CSI Episode # 905 “Leave Out All The Rest”

For a more detailed plot sum­mary, please see here.

This episode opens with a body dis­cov­ered on the side of the road in a dirt field. When Grissom arrives at the scene, it’s pour­ing rain and the body has been cov­ered by a first respon­der with a blue tarp. Catherine is already at the scene try­ing to divert the rain water to sal­vage tire track impres­sions by dig­ging small ditches around the tracks. Grissom is upset that the body was cov­ered with a tarp, claim­ing the tarp is a poten­tial source of contamination.

Examination of the body and cloth­ing indi­cated the vic­tim was prob­a­bly tied under a vehi­cle and dragged to death. Further inves­ti­ga­tion reveals stab wounds, burn marks on the tongue, and sym­met­ri­cal punc­ture marks around the man’s nip­ples. The team the­o­rizes the burned tongue and nip­ple punc­tures are pos­si­bly the result of an S&M encounter.

A search of the victim’s home reveals he’s mar­ried, but his wife is nowhere to be found, along with her car. An absence of S&M gear in the bed­room sug­gests the vic­tim isn’t prac­tic­ing the S&M lifestyle with his wife. Riley dis­cov­ers a trunk where the vic­tim is hid­ing his S&M gear, the con­tents clearly belong­ing to a sub­mis­sive. Needing a pro­fes­sional opin­ion on the S&M evi­dence, Grissom takes the case data to Lady Heather, a retired dom­i­na­trix we’ve seen from pre­vi­ous cases.

Eventually the wife and her vehi­cle are found, but she’s been mur­dered too. Her burned vehi­cle is located in the desert, and her burned body inside. As we later learn, the wife was fatally hit from behind by her own car prob­a­bly try­ing to escape her killer. Her body was put in the vehi­cle by her killer before it was torched. There is a sec­ond set of tire tracks lead­ing away from the scene, indi­cat­ing that the assailant drove away from the scene in a sec­ond vehicle.

Phone logs to the wife’s cell phone turn up an insur­ance sales­man who called her as a pos­si­ble lead. He’s brought in for ques­tion­ing, but explains away the phone call as a failed effort to sell her insur­ance before she hung up on him. As improb­a­ble as it sounds…further evi­dence shows the insur­ance sales­man is way more involved in the events lead­ing to both deaths than his orig­i­nal state­ment. During his sec­ond inter­view he is accom­pa­nied by coun­cil who threat­ens to chal­lenge the DNA evi­dence against her client with a Daubert chal­lenge, alleg­ing DNA evi­dence is unreliable.

Eventually we learn the dead hus­band, the insur­ance sales­man, and his female lawyer did an S&M scene together at a local S&M club. The dead hus­band is fol­lowed home by the dom­i­na­trix lawyer, and they have sex. Her insur­ance sales­man sub­mis­sive fol­lows them to the house, furi­ous to be excluded from the extra cur­ric­u­lar escapades. He breaks into the house and a fight ensues between the two men. Both the insur­ance sales­man and the dom­i­na­trix lawyer claim when they left the house the hus­band was alive.

The episode ends with­out any clo­sure to the “who­dun­nit” aspect of the dou­ble homi­cide, and the team has yet to solve the murders.

What we do get is a heap­ing dose of a lonely Grissom pin­ing away for Sara Sidle, who has emailed him a video let­ting him know she’s ok with them not end­ing up together. Maybe Grissom isn’t as enthu­si­as­tic to move on as Sara claims to be. He’s totally dis­tracted by Sara the entire episode, a big yawn in my book. In the end, Grissom turns to Lady Heather for com­fort, who armed with a Masters in Psychology is doing a good job get­ting in Grissom’s head. Realizing Grissom is strug­gling emo­tion­ally, she offers him her guest bed­room to stay with her as long as he likes.

Forensic Points of Interest

Catherine mak­ing casts of the tire track impres­sions;
DNA from blood bub­ble in house;
DNA on metal chop­sticks found at the S&M club.

The tire tracks bear men­tion­ing for the sim­ple rea­son that CSI Las Vegas is so much bet­ter foren­si­cally than CSI Miami. If you recall from Miami episode “Wrecking Crew”, they did some nifty tire track analy­sis using 3D pho­tog­ra­phy and a tricked out A/V Hummer. Here we see Catherine pour­ing plas­ter to get tire impres­sions the old fash­ioned way.

But aside from the less flashy reality-based tire tread tech­nique, there wasn’t much inter­est­ing foren­si­cally in this episode. They linked DNA on the chop­sticks in the S&M club to the club’s female owner and to the dead hus­band. Big deal. It hasn’t solved the crime.

The blood droplets found at the dead couple’s house had a bub­ble in it, Nick claims this proves it con­tained saliva. He deduces this blood evi­dence is most likely the result of a punch to the mouth dur­ing the fight between the hus­band and the insur­ance guy. I don’t know how accu­rate Nick’s saliva con­clu­sion is since I don’t do blood spat­ter analy­sis. But min­i­mally we learn the blood was the insur­ance salesman’s, so the hus­band got in at least one good hit.

There was very lit­tle foren­sic analy­sis this episode. There was mostly plot pro­gres­sion towards Grissom’s depar­ture from the show. It really wasn’t a great episode, unless per­haps you’re an S&M buff or you like the Lady Heather char­ac­ter. She reminds me of strong female ver­sion of Grissom in her abil­ity to cor­rectly guess actual events based on min­i­mal infor­ma­tion. At any rate, a more intrigu­ing char­ac­ter than Sara Sidle as Grissom’s roman­tic interest.

The best part of the episode is poor Hodges get­ting dragged out of the lab to help Catherine process the scene. He instantly com­plains about his shoes get­ting ruined in the mud. I love Hodges, he’s the most real­is­tic “lab rat” in any of the three CSI fran­chise shows.