John Waters Lends His Voice to a Fittingly Creepy Project

Baltimore resident John Waters does his fine city proud once again, narrating an upcoming documentary on—we kid you not—dollhouse crime-scene dioramas. In what could be taken straight from Waters’ creepy-camp oeuvre, the TV doc Of Dolls and Murder tells the tale of heiress Frances Glessner Lee and her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Meticulously constructed by Lee in the 1940s, the miniature mise-en-scènes depict the kind of wrong-side-of-the-tracks gals Waters loves, many of whom were reportedly prostitutes. The downscaled scenes are still around, housed on the third floor of the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office. And while we’re getting all CSI here, let it be known that Lee ultimately went on to establish the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine, the country’s first forensic pathology program. Plus, she may have been the inspiration for Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher character in the 80s classic Murder She Wrote.

Leave a comment