Episode 3 - Frances Glessner Lee: "Grandma knows her murders"

Imagine your best friend gets murdered. You call the cops, expecting a team equipped with gloves, evidence bags, testing kits, all of that. Instead, they trample through the house, accidentally ruining all the evidence that could have led them directly to your friend's killer. While this would cause outrage in today’s society, this was normal in the 1800s. Investigators were not investigating back then (they didn't even have proper training).

There was this one grandma who had enough. She decided that she would contribute the rest of her life to teaching the cops how to cop. She was a real life CSI investigation episode. She used her womanly grandma craft skills to build incredibly accurate models of real life crime scenes to teach the police how to investigate. BTW grandma also became the first female police captain in the United States.

This is the story of Frances Glessner Lee, aka the Mother of Forensic Science.

Sources:

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/biographies/lee.html#:~:text=Frances%20Glessner%20Lee%20(1878%E2%80%931962)%2C%20a%20New%20England,medicine%20and%20scientific%20crime%20detection.

https://www.deathindiorama.com/francesglessnerlee.html

https://deadmaidens.com/2015/05/04/murder-she-crafted/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/The-history-of-policing-in-the-West

https://www.universalclass.com/articles/law/history-of-forensic-investigation.htm

​​https://unfspinnaker.com/90467/features/womens-history-month-spotlight-frances-glessner-lee/

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/nutshells

https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/frances-glessner-lee/