18 tiny deaths, p.25
18 Tiny Deaths, page 25
“The most serious damage is to the large model in the center of the room, the water from the roof coming directly into that model,” Glass wrote. “When discovered, the model (I suppose because of the excessive dampness) had been growing mold on many of the leather and cloth components. It is truly a sorry sight to see.”39
Lee inspected the Nutshells, made the necessary repairs as possible, and had them back in their cabinets in time for the police homicide seminar in the fall of 1961, the last one she attended even as her cancer had returned and spread.
12
POSTMORTEM
January 27, 1962
FRANCES GLESSNER LEE DIED AT her home at The Rocks a month short of her eighty-fourth birthday. The immediate cause of Lee’s death was intestinal obstruction, which was related to liver cancer that had metastasized from breast cancer. She had ascites—an accumulation of fluid in the abdominal cavity—due to the liver failure as well as decompensating heart failure that produced a generalized swelling of her body.
The mass for Lee at the Littleton church was attended by most of the employees of The Rocks, most of the staff from the Department of Legal Medicine, six New Hampshire state police officers in uniform, and eight or ten police officers from other states.1 She was buried in the Maple Street Cemetery in Bethlehem, New Hampshire.
News of Lee’s death brought accolades from throughout the United States and overseas. “Mrs. Lee was unquestionably one of the world’s most astute criminologists,” said Parker Glass, who had been secretary for the Department of Legal Medicine since the days of Magrath. “She was acquainted with and respected by top criminologists all over the world.”2
Cyril Cuthbert, founder of the forensic science laboratory at Scotland Yard, said Lee was “the only person in the world going out of her way to teach legal medicine to police.”3
Erle Stanley Gardner’s obituary of Lee appeared on the front page of the Boston Sunday Globe. He gave the newspaper his obit at no charge as a labor of love.
She was…my personal friend because I appreciated her grim, relentless pursuit of an objective, her uncompromising insistence on the best and her loyalty to the causes she espoused and to her friends generally.
Capt. Lee had a strong individuality, a unique, unforgettable character, was a fiercely competent fighter, and a practical idealist.
The cause of legal medicine and law enforcement suffered a great blow with her passing and yet for years the country will benefit because of her dogged determination, her down-to-earth grasp of the problems with which she was confronted, and her unswerving determination to find a solution by persistence, diplomacy, charm, and, if all else failed, by downright battering ram in-fighting.
She was a wonderful woman.4
During her lifetime, Lee was bestowed numerous honors and awards. She was given an honorary doctorate of laws from New England College in 1956, and two years later an honorary law degree from Drexel University.5 Lee was an honorary captain in the Maine State Police, the Vermont State Police, the Massachusetts State Police, the Virginia State Police, the Connecticut State Police, and the Chicago Police Department, an honorary major in the Kentucky State Police, and an honorary captain in the U.S. Navy.6 In recognition of her extraordinary contributions to the advancement of legal medicine and forensic pathology, the Institute of Medicine of Chicago created a category for Lee: Citizen Fellow of the Institute of Medicine.
One recognition that was never granted to Lee—the one that would have held the most profound meaning for her—was an honorary degree from Harvard.
Without the support of Lee, the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School went into a death spiral.
By 1963, Harvard estimated that consulting on nearly four hundred postmortem cases a year cost the university about $50,000 annually—an amount considered an unacceptable burden on the medical school. A committee reporting to Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey and medical school dean George P. Berry recommended that the Department of Legal Medicine be made into a division in the Department of Pathology.7
After repeated clashes with his colleagues, Ford was relieved of his academic duties, and his appointment to the Department of Legal Medicine ended in June 1965. He continued to serve as Suffolk County medical examiner. Harvard ceased operations of the Department of Legal Medicine on June 30, 1967.8 All the books and other material in the Magrath Library of Legal Medicine were subsumed in the collection of the medical school library, now called the Countway Library of Medicine.
Lee’s legacy at Harvard is commemorated with the appointment of the Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Legal Medicine. As of this writing, this position is held by a pediatric anesthesiologist who is the director of the Center for Bioethics. Harvard does not have a forensic pathologist on the medical school faculty.
As head of pathology at Case Western Reserve University, Moritz was involved in the founding of the Law and Medicine Center, which aimed at becoming one of the country’s premier institutes of forensic medicine education.9 In a 1958 True magazine article, Moritz estimated at the time that as many as five thousand homicides went undetected every year in the United States. “It is an amazing truth that in most localities of the United States the official medical examination of unexplained deaths is so casual and inexpert that clever murderers often go free,” he said.10
Moritz was involved as an expert witness in the July 4, 1954, murder of Marilyn Reese Sheppard in Bay Village, Ohio. An investigation by Cuyahoga County coroner Dr. Samuel Gerber, a well-regarded medical doctor, pointed to the victim’s husband, neurosurgeon Dr. Samuel Sheppard. Sam Sheppard was found with nonlethal injuries and claimed that a “bushy-haired man” was responsible for killing Marilyn and attacking him.
