99% Invisible - 165- The Nutshell Studies

Episode Date: May 20, 2015

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up there for an autopsy. On an average day, they might perform twelve autopsies; on … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So a quick announcement before we start. Earlier this year, I went to the TED conference in Vancouver and I gave a talk about flag design. It was an incredible experience and even though there was a little bit of skepticism when I started the talk, you know when everyone Learned that it was really going to be about flag design. The talk totally won over the crowd and I got a standing ovation. It was a real highlight of my career and last week the video was finally released. So I really hope everyone who listens to the show will go watch it and share it. You're gonna dig it. The cool part is that let me perform the talk like a radio piece instead of the normal TED talk. I'm sitting down and playing audio clips and talking over music, and for once you get to, you know, see my face while I do it.

If you've been listening to 99% of visible for a while, you know that one of the thorns in my side is the city flag of San Francisco. If you're not familiar with that flag, you'll see it in the video. It's not good. Anyway, 99PI has some fans at the company Autodesk, and if you don't know Autodesk, all you need to know is this, if the thing you're looking at exists in three dimensions in the real world, that object was probably designed on Autodesk software. So Autodesk has this big office in San Francisco, and they saw all the TED Talk and suggested

that we partner together to help plan a redesign of the San Francisco flag. I'm really excited. We have a website, San Francisco Flag.com, you can watch the TED Talk there, sign up, learn more, get involved, that's San Francisco Flag.com. Please visit, watch the video, share the link, I'm trying to get my TED Talk to become the most watched TED Talk in history, so we just need 33 million more views to get there. So if each of you who download the show, watch the video between 16-70 times. We can make it, or you can just share it a lot and make your friends watch it. Alright, thanks so much. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

The office of the Cheek Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up there for an autopsy. On an average day, they might perform 12 autopsy's. On a heavier day, they might do more than 20. The building is six stories tall. Around 80 people are employed there. All day long, fleets are coming in and out. People are calling about their deceased loved ones.

The press is calling with inquiries. But there's this one room on the fourth floor that sits apart from the buzz of normal activity in the building. Producer Katie Mingle was just there in Baltimore. This room feels a bit more like an art gallery because well it is kind of an art gallery. It houses the nutshell studies, which are these miniature doll house-like dioramas, and each one is a different scene. There's a kitchen, a log cabin, a barn, a bathroom. There are 18 different scenes. And each scene has different tiny features,

tiny furniture, tiny windows and doors and lamps, and there are also tiny people, dolls in each scene, and all of the tiny people in these scenes have one thing in common. They're all dead. When you look at a nutshell diorama, you're looking for clues about how the person or person's died. Was it a suicide, a homicide, an accidental death? The guns there. You're obviously going to get a lot of evidence off the gun. So why would

someone that came into murder them? Why would they leave a gun if they knew that that's going to happen? So I said a minute ago that the nutshell room is usually a quiet sanctuary and an otherwise busy office. And it is usually. But this week there are quite a few people in here. They're mostly police, a few FBI, and they're here for a week-long seminar on homicide investigation. While they're there, the attendees will hear speakers, they'll see an autopsy, and they'll be broken into groups and assigned a nutshell diorama. At the end of the week, they'll be asked to present their theories of what happened in their dioramas.

This group is looking at one of the few multi-room nutshell studies. And then he stumbles in here. He's crawling at this point, gets in the bed, and then falls, and that's where he dies. But he drags the comfort under him. You might have thrown him off beforehand. Now most nutshells are just one room

and about the size of a shoe box. This one is a little bigger. It has three rooms plus a porch. It's in a glass case, so you can look down and see the interior of the house from above. He doesn't check the round until it comes into the baby's room. I think there's a lot of room. The scene is of a lovely well-kept suburban home.

There are lace doils on the tables. Flower print linoleum in the kitchen. And blood everywhere. In the bedroom, a husband and wife are dead from gunshot wounds. In another room, a baby has been shot dead in her crib. Blood is spattered all over the pink wallpaper. It's a gruesome scene. The neighbor's dead. The neighbor was just supposed to be a murder suicide with him and his wife. blood is spattered all over the pink wallpaper. It's a gruesome scene.

