We are deep in the throes of editing Murder in a Nutshell: The Frances Glessner Lee Documentary -- getting ready for the screening in October 2024.
Above is a still from the section about the missing Nutshell. When we were working on Of Dolls & Murder, Jerry D (if you don't know who Jerry D is, watch the movie) told me about the destroyed Nutshell and the missing one. I figured that as a documentary filmmaker it was up to me to try to find it.
It eventually led me to a Nutshell I had never seen before. Not in archival photos and not in person. It was in an issue of Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It was an amazing find. At least that is how it felt. But I still had no idea what happened to the missing Nutshell. Until later on when I spotted it in a photo on a website for the Bethlehem Heritage Center in NH. (Near Frances' former estate at the Rocks)
Turns out the Nutshell wasn't missing at all. No one thought to ask anyone at the Rocks. So there it sat, overlooked for decades.
I was the first person to tell Clare Brown (She works at both The Rocks and the Heritage Center) that the Nutshell hiding in plain sight at the Bethlehem Heritage Center was considered missing. That was news to her. All she knew was that she found it in "the old tool barn" at the Rocks and literally had no idea what it was or much about Frances Glessner Lee at the time. (Side note: Clare's grandfather worked for Frances.)
This Nutshell wound up getting cleaned up and carefully sent to London for a Welcome Trust exhibit before it safely making it home.
Interesting lesson: Things that are consider missing, maybe never were. We just never asked the right people.
Side lesson: Don't assume others that came before you (even detectives) did their homework.
