You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by author Bruce Goldfarbe, talking to
us about his book Eighteen Tiny Deaths, The Untold Story of the Woman who
invented modern forensics. Bruce, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be talking about one of
my favorite subjects. Start by telling us a little bit about yourself and how
you got involved in writing about true crime. I started out as a young
man as an EMT and a paramedic and a frustrated firefighter, and eased my
way into freelance writing. I didn't really have an interest in true crime so
much as I was writing about science and medicine. That's, in a very
roundabout way got me working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the
State of Maryland, where they had they located the nutshell studies of unexplained that.
So I had this opportunity to spend time with the dioramas. I actually
ended up being the curator of them, to learn more about them and other
facts that were associated with them, like Francis Plistner Lee who created them,
and how they were used. And I just I don't know what to say.
It was the path of least resistance. And here I am tell us,
how many years back is it your original affiliation with the Office of the
Medical Exacs Way back in the nineteen nineties, when I was an independent writer,
a freelance writer, I was very mercenary, so I was strictly in
it for the money. As a freelancer, you have to make money whenever
you can. One of the publications I wrote for was American Medical News,
which was the weekly newspaper of American Medical Association, and they paid really well
for feature stories about doctors. They love stories about doctors who had vineyards through
doctors who collected art. And I wrote about a gang, a motorcycle gang
of doctors. And I wrote about a doctor who studied ancient Egyptian pyramid pyrit
manuscripts. And I had heard about these diorromas that were at the Medical Examiner's
office. This was in the early nineteen nineties, I believe ninety one ninety
two, and I just did this one off story. I just did a
feature story for America Medical News about these dioramas of death that were used to
train death investigators, and that was it. I thought it was done with
it. The story kept coming back to me. People asked me to arrange
a visit, and I kept coming back to the Medical Examiner's office again and
again. They got to know me there. In twenty twelve, I was
working for as an editor for some hyper local news website and arranged for a
tour at the Medical Examiner's office for a group of editors. And while we're
on the tour, they mentioned that they had this position as an assistant for
the chief who'll be working in the Chief's office, would be the public information
officer for the OCME and would do troubleshooting. An ideal candidate would be a
say, an EMT with the newswriting experience, and it was pretty much ideal
for me. So I got the job, and that's when I began working
much closer with the dioramas. It was actually because I was the low man
in the total pole. I was the new guy, and they basically threw
the keys at me, and they said, it's your problem. Now you
can deal with it. You changed the light bulbs, and you deal with
it. So great. It was an ordinary experience to look inside and to
see how they were made, and to see details that were never captured on
any images, and secrets that they held, and all kinds of things.
It was an extraordinary experience. Can you tell us a little bit more detail
about what these dioramas look like and why they were referred to as nutshell studies?
Sure. Francis Klesner Lee, who created them, was affiliated with Harvard
Medical School, where she had established a program up there, and she and
the chairman of the department doctor Alan Moritz had. At the time, there
were no real homicide detectives. The police were not necessarily the best in the
brightest. A lot of them were functionally illiterate. They weren't high school graduates.
There were big, strong brutes who could be didn't have to have interviewing
skills or critical thinking skills if you could beat a confession out of somebody,
and the cops were big dumb guys. She under took to train police and
scientific methods of death investigation what we now know of as forensic science and forensic
medicine, and she was the one to really introduce this in a systematic educational
way. She began the seminar in nineteen forty five, and participants in this
program would learn about sharp force injuries and blunt force injuries, and poisoning and
drowning, all these death related topics, but the most important piece was the
crime scene itself, because you only have one chance to do things right,
and up until that time they weren't. They would move evidence, they would
move the body, they would walk through blood, they would handle things.
And she had this problem of how do you teach somebody to observe a crime
scene. How do you teach somebody to look and they talked it through.