The seminar that brought these folks here has been happening every year for the last 70 years. And the person who started it is the same person who made the little death scene dioramas. Her name was Frances Gllezznerly, and her work in the field of forensics has shaped just about everything that happens inside the office of the chief medical examiner in Baltimore, Maryland.

To tell her story, I wanna introduce you to a couple of people. Medical examiner's office. Or you can call our investigations department and let me give you the first. That's Bruce Goldfarb. And I'm the executive assistant to the chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland. And this is Corinne.

Hi, I'm Corinne Botz. I'm an artist in photographer. And I'm the author of the Nutchell Studies of Unexplained Death. Corinne spent seven years researching Francis Glezener Lee. So Francis Glezener Lee would have loved the opportunity to study medicine and go into college, but her parents were not supportive of that.

This was around 1900. Women weren't really going to medical school. Her brother got to go, though. Of course, and he brought a friend home once, a guy by the name of George McGrath, who was a pioneering medical examiner. McGrath and Lee became great friends, and when he'd come to visit, he'd tell her stories about cases he was working on. When she was just absolutely fascinating, she loved it.

Now Lee came from a wealthy Chicago family. She was supposed to be a proper society lady with lady hobbies, like needlework. So her interest in death wasn't really encouraged by her family, which meant for years she quietly studied it. She was a voracious reader, you know, talking to experts, getting first-hand experience by going to crime scenes. And then came to realize that people were getting away with murder, literally. Police would routinely botch investigations.

They would contaminate crime scenes, move bodies, do things that today would be obviously, you know, don't do that. But at the time they didn't know any better. And beyond that, the police just didn't know how to get information from these scenes. You know, they might not realize the significance of, you know, a pile of cigarettes or the positioning of a firearm. And the other thing was autopsies. Either weren't being done at all,

or were being done by doctors with no specific training in forensics. Eventually Lee's parents and her brother passed away. She was in her 50s by then, and she finally had access to the family money and agency to do what she wanted. So in 1936. She gave a bunch of money to Harvard University

to establish the first program in legal medicine to train doctors and make them medical examiners. And then in 1945, Lee starts and presides over these week-long training seminars for police, the ones that are still going on today. She wanted to teach police, among other things, how to gather clues from a crime scene. Of course, in terms of the galleries and time constraints, they weren't actually able to visit a crime scene during the seminars. So, lead decides she'll build miniature death scenes

for the police to study. Each one will be based on a real death. She'll call them the nutshell studies of unexplained death. Basically, she would come up with the concept and the design, and her carpenter would drop the blueprints with a scale of an inch to a foot. Leigh's carpenter built the structures, framed the rooms exactly as you would a real life-size room.

Real studs, real doors with real locks that worked. Leigh handled all the figures and the textiles, the rugs and drapes and tiny clothes on the tiny figures. Finally, those society-ladies' skills were being put to use. She would knit the stockings with needle-socies of straight pins using a magnifying glass, and of course, she could only work for like a few seconds before her eyes would fatigue. The figures in the nut shells also sometimes show rigor mortis, which is a post-mortem stiffening of the body, and levity, which is the way the blood pools or settles in the body after

death, both provide clues as to how and when a person died. The detail in the nunchells is bordering unobstressive. In one, an ashtray overflows with tiny cigarettes made with real tobacco hand-rolled by Lee herself, each one burned and then stubbed out. The coffee pot she has, there's a strainer inside and coffee grounds in it. They're full of extraneous information because that's the way real life is. You know, you go into somebody's home, they could have a bag of drugs and a weapon over here and I have a heart attack. It may or may not mean anything.

