Frances Glessner Lee is affectionately revered as the Patron Saint of Forensics, and yet very few people know she was one of the greatest crusaders for criminal justice of all time. 

Despite the fact that women were not widely accepted in the realm of science and criminology in the 1930s, Lee established the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard to elevate law enforcement to a scientific level. Interestingly, at the same time, women weren’t allowed to attend Harvard.

Nothing and everything prepared Lee for changing the course of history. She was born in the Victorian era – a wealthy heiress of the International Harvester fortune, but the role of a Chicago socialite didn’t suit her. Lee was no-nonsense, extremely intelligent, talented, excelled at craftwork, and had plenty of strong opinions.

Murder in a Nutshell: The Frances Glessner Lee Story explores Lee’s extraordinary life and her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death – a surreal collection of dollhouse crime scenes she created to help train police to use their powers of observation to “convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.”