It was the most brutal murder the local police had seen in years. Detectives of the era received little training in crime scene investigation, and they were in over their heads. It was time to call in, perhaps begrudgingly, the forensic scientists from Harvard Medical School — the “college boys,” as the officers sometimes put it.

The teletype message arrived at 2:30 that same afternoon, July 31, summoning staff from Harvard’s new department of legal medicine. Dr. Alan Moritz and his colleagues drove from Boston to Dartmouth right away, and were relieved to find police hadn’t disturbed the body. A Harvard pathologist had once arrived at a home to find officers scrubbing blood evidence from the wall — they didn’t want to bump against it and stain their uniforms.

Examining the scene closely, Moritz knew there was much to do, including a careful autopsy, leaf and insect analysis, and experiments with the rope. But he could already conclude this much, judging by the broken stems of nearby underbrush — she’d likely been murdered elsewhere, and dragged by the feet to this spot.

Although it would eventually become clear that life hadn’t been kind to this young woman, she would receive one of the most advanced death investigations of the time. And it would be largely thanks to the most unlikely of figures: a strong-willed, unconventional heiress in her 60s named Frances Glessner Lee, who was on a mission to revolutionize murder investigations. In the years to come, Lee’s life, and the woman’s death, would connect the two in unexpected ways.

Lee stepped into the male-dominated world of detective work later in life, like a real-world Miss Marple from Agatha Christie’s novels. Lee, who favored brimless hats and dark dresses, was described in 1949 by a reporter as “motherly looking” and “amply girthed.” But a police detective she trained offered a more telling description. She was “unquestionably,” he said, “one of the world’s most astute criminologists.”

Lee was the driving force behind Harvard’s new department of legal medicine, the first program of its kind in the United States. She’d pursue her mission of professionalizing murder investigations with single-minded focus, despite significant odds stacked against her at Harvard and in local police departments across the country. She contributed much of her personal fortune, political acumen, and even her artistic talents to making sure all victims — man or woman, rich or poor — got investigations that were full and fair.

With resolve as deep as her pockets, she’d will the department into existence, be appointed an official consultant, and be named a founder of crime scene investigation. And among her many other accomplishments, it would turn out, was engineering a way to make sure the woman in the woods­ would not be forgotten.

FRANCES GLESSNER LEE’S quest to reform homicide investigations started at a low moment in her life. A divorced mother of three adult children, she had grown weary of her image as a rich woman with too much time on her hands.

Born in 1878, Lee grew up on one of the most affluent streets in Chicago, in a 17,000-square-foot mansion that is now a museum. Her father’s fortune came from building International Harvester, the maker of agricultural and construction machinery. She and her older brother were both bright and received a rigorous education at home by tutors, including learning multiple languages. He went off to Harvard, but she wouldn’t go to college. Her parents believed “a lady didn’t go to school,” she once told a reporter years later.

Lee was also taught how to run a household, be a generous hostess, and pursue crafts such as needlework. She showed an aptitude for noticing the smallest details and significant artistic talent, according to 18 Tiny Deaths, a biography of her by Bruce Goldfarb. For her mother’s birthday, she once made a scale-model of the 90-member Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where each musician was recognizable and had a miniature instrument and tiny musical score.

In her late teens, Lee was sent on a 14-month grand tour of Europe, then introduced to Chicago high society as a debutante in November 1897. Just shy of her 20th birthday, she married a Southern lawyer named Blewett Harrison Lee, a distant relative of Robert E. Lee. They had three children, but Lee felt chronically unhappy and hemmed in by the marriage. In her mid-30s, she took the then-unusual step of obtaining a divorce. She’d never marry again.

Over the years, Lee adopted New England as her home, dividing her time between her family’s 1,400-acre summer estate, The Rocks, in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, and the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Boston. In this city in the early 1930s, a series of conversations with Dr. George Magrath, a close Harvard classmate of her brother’s, inspired a new intellectual passion — the investigation of murder.

