Baltimore's Unexplained Deaths

With its façade of new brick and tinted glass the five-storey building in the west of downtown Baltimore could be the HQ of an asset management company or an executive recruitment agency. In fact it is dedicated to the study of human death and its causes. This is the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) for the State of Maryland and it is hosting its annual week-long Seminar in Homicide Investigation for murder detectives from all over North America. On the third floor the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Jack Titus, is delivering the first lecture of the morning: 'Death Due to Hanging and Strangulation'. As Dr Titus describes the terminal phase of death ('Stomach contents will come up into the airway'), accompanied by a graphic Power Point presentation ('Here's an individual who hanged himself with a Play Station cord'), a roomful of dressed-down cops slurp coffee and munch on Dunkin' Donuts' signature comestible. 

In the break that follows some take the chance to drift round to a windowless room on the same floor next to the reception area. Here, looking like Gulliver in Lilliput, burly officers packing firearms next to the badges on their belts stoop to examine a series of 18 doll's house-like structures. On a scale of one inch to one foot, these models depict scenes of apparent domestic normality from the America of the 1940s. A kitchen is equipped with postwar labour-saving devices. A bedroom has stripy wallpaper and there's a wedding photo on the dresser. But Death has come to Toytown. Walls are spattered with blood and floors and beds littered with corpses - knifed, shot, hanged, decomposing. 'This one's a double murder-suicide,' says one of the homicide investigators, indicating a model called Three-Room Dwelling. 

His colleague agrees: 'Looking at the angle, it almost appears as if he shot the child while standing on the chair.' 

The models are known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and they occupy a unique place in the criminological history of the United States - as well as offering tantalising glimpses into the mind of the woman who conceived them. That woman was a wealthy socialite turned police captain called Frances Glessner Lee - widely believed to have been the inspiration for the Jessica Fletcher character played by Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. In the 1940s and 1950s, in a farmhouse in New Hampshire, Lee assembled these scenes of domestic dysfunction with extraordinary skill and obsessive attention to detail. All are based on real - and particularly complex - cases, or composites of cases, and their purpose was to test and hone investigating officers' observational powers at the scene of a crime. 'The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall,' she wrote. 'He is seeking only the facts - the Truth in a Nutshell.' 

Thus they acquired their familiar name and 70 years after they were first used - at Harvard University in the 1940s - and despite revolutionary developments in forensic medicine and the infinite graphic possibilities of digital technology, the Nutshells are still being used for the same purpose. Just the venue has switched, from Boston to Baltimore. 'The gathering of evidence has changed [since Lee made her models] but the interpretation of a scene has not changed,' says one of the homicide students, Detective Inspector Martin Graham of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Ontario Provincial Police in Canada. His verdict on the Nutshells: 'Fantastic. Neat training.' 

Of the 18 models kept in Baltimore, six are freestanding constructs, with exteriors as well as interiors (in Barn, for example, a man has apparently hanged himself in an outhouse. The pail standing outside by the water pump is a crucial piece of evidence). The remaining 12, mostly of the interiors of single rooms, are displayed behind glass like objects at a jeweller's. Insured for $100,000 each, the Nutshells are not accessible to the public (though anyone who can demonstrate a professional interest may arrange a private viewing) and the series will never be split up. But the Wellcome Collection, the science-based museum in London, has managed to secure a 19th Nutshell that was in Lee's New Hampshire home and is now in the collection of the Bethlehem Heritage Society in Bethlehem, NH. Showing a man who has apparently drunk himself to death, this will feature in the Wellcome's new exhibition on Forensic Medicine which opens on February 26 (2015). In this way, for the first time, the British public will be able to peer into the strange and disturbing world of the woman of whom her friend Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, said, 'I don't believe she has ever overlooked a detail in her life'. 

Demonstrating the truth of this observation Bruce Goldfarb, the Assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner and the de facto Keeper of the Nutshells, indicates one of the models, Pink Bathroom. It depicts a 'widow', Mrs Rose Fishman, who lies dead next to her marble bathtub. A brownish discharge seeps from her nose and mouth. Through the bathroom window at the back, a small section of fire escape attached to the adjacent building is just visible. Goldfarb opens the front of the model to reveal that the fire escape is complete. There's also a side window that you can't see at all when the model is properly assembled. 'How crazy is that?,' says Goldfarb. 'It wouldn't matter to anybody [if the window wasn't there].' 

To anybody, that is, except Frances Glessner Lee. She was born in Chicago in 1878, the daughter of one of the co-founders of the International Harvester Company, the manufacturer of farm vehicles and machinery, and had a privileged but restricted upbringing. She learned needlework, embroidery and interior design (aptitudes she would put to good use in the Nutshells) from her mother but despite her academic aspirations there was no question of her being allowed to follow her brother to Harvard University. She lamented that she had been cast in the role of 'rich woman who didn't have enough to do'. 

It wasn't until she reached her fifties, after a failed marriage, three children and divorce, that she found her calling, developing a passionate interest in 'legal medicine' (what would nowadays be termed forensic medicine) through her friendship with a pioneering medical examiner and forensics expert, George Burgess Magrath. Forensic medicine was in its infancy in the mid-20th century. Local coroners responsible for determining cause of death were not required to have medical training (in some US states this is still the case) and many deaths were wrongly attributed. 'People were literally getting away with murder,' says Goldfarb. 

