CSI Miami Episode # 707 “Cheating Death”

The open­ing of this one is pretty humor­ous. A vaca­tion­ing Kansas cou­ple is try­ing to sleep in their Miami hotel, but there’s loud bang­ing com­ing from an adja­cent room, sounds like a cou­ple in the throes of pas­sion. When the cou­ple bangs on the wall yelling at their neigh­bors to quiet down, the noises stop at first, only to be fol­lowed by blar­ing radio music. So the Kansas guy decides to con­front his loud neigh­bors, but his wife urgently pleads, “No don’t. This is Florida, peo­ple have guns here.” Come on lady, like peo­ple from Kansas don’t have guns?

Eventually the hotel man­age­ment arrives, and music still blar­ing, enters the room to find a woman who had been passed out on the bed next to a dead guy lay­ing in a pool of his own blood and hand­cuffed to the bed. Enter the CSIs. After giv­ing the scene a quick once-over, Horatio asks about the cou­ple who called in the com­plaint and are now leav­ing the hotel. He is told they are a tourist cou­ple from Kansas…and then…get ready for it…get ready for it…our Horatio-ism of the week.….“They’re not in Kansas any­more.” Cue the yell and open­ing credits.

OK it wasn’t that good of a line, but still funny. Thank you CSI Miami producers!

Back in the hotel room we find out the woman is Christina Dodd, a sub­ur­ban­ite turned amateur-prostitute (bit of an oxy­moron, I know). She started pros­ti­tut­ing after a one-night stand mis­took her for a hooker and paid her $500. Now she turns tricks a cou­ple times a week to sup­ple­ment her income. She claims the dead guy, Steve Howell, was another trick who slipped her GHB, so she has no rec­ol­lec­tion of the mur­der. Howell has been stabbed to death, but the mur­der weapon is gone. The hand­cuffs were part of Christina Dodd’s arse­nal of hooker tricks.

My wife’s first ques­tion was, “Does her hus­band know?” I replied with one of my famous quick-witted com­ments, “Huh?” My wife explains to me that if the woman is from the sub­urbs, she is prob­a­bly mar­ried. Good catch!

Back at the lab, Eric and Ryan try to be prac­ti­cal jok­ers, bring­ing a lit­tle more comic relief than Horatio’s opener offered us. They prank the new ME, Dr. Price, while she’s out of the room by hid­ing Steve Howell’s body in a cold box, replac­ing it with one of the black foam bod­ies so pop­u­lar in CSI shows. When she re-enters the exam­i­na­tion room, Eric remotely makes the gur­ney rise, scar­ing the hell out of Dr. Price. Instead of a good hearted laugh, she rips into Eric let­ting him know his shenani­gans have com­pro­mised her abil­ity to deter­mine what the mur­der weapon was because iso­la­tion of the body was cru­cial. She needs to make casts of Howell’s stab wounds to deter­mine the weapon.

Dr. Price takes fin­ger­nail scrap­ings from Howell reveal­ing DNA from mul­ti­ple female donors. DNA is able to sep­a­rate the mul­ti­ple donors and get an instant CODIS hit on the main con­trib­u­tor, Audrey Yates (Lucy Lawless aka Zena Warrior Princess and Number 3 from Battle Star Galactica).

Yates was busted years ago for being a madam who runs a legit­i­mate escort ser­vice now. Yates is also able to con­ve­niently explain away her DNA being found under Steve’s fin­ger­nails — he’s a tan­ning but­ler at the hotel, his job is rub­bing tan­ning lotion on women. Amazing. Only in Miami.

DNA analy­sis of a rape kit taken from Christina Dodd lands another CODIS hit to Dan Becks, who has pri­ors for aggra­vated assault with a deadly weapon. The CSIs roll up on Becks and give him the third degree about his where­abouts the morn­ing of the mur­der. Becks says he was tak­ing his kid to soc­cer. The CSI show him a pho­to­graph of Christina Dodd for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Surprise, sur­prise, he iden­ti­fies her as his wife.

Ok, so my wife is smart. And the CSIs are dumb.

A small bro­ken bot­tle found at the crime scene is exam­ined for latent prints, lead­ing CSIs to ques­tion Lisa Radley. She says she was shop­ping the morn­ing of the mur­der, pro­vid­ing a store receipt as proof of her alibi. She explains her prints got on the bot­tle after she was the vic­tim of GHB drug­ging where she was date raped and robbed in that same hotel. She couldn’t report the crime to police because her wed­ding ring was stolen, and her hus­band would be furi­ous over both the affair and the loss of the ring. Instead, she told him she lost her wed­ding ring down the drain while doing dishes.

Back at Howell’s house, the team finds numer­ous pho­tographs of women that he preyed on, includ­ing Christina Dodd and Lisa Radley. There are mul­ti­ple poor res­o­lu­tion reflec­tions of the pho­tog­ra­pher in the pho­tos. Turns out the pho­tog­ra­pher is our good friend Ms. Yates. Upset that ama­teurs were mov­ing in on her action, she picked out marks for Steve to seduce, drug, and rob. Married women were tar­geted because they were less likely to tell police for fear of their hus­bands find­ing out. Howell gained mon­e­tar­ily through rob­bery; Yates by scar­ing off the competition.

Yates is called in again for ques­tion­ing, and Horatio sopts Lisa Radley’s wed­ding ring on her fin­ger. She’s arrested, most likely for pos­ses­sion of stolen property.