Magrath was a longtime Suffolk County medical examiner who, over his career, testified in some 2,000 court cases and investigated 21,000 deaths. A dapper dresser, he cut an unusual figure in town. He wore pince-nez for glasses, smoked a pipe, and lived for years at Boston’s private St. Botolph Club, then on Newbury Street. He ate only one meal a day — at midnight.

Lee liked him immediately.

She listened, enthralled, as Magrath shared stories of complex autopsies, many of which revealed surprising causes of death missed by bumbling police. In some cases, murders were masked as suicides; at other times, police mistook suicides for murders. His passion for the inner workings of the human body — and what clues they reveal about death and a person’s place in society — mesmerized Lee.

She began to join Magrath at autopsies and crime scenes, poring through murder case files and tracking state-by-stage legislation related to death investigations. She and Magrath shared a vision of the system of trained medical examiners — which had existed in Suffolk County in Massachusetts since 1877 — going nationwide.

Lee wanted it to replace the patchwork system of coroners, typically funeral directors, political appointees, or elected officials with no medical training making critical decisions about causes of death. That system dominated the country in the 1940s. Today, more than half of Americans live in areas governed by coroners.

In 1931, at the age of 53, Lee gave $4,500 a year (about $90,000 in today’s dollars) to fund a Harvard Medical School professorship for Magrath, the first such forensic science position in the country. She’d soon donate a library in Magrath’s honor with 1,000 volumes she’d collected, including the memoirs President Garfield’s assassin penned while he awaited the gallows.

But her role went deeper than money. With her own desk at Harvard, she worked as Magrath’s teaching assistant, and later was named a consultant. To Lee it felt like finally, in middle age, she was contributing something important — that she had a mission. “For many years I have hoped that I might do something in my lifetime that should be of significant value to the community,” she once told a reporter. She “was sincerely glad to find that my opportunity to serve lay here at Harvard Medical School.”

The intense ties between Magrath, the lifelong bachelor, and Lee, the long-divorced heiress, sometimes raised eyebrows. “At times Lee bordered on the coquettish, referring to herself in unpublished writing for Magrath as ‘Ye Saucy Scrybe,’” Goldfarb writes in Lee’s biography, “and yet in correspondence between the two, they never used terms of endearment. Lee always called him Dr. Magrath, and to him, she was Mrs. Frances G. Lee.”

As Magrath’s health began failing — he died in 1938 at 68 — Lee’s obsession with forensic science did not diminish. She donated the equivalent of about $5 million to start the department of legal medicine, a place to teach cutting-edge methods in blood spatter analysis, gunpowder chemistry, and more. She suggested to Harvard she might be willing to write an even larger gift into her will, perhaps as much as $22 million in today’s dollars.

Lee’s new department, she vowed, was not to be corrupted by politics or other outside influences. “We testify for no party,” its official credo read, “neither for the prosecution nor for the defense but for the Truth alone.”

WHEN LEE STAYED at the Ritz, she’d eat meals at her usual table overlooking the Public Garden. On August 1, 1940, if she’d been reading The Boston Daily Globe, she’d have found it weighty with portents of looming war. Lowering the draft age was in discussion, and the US House had just passed the biggest appropriations bill in history, $5 billion to build warships and warplanes. The 23-year-old son of the ambassador to Great Britain had just published his Harvard senior thesis, “Why England Slept.” His name was John F. Kennedy.

But above all the stories, above everything on the front page of that evening’s edition, stretched a headline in bold capital letters: “GIRL, 22, TRUSSED AND SLAIN.”

The victim discovered in the Dartmouth woods two days earlier had been tentatively identified as Irene Perry, a 22-year-old single mother who couldn’t have come from a background more different than Lee’s. If not for the shocking brutality of Perry’s murder — and the provocative circumstances around what the press nationwide immediately dubbed the “Lover’s Lane Slaying” — it’s doubtful her death, like her life, would have risen to the notice of the newspapers at all.

