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Thanks to the rec from @singelisilverslippers (it won’t let me tag you) (how was i not following u back idk) we went to the Renwick Gallery, which had been about fourth or fifth on my list of Must Visit Museums in Washington up to that point. And I posted on Instagram about it, but Insta crossposts don’t come over to Tumbr. I had a bunch of pictures I took of other things there– the emphasis in that museum is on contemporary craftsmanship, so that was the focus.
Anyway.
The Murder Dollhouses were there on a temporary exhibition– I’ve seen discussion of them online before. It was super crowded, but there they were, and it was cool to see them IRL. They’re still active training tools, though, for forensic scientists, so the “solutions” aren’t public. Some of them seemed really cut-and-dried, others bafflingly opaque. [more about the Nutshells, as they’re formally called, behind cut]
And, obviously, they weren’t meant to be studied as dioramas behind glass– one of them, there was a little flip-up exhibit aid to show you that the underside of the pillow next to the woman who seemed to have died in her sleep had little spots of blood on it, like she’d been violently smothered and then the blood had been cleaned from her face. You wouldn’t be able to see that from the diorama behind glass, though, because it was the underside of the pillow. And it served as an excellent illustration of why you’d use a dollhouse for this, not a drawing.
They were more disturbing than you’d think, though. I mean, they were dollhouses, but one featured a man who’d burned to death, and there was his exposed skull but somehow worse were where his feet had fallen off and left the knobs of his ankle bones behind. Expressed in ceramic doll bones. And much was made of how his nephew had survived the fire and been found wandering in complete confusion outside, but nowhere did it tell you whether this nephew was a small child or an adult.
One was a two-parter, showing how a policeman had picked up a man seemingly passed-out drunk on the sidewalk, and then later showing how the same man had been found dead in the holding cell. Most notably, on the sidewalk, the man’s face was pillowed on his arm, but in the cell, he was facedown on the concrete with blood coming from nose and mouth.
I took some photos, two on my phone and a couple on my camera, that came out poorly. But it was hard to take many, because it was intensely crowded, and the tableaux were arranged such that you had to peer in tiny windows to see some of them, so if someone stood there looking a while, you just had to wait, you couldn’t peer around them.
“convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell” is the whole quote.
I took this one on my phone and already posted it– this was a tableau called “Three-Room Dwelling” and it contained a murdered (murder/suicided?) family of a man, his wife, and their baby. Doors locked from the inside, baby and wife shot in their beds, husband lying on bedroom floor with a trail of blood out to the kitchen where the rifle was. Had he killed them, then himself, then crawled into the bedroom to expire?
Notably, the nursery window was half-open. I’m not sure what we were supposed to draw from it. I wish I had time to look closer with a magnifying glass! Apparently every window and every door had working latches and locks.
They were dolls, but the blood splatters were exacting– the woman had been clearly shot as she lay on her side, with the blood splatter going out across the wall. (There’s a good photo of her on the exhibit website, but the photo just shows her as she lies– in person, you could see that the blood splattered as far as her closet door, which in scale would be some feet distant.)
Look at that linoleum, though!
The exhibit explained that they were all taken from composites of real cases, so there was no one real-life story you could draw the solution from. The other things that were important was that many of them were victims cops normally didn’t care about– prostitutes, drunks, people on the fringes of society. The settings were exactingly lower-middle-class in many cases, with details like the dough-smeared apron of a dead housewife, the chipped paint of a chair, the tablecloth oddly askew on the carefully-laid table, the worn-threadbare carpet.
This one, above, was of a man lying on a couch, apparently “dead of drunkenness”, but this is about as close as I could come. You see how you can only see in from one angle, and if someone’s looking, you can’t too.
This was the non-burned side of “burned cabin”, which had been carefully built and then burnt with a blowtorch to get the right effect. The bluish light off to the right is a hand-held flashlight: every tableau had one supplied, so visitors could illuminate parts of it that were dark. They were all encased in glass so the reflections made photography even more challenging.
This tableau was a disgraced corporate VP who had apparently asphyxiated himself in his running car– or had he? (He’s slumped over in a fur coat inside the roadster, with his hat on the ground nearby. At the far end, the window is open where the policeman broke in to find out what had happened.)
This is a detail of the faux-stained glass in “Dark Bathroom”, which was a detail I found charming. This is the thing, though– some of the things that are degraded, I couldn’t tell if they were meant to be like that, or if it’s because these tableaux are 70 years old. I also thought that a lot of the miniature food and bottles and things were meant to be recognizable, which they wouldn’t be to a modern person– clearly, you’d recognize the brand if you were contemporary.
A slightly wider view of “Dark Bathroom”. This is an issue i have with miniatures, though– fabric doesn’t drape properly at small scales. Her skirt would surely be flatter if she were full size. But how exactingly trimmed– apparently the clothing was often made of garments Glessner Lee herself wore to make the fabric worn enough, then cut down for use. She hand-knit stockings using pulled threads for yarn and straight pins for needles.
I admire minaturists, but. That’s. A lot.
This one’s awfully blurry– this is Burned Cabin, and the white is the skull of a man presumed to be the cabin’s owner, who was listed as “missing, presumed dead”. As I mentioned, it’s not wood painted to look burnt, it’s really a tiny wooden cabin burnt with a blowtorch.
Detail of Red Bedroom, showing the bottles of liquor the whole thing was blamed on, and then the incriminating dark stain on the carpet that puts the witness/suspect’s statement that the victim did it herself into question. (Stain is out of focus, of course.)
I found a lot of it horribly distressing, and morbidly fascinating, and I wanted to look at them longer, and also didn’t want to look at them at all. What a neat exhibit.
But, I mean. Obvi, somebody needs to do some more of these, updated for the contemporary age. You could even multimedia them, with the characters’ electronic recent histories appended for detectives’ perusal. Because these– clearly, the level of detail, they were meant to be brand names you recognized, the fashions and state of clothing of the various characters were things you’d draw conclusions from, the types of furnishings etc. …
In the accompanying video, they explained that Frances Glessner Lee hosted semiannual seminars where she taught the course that went along with these Nutshells, and wined and dined the invited guests extensively– police, yes, but also journalists, judges, insurance people, medical professionals, anyone she felt should know about this sort of thing. It’s fascinating, and apparently she bankrolled all this from her personal fortune because she felt it just was so important.
It’s worth thinking about again, I think, because CSI shows are so popular, and yet we’ve lately begun to debunk a lot of forensic sciences. So many “expert witnesses” relied upon are not, in fact, experts. It’s good to take a hard look at these things again, and remember– Glessner Lee did this because she believed so much in justice and serving truth.
(The tableaux each cost what would be about $40,000 in today’s dollars. She had a full-time employee, a carpenter, to help her.)
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