Unexplained Deaths: How one woman changed homicide investigation forever

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) was a socialite from a wealthy Chicago family who became the mother of modern forensics. She learned forensic science under the tutelage of pioneering medical examiner Magrath and created The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dollhouse-sized crime scene dioramas that became an integral part of the highest-regarded training for police detectives in America.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 05 August 2021
Publisher: Octopus Publishing Group

For the majority of human history, sudden and unexplained deaths of a suspicious nature, when they were investigated at all, were examined by laypersons without any formal training. People often got away with murder. That is, until Frances Glessner Lee.

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she became the mother of modern forensics and was instrumental in elevating homicide investigation to a scientific discipline.

Frances Glessner Lee learned forensic science under the tutelage of pioneering medical examiner Magrath. A voracious reader too, Lee acquired and read books on criminology and forensic science - eventually establishing the largest library of legal medicine.

Lee went on to create The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death - a series of dollhouse-sized crime scene dioramas depicting the facts of actual cases in exquisitely detailed miniature - and perhaps the thing she is most famous for. Celebrated by artists, miniaturists, and scientists, they were first used as a teaching tool in homicide seminars at Harvard Medical School in the 1930s, subsequently becoming an integral part of the longest-running and still the highest-regarded training for police detectives of its kind in America.

In Unexplained Deaths, Bruce Goldfarb weaves Lee's remarkable story with the advances in forensics made in her lifetime to tell the tale of the birth of modern forensics.

Weight: 302g
Dimension: 126 x 197 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781913068271