By Garrett Murphy
American Medical News 11/17/03

In 1931, Lee gave $250,000 to establish the nation's first department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School, and she created the models for use in its forensic pathology program.

When Lee built her models, forensic pathology was in its infancy. In most parts of the country, a coroner did not have to be medically trained.

"It's not necessary for [a coroner] to know a tibia from a tuba, a choked drain from a choked windpipe," journalist Pete Martin wrote in the Saturday Evening Post of December 10, 1949. "The only skilled knowledge he may have is how to play ball with the local political bosses. About the facts of violent death he may know precisely nothing."

Lee "felt that there should be better interaction between law enforcement and the medical community," says Carl F. Flemke, Maryland's chief death investigator. "Certain cases were falling through the cracks."

She called her models the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after the saying in forensic pathology that an investigation's purpose is to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell," Flemke says.

The studies were based on actual crime scenes, reconstructed from photographs, sketches and statements by witnesses and police. Only names and revealing details were changed. The dollhouse-like models are designed on a scale of one foot to one inch, perfectly proportioned for an investigator six inches tall.

Some of the models could have been drawn from Norman Rockwell paintings. A kitchen lined with faded floral wallpaper is washed in warm sunlight filtering through lace-edged window curtains. A cake cools in the oven. Peeled potatoes sit in the sink. An ironing board and basket of laundry occupy in the center of the floor.

But one ghastly detail disturbs the coziness: The dead body of a 45-year-old woman, her hair pulled into a bun, supine on the floor in front of the open ice box. She wears a print dress and an apron, and stares blankly at the ceiling.

During training, an investigator is taught to methodically scan the room, starting at one point and sweeping in a clockwise direction. Every detail must be noted. All the gas jets on the stove are wide open. Both doors are locked from the inside. The windows are closed and secured with spring-loaded locks. Newspaper is stuffed in the gaps around the door; nearby is a stack of paper and a knife apparently used for this purpose.

Looks like suicide. But Maryland's chief medical examiner John Smialek, M.D, points out inconsistent details. The woman was in the midst of performing routine domestic chores. Would she bake a cake and iron the laundry while on the verge of suicide? A bench in front of a window is slightly askew in an otherwise tidy room. An ice cube tray is on the floor beside her body, as though she had been getting a cool drink for a visitor.

Was it suicide, or murder?

"Her estranged husband killed her, then tried to cover it by making it look like suicide," Dr. Smialek explains.

Alcohol and lust are common themes portrayed in other models, such as "The Red Bedroom," in which a prostitute is crumpled at the floor of her closet, with her throat sliced and wrists bound by rope. Two liquor bottles and a box of chocolates sit on the bedroom floor.

Some models depict accidental deaths. In "The Burned Cabin," a body on the bed is charred beyond recognition.

Another model is a double-homicide/suicide, an intricate three-room tableau in which a man shot his wife and infant with a rifle as they slept, then put a bullet through his own head in the kitchen. Despite the lethal head wound, he had walked through the house, sitting for a while at the foot of his child's crib, before lying on the bed next to his dead wife in their bedroom. Blood is spattered everywhere.

Lee commissioned craftsmen to fabricate furniture and certain pieces, but did most of the work on the models with her own hands. Scenes were flawlessly recreated. There are doors that close and drawers that open. Keys come out of keyholes. Lamps have working light bulbs.

Lee knitted a tiny sweater using straight pins as knitting needles. For another she hand-whittled minuscule clothes pins. Beer and liquor bottles, just fractions of an inch tall, have hand-painted labels. Several models have hand-rolled cigarettes less than a millimeter thick. And burned butts in the ashtrays.

She was neurotic about detail," says curator Sian B. Jones, who refurbished and cleaned the models with her partner Margaret Craft.

The models contain details beyond the range of view, glimpsed through mirrors or discovered only by taking the displays apart. One scene includes a victim near the door of a tavern. Behind that door -- even though you can't see it -- is an entire bar.

The models were used in the 1940s during seminars in forensic pathology at Harvard. “They were invaluable as training tools," Dr. Smialek says.

"Today we can shoot video," he says. "At the time, there was no other way to recreate a scene in such a way that it could be scored in a standardized way."

Twice a year, Lee brought together forensic experts and homicide detectives from across the nation for intensive training sessions. The Nutshell Studies were the focal point of the week-long seminars, Flemke says. Participants were given 90 minutes to study each model, a grueling practice that requires intense concentration.

The most minute detail could be significant: the lividity of the skin, the knot in the rope around the wrists, the positions of the weapon and the victim, spatters of blood on walls and ceilings. At this scale, a mote-sized particle can be crucial. In one model, of a lover's cabin, the bullet is literally a pinpoint wedged in a rafter. "The bullet is very difficult to find," says Flemke. "Hard as that is to see, you have to spend that type of time to scrutinize a scene that closely, because that cleared an innocent person in this case."

Seminar participants were only allowed to observe, using tools that would be available at the scene of the crime, such as a flashlight and a magnifying glass. But no crime lab or autopsy results.

After forcing seminar attendees to strain their eyes for a week, Lee hosted an elaborate banquet at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where cops were feted with prime rib and cherries jubilee served on $8,000 gilt china. These banquets were "the social highlights of the seminars on homicide investigation," wrote Perry Mason creator and longtime Lee friend Earle Stanley Gardner.