Imagine - you leave your sweet, innocent, little-angel happily playing with her Barbie & Ken dolls and quietly tip-toe away; a large, contented grin spread over your face as you sigh with parental happiness. Over the years you don’t think much about your daughters obsession with Barbie. She’s healthy, she’s got lots of friends, really popular at school. What harm can it do, right? Then, one day, you notice your daughters computer is on and idly enter her room to turn the monitor off. It’s then that you see this grizzly scene on the screen …
You stumble backwards and catch your feet on a shoebox sticking out from under the bed. You fall and as you lift your head you see the box is full of Barbie parts; horrifically mutilated heads, limbs and torso’s a tangle of torn plastic and matted hair. You scream in horror (like a little girl) and then remember that little old woman who did something very similar in the 1940’s. You sip your tea, pick yourself up and wonder downstairs whistling a nice ditty.
http://barbiecrimescenes.blogspot.com/
Yes, this website may conjure up images of horrible little teenage monsters giggling while burning Barbie’s boobs but it is the work of an eccentric old lady called Frances Glessner Lee in the 1940’s that helped train the forensic pathologists of the day. In 1931, Lee gave $250,000 to establish the nation’s first department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School, and she created the models for use in its forensic pathology program.
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You can read more on Frances here. Quote …
During training, an investigator is taught to methodically scan the room, starting at one point and sweeping in a clockwise direction. Every detail must be noted. All the gas jets on the stove are wide open. Both doors are locked from the inside. The windows are closed and secured with spring-loaded locks. Newspaper is stuffed in the gaps around the door; nearby is a stack of paper and a knife apparently used for this purpose.
Looks like suicide. But Maryland’s chief medical examiner John Smialek*, M.D, points out inconsistent details. The woman was in the midst of performing routine domestic chores. Would she bake a cake and iron the laundry while on the verge of suicide? A bench in front of a window is slightly askew in an otherwise tidy room. An ice cube tray is on the floor beside her body, as though she had been getting a cool drink for a visitor.
Was it suicide, or murder?
“Her estranged husband killed her, then tried to cover it by making it look like suicide,” Dr. Smialek explains.
Alcohol and lust are common themes portrayed in other models, such as “The Red Bedroom,” in which a prostitute is crumpled at the floor of her closet, with her throat sliced and wrists bound by rope. Two liquor bottles and a box of chocolates sit on the bedroom floor.
Some models depict accidental deaths. In “The Burned Cabin,” a body on the bed is charred beyond recognition.
Another model is a double-homicide/suicide, an intricate three-room tableau in which a man shot his wife and infant with a rifle as they slept, then put a bullet through his own head in the kitchen. Despite the lethal head wound, he had walked through the house, sitting for a while at the foot of his child’s crib, before lying on the bed next to his dead wife in their bedroom. Blood is spattered everywhere.
Thankfully, these amazing models have been photographed and collated into an equally amazing book called ‘The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’ which as of writing this post is still available on Amazon here.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Glessner_Lee
http://brucegoldfarb.com/?p=22%3E%3CMETA%20NAME=
http://www.bellwethergallery.com/artistsindex_01.cfm?fid=28