You really couldn't do it by a moving picture. You'd have to zoom in,
and what it is you want somebody to see, image doesn't really quite
capture it. I could show you a picture of evidence, but that's really
not the same thing as standing there and making you find it yourself. And
that's the first step that you need to be able to recognize evidence so you
can preserve it, so you can collect it, so you can process it
properly, and then analyze it properly. But the very first thing is recognizing
it preserving it. If you don't preserve it up front, everything else is
the whole trajectory of everything is ruined. This was her solution, was to
make little crime scenes. Because they were mainly the police were mostly men,
adult men. She wanted to make sure that they were not toilet like,
so she went to great lengths to make sure that these were as realistic as
possible. She never used the expression to suspend disbelief, but she wanted somebody
to get immersed in this little world. And so they're all built on a
scale of one inch to one foot, which is a standard sized for miniatures,
and they're mostly domestic scenes and residences. These are people of all walks
of life. There are some sex workers, there's a lot of alcohol and
violence, and there's some domestic violence, and it really does reflect, I
think, lifestyles that were removed from her own life. She was very much
a wealthy woman of society and memes, so that's what she did. I've
described them as nineteen forties virtual reality, but I've had many homicide detectives tell
me that it is about as close as you can get to a real crime
scene. It's interesting to me that Francis Klesner Lee is not your typical grandmotherly
type of lady. We were saying off air. She's a badass, she's
a force of nature, and she's certainly not your typical forensic scientist. Why
was it so unusual for women to be involved in fields like medicine and forensics
in the early part of the twentieth century. We've got people now, I'm
sure who can't imagine a time in which one would not have been involved with
this. Can you shed some light on that historical component? There were some
women in medicine at the time, Actually in an nineteenth century, I believe
there was something like twelve or fourteen women's medical schools. It was not there.
Granted, there were not as many women doctors then as there are now,
but certainly in law enforcement was almost exclusively a men's club from the very
beginning, back from the night watch days in the colonial times. And it
really wasn't until right around the turn of the twentieth century that you start women
were actually recruited in the police first to look for a juvenile delinquency and in
the tenement it's almost like social work. It took a while for women to
be given badges and the arrest powers and the uniform that came later on,
but even in the nineteen there were women. I believe in nineteen twenty five
there were actually women detectives in New York City, And to follow through on
that point, even today in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, although
there are quite a few women in the police force in uniformed police office,
once you go up in the command into the officers and chiefs, there's not
so many. So there's still quite a ways to go in terms of any
sort of equality. But it always was a men's club, and it was
just had always been that way, mainly because it involves violence. And there
certainly was this belief that women who were too delicate constitution to be dealing with
such shocking matters. It took some time for there to find their role,
and she just totally broke through all of that. Francis Glestner Lee did that
glass ceiling was definitely not there for her because she had the money, because
she could afford it. She had a very powerful personality, and when you're
a millionairess, you can get people to pay attention to you. That was
actually going to be my next question, how did she use her wealth and
her position in society to her advantage, because she clearly did, and I
don't falter for that, Absolutely she should. I wish there were more like
her. She was born into wealth, it wasn't her fault. Her parents
were wealthy, and she always felt that she hadn't earned her privilege and really
felt unneed. In learning about her life, I found that she was dissatisfied.
She was looking for something to do, something meaningful. Really, she
could have spent her life going to cocktail receptions and collecting art and traveling and
doing these things that wealthy people do, and nobody would have been a wiser
and nobody would have blamed her for it. But she chose to use her
money like a parrot and a stick, and she would dangle her money to
manipulate others to do her bidding, and she got Harvard Medical School to do
things for her and to begin this program by promising them boatloads of money.
She had a very powerful personality. She was very difficult, she was strong
willed, she was smart as a whip. She had been very wealthy,
trained and tutored from an early age, and she was fluent in multiple languages,
mathematics and sciences and arts and culture. You're raised like that, and
then what you've got your life and you're going to go to another museum,
opening another gallery, talk about decorative arts. She really was looking for something
challenging to send her teeth into it, and she found it in forensic medicine.
Do you know why she was initially so attracted to this field, which
is, let's face it pretty dark. There's blood and guts and gore and
violence, and this just seems out of the norm for women at that time.