In 1936 Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard. In 1942 she was made a Captain in the New Hampshire State Police and three years later she hosted the first Seminars on Legal Medicine. By this point she had already started to construct models of actual crime scenes that she or colleagues had investigated and she now introduced them as teaching tools. Photographs of the time show her looking severe and matronly - more Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple than Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote - though she is said to have loved being the centre of attention among police officers. 

Detectives, in turn, were keen to be part of her ground-breaking work. 'Invitations to attend [the Harvard seminars] are as sought after in police circles as bids to Hollywood by girls aspiring to be actresses,' wrote Erle Stanley Gardner in 1949. The seminars were later renamed the Frances Glessner Lee Seminars in Homicide Investigation - the title they still bear. Lee died in 1963 and when Harvard's Department of Legal Medicine closed down in 1967 the seminars - along with the Nutshells - were transferred to Baltimore. 

It was by a strange synchronicity - one that Lee would no doubt have relished - that her models should end up here. A few minutes' walk north of the Medical Examiner's Office, in a neighbourhood of housing projects that Bruce Goldfarb describes as 'seriously dangerous', lies the small red-brick house in which Edgar Allan Poe lived in the 1830s. Poe is credited with inventing the first fictional detective in the English-speaking world, C Auguste Dupin, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue - and Dupin's 'pure analytic ability', his powers of 'ratiocination', are precisely the qualities that the Nutshells were designed to cultivate. 

The 70 homicide detectives (53 men, 17 women) who are putting their analytic abilities on the line in the latest seminar are from Baltimore and central Maryland, from Vermont, Arizona, Chicago, New Jersey, the United States Park Police and Canada. The average age looks to be somewhere in the late 30s. They are attending five days of lectures - on subjects ranging from 'Sharp Force Injury' to 'Time of Death and Postmortem Changes' - but the core component of the Seminar remains the Nutshells. 'The real value of these things is in making the observations that allow you to arrive at a reasonable conclusion,' Dr David Fowler, the Chief Medical Officer, tells me. 'Can they spot all the clues that are present? The idea is to orientate students to what we realistically can and cannot do. To get away from this CSI nonsense.' 

On the first day Jerry Dziecichowicz, a semi-retired former Administrator of the OCME, divides the students into 10 groups of seven and assigns each group to one of Lee's models. 'You say to these guys: Picture yourself six inches tall. It's your scene. Walk into it,' he says. In addition to the scene as presented in the model, the detectives are given the first statement or statements obtained from one or more witnesses ('Eben was hard to get along with. When he was irritated, he would go out to the barn, stand up on a bucket, put a noose around his neck, and threaten suicide...'). As Lee pointed out, these statements are not necessarily trustworthy: 'It must not be overlooked that [the] statements may be true, mistaken, or intentionally false, or a combination of any two or all three of these'. 

Lee's criminological conundrums are a minefield for even the most experienced of homicide investigators and Dziecichowicz is one of the few people alive who knows her definitive explanations, which the OCME is at pains to keep 'hush-hush' so that the Nutshells retain their training value and mystique. On the penultimate afternoon the groups will present their theories and conclusions and he will tell them whether they've been blowing hot or cold. 'Frances had a solution - a beginning, middle and end in mind,' he says. 'But they're not little whodunnits. If students come up with good answers, I'm not fighting them.' 

Over four days, before lectures start and in the coffee breaks between them, the detectives are drawn to the Nutshells room where they shrink to Alice-size and inspect their respective criminal wonderlands with one of the torches provided or with the flashlights on their smartphones. Some return again and again, obsessed, baffled. 'I've been working with dead bodies for 10 years,' says a detective from Vermont (he declines to give his name). 'The level of detail here is amazing.' 

The mention of dead bodies is a reminder that this is not a parlour game. Away from the homicide lectures the OCME is a conduit between life and death. All suspicious deaths occurring in Maryland are reported here. Nearly six million people live in the state - about 620,000 of them in Baltimore itself, which has an annual per capita murder rate that ranks it among the most violent cities in the US (the reality of that statistic inspired The Wire, one of America's most successful television crime series). 'We're big and busy,' says Bruce Goldfarb. 'We investigate more than 9,000 deaths annually and do autopsies on about half - 4,500. Four per cent are homicides, 65 per cent are natural causes [of the remainder, 17 per cent are accidental, 6 per cent suicide and 8 per cent undetermined]. But these deaths are suspicious until they're proved otherwise.' 

Only one of the two autopsy rooms is in use today. Lying on stainless steel platforms, seven naked cadavers are in various stages of evisceration and disassembly. Viewed from the observation deck above, the bodies and their removed parts appear wax-like, slightly greater than human-sized - no more real than the tiny corpses Lee fashioned for the Nutshells from porcelain, cloth and wood, painting discoloured flesh to represent lividity or carbon monoxide poisoning. Standing alongside us on the observation deck are three detectives who are possibly interested in the 'female train victim' that is pointed out to me below (Did she jump? Was she pushed?). Ninety nine per cent of cases referred here are subject to an autopsy within 24 hours of being found or declared dead - which means that a day previously, while I was flying into Baltimore, these seven bodies were probably alive. 