Perry was 15 years old when her mother died, and dropped out of school to care for her father, four brothers, and eight sisters, news reports said. When she was around 20, she had a baby on her own. The Catholic immigrant family — “Perry” was an Anglicized version of their Portuguese name — lived in a modest home in New Bedford, where Perry’s father worked at the country club as a greenskeeper. Hers was a hard life. Later, some said she dreamed of disappearing to Europe where she could start anew.

She’d last been seen on the evening of June 29, when she left her 2-year-old son, Donald, at home and headed to a store about a half-mile away to run an errand, with a dollar from her father in hand. A slim woman with dark hair and large, deep-set eyes, she wore a brown plaid jacket and dress and a blouse with puffed sleeves. It was the last time her family saw her alive.

Perry’s father didn’t report her missing until the next day. She’d had boyfriends, and apparently this wasn’t the first time she hadn’t returned home at night. A month later, he got a heart-stopping call: Police asked him to come to a funeral parlor to look at a body. His daughter’s remains were badly decomposed, but he recognized her clothes.

It would be up to Dr. Moritz and the Harvard forensic scientists to make a positive identification, using evidence they’d gathered from the crime scene and her body. They’d also be tasked with solving a series of mysteries that stacked like nesting dolls.

When did Perry die and where?

How was the murder committed and who was the culprit?

And why would anyone want to kill Irene Perry in the first place?

LEE DIDN’T KNOW anything about living a life as hard as Perry’s, but she knew what it was like to be a woman in the early 20th century. How the wishes of a girl’s parents, and then a woman’s husband, could circumscribe a life. What it was like to dream of a new start in a new place. How it felt to be looked down upon.

“Chief amongst the difficulties I have had to meet,” Lee once wrote in a private letter, “have been the facts that I never went to school, that I had no [professional degree] letters after my name, and that I was placed in the category of ‘rich woman who didn’t have enough to do.’”

Still, Lee had a preternatural ability to prevail when people made the mistake of underestimating her, including in the halls of Harvard Medical School, which didn’t admit female students until 1945.

In 1935, she decided the department of legal medicine needed more office space, training her eye on a set of offices occupied by the pharmacology department. When her written request to the dean for that space was rebuffed, she took her case to Harvard’s president — he also resisted.

She waited three months and then wrote to the president again. “I do not feel that I can let our decision pass without a protest,” she wrote, “and request that you give this problem a little further study.”

She got the office space.

Lee tangled with medical school leaders in other ways, including over priorities for the department. She believed Harvard should play a larger role in training police officers, so they could improve their ability to spot clues at crime scenes and gather and protect evidence for medical examiners. But Harvard leaders were more focused on research and teaching — plus, they found assisting the local police expensive — and largely dismissed the police work she supported.

Lee had a theory about one of the reasons why. “Men are dubious of an elderly woman with a cause,” she observed. “My problem is to convince them that I am not trying to butt in or run anything. Also, I have to sell them on the fact that I know what I am talking about.”

As Lee pushed for change, in Massachusetts and across the nation, she tapped influential people. She once arranged a meeting with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to discuss forensic medicine. And she developed a close relationship with Malden-born Erle Stanley Gardner, author of The Case of the Fenced In Woman and other Perry Mason mysteries. He’d become a booster of her cause, and dedicate a novel to her.

Lee’s goal was to eliminate human bias from death investigations. “[F]ar too often the investigator ‘has a hunch,’ and looks for and finds only the evidence to support it, disregarding any other evidence that may be present,” she wrote in an article for a criminology journal. “This attitude would be calamitous in investigating an actual case.”

FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS after Irene Perry’s body was discovered, Dr. Moritz and his colleagues at the department of legal medicine worked feverishly. This was one of the new department’s first major cases, and Lee knew high-profile investigations could demonstrate the importance of forensic medicine across the country.