What was it about this field that grabbed her? Attention. She had
a sense of justice. Really, if you read about Francis Clesderley online,
she's depicted as this wealthy grandmother who had an interest in murder and solving murders,
and it's absolutely not true. She never investigated the case herself, and
just as we have the Innocence Project today, she was as concerned, if
not more concerned about people who were wrongfully accused of crimes. It's just as
important to clear the innocent as it is to convict the guilty. There are
two sides of the same coin. It's about getting the right person. That
was initially what got her interest. She had a friend, it was actually
her brother's best friend who went to Harvard a doctor by the name of George
Burgess McGrath. And doctor McGrath was the medical examiner in Suffolk County where Boston
is, and he was the first pathologist to be appointed as a medical examiner,
so he was literally's first forensic pathologist, and he was involved in a
number of these high profile cases. The nineteen nineteen Boston molasses disaster was his
case, the Saco and Venzetti case, and so he had really gained this
reputation as a crime doctor really sherlocky, and it got this reputation as for
applying these scientific principles to death investigation. And they spent some time together in
nineteen twenty nine. They had been friends since she was a teenager, but
it wasn't until nineteen twenty nine when they spent the summer together and he's talking
about his work and the injustice of it, and how the country most of
the countries on the coroner system, and the difference in corners of medical examiners,
and it was literally like as though a switch was flipped in her brain.
She was at that time in a pretty dark place in her own life.
Her brother had died, her children had grown up and been married,
and she was very much alone and adrift without anything to do really, and
doctor McGrath came along and just threw this out here about we should have medical
examiners from coast to coast, and she said, yeah, we should,
and she just spent the rest of her life to try and act what he
had envisioned. It's so cool. F Scott Fitzgerald said, there are no
second acts in American lives. And I feel like Francis Klosner Lee's greatest part
of her life was her second act doing all of this amazing work for the
criminal justice system. As you mentioned before, it wasn't just the Nutshell Studies
and Harvard Medical. She was advocating for education for death investigators. And do
you feel like we have done enough now to bring her dream to fruition or
do we still have a long way to go in terms of reaching a point
where she would look at us and go, you know what, you guys
are doing great? Unfortunately, very little has changed since her death in nineteen
sixty two when she got in. When Francis presently got involved in nineteen twenty
nine, medical examiners existed in three places in the entire United States. They
were Boston was first in eighteen seventy seven, New York City was second in
nineteen seventeen, nineteen eighteen, and New Jersey, which was like nineteen twenty
five, twenty six, something like that, and that was it. The
rest of the country was still on the corner system, which is literally from
the Middle Ages, not terribly signed, typic not reliable, corrupt and competent.
And she, Francis single handedly, not only she spent literally millions to
establish a training program at Harvard Medical School to train doctors the first clinical program
what was then called legal medicine. We now call it forensic medicine. But
she created a field of medical practice from scratch, from the ground up.
She also lobbied at state lawmakers and governors to change the law. It's a
complicated process to move from corners to medical examiners. In some cases, you
have to change the state constitution. You have to abolish the office, abolish
corners in quest change the law to authorize a medical examiner. And this takes
time. There's a lot of special interests against it. The corners obviously funeral
homes tradition. When she died in nineteen sixty two, she left about half
the country still on the corner system. Today have coroners. There are medical
examiners in I believe twenty eight states coroners exclusively. I believe in fourteen states,
and the other states have a combination of medical examiners and coroners. Illinois,
for example, there's what one hundred counties. There are medical examiners in
Cook County and Chicago, but the rest of the state is covered by these
corners of various qualifications and experience. We had talked to doctor Michael Bodden a
couple of months ago on mind Over Murder, and he was very critical of
the coroner system and said how antiquated it was and that many of these people
that are coroners have really little to know qualifications to make determinations about how people
have died or to determine whether crimes had been committed. Is that how you
think Francis saw it as well? It's still true, Yes, that's exactly
it. And she was particularly critical of local sheriffs, who she had absolutely
no time for whatsoever. She had a lot regard for state police because they
often had college degrees, they're disciplined, and we're good at taking orders.
