Frances Glessner Lee (March 25, 1878 – 1962) was a millionaire heiress who revolutionized the study of crime scene investigation. She founded Harvard's department of legal medicine, the first program in the nation for forensic pathology.
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She was born in Chicago. Her father, John Jacob Glessner, was an industrialist who became wealthy from International Harvester.[1] She and her brother were educated at home; her brother went to Harvard, but she was not permitted to attend college and instead married a lawyer, Blewett Lee, who later divorced her.[1] When she expressed interest in forensic pathology years later, she was emphatically discouraged. She had to wait until a year after her brother's death in 1930, when, aged 52, she took her first steps towards her own career.
Glessner Lee's perfectionism and dioramas reflect the family background. Her father was obsessed with furnishing the family home with fine furniture. He wrote a book on it and the family home, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson,[1] is now a museum. She loved Sherlock Holmes's stories because of their twists, which often result from overlooked details.
She was inspired by a classmate of her brother, George Burgess Magrath, who was just getting his MD from Harvard Medical School and was particularly interested in death investigation.[1][2] They remained close friends until his death in 1938. Magrath became a chief medical examiner in Boston and together they lobbied to have coroners replaced by medical professionals. Glessner Lee endowed the Harvard department of legal medicine (in 1931, the first such department in the country),[3] a chair in the field, the George Burgess Magrath Library,[1][4] and Harvard Associates in Police Science, a national organization for the furtherance of forensic science, one division of which is the Frances Glessner Lee Homicide School.[5] The Harvard program influenced other states to change over from the coroner system. Magrath became the department's first Chair.
Through the 1940s and 1950s, Lee hosted a series of semi-annual "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death." 30 or 40 leading crime scene investigators would be invited to a week-long conference, where she would present them with an intricately constructed diorama of actual crime scenes, complete with working doors, windows, and lights. They would have 90 minutes to study the scene. The week culminated in a banquet at the Ritz Carlton.[1][4] The 18 dioramas are still used for training purposes by Harvard Associates in Police Science.[5]
For her work, Lee was made an honorary Captain in the New Hampshire State Police in 1943, the first woman in the US to hold that rank.[3][5]