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Tag Archives: criminologo

Dolls and murders

Jul10

I have been your doll-wife, just as at home
I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.
I thought it great fun when you played with me,
just as they thought it great fun when I played with them.
That is what our marriage has been, Torvald.

(H. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act III)

When Frances Glessner Lee was born in Chicago in 1878, her life had already been planned.
Her parents, industrialists who became millionaires selling agricultural machinery, had very clear ideas about what they expected from her: she was going to grow up in the big family estate, which resembled a fortress, where private institutors would instruct her in the feminine arts of sewing, embroidery, painting. Once she had become a raised-right young lady, she would marry and continue her existence in her husband’s shadow, as it was suitable for a respectable woman. For a perfect doll.

And Frances followed these rules, at least apparently. After her parents refused to send her to Harvard to study medicine like her brother (because “a lady doesn’t go to school”), the young girl married a lawyer and gave him three children.
And yet Frances felt secretly repressed by the morals of her time and by not being allowed anything outside domestic tasks: she was eager to do something tangible for the community, but on the other hand could not openly dispute the social role that was assigned to her.
Thus many bitter years passed, until things slowly began to change.

In 1914 a first, small scandal: Frances divorced her husband, partly because (according to her son) he was not happy with her doing creative manual work, in which she excelled. In little more than ten years, in turn, her brother, her mother and her father died. Frances found herself with an immense fortune, free at last to pursue her true vocation – which actually was quite far from the dreams others had dreamt for her.
Because her passion, fueled by the stories of Sherlock Holmes, was the newly-born forensic science.

Frances had a close friendship with George Burgess Magrath, who was her late brother’s collegue and a famous medical examiner specializing in murder cases. Magrath often complained about investigators misinterpreting or even tramplimg with the evidence on a crime scene: there still was no education on this matter, police officers moved the bodies or walked on blood stains without giving it a thought, and as a consequence a high number of homicides went unsolved.
The now wealthy heiress decided, initially assisted by Magrath, that she would begin to do her part in renewing the system. In 1931 she endowed Harvard University with a generous donation in order to establish a Department of Legal Medicine; subsequently she founded the George Burgess Magrath Library, and created an organization for the progress of forensic science, the Harvard Associates in Police Science.

Magrath died shortly after, but Frances — even though she was not a trained doctor — had already acquired a stunning knowledge in criminology. In the pictures from the time, she is sitting beside the biggest experts in the field, like a respected godmother and patron.
But her most extraordinary contribution to the cause was yet to come.

In the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee decided to hold biannual seminars for detectives and investigators. And here she presented for the first time the result of countless days of solitary work: her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
At a first glance they looked like elaborate and detailed dollhouses, but looking closely one could discover their macabre secret: the puppets inside those houses were all dead.
Each diorama was in fact inspired by an actual crime scene, which Frances had studied or seen in person during the investigations.

The quality of craftmanship was impressive. With painstaking care, every doll was dressed with tiny cross-stitched clothes; using jeweler’s precision tools Frances was able to equip her models with windows that could be opened, working keys and locks, pantries filled with food cans and countless other microscopic details.
Thanks to her familiarity with autopsies and crime scenes, the murdered dolls showed realistic signs of violence and death: wounds, bruises, decomposition symptoms, blood spatters on clothes and walls, everything was reproduced to the smallest detail.

SUMM_L0076432__3179415b

sofa

bath

Striped-Bedroom11

The dioramas, each accompanied by a “witness statement”, were designed as crime mysteries to be solved.
The investigators attending the seminar were given 90 minutes to examine each single scene; they had to carefully study every clue.
What happened exactly to that family, all massacred by gunshot? Was it a murder-suicide, or were the father, mother and baby killed by a stranger?
And why did this housewife decided to commit suicide with gas, taking the precaution of carefully sealing the door — but leaving in the sink some half-peeled potatoes? Could the hour of death be determined by the state of food in the open freezer?
Did the man in the barn really hang himself?
If this other woman really died while drawing a bath, how come the stopper was not in the bathtub? And why her legs, in full rigor mortis, had stopped in that unnatural position?