She thought that state police would be the ones that would be investigating debt,
so she focused on state police the corner situation. Of the twenty eight states
that have corners, only a third have any sort of requirement at all for
any counter call educational requirement, and those that do require any sort of education,
where typically it's forty to eighty hours one to two weeks of training.
Not to pick on Missouri, this is true in Missouri, Indiana, Colorado,
New York. Places that elect corners to office in the state of Missouri.
To be a corner, you have to live in the state for one
year. You have to live in that county where you want to practice for
at least six months. You have to be of legal age. To hold
public office, you have to be twenty one or older, and you have
to get more votes than anybody else. That's it. It's it. No
medical requirements whatsoever. Now out to be a licensed barber in the state of
Missouri, and to legally cut hair, you have to have fifteen hundred hours
of training and pass a test. To be a manicurist and legally give a
manicure, you have to have five hundred hours of training and pass the test.
But if you're elected corner, you can crack open a beer and start
signing cause met or death and desertificuess you're good to go. So now,
the person that cuts your hair or styles your nails has a significantly higher level
of training and expertise than does the person who tells your relatives how you died
and by what method, and whether or not perhaps a crime was committed.
Vast parts of the country today are covered by that very system. That's insane.
It really is. There's no other word for it. I can't argue
with you. It is insane. There should be you would think in this
day and age, people love these TV shows, They watch the sea shows,
and they have the belief that anytime somebody dies, there is a group
of well trained professionals who come to the scene and they scrub and they find
evidence, and they test all these things in the laboratory. That does not
happen in most parts of the country. That's not the way it works.
You're lucky if you get somebody to come to the house and look around.
You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from
our sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder. How does Francis Lesnarley get
the idea that she's going to use what I thought of when I saw the
photographs. They're almost like dollhouses, the rooms within a dollhouse, but with
extremely sad and often violent outcomes portrayed an incredible detail. How did she dream
up this idea? I'm going to use use these little dioramas to train these
people who clearly need all the training they can get. How did she dream
up this idea? If you read the book. There's actually an evolution towards
the models. I believe it was the nineteen thirty six World's Fair that was
the first time that legal medicine for forensic medicine was presented to the public,
and they did. There was a very small exhibit, and this was their
idea was to have the photograph of a car crash and to ask the questions
was this an accident or was it murdered? So that had that idea had
been tried, presenting a case and asking questions about it, and it got
more and more evolved, apparently issues having a discussion with the doctor McGrath at
one point, he's talking about a difficult case that he had and the difficulties
that in the courtroom in expressing to the jury exactly how things were were,
the way things were positioned and their location and their relation to each other.
And she suggested at the time, what if we just made a little model
and presented that in court. So they actually do that in cases today.
It's not uncommon for a complicated scene, they'll make a little model and they'll
show that to the jury as to where everything was. Having the need you
want to teach somebody to observe a crime scene. There just weren't crime scenes
when you needed them. You just you know, and you can't take a
whole class of people walking through a crime scene. Logistically, there's just all
these problems. And it was really she had this background in the decroot of
arts. Miniatures are much more of a thing back and when she was a
child, and she had been trained since she was very little in knitting and
sewing and all these domestic arts. And once again it was just she had
the skill set to apply to this problem of how do you teach all just
make little miniatures perfect? That's the answer. And it worked. And not
only did it work, then there's still nothing better for that. There's still
use today, there's still relevant, and there's still a model part and the
pun for other similar training. There are other programs that have returned to miniatures
for the purposes of teaching forensic death investigation. When did she get an inkling
that, oh, this is working. Was it immediate or did it take
a couple of years before it became a parent that Okay, teaching news in
the miniatures, this is actually helping, this is doing some good. The
feedback really from the miniatures was right from the get go. These guys.
She did basically a little focus group. She invited some few detectives to her
home. Take a look at these What do you think? And right off
the bed, this is just amazing, It's mind blowing, just great.
