The Dollhouse Murder Investigator
Here’s a great story at Smithsonian Mag:
Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) was a millionaire heiress and Chicago society dame with a very unusual hobby for a woman raised according to the strictest standards of nineteenth century domestic life: investigating murder.
At first, she just had unusual taste in friends:
Rather than using her well cultivated domestic skills to throw lavish parties for debutantes, tycoons, and other society types, [Glessner Lee] subverted the notions typically enforced upon a woman of her standing by hosting elaborate dinners for investigators who would share with her, in sometimes gory detail, the intricacies of their profession.
Then she got to work:
In her conversations with police officers, scholars and scientists, she came to understand that through careful observation and evaluation of a crime scene, evidence can reveal what transpired within that space… If a crime scene were properly studied, the truth would ultimately be revealed.
To help her investigator friends learn to assess evidence and apply deductive reasoning, to help them “find the truth in a nutshell,” Frances Glessner Lee created what she called “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” a series of lovingly crafted dioramas at the scale of one inch to one foot, each one a fully furnished picturesque scene of domesticity with one glaringly subversive element: a dead body.