‘NCIS’: What’s the Story Behind Frances Glessner Lee and Her Dollhouses?

NCISSeason 17, Episode 17, titled “In a Nutshell,” was a little creepy. With thehelp of a young woman being questioned about the murder of her brother, theteam uses small dollhouses (called nutshells) created to look like crime scenesso they can solve a murder case. Here’s the story behind the dollhouse/nutshelland its real-life creator, Frances Glessner Lee.

Who was Frances Glessner Lee?

In one of the early scenes during episode 17, Gibbs seesKasie and Sloane analyzing small structures that look like dollhouses. Insteadof scenes of happy families enjoying a meal, viewers see bloody dolls lying onthe floor, fatally injured. Each little house mimics a crime scene attached toan unsolved murder case.

When Gibbs sees Kasie and Sloane looking at the nutshells,he tells them to get back to work. However, they tell him they are working. “Really?You two look like you’re playing with dollhouses,” responds Gibbs. Ducky arrives,telling Gibbs the models aren’t dollhouses, but nutshells. He then explains whoFrances Glessner Lee was and why she created them. “Back in the 1940s, therewas a brilliant woman by the name of Frances Glessner Lee,” says Ducky. “Shecreated a series of crime scene miniatures, which she called The NutshellStudies of Unexplained Death.”

Lee was a millionaire heiress, reportsThe New Yorker. She modeled her work after real crime scenes. By the1950s she and her assistants crafted 20 nutshells. 

Kasie Hines explains the purpose of Frances Glessner Lee’s crime scene dollhouses

Kasie jumps in to add the miniatures were used in thetraining of homicide detectives and forensics students to help them analyzecrime scenes. Lee and her team made an effort to include even the smallestdetails in each nutshell. In one of them, you can see accurate labels on cannedgoods in a deceased person’s kitchen cabinet. Lee said the point of being sodetailed was to teach detectives and forensics students to pay attention totiny details and not just obvious ones, according to The New Yorker.

How the ‘NCIS’ team relied on Frances Glessner Lee’s nutshells to solve a crime

In one of the miniatures, Gibbs notices a scene with a womanin a house that had a fire. The back of the nutshell has a label that says,“plain old electrical fire.” However, Gibbs did some digging and was able tosolve the mystery of the woman’s death. He and the team discover the fire inthe woman’s house wasn’t an accident. The fire was set on purpose by a man sheknew who had a background as an electrician. The woman happened to be verywealthy, so she was a target.

Frances Glessner Lee’s legacy

Glessner’s work was featured at the Smithsonian American ArtMuseum. Back in 2017, the museum displayed her nutshells in an exhibitiontitled Murder Is HerHobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.Smithsonian curator Nora Atikson said in a video for the exhibition that thenutshells are still used in training today at the Office of the Chief MedicalExaminer in Baltimore, Maryland.

Read more: ‘NCIS’:Interesting Facts About Ziva, Gibbs, and Tony’s Wardrobe

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