the truth in a nutshell

When the scriptwriters of CSI Season 7 (2007) were interviewed about their inspiration for the season-long ‘Miniature Killer’ story arc, they cited Frances Glessner Lee and her ‘Nutshell Studies’.

This wealthy American heiress had dreams of a career in crime detection science. But in the early twentieth-century the patriarchy had other ideas, and so she went into marriage and child-breeding instead. By the 1930s, Frances Glessner Lee was a wealthy widow, free to follow her friends into the appropriately feminine hobby of tiny housecraft in which women tried to out-do each other in feats of historical accuracy and scale.

For example, one of Fanny’s fellow Chicagoan socialites, Mrs James Ward Thorne (she didn’t have her own name, apparently) was responsible for no fewer than sixty-eight miniature rooms now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. My particular favourites include a 1/12th scale model of an English Tudor Great Hall and an American prairie home of the nineteenth century which lets me imagine I’m a tiny Laura Ingalls.

Remember, these were adult women engaged in serious artistic pursuits, not scale model hobbies for children as one might imagine dollhouses, model railways and Barbie’s dreamhouse to represent. I doubt very much if Thorne and Lee’s contemporary miniature-commissioner on the other side of the pond; Her Majesty Queen Mary, would have allowed her great great great grandchildren to play with her famous dollhouse at Windsor Castle. She was in her 50s when this very grand miniature was commissioned for her by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. It was then, and is now, intended to display the very best of British craftsmanship – it’s not a toy and no dolls live in it.

Queen Mary’s dollhouse can only be enjoyed by glove-wearing full-sized adult conservators, or by entrance-fee paying plebs from behind glass. Camilla showed it to Melania recently, but press photos and footage from the visit show the doors of the glass case stayed firmly shut.

Fanny Lee’s miniatures were different from Queen Mary’s and Mrs Thorne’s (and from those on the recent BBC show where this blog thread started!) because she did make doll-sized residents for her rooms. She painstakingly knitted tiny stockings on cocktail sticks for them. She handstitched tiny garments from appropriately aged fabrics for them. She employed a full-time carpenter to craft fully functional furniture for them. She named them, gave them family trees and friends, biographies and backstories, and then she killed them.

Nearly two-dozen dioramas she called Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death were made over 20 years by Lee and her carpenter. In each one she invented a story of a suspicious death, entirely fictional but inspired by composites of cases in newspapers and books she read. She invented tiny clues, painted microscopic blood spatter and hid little murder weapons. Each had a ‘solution’ which investigators in training at Harvard Medical School could be tested against. They were a forensic teaching aid by which detectives might learn to:

“Convict the guilty,
clear the innocent
and find the truth
in a nutshell.”

When some of the Nutshells were displayed at the Smithsonian Museum in the twenty-first century, visitors were handed torches so they too could play detective and test their theories against the solutions given at the end of the exhibition. They included suicides, family annihilations and accidents, each more grim than the one before.

A documentary film about them was released in 2012, coinciding with a renewed interest in Lee’s work and also with the so-called ‘forensic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Two important temporary exhibitions opened in London in 2015 to exemplify this forensic cultural moment, which was when I was writing my PhD.

The first was Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime at the Wellcome Collection, which included art inspired by forensic evidence, including one of Lee’s Nutshells on loan. Other tiny forensic exhibits from real cases featured, like a maggot in formaldehyde from the Buck Ruxton case. The other exhibition was the Crime Museum Uncovered at the Museum of London, curated from objects belonging to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum.

These artefacts included exhibits of evidence from crimes over more than one hundred years and Sussex - the county I now call home - was well-represented among them. The bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, for example, and the Brighton Trunk Murders. Some of the items made Fanny’s miniatures and the maggot at the Wellcome look comparatively tame, like all that was left of poor Olive Durand-Deacon: her handbag and gallstones. John George Haigh took her to his workshop in Crawley, West Sussex, and his nickname the Acid Bath Murderer tells the rest.

Amongst these horrible things then, a few items of tiny furniture displayed as part of the same exhibition looked like children’s toys from a dollhouse! These were one of the exhibits I was most interested in seeing, and the reason I was one of the first through the door (after Boris Johnson and the press junket) on the day the exhibition opened, pre-booked ticket in hand.

You see, Frances Glessner Lee is known to some as The Mother of Forensics because of her Nutshell Studies, but the idea wasn’t hers. For centuries before Mrs Thorne was making her scale historical dioramas, before Lutyens was commissioned to make Queen Mary’s miniature palace, and before Fanny Lee’s tiny homicides, English courtrooms were using miniature crime scenes as genuine exhibits of evidence.

The tiny furniture at Crime Museum Uncovered was just a trace of a forensic tradition that has sadly been long-forgotten, but one that tells a really useful story about courtroom evidence, it’s meanings and misunderstandings. It’s a story we, in 2025, really need to hear right now, and one that deserves to be much bigger than the tiny space it occupies in the archives of crime and the historical record…

Tune in to the next part to hear it!