, and creative self-taught woman immersed herself in a passion that had immense repercussions in the fields of both medicine and the law. Goldfarb places Frances Glessner Lee and her intelligence, influence, wealth, and forceful personality in context within the world of medico-legal death investigation. As this absorbing and evocative book will show you, Frances Glessner Lee should be recognized as the matriarch of the modern practice of forensic pathology.
Her 18 Tiny Deaths have made a whole world of a difference.
Judy Melinek, MD,
forensic pathologist and coauthor (with T. J. Mitchell) of the memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner and First Cut, the debut in a series of forensic noir detective novels
1
LEGAL MEDICINE
October 2, 1944
SEVENTEEN PATHOLOGISTS AND MEDICAL EXAMINERS, all dressed in dark suits and neckties, sat around a long table in a wood-paneled conference room on the third floor of Building E-1 of Harvard Medical School. It was the autumn of 1944. Thousands of miles away, war ravaged Europe and the Pacific islands. The men had gathered at Harvard to attend a seminar on legal medicine, a field that would later be known as forensic science—the application of medicine to matters of law and justice.
Dr. Alan R. Moritz broke the grim news to the group. Unfortunately, Captain Frances Glessner Lee, her preferred title since being made an officer in the New Hampshire State Police the previous year, was unable to attend the seminar as planned, he told the men. She had fractured her right tibia in a fall and subsequently suffered two heart attacks.1
As trained professionals affiliated with one of America’s most prestigious medical institutions, the men well understood the grave prognostic implications for a woman almost sixty-seven years of age with a constellation of health problems. The heart attacks were the latest setback of encroaching infirmity that increasingly limited Lee’s ability to function day to day. Now she faced a long period of strict bed rest under the watchful care of a physician.
For Moritz, one of the nation’s leading pathologists, Lee’s absence was a personal and professional loss. The seminar participants would miss the benefit of Lee’s encyclopedic knowledge of legal medicine as well as the civilizing effect of her presence.
Lee’s seminar curriculum was intended to provide the men specialized knowledge to probe unexpected and unexplained deaths, including how to estimate the time of death, decomposition and other postmortem changes, blunt and sharp force injuries, and related areas of death investigation. No other medical school in America offered anything like it.
Lee was an improbable figure to assume the mantle of authority in the emerging field of legal medicine. A decorous grandmother with a preference for brimless Queen Mary hats and black dresses she sewed herself, Lee was an independently wealthy scion of Gilded Age Chicago society. Often a difficult woman with impossibly exacting standards of perfection and an almost fanatical sense of purpose, Lee was more than just a guiding presence for Harvard’s legal medicine program. By the force of her personality and spending a substantial portion of her personal wealth, Lee was nearly single-handedly responsible for the establishment of legal medicine in the United States.
As a reformer, educator, and advocate, her influence on the field was immeasurable. This genteel matron, herself on the threshold of senescence, was respected as one of legal medicine’s leading authorities. But getting to that point had not been an easy path for Lee. “Men are dubious of an elderly woman with a cause,” she once said. “My problem is to convince them that I am not trying to butt in or run anything. Also, I have to sell them on the fact that I know what I am talking about.”2
In the seven years since she had approved hiring Moritz to chair the country’s first academic program in legal medicine, Lee and Moritz had become friends as well as collaborators. They had been working on an innovative project that could revolutionize the investigation of unexpected and suspicious deaths: an intensive, week-long seminar on legal medicine for police officers. The ambitious curriculum mapped out by Lee and Moritz was groundbreaking, intended to train police in modern scientific forensic methods.
For the better part of two years, Lee had been working obsessively on a series of intricately detailed scale-model dioramas to teach crime scene observation, the identification of clues that may be important to determining the cause and manner of deaths that are unexpected, sudden, or the result of injury. She called the teaching models the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Now, because of her illness, their plans seemed doomed.
“The models are none of them finished and none of them can be finished,” Lee wrote Moritz while recuperating at The Rocks, her fifteen-hundred-acre estate near Littleton, New Hampshire. “I hope you will agree with me that under these circumstances the Police Seminar should not be held.”3
In the Building E-1 conference room, the men paused in their somber legal medicine studies curriculum to draft a resolution for Moritz to deliver to Lee:
Resolved, that Mrs. Frances G. Lee shall have the everlasting gratitude of all those attending the Seminar in Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1944, and that all those present extend their profound thanks and appreciation for her philanthropy which has made possible the holding of these seminars which, in turn, have done so much to advance the cause of legal medicine throughout the United States; and that it is the sincere hope of all of those present that Mrs. Lee will soon be fully restored to her normal health and activities.4
To appreciate Captain Lee’s pioneering work in legal medicine, it is necessary to travel back in time and understand how societies have dealt with death, especially unexpected or unexplained death, over the centuries.
