Voting Station

Frances Glessner Lee

Please vote to return to collections.

Crime Fighter

The Resume

    (March 25, 1878-January 27, 1962)
    Born in Chicago, Illinois
    Birth name was Frances Glessner
    Forensic scientist
    Helped establish the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard, the first such academic department in the US (1931)
    Endowed the Magrath Library of Legal Medicine at Harvard (1934)
    Hosted biannual seminars in homicide investigation for state police
    Created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death: 18 highly-detailed dioramas of real-life crime scenes used for training homicide detectives
    Called 'the mother of forensic science.'

Why she might be annoying:

    She had a sheltered and lonely childhood; at age four, she said to her mother, 'I have no company but my doll baby and God.'
    Her divorce from attorney Blewett Lee was considered scandalous in its day (1918).
    She described herself before she developed her interest in forensic science as 'a rich woman who didn't have enough to do.'
    Her Nutshell Studies look like morbid dollhouses.

Why she might not be annoying:

    She was a fan of Sherlock Holmes stories, in which the plot twists were often based on overlooked details.
    Mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner said about the Nutshell Studies, 'A person studying these models can learn more about circumstantial evidence in an hour than he could learn in months of abstract study.'
    She was the first woman admitted to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (1943).
    She found a way to make her mark in a male-dominated field.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 14 Votes: 14.29% Annoying