Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be
talking about one of my favorite subjects.
Speaker 3: Start by telling us a little bit about yourself and
how you got involved in writing about true crime.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Tell us, how many years back is it your original
affiliation with the Office of the Medical Exacs.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us a little bit more detail about
what these dioramas look like and why they were referred
to as nutshell studies?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: That glass ceiling was definitely not there for her.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: No medical requirements whatsoever.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: Vast parts of the country today are covered by that
very system.
Speaker 3: That's insane.
Speaker 2: It really is. There's no other word for it.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Where were the dioramas originally located.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm putting it on the calendar.
Speaker 4: Ye.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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, I 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: It does.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: Pay you with the library route as well.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me christ and Bill. It's been
a pleasure. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Gonna do it for this episode of mind Over Murder.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.