CSI NY Episode #507 — “Dead Inside”

The episode opens with some kids rid­ing their bikes in an aban­doned lot. One falls down a hole and finds a dead body. The vic­tim is Kevin McBride, killed by a blow to the skull. His face has been eaten away by pos­sums. Mac and the team arrive on scene to dis­cover the hole the kid fell through was a cel­lar that had been beneath a house that is being relocated.

Stella is in the actual crime scene, the miss­ing house, while it’s being fer­ried down the East River on the way from Staten Island. As it turns out, McBride and his wife Annie own a home relo­ca­tion busi­ness, and the house Kevin was killed in is one they were trans­port­ing from Staten Island.

The crime scene in the house has been cleaned, but traces of blood are of course vis­i­ble still using foren­sic tech­niques. Although McBride was not shot, a bul­let cas­ing was recov­ered from the house, along with a large car­rot. The inves­ti­ga­tion shows McBride was killed in the house and his body dragged down to the cel­lar before the house was moved.

At post-autopsy, frag­ments of McBride’s skull are pieced back together, and impressed tool­marks are visu­al­ized. After some search­ing, it is deter­mined the mur­der weapon was a roof­ing hammer.

Lindsay iden­ti­fies the car­rot as a home­made mar­i­juana pipe. The bul­let cas­ing has Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) residue inside as opposed to gun­shot residue (GSR). It was used as the bowl on the car­rot pipe. A DNA pro­file is run on the veg­gie pipe, and it comes back to Tanor Sommerset.

Sommerset is the son of the per­son who sold the house. He’s upset the house wasn’t given to him, so he went out and pur­chased a roof­ing ham­mer, with plans to smash up the house. Instead he leaves the ham­mer on the fire­place man­tle, smokes some mar­i­juana in his car­rot pipe, and goes upstairs to catch a quick nap. The next thing he knows is the house is lit­er­ally mov­ing down the street. Sommerset pan­icked and leapt out of the win­dow of the house while it’s being trans­ported by truck down a busy street, and bystanders on the street cor­rob­o­rate his alibi.

Found at autopsy was a fish­scale embed­ded in McBride’s arm. At some point there was analy­sis using the patented CSI NY DNA rare ani­mal data­base that I’ve had the plea­sure of writ­ing about so many times in these reviews. I’m sure it came back to some ultra-rare fish, but I left the room shak­ing my head. Eventually they end up ques­tion­ing McBride’s sec­re­tary, Rita Mannete. That day she’d got­ten a man­i­cure using the same ultra-rare fish in a weird exfo­li­at­ing tech­nique where the fish nib­ble dead skin off of the hands. Mannete says the last time she saw McBride, she stum­bled down the stairs. As McBride tried to catch her, she ended up scratch­ing his arm with her freshly man­i­cured nails, and that’s how the trans­fer occurred.

A frag­ment of paper was also found in McBride’s hand. The rest of the paper is still wedged in the base­boards of the house. When the pieces are joined, it’s a head shot of McBride printed on a post­card, with the words “If you don’t tell her, I will” writ­ten across his face. The back of the post­card has an inter­est­ing 3D bar­code in one of the cor­ners, which Lindsay scans with her cell phone. Apparently every­one now has per­sonal 3D bar­code scan­ners. Once scanned, the code on the post­card opens up a gimmick-website where peo­ple mail in their secret con­fes­sions anony­mously. Investigations into the reg­is­tered mail­ing address for the web­site turns up a PO Box address paid with cash, an inves­tiga­tive dead-end. Has any­one opened a PO Box lately? The Postal Service wants more proof of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion than you need to get a driver’s license in the State of California. I find the “cash” pay­ment inves­tiga­tive dead-end a cheap way to tie up the loose end. They might as well have just said the web­site owner is out of state or some­thing, and they’ll talk to them in a few days.

Mac takes McBride’s com­puter in as evi­dence. McBride’s daugh­ter Ella makes an urgent plea to Mac to please get her dad’s com­puter back to her mom as soon as pos­si­ble, because there are impor­tant com­pany files needed. Looking into the files on McBride’s com­puter indi­cate he was involved with some­one over the inter­net called “Lola54”. Shortly after McBride emailed a pic­ture of him­self to Lola54, she stopped com­mu­ni­ca­tion with McBride. McBride kept try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to reestab­lish com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Lola.

Eventually Lola’s iden­tity is dis­cov­ered to be Ella McBride. Mac goes to her place to talk to her, and sees hun­dreds of sub­mit­ted con­fes­sion post­cards to the 3D bar­code web­site. Ella says she fig­ured out who her inter­net boyfriend was, and stopped com­mu­ni­ca­tion with him. Even send­ing the photo back that said tell your wife or I will. Ella con­fesses McBride had been in trou­ble in the past for hav­ing mul­ti­ple affairs.

Back at the lab, the DNA pro­file on the ham­mer was a famil­ial match to Ella, so the Stella starts lean­ing on Mrs. Annie McBride as the sus­pected killer. But Annie has a great alibi. A video of her doing a walk through of another relo­ca­tion prop­erty shot at the time of the mur­der. Stella catches that the shad­ows are off in the video com­pared to the time of day Annie claims the video was filmed. Through exper­i­men­ta­tion, Stella proves that the time codes on the video have been altered, and Annie’s alibi is fake.

Annie even­tu­ally admits to killing her hus­band with the ham­mer, after dis­cov­er­ing the pho­to­graph of him in a drawer with the words, “Tell your wife or I will,” writ­ten across it. Classic Greek tragedy, I know.

During the inves­ti­ga­tion, Stella is called with a threat­en­ing phone call, telling her to stop the inves­ti­ga­tion into the death of the rat fish­er­man. At the end of the episode, she gets a par­cel with a dead rat inside it. At which points Stella is ready to break some rules, and start going after who­ever is respon­si­ble at the Greek embassy, regard­less of their diplo­matic immu­nity status.

The rest of the episode is tied up with per­sonal rela­tion­ships with Flack. First with his sis­ter, Sam. Sam was fired from her job at a bar, for drink­ing on the job. She was almost run in by Det. Angell for throw­ing a beer bot­tle at patrol cars. We dis­cover Sam is an alco­holic after Flack fol­lows her to an AA meet­ing. He leaves with­out let­ting Sam know he fol­lowed her. He gives Det. Angell a big smooch, and walks home. I guess we needed some romance this episode.

Forensic Points of Interest:

DNA

Of course our good friend DNA was there. We had reg­u­lar (car­rot pipe), mito­con­dr­ial DNA (famil­ial match on ham­mer han­dle), and the patented CSI NY exotic ani­mal DNA data­base as well (fish scale).

Toolmarks on the Skull

Toolmarks is the gen­eral fam­ily of com­par­i­son analy­sis, which hap­pens to include firearms iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. In this episode we were look­ing for gen­eral char­ac­ter­is­tics (impressed on the skull frag­ments) to iden­tify what type of tool made the marks, as opposed to try­ing to iden­tify which unique tool made the marks.

Controlled Substances

We looked at the residue left behind in the casing-bowl of the car­rot pipe, to deter­mine the pipe was used smoke marijuana.

It was a good episode over­all. Even con­sid­er­ing the time wasted on Flack’s sis­ter Sam, and his brief roman­tic exchange with Det. Angell. Most of the foren­sic sci­ence was sound, with the excep­tion of the rare fish scale DNA iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. But that’s CSI NY’s trade­mark item. Like Horatio Caine’s quips in CSI Miami.