Francis Glezner Lee spared no expense on her dioramas. Like she sort of lavished love onto these brutal crime scenes. Each one took about six months and around $6,000 to build. That's about the same amount of time and money it would cost to build a real house in the 1940s. Leigh felt like if the policemen looked at them and saw any fault and didn't take them seriously, you know, they wouldn't learn from them so that's why she felt like everything had to be done perfectly. Of course, Frances Glasner Lee was always trying to be taken seriously in the all-male world

she had entered. She was ultimately both respected and adored by the police that she worked with. The week-long seminars she led were thought to be the best training homicide detectives could receive, and they're still thought of that way, actually, even today. After Francis Glezznerly died in 1962, the program she funded at Harvard, including the Wequong seminars were ended, and the nut shells were put in storage, possibly headed for the trash. And then the medical examiner in Baltimore at the time, a guy named Russell Fisher, who was a former student of Lee's programs at Harvard,

stepped in and said, we'll do it, we'll do the seminar. You know, we'll just pick it up here in Maryland and they brought the nut shells down. And so it's been the seminar and the nut shells have been used here since 1968. The building that houses the Medical Examiner's office in Baltimore is fairly new. It was built in 2010. Hello. Hello.

Bruce is giving me a tour of the building. It has some pretty unique features, including a full-size apartment that investigators can use to stage death scenes. Back behind us, we got a little dining area, kitchen. Bruce refers to it as a life-size nut shell study, and the most violent room in Baltimore. This is the most violent room in Baltimore. They also have a parking garage that, in an emergency,

can quickly turn into a huge morgue. And they have a biosafety facility to deal with death from highly contagious diseases. There's a whole isolation suite, and it has its own higher generation, its own ventilation, its own drainage. As we walk around the autopsy floor, the second floor, I'm on high alert. I'm basically terrified of running into something I'm not prepared to see or smell. You have to go through the decamper, if you want to stop and turn around, it's absolutely fine.

Wait, what am I going to have? I I'll see some stuff for all small things. Well, we'll hold it together, Mangle. Be cool. I know, totally not being cool. But we go through, and it's fine. I mean, yes, there are dead bodies. And I have many existential feelings about that that I won't share here.

But mainly this place feels like a really clean hospital for dead people. It feels like, yeah, this is how it should be. Francis believed in science-based death investigation. The whole institution topped the bottom, I think is probably the fullest embodiment of her philosophy and her approach. Bruce is talking, of course, about Francis Glezner Lee. He says not only is this building an embodiment of her philosophies, but so is the whole Maryland system for dealing with death investigation.

If you die unexpectedly in the state of Maryland, your death is likely to undergo a thorough investigation including an autopsy by a medical examiner with specific forensic training. But this is not what you get everywhere. Depending on where you die, you could end up in a facility like Maryland or you could literally end up on a makeshift table in someone's garage. From state to state and even county to county, there can be huge variations in quality. And there are definitely no federal regulations. There's a lot of substandard work.

Unfortunately, being done in that field, it's not like CSI. It's not like what you see on TV very often. That's AC Thompson. He did a bunch of reporting on this for pro-publica a few years ago. Very often, it's people working under dismal conditions for very little money with very little oversight. When someone dies in the U.S. and authority has to issue a death certificate with a cause of death.

If you die from an illness in hospital, this is something your doctor would do. If you die unexpectedly, like if you're murdered or a fall-downsmeep steps, a death certificate is issued by either a corner or a medical examiner. Maryland is on a medical examiner system. South Carolina, Colorado, and several other states are on coroner systems. And then you have states that are a weird mix of both, depending on what county you're in. In Francis Glezzarly was actually really passionate

about abolishing coroners in favor of medical examiners. Because, well, I don't know if she would have put it like this, but basically. The coroner system is crazy. It's bonkers, and it's an A-scientific thing from another era. First of all, you don't necessarily have to be a doctor to be a corner.

That is to be the person who issues a death that you get with a cause of death. Like, I'm a high school graduate and a lot of places I could just roll out and say, ah, I'm running for a corner and be the county coroner. Now, I would typically work with an MD who would do the autopsy, but I'd be the one who would make the final decision.

