Curious about these photos? Fabulous! Read on!

 

I'm Susan Marks and I've taken a lot of photos for a documentary film I'm directing, OF DOLLS AND MURDER. Here's the scoop:

 

Feeding into this nation’s insatiable appetite for programming like CSI, The Wire, Without a Trace, Cold Case, 48 Hour Mystery and Law & Order, the new documentary film, OF DOLLS AND MURDER takes this phenomena one unimaginable step further. With iconic filmmaker John Waters as the narrator, this film unearths the criminal element that lurks in one particular gruesome collection of dollhouses at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Maryland. Rather than reflecting an idealized version of reality, these surreal dollhouses reveal the darker, disturbing side of domestic life.

 

Created strictly for adults, these dollhouse dioramas are home to violent murder, prostitution, mental illness, adultery and more often than not, alcoholism. Each dollhouse has tiny corpse dolls, representing actual murder victims. In one bizarre case, a beautiful woman lays shot to death in her bed, her clean-cut, pajama-clad husband lies next to the bed, also fatally shot. Their little baby was shot as she slept in her crib. Blood is spattered everywhere. And all the doors were locked from the inside, meaning the case is likely a double homicide/suicide. But something isn’t right. The murder weapon is nowhere near the doll corpses – instead the gun was found in another room.

 

Why would anyone create such macabre dollhouses? And why would anyone re-create crime scenes with such exquisite craftsmanship that artists and miniaturists from around the globe clamor (unsuccessfully) to experience this dollhouse collection in person?

 

OF DOLLS AND MURDER explores these haunting “Nutshell Studies” dollhouses and the unlikely grandmother who painstakingly created them – Frances Glessner Lee. A remarkable woman, Lee didn’t let gender biases and prescribed social behavior of a wealthy heiress keep her from pioneering the new arena of forensic medicine in the late 1930s and 1940s.

 

To train investigators, Lee created 18 dioramas (20 actually, but two are missing) for detectives to study crime scenes from every angle. She used only the most challenging and mysterious cases (cases that could have easily been misruled as accidents, murders, or suicides) to challenge students’ ability to interpret evidence. Almost 70 years later, Lee’s dollhouses are still relevant training tools because all the latest technological advances in forensics do not change the fact that crime scenes can be misread, and then someone will literally get away with murder. But the story does not end with Lee and her dollhouses of death.

 

The nation is obsessed with forensic justice television, and why? Why do we love to watch a skewed reality of crime-fighting forensics? The answer lies somewhere with the need we have to entertain ourselves with stories about our fear of untimely, brutal death. The societal truths about how loved ones often murder one another is far too wicked to face, let alone change. Instead, we prefer to escape into a safe haven where solving murders easily wraps up in under one hour.

 

The documentary is currently in production, with several key interviews completed, such as a Glessner Museum historian, the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, several homicide detectives in Baltimore, and state morgue staff. Additional production plans are underway to shoot interviews and b-roll at the FBI training facility, “The Body Farm” – a forensic anthropology site at the University of Tennessee, and an interview with an executive producer of the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

  

Join us on Facebook:

www.facebook.com/pages/Of-Dolls-and-Murder/130000023882?r...

 

Follow us on Twitter:

twitter.com/Ohsolazysusan

 

Watch our clip on Youtube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp2LpqtOH6c

 

Read and comment on our blog:

ourwildestdreams.blogspot.com/

 

Get in touch:

doll.documentary[at symbol]gmail.com