It was very useful. I've had many I've talked with many homicide detectives over
the years, and I've had them tell me that even if you're an experienced
cop, you can be doing bby, you can be doing other things for
years and years. Once you get to a homicide scene, it's a whole
different ballgame. Everything you know it's totally out the window. A homicide scene
is different, a death scene is different than anything else, and you really
don't want to learn on your first actual scene. It's great experience having this
little practice and the fact that they are so detailed. It's very useful,
and so at least you have that a little bit more confidence, a systematical
way of going about your search. You learn these ways. It's not just
an exercise and looking at these toys. But she had a very purposeful way
that you should approach a crime scene. And she had a methodical way.
Should start with the left and you lurk and you go in a counterclockwise way
from the perfery towards the middle of the room. So she had this whole
system for looking at a scene. And it was quite clear that not only
was that a useful way of teaching, but that the courses themselves paid off
quite quickly in terms of identifying missteps that were avoided, improving investigation, solving
cases. But there was no question if this was a it was a useful
approach and that was valuable. Where were the dioramas originally located. They were
located at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She had a room built for her
to her specifications to locate them, and when she died in nineteen sixty two.
Over the course of the nineteen fifties, the relationship between Francis personally and
Harvard Medical Schools soured. She ended up not leaving any money to Harvard at
all. She didn't want Harvard to have the nutshells. She died in nineteen
sixty two and Harvard lost interest in the whole program and they pulled the plug
and the legal medicine department and to this day they don't have a forensic pathologist
on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. I heard that the dioramas were actually
headed towards the dumpster by the nineteen sixties. They were decades old, dusty
artifacts that nobody really wanted. And the guy who is the chief medical examiner
in Maryland, Russell Fisher, who was quite a prominent forensic pathologist and he
was chief here, had been through the Harvard program, and Francis knew him.
She recommended for the job here. So Fisher went to Harvard and said,
how about we pick up the homicide seminar. We'll do it in Baltimore.
And Harvard said, great, you can do it. You take these
things and they brought them down to Baltimore in nineteen sixty eight and they've been
here ever since. Okay, the sixty four thousand dollars question that I'm really
hoping you're going to say yes to. Can people go to visit the nutshell
studies who are not homicide investigators? I really want to see these things so
bad they were close to the public for quite a while. I have been
fighting for open more open access since leaving there. The OCME has finally broken
down and they have allowed visits for one hour. Is it an hour two
hours, one day a month, the first Tuesday of East month. You
can have to call in advance to get a reservation, but they are open
to the public on a limited basis. Yes, I'm putting it on the
calendar. Ye. Now, several years ago the Smithsonian had an exhibit.
We're all eighteen or nineteen. I see two different numbers of the dioramas on
display at that Smithsonian exhibit. Yes, they actually had nineteen. There were
originally twenty. They're actually more than twenty one. There were twenty that were
completed. One of them got sidetracked and was up in the rafters in New
Hampshire and was never used for teaching. One of them, unfortunately, got
destroyed. So we're left with eighteen of them that were used for teaching in
Baltimore. And when I started in twenty twelve and had the opportunity to look
more closely inside the cabinets, I noticed some things. I'm a lay person,
but I found what I thought asbestos. Cute, tiny little asbestos,
but there was crumbling asbestos. And some of them had as bestis wrapped around
light fixtures and that was crumbling, and there were materials that were cracking they
were old. These were with seventy year old, eighty year old artifacts.
They'd never really been conserved. They've been cleaned, but never really been looked
over. And I guess it was twenty sixteen. I got a call from
Nora Atkinson, who is the curator the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery and the Runwick does
crafts. It's located literally right across the street from the White House on Pennsylvania
Avenue, and she came up to look at them and just thinking out loud,
and she said, what if we didn't exhibit, what would you think
of that? And of course we would do that. They'd have to be
conserved and fixed before they could be moved. They were very delicate, and
so they basically offered to do. It ended up being I don't know,
a quarter million or more worth of work on the diorama. And they replaced
all the light bulbs and they all the cracked painting. They just did amazing,
extraordinary work. And that was the tradeoff, was that they would have
them all on exhibit. They even got the one down from New Hampshire.
It was the first time all nineteen were together since they were created. It
was the second most popular exhibit at the Renwick Gallery up until that time had
one hundred thousand people go through the gallery. It was extraordinary. When they
came back from the Smithsonian and back in their cabinets, they were all repaired
and fixed and they're good for generations now. They're in great shape nowns.