And that's the other thing. The coroner is an elected office. When you have medical professionals or even non-medical professionals who have to run for office based on what happens in the morgue, hmm, sets up potential conflicts of interest. One of the situations where you might see conflicts of interest are cases where someone dies in police custody. AC actually did some reporting on this very thing in New Orleans. And what you see

in New Orleans over and over and over again is that when people died in police custody or when people died in jail custody, there would be pretty good evidence that something untoward had happened. They'd been neglected, they'd been severely beaten, they'd been attacked, and what was happening was the corner there was basically trying to pretend that these things didn't happen. He was ruling deaths to be accidental that should have been ruled as homicides. His name was Frank Mimmyard. He actually was a doctor, but he wasn't trained as a medical

examiner. He was an OB-GYN, and he seemed to have a bias toward protecting the police. Maybe because he constantly had to campaign to keep his job. Who does he want to endorse him? Well he wants the police to endorse him. And if he's got a big spat with the police, is that going to look good for voters? In New Orleans, the FBI finally stepped in and did some of their own investigations and some police did eventually go to jail for some of those deaths.

But Minnard was never fired by the voters or anyone else. He served as coroner for 40 years and finally retired in 2014. So it's worth noting when you're talking about incidents involving the police, that if the police shoots somebody, the coron medical examiner is gonna say, it was a homicide, you can't really get around that. And then the question will be, is it justified or not? But then there are cases that are less gut and dry.

And those are the ones where an impartial, scientific death investigation might matter the most. And actually while I was in Baltimore, one of these cases was playing out, you probably heard about it. For a second day in Baltimore, a demand for answers into how 25-year-old Freddie Gray suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody. Freddie Gray sustained his fatal injury on April 12th.

He died a week later on the 19th. And for days after his death, people protested and waited to see if the state's attorney, Marilyn Mosby, would bring charges against the police involved in the incident. And Mosby was waiting too. She was waiting to see how the medical examiner would rule the death. As soon as she got their findings, she made her announcement. The findings of our comprehensive, thorough and independent investigation coupled with the medical examiner's determination

that Mr. Gray's death was a homicide, which we received today, has led us to believe that we have probably caused to file criminal charges. So, so, so, so. We don't know if the officers charged in Fertig Freddie Gray's death will be convicted, but they were charged, and for a lot of people, this was an important first step. I had left Baltimore by the time the medical examiner's office released their findings on Freddie Gray, but I have to say that having just been there and seen the way they do

things, I felt pretty confident in their process. It felt like their findings would be based in science and not tied to politics. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that Frances Gvesner Lee had something to do with that. If she were to walk around, see what we do, how we do things here, I think she'd be very pleased. And you know, she really is, I don't know if we believe in guiding spirit, so that sort of thing, but she is very definitely a

presence here every day. At the end of the Francis Glezzner Lee seminar and homicide investigation, the attendees present their theories about what happened in each of their nutshell studies, and then they get to find out the actual solutions. Was it a homicide stage to look like a suicide, or a suicide stage to look like a homicide, or something else entirely? This is the folder that contains the solutions to the nut shells. The guy that has the answers to these questions might be the most Baltimore guy I met in Baltimore.

Hi, my name is Jerry Jetsch. You have also known as Jerry Day. Sometimes the police will come up with their own solution. And since they're all wearing guns, I don't challenge them to say you're wrong. I just say that's not how Frances saw it, but I do have the answers. Jerry D is not going to let me see the folder or record when he tells the solutions. They guard the nutshell secrets like the recipe for Coke or the code for the Google search algorithm because they're still valuable secrets. As long as the solutions aren't easily searchable, the nut shells are still great tools

for teaching homicide investigation. And that is something that the Medical Examiner's Office in Baltimore, Maryland, especially Bruce Goldfarb for letting us come to visit. Corinne Botz's book, The Nut Shell Studies of Unexplained Death, is full of amazing photographs of the nut shells, some of which you can see on our website is99pi.org. Being that this is the 70th anniversary, in order to celebrate,

we've actually had a 70th anniversary challenge coin made with Francis Gersnerley on the back, and the Harvard Associates on the front. Yep, Katie got a Francis Gersnerley challenge coin made with Frances Guizmeli on the back and the Harvard Associates on the front. Yep, Katie got a Frances Glusner Lee challenge coin when she was there and every is so jealous. Make sure you coin check Katie when you're here. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine,

an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible. You must go to 999pi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.