When the allowed time ran out, the detectives had to draw their conclusions on what might have happened.

Nutshell_woman_in__3179450c

darkbathroom(girlintub)

JW3

5.-barnhanging

15nutshell

Three-room-Dwelling

murder scene 6

cot

Screenshot_2014-04-26-14-45-13-1

ThreeRoomDwelling1

kitchen

kitchen(door)11

kitchen2

Thanks to her exceptional work, Frances was made honorary captain in the New Hampshire State Police in 1943, becoming the first woman to be chief of police.
Frances Glessner Lee died in 1962; but to think her incredible dioramas (18 in total) were some kind of eccentric and cheap game, would be way off mark. They are so complex and accurate that they are used still today in Harvard to train forensic specialists.

woodmanscabin

unpaperedbedroom(door)

Twostoryporch(barrels)

saloonandjail(street)

Red-Bedroom

Red-Bedroom-(doorway)

New Angle Parsonage

 floor

Beside their specific educational value, the story these works tell us is also interesting for another reason.

In a sense, Frances Glessner Lee never stopped playing with dolls, as she was taught to do when she was little.
And yet the bourgeois interiors, the cabins, the bathrooms or the alleys recreated in her models speak of a reality of abuse and violence, of victims and executioners. In a subtly subversive way, the Nutshell Studies use the “language” of toys and childplay to describe the most brutal and terrifying aspects of existence — hatred and blood creeping into the reassuring tableau of a marriage, of a family, splattering those clean and tidy walls. It’s real life, with all its cruelty, bursting into the idealistic world of childhood.

redbedroom

pink

Living-room

livingroom(cigarettes)

inbed

green

  burnedcabin(fromafar)

  attic(letters)

042015hr-0545

One could guess, in these dioramas, some sort of secret pleasure on the part of their creator in destroying the idyllic domestic space.
Maybe staging savage murders inside a dollhouse — thus turning the perfect decent lady pastime into something terrible and macabre — was to Frances a small, symbolic revenge.

hat

bed

Parsonage-Parlor

The victims in the Nutshell Studies are mainly women.
And this last detail sounds a bit like a warning, a cautionary note addressed to young girls: do not believe too much in fairy tales, with all their princes charming; do not believe in the golden, coddled lives the adults are preparing for you.

Do not believe in dollhouses.

On the Nutshell Studies you can find a documentary film on YouTube and a book on Amazon.
I highly recommend a visit to this website: besides finding further infos on Frances Glessner Lee and her dioramas, you can test yourself on some of the puzzles, explore crime scenes and examine the main clues.

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28 Comments Posted in MondoMacabro, Anomalous Science, Weird Art Tagged assassination, assassino, bambola, bambole, body, cadaver, cadavere, casa, corpse, crime, crimine, criminologia, criminologo, criminology, death, detective, didactic, didattico, diorama, doll, doll house, dollhouse, donna, education, educazione, feminism, femminismo, forense, forensic, Frances Glessner Lee, homicide, ibsen, investigator, investigatore, legal, medicina, medicine, model, modellino, modello, morte, murder, murderer, nutshell, omicidio, police, polizia, room, scena, scene, science, scientific, scientifica, scienza, stanze, studies, studio, suicide, suicidio, unexplained death, woman

Nicolae Minovici

Dec28

Physician’s is a strange job: on one hand it is a profession, on the other an “absolute” vocation, which should not depend from personal gain and well-being. In fact, from the moment he takes the Hippocratic Oath, every doctor is required to provide first aid even outside the strictly professional sphere, and there are many doctors who put their own health in danger to cure, or even just understand, a disease.