So I feel very good about that. We've got a lobby lobby the OCME
in Maryland to open this up beyond one hour a month, because if one
hundred thousand people came to see these incredible dioramas, with these amazingly detailed and
we'll include some links in our show notes here death scenes, you would think
that there'd be a real interest in this, even if they charged ten bucks
or whatever to come in and take a look at them. Unfortunately, they
can't charge for one thing. But I appreciate that they're going to suit through
some things. At the moment, they've had an acting chief since for the
past couple of years. They've just had a very bad manpower shortage. They're
very severely short of staff, and they had a backlog of autopsison. They
have some problems and honestly, entertaining the public's morbid curiosity is really not within
their main mission and I totally get that, Yeah, understood, but their
value as teaching tools is still valid. I still get contacted from death investigators,
from people with the legitimate, real, genuine instructional professional interest, and
they can't get in. Hopefully, maybe in time we'll see I don't know.
And your point about the Chief Medical Examiners Office and the challenges they were
facing, we don't mean to make light of that. When you've got autopsies
that aren't being conducted and staff shortages, and I'm sure their challenges are significant.
This probably would fall further down on the to do list. It does.
Yeah, so our listeners know that I am a big fan of CSI,
and I realized that some people may view that was a little bit of
chagrin, but it's what actually got me very much interested in true crime.
When did you learn that CSI had written an arc about the Miniature Killer which
was based on the nutshell Studies? Probably from day one. People love even
people who didn't know about her, they knew about her in popular culture.
They knew about the dioramas. People even online. I don't know where they
hear about it, but they knew about the Nutshells. Before they even know
who she was or the whole context or anything else. And they still ask
and read it in places where we talk about the dioramas and somebody say,
is that the inspiration for the miniatures killers? Yes? That was. Yes,
they came and visited, they looked at them. And what was the
other in CIS? So what David McCallum, They played Ducky. He also
apparently was a fan of Francis. And my phone just lit up. There
was that episode you mentioned Francis and the dioramas, and boom, I just
get bombarded with emails and everybody told me she was mentioned again. How do
you think she would feel about being now part of this massive pop culture phenomenon
that is CSI and and CIS. Would she be cool with that or would
she be like you guys, settle down. Personally, she was quite reserved.
She really didn't want the attention and actually was her choice to stay in
the background. And very early on in the nineteen forties nineteen fifties, the
program in what she was doing at Harvard, they got covered in Life magazine
and Saturday Evening Post and Popular Mechanics and all these magazines and the bust and
Chlobe, and it got to the point where I think she got a little
tired of being portrayed as this wealthy model maker who is sort of sitting on
the sidelines and just I don't know, helping the boys do their work,
and she just got tired of it. Just leave me out of it all
together. It's not about me. If you were alive today, she would
be astonished, maybe amused at all the popular culture things about her. I
think that she would be very thrilled that people are so knowledgeable about forensic investigation
and so interested. I talked to kids all over the country, and these
courses are very popular, and it's very good science. You learn the critical
thinking, you learn all these things that they want to be, they would
like to work in the field. All these things are all very good.
But what we don't have is the means to have medical examiners from coast to
coast. And I think that would disappoint her and send her that we have
not made any progress in the past six decades. Yeah, I think when
we take a look at the potential versus the actual progress, we do fall
short as a country. And when you hear about just how archaic our system
is currently and I've said this on the podcast before. As much as I
enjoy those procedur rules that show us how it can be done, that's not
actually how it's done. In so many places around the country. That is
true, and it's interesting. There is what they call the CSI effect,
and that people have become so much more sophisticated on juries and they know about
DNA evidence, And in a way that's a double edged sword because I think
people's expectations are too high. They expect that you're going to find DNA on
any scene, that you're going to have the identity of who that DNA belongs
to, the next day, that things are solved, that you'll find fingerprints.
