CSI Crime Scene Investigation

The show that I decided to use for my analysis is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Complete First Season, Episode 110, “Sex, Lies and Larvae”. The reason I picked this show is because we have it on DVD, which made it easy to watch it several times. This episode has three cases, the first and main case of the episode starts out with two people hiking in a remote desert area and the girl finds a dead body with flies buzzing all around it. The second case involves a stolen painting and the last case is a missing person case.

In the first case, Grissom (who is a forensic entomologist) and Sara (analyst) are sent to the crime scene. The first thing that was noted was that there were beetles on the body but no alkali fluids in the dirt so she
was not killed there. Grissom put the bugs in with beef jerky to keep them alive and the others were put in hot coffee to preserve them. Grissom said the time of death can be determined by “using linear regression to count the hours backward”. During the autopsy Doc Robbins tells Grissom and Sara that the women was shot in the head at close range by a .38 caliber.
He also showed them evidence of old injuries and suspect it is from an abusive relationship. Grissom also finds a musket fly during the autopsy. The women was identified as Kaye Shelton through the AFIS (The Automated Fingerprint Identification System) and her husband was Scott Shelton. Grissom said he knew that they lived downtown because of the musket flies that were on the body, and they are only found in urban areas. Grissom and Sara go to their house to look for evidence. Her husband said that he has nothing to hide and he has been away on a business trip for five days. Grissom finds fiber evidence (similar to the blanket that Kaye was wrapped in). Scott Shelton’s gun was also recently cleaned and a bullet is missing. During their search, Sara smells bleach and finds evidence of blood on the wall. But, the linear regression of the insects shows that Kaye has only been dead for three days. Thus it was not possible for Scott to be the killer since he was not in town three days ago. Both Sara and Grissom think Scott is guilty. But, the insects do not
support their suspicion. After some thought, Grissom believes that the blanket was wrapped so tightly (he could tell it was tightly wrapped by the folds in the blanket) that it made the body decompose more slowly. So, he wraps a pig in a blanket and does the test again. Grissom says that pigs are the most like a human. With the pig test, Grissom determined that the blanket did indeed impact the regression of the insects and it caused the insects an additional two days to start breeding and that her actual time of death was five days. But, since would be difficult to understand and convince a jury, they needed another piece of evidence. So, Sara, who is a materials and element analyst in the show, retrieves one of Scott’s bullets from trace evidence and fires it. She finds that the teflon from the bullets that belonged to Scott matched teflon on a piece of hair of Sara’s and also the teflon at the entry of the bullet wound. They then were able to arrest Scott with this ballistic evidence.

In the second case, Catherine and Warrick think that it is a missing person, Paul Sorison, but it turns out that Paul Sorison was a painter from the early 1900s and the case is actually a missing piece of art.
The owner of the paining says that he interrupted the burgler and the alarm system had been disengaged. Catherine and Warrick think that it is an inside job. While they are dusting for prints, they find an ear print which they photograph and lift to compare later. They ask members of the family to come to gather at the house and requested that they get a ear print from each of them. It turns out to be the ear print of their son who is in college. He goes to his trunk and brings the painting back. The father does not press charges. They take the painting in for evidence and has it tagged. But, something does not feel right to Catherine. She investigates the case further and determines that the painting is a forgery, in fact, the son had replaced all of the paintings in the house with fake ones. The father decides to show his son that he now has his attention and presses charges.

The third case is humorous. A husband reports that his wife is missing. Nick is the investigator. They find her car at a bus station and find red hair in the trunk of her car. Later he discovers evidence of blood in the trunk. They rush to a hotel after her credit card was used and find Cheryl Applegate handcuffed to a bed and obviously safe and just having a rendezvous with another man. She explains
that she had picked up a wounded dog and that explains the blood in her trunk. As they leave, she ask them not to tell her husband how they found her. Case solved.

Even though I have watched CSI before taking this course, I found myself analyzing the things they did in this episode. For example, did they photograph, collect, and document their evidence. Prior to this course I would not have understood the importance of the ballistic report. Or what AFIS was. I only picked up on a few errors. I don’t believe in an actual investigation that they would put the insects in hot coffee. The chapter on forensic entomology in our textbook was especially helpful when I reviewed this episode. Since this chapter discussed that you can determine if a body was moved, link a suspect to a crime scene or to a victim by the presence of insect evidence. It can also be possible to use the insects to provide the postmortem interval. The one error that was very obvious, was the fact that Grissom but the beetles in coffee. At a real crime scene, they would have been put in a jar containing cotton balls or plaster soaked with ethylacetate and later transferred to vials with 75%-80% ethyl alcohol. In the first case, I noted that they did follow the chain of custody. They took photographs, put gloves on, used specimin cups and labeled them (shown in a later scene). In the second case, they used gloves and noted they were going to take photographs and do lifts to compare ear prints. There was an error here, they took the ear prints from family members and did the dusting while the family waited. In real life, they would have sent the prints back to the lab for comparison. In the last case, Nick used gloves, took photographs and used phenolphthalein to check for blood in the trunk of the clean car. They did not show all the steps in this case, but I think this case was just to add humor to a show that is normally very serious.