Nicolae Minovici (1868-1941) was one of these men determined to get his hands dirty in order to help others.
Most of his life was spent giving assistance to the weak, the poor and the outcasts who in Romania at the beginning of the XX Centry received little or no support from authorities: he founded one of the first ambulance and emergency services, provided care and assistance to more than 13.000 homeless people giving them the opportunity of working for the emergency units. He also helped out single mothers, opening shelters where they could find assistance before and after giving birth. He was even appointed mayor of  the Băneasa district, where he modernized the sewage system, the fountains, the night shelters.
His professional and academic career was just another variation of Minovici’s interest in social issues. Having worked as a coroner, he touched first hand the most dramatic realities of his time; his studies in forensics, pathological anatomy, psychiatry and anthropology led him to take interest in delinquency (after all, his father was Mina Minovici, Romanian founder of criminological disciplines). In 1899 Nicolae published an essay on the alleged relationship between tattoos and criminal personality, coming to the conclusion — atypical in those times — that this relationship does not exist. HE founded the Romanian Association of Legal Medicine, and the Romanian Journal of Legal Medicine.
But his name is above all remembered for another work, his Study on hanging (1904).

Minovici’s humanist sensibility led him to believe that the physician’s vocation had to be both scientific and moral, as we said in the beginning. After all, he was not the kind of man who backs up before danger.
When, at the beginning of his studies on strangulation, he realized that he could not understand the dynamics of hanging without first hanging himself, Minovici did not hesitate.

In his first experiment, Minovici tried to personally adjust the intensity of asphyxiation. He passed a rope through a pulley fixed on the ceiling, and attached a dynamometer to the (non contracting) noose: he then pulled as hard as he could on the other end of the rope. Immediately his face turned purple red, and Minovici heared a prolonged hiss in his ears, as his visual became blurred. After just six seconds, he lost consciousnees.

This system allowed him to discontinue the rope’s tension in the exact moment he was about to faint. After experimenting with this method several other positions, recording symptoms and timing his resistance, Minovici moved to a new phase of decidedly more dangerous tests. With the help of some assistants, he decided he would be lifted from his neck, once again using a non contracting knot.

A couple of assistants pulled on the rope, one of them counted loudly as the seconds went by, so that Minovici could hear them over the tinnitus. But the first time the professor was lifted from the ground, and his feet lost contact with the floor, an excruciating pain went through his throat, as his airways were strangled and his eyes involountarily shut. Minovici frantically signaled the assistants to bring him back down, after few seconds.

Not at all discouraged, Minovici decided he needed a little practice. “I let myself hang six to seven times for four to five seconds to get used to it“. After this training, the professor was able to resist up to 25 seconds as he was hanging with his feet a couple of meters from the floor: the reckoning for this experiment were two weeks of sharp pain in his neck and throat muscles.

Eventually, Minovici was ready for the most dangerous and extreme endeavour: being hanged with a slip knot.

As usual, his assistants began to pull the rope, but this time the noose tightened in a split second, squeezing his neck in a grip of burning pain. The shock was so intense that after just three seconds Minovici signaled to let go of the rope. His feet had never even left the floor: the professor nevertheless swallowed with great difficulty and pain during the following month.

Besides experimenting on himself, Minovici ran some tests — albeit less dramatic ones — on some volunteers, who were chocked by applying pressure on the carotid and jugular. In these cases, as the subject’s face turned purple, he recorded sight problems, paresthesia (tingling sensensation, or numb limbs), a sensation of heat in the head, and tinnitus.
Minovici’s research, published in Romania in 1904 and in France in 1906, was extensively quoted in successive studies on the topic. His essay, in fact, was not limited to these singular hanging experiments, but related clinical records, statistics, information on the knots most frequently used by suicide victims, anatomy notes and so on.

Nicolae Minovici, who was passionate about Romanian folklore, had been collecting folk art objects all of his life. When in 1941 he died a bachelor, he donated his estate and collection to his Country, and today his former villa in Bucarest houses an ethnological museum.

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5 Comments Posted in MondoMacabro, Anomalous Science Tagged asfissia, asphyxiation, cappio, criminologia, criminologo, criminology, death, doctor, esperimento, experiment, forca, forensic, gallows, hanged, hanging, impiccagione, impiccato, knot, medicina, medicine, medico, method, metodo, minovici, morte, nodo, noose, physician, romania, science, scientifico, scientist, scienza, scienziato, scorsoio, strangle, strangolamento, suicide, suicidio
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