The spirit of Lee lives on in the OCME. Not only is she referred to - both reverently and affectionately - as 'Frances', but her models have a 21st century incarnation. Goldfarb shows me the 'Scarpetta House', a facility donated by the crime writer Patricia Cornwell and named for her fictional forensics expert Kay Scarpetta. 'This is the most violent room in Baltimore,' says Goldfarb proudly. 'A life-size Nutshell.' The room, complete with furniture and realistically weighted and articulated mannequins, can be configured to represent any number of murder scenarios. 'We recently staged a simulated religious mass suicide,' he says. 

Back in the Nutshells room the detectives are working on their cases. Were Lee to stand quietly alongside me in the corner of the room, she would be proud of what she hears and sees. There's a bit of banter - 'I personally think she did all these murders and that's how she knows what the crime scenes look like,' quips one cop - but the mood is generally respectful and earnest. 

One discussion, over the fate of Arthur Roberts, 'insurance salesman', in Log Cabin, grows heated: 'It's possible he shot himself. The only issue is his head. If you fall, wouldn't you move your head to the side? That's what's throwing me off.' 

'I'm telling you bro. He killed himself. One shot, front through the back. End of conversation.' 

And what about Mrs Ruby Davis, 'housewife', found dead at the bottom of the stairs in Living Room? 'What I'm thinking is, sometimes when you have a fall you have a seizure, right?' 

'But there's lividity on her back. So obviously she was moved...' 

The following afternoon the various groups gather in the lecture room to deliver their case reviews to Jerry Dziecichowicz. There is one piece of left-field speculation that Hugh Patterson, the 'bank vice-president' found dead in his car in Garage, was the victim of 'erotic auto-asphyxiation' (he wasn't). Their conclusion on another case turns out to be wrong but is well argued. But in general the detectives' observations and analysis are impressive. They find the bullet in the ceiling in Log Cabin. They spot that the knife sticking out of Dorothy Dennison, a 'high-school student', in Parsonage Parlor was a post mortem wound 'as there's no blood around it'. They believe another case 'is probably a homicide'. And so on. 

'Good job guys,' Dziecichowicz concludes. 

One of the final lectures of the week-long Seminar is given by a Major Case Specialist in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia (in The Silence of the Lambs Clarice Starling, a Special Agent in this unit, is sent to pick the brains of Hannibal Lecter). The subject of the lecture is Criminal Investigative Analysis - otherwise known as psychological profiling, or deducing information about an individual from analysis of the crime scene. It struck me that even the most prolific serial killer leaves behind fewer crime scenes than did Frances Glessner Lee, who totted up nearly 20 in her lifetime. So, to turn the tables, what do today's commentators conclude about her? 

Since the first Nutshells were displayed in the 1940s there has been much speculation about what they reveal of the woman who made them - an adult who co-opted the fantasy world of children and defiled it with blood and violence, a mother who lavished so much love on death. 'I think she had a morbid curiosity,' says Bruce Goldfarb. 'This was a woman with considerable means who could have done whatever she wanted. And yet she was fascinated by death.' Jerry Dziecichowicz goes back to her fanatical attention to detail. The fire escape and invisible window at the back of Pink Bathroom are not the half of it. 

In her workshop at The Rocks, her New Hampshire farmhouse, she spent countless hours lovingly knitting stockings for her female corpses using dressmaker's pins as knitting needles. Though some of the contents of the rooms were adapted from existing objects or doll's house furniture - the egg whisk in one kitchen is actually a 14ct gold charm sprayed silver - much was made from scratch by her or the carpenter she employed. Even sheets of toilet paper - the old-fashioned, crinkly stuff that pre-dated rolls - are faithfully rendered. And she required a rocking chair, when pushed, to rock back and forth the same number of times as the one in the real crime scene on which it was based. 'You get to that stage, you might get put away if you didn't have money!' remarks Dziecichowicz. 

Goldfarb commends a rich, privileged person for portraying the lives (and deaths) of the 'marginalised' - drunks, prostitutes, blue-collar workers - while Dziecichowicz finds it 'disturbing that the majority of victims are women. And it [each death she depicts] happens in the home, where you're supposed to be safe.' Certainly it is hard to look at the baby lying in her cot in Three-Room Dwelling - her face shot out, the bars of the cot and the pink-striped wallpaper behind spattered with blood, the teddy on the floor and the doll in the high chair - and not wonder at the mind prepared to turn the world upside down in this way. 

On the subject of her inner life and motives Frances Glessner Lee herself never spoke or wrote, remaining even harder to figure out than the most enigmatic of her Nutshells. She dealt only in facts - the truth in a nutshell. And, in the words of the homicide detective from Vermont I spoke to, the one ineluctable truth you take from her dystopian dioramas is this: 'There's only so many ways to kill someone. There's only so many ways to die.' 

Published in The Telegraph Magazine on January 31, 2015