Frances "Fanny" Lee

Glessner House

Fanny Glessner was born in Chicago on March 25, 1878, the youngest child and only daughter of John and Frances Glessner. In her journal, Frances described her daughter as a delightful, clever and precocious little girl. Fanny was tutored at home like her brother George.

Fanny's early adult life unfolded in much the same way as the lives of other wealthy girls at the time. After receiving an excellent education at home, she then spent fourteen months in 1896 and 1897 touring Europe with her mother's sister, Helen Macbeth. Five months after her return, in November 1897, she made her formal Chicago society debut. On February 9, 1898, she married Blewett Lee, a law partner of one of George's friends. The couple moved one block to the north into 1700 S. Prairie Avenue (demolished), one of two twin townhouses that John and Frances had built for their children. Frances and Blewett had three children, John Glessner Lee (1898), Frances Lee (1903) and Martha Lee (1906). The marriage was not a happy one and the couple divorced in 1914.

In 1938, Frances took up permanent residence at The Cottage, her own home at her parents' summer estate, The Rocks, in New Hampshire. Previously, she had managed a house in Boston for soldiers and sailors returning from World War I, and then sold antiques in New Hampshire before pursuing her growing interest in legal medicine. Her friendship with Dr. George Burgess Magrath, medical examiner for Suffolk County in Massachusetts, had already piqued her enthusiasm and her philanthropic spirit—in 1931 she gave $250,000 to Harvard University to create a chair in legal medicine, and in 1934 she gave a collection of 1,000 volumes to create the Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. In 1943, New Hampshire appointed her State Police Captain; at the time, she was the only female police captain in the country. She created a series of twenty miniature crime scenes, the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, drawing on the miniature model-making at which she had become quite adept. The models became an essential teaching tool in what became prestigious, biannual seminars, known as the Seminars in Homicide Investigation for State Police. Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason novels and one of the few laymen allowed to attend the seminars, dedicated The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom to her. Gardner wrote that Frances Lee had a logical, orderly mind that was suited for police work. He described her as a perfectionist, with a warm heart and a keen sense of justice.

Frances Glessner Lee died at The Rocks on January 27, 1962. She was 83. Gardner's tribute to her was published on the front page of The Boston Globe. Harvard closed the department of legal medicine in 1967. Since that time the seminars have been held in Baltimore at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland, and the Nutshell Studies continue to be used as part of the training.

On October 20, 2017, the nineteen surviving Nutshell Studies were placed on public exhibition for the first time ever at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. in an exhibit entitled "Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death." The exhibit closed January 28, 2018.