To understand the circumstances of Perry’s death, the scientists would need to summon all the disciplines at their disposal, including medicine, chemistry, entomology, and botany.

Moritz confirmed the body was Perry. In addition to her clothing, everything else matched: her height (about 5-foot-2), her estimated weight (100 to 110 pounds), and her short brown hair. Dental characteristics made it certain.

A key question was this: Did Perry die the night of June 29, 1940, when she disappeared, or days or weeks later? The answer could help police rule out suspects — or identify a killer.

At the crime scene in Dartmouth, the scientists found that the plants trapped beneath Perry’s body, including lowbush blueberries, had reached full leaf — and then abruptly stopped growing. Considering when that stage was reached for that species, her body must have been left there sometime after June 15. Meanwhile, the insect larvae found on Perry were in a stage of development that put her time of death at four or more weeks before she was found. Combining this analysis with the date of Perry’s disappearance pointed to a time of death very close to when she was last seen.

Moritz knew the heavy rope found wrapped around the victim’s neck and wrists required careful observation.

To determine if Perry was strangled to death, he measured the first loop of rope around her neck. It was 10.5 inches. That was likely tight enough to kill her, but her neck was so decomposed Moritz couldn’t be sure. He assembled 50 female volunteers between the ages of 18 and 25, so he could measure their necks. None had a neck circumference less than 12.5 inches.

When Moritz and his staff tightened a rope on the necks of these volunteers, they found merely a half-inch caused “great discomfort,” and 3/4 inch “could not be tolerated.” The evidence showed Perry was a “victim of homicidal strangulation,” Moritz wrote in his report.

A close examination of Perry’s skeletal remains yielded one last surprising finding: Fetal bones. At the time of death, Perry was pregnant with her second child.

“Irene Perry was unmarried,” Moritz wrote in his report, issued on August 10. “The finding of the bones of an unborn three month old fetus in the abdominal cavity of the dead woman provides a possible motive for her death.”

In the understated tone of a scientist, he noted a new avenue deserving of inquiry: “The desirability of attempting to learn the identity of the man responsible for her pregnancy is obvious.”

ON THE NIGHT of August 26, police arrested Frank Pedro, a 25-year-old New Bedford laborer, and charged him with murder. They had interviewed dozens of people, and finally zeroed in on Pedro because of the unique characteristics of the rope in the murder.

Investigators had traced it to a manufacturer in New York, where a strand of rope had been accidentally made with 24 threads, rather than the usual 21. After that manufacturing mistake, the rope was trucked to a Long Island wholesaler, and then to a job site at an estate in Rhode Island where Pedro’s relative worked. The same rope — the same 24 threads — was found in Pedro’s basement, police said.

The forensic scientists and police had uncovered the evidence. The rest was up to the legal system of the day.

Reporters were in the Bristol County Superior courthouse in May 1941, when Pedro’s trial began. Newspapers had been covering every unseemly twist of the case, drawing an increasingly unsympathetic picture of a promiscuous young woman, one who’d had her first child out of wedlock and was pregnant with another. Records show lawyers were concerned potential jurors might be swayed by the salacious details they’d read.

Judge Walter Collins presided over the trial, swearing in 12 jurors that would ultimately decide if the defendant was guilty. As was customary at the time, it would be limited to men — women in Massachusetts were barred from sitting on criminal juries until the 1950s.

Prosecutors outlined their case: Perry’s murder was likely committed shortly after her disappearance on June 29, 1940, and at some place between her home and the rifle range. She was killed somewhere else, then dragged into the woods. Dr. Moritz was called to the stand, testifying that “the probable cause of death was strangulation.”

The rope found in Pedro’s cellar and around Perry’s neck “were identical in every respect,” a police captain said from the witness stand.

Prosecutors also pointed to the motive. Pedro was a married man, with a baby boy at home. He’d admitted during police questioning that he had been romantically involved with Perry for several years — that he had “illicit relations with the girl over an extended period,” in the words of a news story. They’d even gone parking near Lovers’ Lane, he admitted, in the area where Perry’s body was discovered.