The investigation was conducted poorly from the onset, beginning with the failure to secure the crime scene. The Sheppard house was open to bystanders, including Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham, a friend of the family. Local newspapers turned on Sheppard. Coverage of the case was so intense that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the excessive publicity denied Sheppard a fair trial.11
Sheppard was acquitted of murder in a 1966 retrial. By then an alcoholic unable to practice medicine anymore, he later performed as a professional wrestler as “Killer” Sam Sheppard. The Sheppard murder was the basis for the television series The Fugitive and the subsequent theatrical film.
Moritz lived until 1986 when he died of natural causes at age eighty-eight.
On August 3, 1970, Dr. Richard Ford died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.12
Lee left an estate worth almost $1 million at the time of her death. In her will, the bulk of the estate was divided between her two surviving children—John G. Lee and Martha Batchelder. A portion of Lee’s estate was set aside for the Frances Glessner Lee Fund for the Study of Legal Medicine. Harvard was never mentioned in Lee’s will. The university was left nothing.
In 1978, John G. Lee and Martha Batchelder donated The Rocks to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests to continue the conservation and restoration efforts began by their grandfather, John Jacob Glessner, a century earlier.13 As a provision of their gift, The Rocks must always have a crop in their fields. For more than three decades, that crop has been Christmas trees. The Rocks is open to the public and hosts activities throughout the year, ranging from a network of well-maintained trails to school trips for children to learn about making maple syrup.
In August 2018, the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources unveiled a highway historical marker on Route 302 at The Rocks, honoring Lee as the mother of forensic science and creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.14
Ownership of the Glessners’ Prairie Avenue residence went through several hands over the years. The heirs of the Glessner property deeded the residence to the Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology, which leased it to the Lithographic Technical Foundation. The house was used by the vocational school until 1965 when it was put on the market for $70,000. With no takers, H. H. Richardson’s landmark residence was slated for demolition.
The Prairie Avenue residence was saved from the wrecking ball when a handful of local architects and preservationists joined to form the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation. The foundation bought the house for $35,000 in December 1966. Programming and exhibitions began within a year, and a regular tour program started in 1971.15
In 1994, the foundation spun off the Glessner House museum as a separate nonprofit corporation. The Glessner House museum is open to the public for tours and special events in the Historic Prairie Avenue District on Chicago’s South Side. With the original floor plan intact, the residence has undergone extensive work to restore original appearances and furnishings. Members of the Glessner family have returned many pieces of furniture and decorative objects to bring the residence back to its heyday. Three generations of Glessners are responsible for the Prairie Avenue house surviving to this day.
In March 2019, the Glessner House museum unveiled the restoration of Lee’s childhood bedroom, including her bed designed by Isaac Scott.
Lee presided over every homicide seminar without fail until shortly before her death. In her later years, speaking to her involved yelling into a hearing aid the size of a pack of cigarettes that she held aloft. The seminars continued to be held at Harvard under the supervision of her daughter, Martha Batchelder, until 1967 when Harvard ended the training seminars for police officers.
Russell Fisher, chief medical examiner for the State of Maryland, who had trained with Moritz and was one of Lee’s favorites, approached Harvard about continuing the homicide seminar in Baltimore. With the consent of Lee’s heirs, the President and Fellows of Harvard College voted to permanently loan the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death to the Maryland Medical-Legal Foundation for the purposes of training police officers in the renamed Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation.
When the first Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation was held in Baltimore during the week of May 6–10, 1968, the Nutshell cases were assigned to participants by Fisher. The reviewer of the cases, the keeper of Lee’s confidential solutions to the dioramas, was Parker Glass, the Department of Legal Medicine secretary who, aside from Lee, had spent more time with the dioramas than anybody else. Having looked at the Nutshell Studies for more than twenty years, Glass couldn’t help but notice a few things out of place, possibly the result of jostling during the trip from Boston.
“There are two minor items that might be changed,” he wrote in a letter to Fisher’s secretary, Dorothy Hartel. “In the scene showing the gal dead in a closet with her throat cut, the little knife is missing. Should be beside her hand on the floor. In the living room scene showing the wife dead on the stairway, there is a vase on the floor beside the divan. It should not be there. One of the boys [attending the seminar] insisted that this was indication of some kind of struggle in the room. If I am invited for next seminar, I perhaps could look over the models in their new home for any misleading changes.”16
Today, the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation is held at the Forensic Medical Center for the State of Maryland in Baltimore. The seminars are conducted in accordance with the traditions set by Lee, although admission is more open than her strict invitation-only rules. Students still receive a diploma that says “Harvard Associates in Police Science” and a HAPS lapel pin. Every seminar has a group photo.
On the second night, seminar participants go out for a fine dinner at one of the best steakhouses in Baltimore. Food is not served on gold-leaf place settings, but it’s still a pretty good meal.