Dr. Price makes cast­ings of Steve Howell’s stab wounds to iden­tify the mur­der weapon. She con­cludes the approx­i­mate length of the blade, and that it has a top edge that was sharp­ened at the tip, and ser­rated towards the han­dle. Calleigh browses the inter­net and finds the exact model of knife used, and it’s mil­i­tary issue. Conveniently Dan Becks was in the mil­i­tary and had been issued that pre­cise weapon.

Becks sus­pected his wife was cheat­ing after receiv­ing a text mes­sage from a sup­posed friend of her’s with a fake alibi that they were out for sushi. Christina Dodd is aller­gic to fish. As we learn, the hotel concierge offers alibi ser­vices (among many oth­ers), sell­ing ali­bis such as fake receipts and phone calls, for $100 a pop. He sent the sushi mes­sage to Becks.

When Dodd hadn’t returned home in the morn­ing, Becks called his credit card com­pany to report his card stolen. The bank gave him a run down of where the past sev­eral pur­chases had been made, point­ing him to the hotel room his wife was in with Howell. Military issue knife in hand, Becks entered the room through the slider door. By this point, his wife is passed out from the GHB and Steve is hand­cuffed to the bed. Becks threat­ened to kill Steve if he ever caught him with his wife again. In a fit of rage, he stabbed his mil­i­tary knife into the head­board above Steve.

Earlier, Lisa Radley had spot­ted Howell and Dodd in the bar, head­ing up to their room. Just after Becks leaves, Radley uses a room­ser­vice maid’s key to enter the room. She demands her ring back from Steve, who is still hand­cuffed to the bed. He doesn’t even rec­og­nize her at first. Eventually he rec­og­nizes her, and says that after the things she did with him, she didn’t deserve that ring any­more. Radley flips out, grabs the knife still stuck in the head­board, and stabbed Steve to death. When she’s arrested, CSIs find Becks’ bloody knife still inside the trunk of her car.

Basically we have a game of clue — who did it with what and where. Only prob­lem was we had dif­fer­ent peo­ple bring­ing in the mur­der weapons, and peo­ple buy­ing false alibis.

Forensic Analysis

Chain of Custody:

Chain of cus­tody and evi­dence integrity is a huge issue in this case. If you missed my post about evi­dence integrity issues in LAPD’s fin­ger­print sec­tion of the lab, read this post here.

The point is that Eric and Ryan’s play­ing around with the corpse jeop­ar­dized the inves­ti­ga­tion. The biggest ques­tion is why was evi­dence (Steve’s body) left out unat­tended? Why do the CSIs have access to the ME exam­i­na­tion room? More and more foren­sic labs are hav­ing to sec­tion­al­ize their lab­o­ra­to­ries to pre­vent unau­tho­rized access to evidence.

Casting of stab wounds to deter­mine weapon:

This is a bit out of my area of knowl­edge. I’m just say­ing if it is half-way as easy as they por­trayed it in this episode, it’s a great tech­nique. Simply by cast­ing the stab wounds, the ME can deter­mine what type, includ­ing size and design, of knife was used.

Toxicology/drug chem­istry test­ing:

In this par­tic­u­lar case, GHB was the drug of choice. The CSIs had to detect GHB in Ms. Dodd’s blood, and GHB residue on the broke glass bottle.

DNA DNA DNA:

We have DNA every­where this episode, as is usu­ally the case. And of course every­one seems to be in the CODIS sys­tem. The rape kit, and the nail scrap­ings both had usable pro­files that lead to instant CODIS hits.

Latent prints on glass pieces:

CSI Miami needs to help out CSI New York. If you remem­ber from my CSI NY Episode # 506 “Enough” review in that case CSI New York used a doc­u­ment scan­ner to scan in the 3D shapes of the bro­ken glass frag­ments to show the CSI how to glue the glass bot­tle back together. Once the bot­tles were back together, latent prints could be developed.

In this episode Eric makes the process even bet­ter by fum­ing all the bro­ken pieces to develop par­tial latent print evi­dence. He then takes pho­tographs with a dig­i­tal SLR cam­era. The com­puter then reassem­bles all the parts, not only to fig­ure out the orig­i­nal shape of the bro­ken bot­tle, but to “stick” together the dif­fer­ent par­tial latent prints. An instant AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) hit fol­lowed of course.

Of course this is all crazy Hollywood non­sense, but it helps CSI Miami get their case solved before lunch.

Photo-grafting:

The pho­tographs Yates took at the bar of the dif­fer­ent female tar­gets didn’t have a clear reflec­tion of her in any of them. But thanks to the magic of the “Minority Report”-esqe com­puter sys­tem, the pho­tographs are over­layed, and dif­fer­ent frag­ments of the pho­tographs reveal the iden­tify of our pho­tog­ra­pher. The best part was the com­pos­ite image looked like torn strips out of a mag­a­zine pic­ture, as opposed to a semi-blurry com­pos­ite photograph.

The episode wasn’t bad by any means. It was more of what CSI Miami has carved out for itself. A lot of pretty mov­ing images on the TV set, tied together with lab work loosely asso­ci­ated with actual foren­sic techniques.

Refreshingly, the inten­si­fy­ing rela­tion­ship between Eric and Calleigh was barely touched on this episode. In the end they had extra time, so they showed our mur­derer, Lisa Radley, being printed and pho­tographed, and even­tu­ally lead out of the build­ing to jail. On the way out, as he usu­ally is, Horatio is stand­ing sunglass-less on the side­walk, hands on hips, block­ing her egress, with a silly “shame-on-you” smirk on his face. Radley says an almost oblig­a­tory, “I’m sorry,” as she’s lead away. Horatio con­tin­ues smirking.