Great article by Michael Sragrow in the Baltimore Sun about Of Dolls & Murder.
www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bs-ae-nutshells-20120531,0,2881407.story
Murder
in a nutshell
A rich
Chicago grandmother created dollhouses filled with crime scenes seven decades
ago. Now, they educate homicide cops from Baltimore and across the country.
By Michael Sragow, The Baltimore
Sun
6:34 PM EDT, June 1, 2012
A man hangs from a rope connected to
the beam of a barn, his feet smashing through a wooden crate so he looks like
he's cut off at the knees. His wife explains that when he was angered or
annoyed, he would go to that spot, get up on a bucket, put a noose around his
neck and threaten suicide. On the fatal day, she placed the bucket elsewhere,
so he grabbed the crate.
Is this a picture of accidental
death, as she contends? Or is it suicide — or murder?
This scene doesn't belong to a
forensic TV series like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." It's
depicted in one of the 20 meticulously detailed dioramas made over 70 years ago
by Chicago heiress Frances Glessner Lee. The toy-size tableaux do more than
illustrate natural death, accidental death, homicide, suicide or deaths that
are inexplicable. They challenge the viewer to locate clues, whether in the
clutter of a chaotic domestic killing or the apparent simplicity of a lone
drunk lying facedown on a sidewalk.
Used as teaching tools, "The
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" ultimately ended up in the Maryland
medical examiner's office. Studying them has become an important part of
training for homicide detectives and other investigators in the Baltimore
Police Department — as well as a prime attraction for crime specialists from
across North America.
Now Lee and her Nutshell Studies
have come under canny scrutiny in a film, "Of Dolls and Murder,"
which has its Baltimore premiere Tuesday at the Hollywood Cinema in Arbutus.
The director, Susan Marks, is from Minneapolis. But she has filled the film with
Baltimoreans, including narrator John Waters. At its best, the film unfolds in
its own macabre Everyworld. With first-rate filmmaking instincts, Marks set her
camera roaming inside Lee's criminal microcosms, where a straw hat can get creepy and a
cheery-sleazy Hy-Da-Way cabin can become a house of horror.
Just one photo of one Nutshell
hooked Marks when she stumbled across Lee's story in a magazine about 10 years
ago. As she earned her master's degree in liberal studies at the University of
Minnesota, and worked on other projects, she couldn't get the image out of her
head.
"It haunted me," she said
recently.
"Frances Lee captured the
moment when everything is at a crime scene — there's so much evidence
available, if you know how to look for it," said Jerry "D"
Dziecichowicz, a semiretired medical examiner's office administrator who
appears in the film. He has guarded the Nutshells' secrets for over 15 years.
He never reveals Lee's explanations for the crimes because that would defeat
her purpose.
Born into the family of an
International Harvester vice president in 1878, Lee transformed herself into a
master of forensic analysis 50 years later. Her dioramas are scaled so that one
inch equals one foot, and she created police reports and witness statements to
go with them, based on real cases.
Lee conceived of the Nutshells as
educational devices, and they became a key ingredient of the prestigious
Harvard Associates in Police Science seminar, or HAPS. She named them for a
time-honored police aphorism: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and
find the truth in a nutshell."
The Nutshells "are not
whodunits that you try to solve, though everybody wants to do that," said
Dziecichowicz. "They're models for you to learn and exercise your
observational technique."
Marks' interest in using the
Nutshells in a film was enflamed by essayist-photographer Corinne May Botz's
book, "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death," published in 2004.
About four years ago, Marks embarked on "Of Dolls and Murder."
When Marks first saw the Nutshells
"in person" — she laughed as she said it — "I knew that no
photography could do them justice."
These still lifes with still deaths
possessed a dynamism all their own. To echo their kinetic effect, Marks and her
producing partner/editor, John Kurtis Dehn, and her cinematographer, Matt
Ehling, planned a series of insinuating camera moves that open up the cases for
the audience.
For Dziecichowicz, their
dirty-dollhouse function — the way Lee took a form associated with innocence
and domesticity, then filled every corner with gritty reality — is part of
their allure.
"It's not Disney ... it's not
'It's a Small World After All,'" he said. "But it truly is amazing,
People who see them for the first time go ooh and aah."