In 2017, after the seminars had been conducted in Baltimore for half a century, a law firm representing the President and Fellows of Harvard College sent a letter to Harvard Associates in Police Science. The attorneys said that their clients were “troubled by the implication that Harvard Medical School and your organization are affiliated.”17 At the request of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, lest students mistakenly believe they received a degree from Harvard, the HAPS website and the diplomas given at the conclusion of the homicide seminar now include the disclaimer “Not affiliated with Harvard University.”
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are still used as Lee intended, for training police officers to observe and report their findings. One of the dioramas—Two Rooms—was irreparably damaged or destroyed in the 1960s, leaving eighteen in existence used for teaching. The disposition of Two Rooms is unknown.
Although more than seventy years old, the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death serve a purpose that cannot be duplicated by any other medium. Not even state-of-the-art virtual reality approaches the experience of viewing a three-dimensional setting.
Despite their continued usefulness, after more than seven decades, the materials Lee used to make the Nutshell Studies were suffering the ravages of time. Some materials were cracking and warping. Exposure to years of heat and ultraviolet light had caused damage to some surfaces. Several of the dioramas contained sheets of asbestos that in some cases was crumbling and could be dangerous to those who maintained the models. An aging electrical system posed an unknown risk of fire.
During 2017, for the first time since they had been assembled by Lee, the Nutshell Studies underwent an extensive conservation by experts from the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum. Under the direction of object conservator Ariel O’Connor, the dioramas were painstakingly cleaned, repaired, and strengthened to slow or stop the effects of aging.
Smithsonian lighting director Scott Rosenfeld replaced the incandescent bulbs in the Nutshell Studies with custom-made computer-controlled light-emitting diodes encased in small glass bulbs to mimic vintage lighting. The electrical system now uses less energy, produces less heat and damaging wavelengths, and poses less risk of fire.
By the time the team of conservators, artists, model makers, and lighting experts had finished working on the dioramas, the Nutshell Studies were preserved for generations.
For three months, the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death had their first—and likely only—public exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, across the street from the White House in Washington, DC. More than one hundred thousand people attended the exhibition, Murder Is Her Hobby. It was, at the time, the second-most attended exhibition in the history of the museum.
Upon the conclusion of the Renwick exhibition, the dioramas were carefully packed in custom-made boxes and returned to their cabinets in the Forensic Medical Center in Baltimore where they continue to be used in the homicide seminar. The Nutshell Studies are not open to the general public.
Today, the United States is served by a patchwork of 2,342 separate death investigation systems—some state-wide, some by county, some regional. There are no federal laws or national standards about how unexplained deaths are to be investigated.18 There is little consistency from place to place in terms of who conducts a death investigation, that person’s qualifications, the conditions under which a forensic investigation is indicated, and how it is conducted. How a death is investigated depends on where a person dies. Since Boston introduced medical examiners in 1877, the growth of medical examiner systems throughout the United States has been painfully slow. Of the 3,137 counties in the United States, more than two-thirds are still served by coroners. About half of the total U.S. population is still under the jurisdiction of coroners.
Every year, approximately 1 million sudden and violent deaths in the United States are referred for forensic investigation. At least half a million of these unexplained deaths are never subject to a thorough inquiry by a qualified forensic pathologist. There is no way to estimate how many murders slip below the radar every year in the United States.
As of this writing, medical examiner systems are present in the District of Columbia and twenty-two states: Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia. The most recent state to convert from coroners to medical examiners was Alaska in 1996.
Less than a third of the twenty-eight states with coroners require them to have training in forensic science.
Eleven states are exclusively on the coroner system (Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Wyoming), while seventeen states have both coroners and medical examiners. For example, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Francisco, and San Diego have medical examiners, while the remainder of California is served by coroners.
Despite the efforts of Lee, Oscar Schultz, and many others going back to the 1940s and earlier, Cook County—which includes the City of Chicago—didn’t have a medical examiner until 1976. As the only medical examiner office in Illinois, the agency covers half of the state’s population. The rest of Illinois is under the jurisdiction of 101 coroners—some elected, some appointed—of various backgrounds. By law, they are required to take a one-week course of basic coroner training upon assuming office.19
Only one jurisdiction—Charleston, South Carolina—has ever reverted from medical examiners to a coroner system. In 1972, the city implemented a dual system in which a medical examiner shared responsibility with a coroner. As one might expect, the approach was plagued with conflict. Public confidence in death investigation was such that political efforts were undertaken to pull all funding from the medical examiner’s office. Since 2001, Charleston has been served by elected coroners.20
The reasons for inertia against adoption of medical examiner systems are the same as they were in Lee’s time: political opposition, resistance to giving up a local authority, the fairly high initial investment cost to set up a well-equipped medical examiner office. One of the most serious obstacles to the wider acceptance of the medical examiner system is a severe shortage of manpower. There simply aren’t enough forensic pathologists to serve the entire United States.21