The forensic evidence and the police interviews appeared strong. When court-appointed defense lawyer Philip Barnet began his interrogations, however, he worked to introduce doubt into key aspects of the government’s case.

Barnet put Pedro on the stand to profess his innocence. He told jurors that he’d ended his relationship with Perry some months before her murder, in March 1940, because he was married, had a child, and, as he put it, “didn’t want trouble with his wife.” Pedro insisted Perry never told him she was pregnant.

Barnet called his own rope specialist to the stand, who said the piece in Pedro’s house was different from the type found around Perry’s neck. In fact, Barnet disputed that Perry had been strangled to death at all. What if the scene was staged to look that way?

Barnet presented another theory that had the potential to turn the jury against Perry. The victim, he suggested, may have died from an “attempted illegal surgery” — a reference to a botched abortion — that was later covered up to look like a murder, perhaps by whoever performed the procedure.

After hearing testimony over two weeks, the jury deliberated for less than two hours. Foreman Frederick Kerry, a Taunton shop owner, delivered the verdict: “Not guilty.”

RECORDS DON’T SHOW if Lee and the Harvard experts were surprised by the verdict, or if law enforcement thought a guilty man went free. Perry’s name disappeared from the headlines. Her son, Donald, would be raised by her extended family.

But in the months that followed, Lee plunged with obsessive energy into a massive, multiyear project largely focused on deaths like Perry’s. It would combine Lee’s childhood training in the “women’s work” of sewing and crafting with her later-life passion for crime scene investigation.

She created 18 immensely detailed, dollhouse-like dioramas of crime scenes. But these were not toys. They were tools to train detectives. To come up with her scenarios, Lee studied real life case files and police photographs.

“My whole object,” she once explained, “has been to improve the administration of justice, to standardize the methods, to sharpen the existing tools as well as to supply new tools, and to make it easier for the law enforcement officers to ‘do a good job’ and to give the public ‘a square deal.’”

Lee called them The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a police saying: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.” The point was to learn to look closely at the evidence.

In a miniature bathroom scene, a woman is dead in a bathtub, her stiff legs splayed out and water running over her face. Did she have an accident? Or did the rigor mortis in her legs suggest she was killed elsewhere and moved into the tub? In a kitchen, a dead woman lies near an open oven door. Was this a case of suicide due to the gas or a clever imitation? At the scene of a fire evidence pointed toward the blaze starting beneath the wife’s bed. Was the husband capable of murder?

Lee spared no time or expense in making her nutshells, spending months and as much as $135,000 in today’s money on each. She personally made many of the items within the crime scenes, working with her carpenter in New Hampshire. Tiny pencils contained real lead, a police whistle can emit a shriek, and one room had a miniature Sherlock Holmes novel.

The minutely detailed models didn’t portray the elegant spaces of Lee’s own life — the mansions, the Ritz, the Chicago Symphony — but environments where working-class people lived and died, predominantly women. Lee is unlikely to have used the word feminist to describe herself, her biographers say, yet her dioramas often seem to point to the oppressed place of women in society.

“Her actions were much louder than her words,” says Susan Marks, a documentary filmmaker whose second film about Lee’s life will be screened in October at The Rocks estate. “Her actions were very much that women’s voices had to be heard.” In making the dioramas, Marks continues, “She chose quite a few situations in which women are murdered, including in places where they are supposed to be safe.”

Lee’s carpenter helped with construction, but Lee insisted on creating the victims herself. She took immense care with them, knitting tiny stockings with straight pins, placing a knife in a woman’s chest, painting a face in the precise shade of red indicative of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

It’s not a coincidence that Lee’s murder scenes are often set in kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms, explains Corinne May Botz, a photographer and author of the book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. “The nutshells can be viewed as precursors to the women’s movement,” she writes, “because they depict the isolation of women in the home and expose the violence that originates and is enacted there.”