The Nutshells now occupy a space on
the third floor of Maryland's bright new Forensic Medicine Center, where they
continue to be used for the weeklong, twice-yearly HAPS seminar. Detective
Robert Dohony, who took the HAPS seminar in 1999 and appears in the film,
remembered when they were scattered around the old medical examiner's building
at Pratt and Penn streets. "There used to be some in the lobby, and I
would really look at those. They were fascinating, unique, and even before I
knew what they were, I knew they were well-done."
What attracted Dohony most were the
details. And they are impressive, in big ways and small. When Lee set a crime
scene in a burned cabin, she built the cabin first, then burned it. When she
filled a kitchen with food, she made sure each tiny item was labeled properly —
you can read the PET logo on a can of evaporated milk. In the movie, Dohony and
two other Baltimore police detectives, Robert Ross and Sean Jones, intensely
analyze a Nutshell, tracing blood pools and drag marks and splatter patterns in
an apparent triple murder.
"It really is like a puzzle.
And that's what makes it real," said Ross. "Because in a real
investigation it's like that. You walk into a house, and you don't know what's
evidence and what's not. So you have to look at everything."
Lee was a Sherlock Holmes fan. Her
students think she should be at least as famous as Holmes' creator, Arthur
Conan Doyle.
Marks' film testifies to her stature
and traces the contours of her life. What used to be called "legal
medicine" tugged at Lee ever since her Harvard-educated brother brought
home a medical-student friend and future medical examiner, who regaled her with
real-life crime stories. Lee went through marriage and divorce, the birth of
three children and the death of several family members before she inherited her
fortune. She underwrote a Harvard chair in legal medicine and financed the
establishment of a Harvard library on the subject; she also gave the university
a $250,000 endowment for a legal-medicine department. She then conceived the
Nutshell Studies. Lee became a legend in her field and was made a captain in
the New Hampshire State Police.
Four years after Lee's death in
1962, Harvard closed its department of legal medicine because of a lack of
funds. In 1967, Maryland's chief medical examiner brought them into his office,
where 18 remain under the protection of the Maryland Medical-Legal Foundation.
(One of the original 20 was lost over time, and another was ruined in transit
to Maryland.)
Ross and Dohony said one thing
they'd want more of in a movie is Lee's life. Marks agrees.
In "Of Dolls and Murder"
she makes clear how daunting it was for Lee to be closed out of men's worlds
like Harvard and law enforcement. But Lee's family wouldn't talk to Marks about
her. So Marks took the film in other directions.
She examined the influence of
"CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," which devoted a season-long story
arc to a killer who worked like Lee in reverse, murdering people and then
creating exact miniatures of the crime scenes. Marks toured the Body Farm in
Knoxville, Tenn., where forensic researchers put corpses through various states
of decomposition. And she eavesdropped on a class at DeSales University that
used a life-scale replica of a Nutshell.
Happily, Lee's heirs have now seen
the movie and have warmed to the prospect of telling her story; they've even
invited Marks to a Glessner family reunion. The filmmaker said she's already
"40 percent" into a follow-up documentary that will fill in some of
the blanks. Marks may not get the whole story, but she aims to present all the
available evidence in a compact and expressive form — giving us Frances
Glessner Lee, in a nutshell.
If you go
"Of Dolls and Murders"
screens at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Hollywood Cinema 4, 5509 Oregon Ave., Arbutus.
Tickets are $10; advance tickets ($8) are available through Monday at
ofdollsandmurder.bigcartel.com. Director-producer Susan Marks and her
co-producer/editor, John Kurtis Dehn, as well as detectives Robert Ross and
Robert Dohony and members of the Maryland medical examiner's office, will
participate in a Q&A afterward.
Waters as narrator
Director Susan Marks said she knew
about John Waters' interest in true crime and thought that his wry attitude
would help viewers relax with the material. "I wrote the narration with
his voice in mind," she said. "I watched and listened carefully to
clips of him on YouTube, to get a feeling for it. He had script approval and
ended up not changing a thing." He did have one cavil. After stating, as
scripted, that Lee's tales were not the stuff of bedtime stories, he quipped,
off-mike, "They're totally what I like as bedtime stories."
Copyright © 2012, The Baltimore Sun