I don't think people have a concept of how difficult it actually is to
get a good fingerprint, because the surfaces all kinds of reasons. People don't
pick up a glass very carefully and to leave a nice neat print, and
so their expectations are very high. There is that, but on juris they
if you don't juries have come to expect the science and they want the DNA
and if you don't deliver it, then they wonder maybe there's something going around
there. And that respect is really very good. There is that expectation that
you know, if I'm living in West Virginia in some small town and that
my sibling my parents are found dead, that's going to happen, and it's
not. It won't be anything like that. It's not going to happen there.
Even in a place like Baltimore, a big city, the full bore
whole thing with the cameras and all that, it's maybe five to ten percent
of the homicides. They just don't do that. You can't do that in
every case. Before we wrap up, I do want to get you to
talk about your most recent book, Ocme tell us a little bit about that,
and then tell us where we can find all of your books. When
I started at the OSA and I'd known a good bit about it, the
Ocume of Maryland was at one time really celebrated as one of the best in
the United States. It was a legendary as a place for training and research
and education and service. It was just really truly extraordinary in terms of how
quickly things were done, how thoroughly things were done. Everything was done by
consensus, so that it wasn't just one person's opinion and over the course of
my I was there for ten years. Over the course of my time there,
I saw this sort of tumble into crisis. A lot of it was
driven by the opioid epidemic. The caseload just went up dramatically, just it
nearly doubled, and a lot of that was driven by the opiate overdose intoxication
desk, and the caseload per doctor was just going higher and higher, and
so people were leaving the field, which would make things worse, and it
ended up in a very bad place where we had there was at one point
a backlog of autopsies that approached two hundred and forty some people waiting for autopsies
up to two weeks, and it was really horrible. My first book was
a biography of a woman. It really does documents this transition from the coigner
system to the medical examiner system and ocm ME is there's like bookends and this
is the modern story of what's going on today in forensic medicine. And the
problems that occurred in Maryland are not unique to Maryland. There are shortages,
manpower shortages coast to coast. There are backlogs in autopsies and autopsy reports from
the West coast and down South Ohio, Mississippi, you name it. There
are problems all over and I had this opportunity to document but was basically a
biography of an organization, tracing their rise in the fall of this once great
institution and the implications that it has not to spend the people of Maryland,
but throughout the country. Both of those books, I think they do go
together. Well, they're available wherever you've books, hopefully pay for them,
but they're also at libraries. You can check them out you want to pay
you with the library route as well, it was in my contract to give
it to libraries for free. I actually left money on the table and gave
up money to make sure that it's available at libraries for free. Do you
think the production, particularly of your new book OCME, will help highlight the
issues that you wanted to What would it take to fix the challenges facing the
Medical Examiner's Office in Maryland. That's a good question, and there isn't really
an easy answer. You can't just hire more doctors because the doctors simply don't
exist. Every year, Medical School's producer around twenty eight thousand doctors. Of
that twenty eight thousand doctors, only about five hundred and fifty or so choose
to do a residency in pathology, and of those people who do a residency
in pathology, more than forty end up doing forensic pathology. They produce every
year throughout the country. We produce thirty seven thirty eight forensic pathologists every year,
which is not enough to replace those who are retiring leaving the field.
The National Association of Medical Examiners National Student Justice they say that right now today
there are about four hundred, five hundred forensic pathologists in the entire country who
are practicing. We need right now on thy twelve hundred French of pathologists right
now. Even if we decided today that we're going to do this and we're
going to train all these people, it would take thirteen years to get them
through pre med medical school, training and working. There is no really easy
answer and no way out of this hole. Bruce, this has been an
amazing conversation. The book is eighteen Tiny Deaths, The Untold Story of the
Woman who invented modern Forensics. Available wherever books are sold, although we do
encourage you to shop local and indie bookstores Whenever possible. Chris, thank you
so much for joining us today. We really appreciated talking to you. Thank
you for having me Christ and Bill. It's been a pleasure. I really
enjoyed this. Thank you so much. Gonna do it for this episode of
mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next
time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions.
Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is
by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud. Mind Over Murder
is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media. You can follow us on Facebook,
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at Bill Thomas five six. Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.