The nutshell studies would become the centerpiece teaching tool of one of Lee’s most lasting legacies: One-week seminars designed to teach state and local police officers from across the country about medical forensics. The seminars would include presentations from experts on the latest advances in criminology, then conclude with training on her nutshell studies.

Lee presided over her invitation-only annual seminars like a regal chairwoman. They included a multi-course banquet at the Ritz with elaborate flowers arranged by Lee herself. The hotel spent thousands of dollars on gold-leaf dinnerware to be reserved only for the seminars, at her insistence. (She was “probably the fussiest patron the hotel ever had,” the general manager later said, “and we loved her.”)

One year, Lee allowed her friend Gardner, the novelist, to attend one of her seminars. Lee’s instructors accomplished feats of deduction “little short of astounding,” he wrote, and said students could learn more from her crime scenes in an hour than in “months of abstract study.”

Gardner would never dare put one of Lee’s graduates in one of his novels, he noted — that detective would solve the mystery a hundred or so pages before Perry Mason.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1946, Lee’s nutshell studies captured the attention of an editor at Life magazine, which published photos and an article about them. That story, in turn, caught the eye of filmmakers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The MGM executives reached out to Lee and Moritz, suggesting a film about the Harvard department. They offered a working title, Murder at Harvard, and submitted a draft script that featured “Mrs. Lee” as a central figure in improving the way homicide investigations were handled.

“Confirming our telephone conversations,” MGM’s Samuel Marx wrote to her in February 1948, “we feel that an interesting motion picture of a semi-documentary nature can be made dealing with your work in the field of crime.”

Lee was pleased her department was gaining notice, but never liked lavish amounts of media attention on her. She wanted the department’s work on behalf of the public to take center stage. When meeting with MGM, she said she had just the right story to focus on. It was a murder case she hadn’t been able to forget, even nearly a decade after it ended without justice for the victim.

Don’t focus on me, Lee said. Focus on the Irene Perry case.

The Hollywood executive listened.

“After our very pleasant dinner,” Marx wrote Lee later in 1948, “I went to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and investigated the Irene Perry case in which the Department of Legal Medicine played such an important part of the solution.”

The script was written and the movie went into production.

BY 1949, THE HARVARD department of legal medicine was weakening. Dr. Moritz left Harvard to head a pathology center in Cleveland, and remained influential in the field. After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he gave expert testimony on the autopsy.

Moritz’s replacement struggled to run the program with a firm hand. “In my opinion,” Lee wrote, “the Department is rapidly dying on its feet.”

In the years to come, she worked hard to get the medical examiner system adopted in more states, but found local resistance throughout the country. She also struggled with serious medical issues, including breast cancer. Her fears about mortality caused her to be more open about some of the challenges — especially as a woman — that she faced in her work.

“For me, it has been a long, discouraging struggle against petty jealousies, crass stupidities, and an obstinate unwillingness to learn that has required all the enthusiasm, patience, courage, and tact that I could muster,” she wrote to her trusted advisers. “Also, being a woman has made it difficult at times to make the men believe in the project I was furthering.”

She appeared to reserve her harshest criticism for Harvard, saying it had a deserved reputation of being “old fogeyish and ungrateful and stupid.” She decided in the end against giving the school any money in her will, and urged her advisers to monitor her previous gifts closely. “Harvard is clever and sly and will need to be watched constantly or she will take advantage of you and apply any funds you may grant her to her own purposes,” she wrote.

In 1962, at age 83, Lee died of complications from cancer. She was buried at Maple Street Cemetery in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. At The Rocks, a few miles away, the state installed a historical marker calling her the “mother of forensic science.”

Some of her fears about Harvard soon began coming true. The university shuttered the department of legal medicine in 1966, and her nutshell studies were handed over — ”on loan for an indefinite period,” says a university spokesman — to the Maryland medical examiner’s office, which had close ties with Lee. The Magrath library was folded into the main one at the medical school. The professorship she’d endowed sat vacant for many years, and for the last two decades the position has focused on bioethics.

When the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., opened an exhibit of Lee’s nutshell studies in 2017, some Harvard physicians broached the idea of bringing the dioramas to a Boston museum. But the proposal got mired in questions of logistics, and still-unresolved legal issues over who actually controls them.

The Maryland medical examiner’s office, however, has continued Lee’s tradition of holding the homicide training seminars. This year’s installment, in October, will include expert-led sessions on strangulation, poisoning, and other causes of death. As is customary, the program will feature investigations of Lee’s nutshells.

Lee’s files at Harvard are full of letters from medical examiners and police officers from across the country, saying they are deeply indebted to her for making them more observant detectives, even as the field of forensics has come to include DNA analysis and other advances she never could have dreamed of.

“This was the essence of Frances Glessner Lee,” says Thomas Andrew, a former chief medical examiner in New Hampshire. “Look at what the scene tells us.”

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IRENE PERRY WAS BURIED at New Bedford’s St. John the Baptist Cemetery, in an unmarked grave that is numbered 976.

Helen Craig, now 79, is Irene’s only surviving sibling, the child of Irene’s father and his second wife. She tries sometimes to visit her half-sister’s grave. She says her father spoke little of Irene’s death, but understands why. “He was heartbroken by it,” she says.

Relatives say Perry — and her murder — were almost never openly discussed at family gatherings, and some surmise it was because her case had the whiff of scandal. “Nobody talked about it,” says Charles Lackie, a retired Dartmouth police sergeant whose grandmother was Perry’s sister. “It’s like it never happened.”

But for those who look closely, Irene Perry’s death and life are memorialized in a different way. MGM had followed Lee’s advice, and focused not on her, but on the case of a working-class woman from an immigrant family in New Bedford.

“Irene Perry’s case is exactly the kind of death that would have been overlooked,” says Goldfarb, Lee’s biographer, “if not for Lee’s determination that all victims, regardless of their background, receive rigorous investigations.”

Renamed Mystery Street, the film premiered nationwide in 1950, receiving many positive reviews. Starring a young Ricardo Montalban as a detective from the local Portuguese community, it was the first forensic-science procedural put to film. It was also the first commercial movie filmed in Boston, with scenes of Beacon Hill and Harvard Square. (The original title, Murder at Harvard, was changed after the university complained it would sully its brand.)

Although Mystery Street is fictionalized — the victim isn’t a dark-haired woman named Irene, but a blonde named Vivian — it includes many similarities to the Perry case. The skeletal remains of a young Massachusetts woman are discovered in a remote area, and the killer remains on the loose. Harvard pathologists led by Dr. McAdoo, modeled on Dr. Moritz, use forensics to establish the facts of her murder. When examining her skeleton, they find the tiny bones of a fetus.

The biggest difference may be that, in the movies, the Perry character gets the Hollywood ending that no amount of forensic science could deliver her in real life. Though police initially apprehend the wrong man, they successfully chase down the real killer. He’s a married man, a father, and had been the victim’s lover. After she confronted him about ignoring her, saying she was “in a jam,” he shot her.

The movie also portrays the hard life of single working women at the time, struggling to pay rent and seeing relationships with men as one way to gain stability in their lives. It is Vivian’s boarding house roommate, Jackie, who first reports to police that she has mysteriously disappeared. Jackie worries something terrible has happened to her.

When investigators interview her, she reflects on how hard life could be for women like her and Vivian.

“Girls like us,” she says. “Mostly there’s nobody to look out for us.”

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Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story incorrectly named the defense attorney in the Perry case. He was Philip Barnet. The Globe regrets the error.

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Patricia Wen can be reached at patricia.wen@globe.com. Follow her @GlobePatty.