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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
Anatomy of a Murder
Aired May 16, 2005 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: The following program contains images and storylines that may be disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
911 OPERATOR: Hello?
CALLER: Oh my God.
911 OPERATOR: What's the matter?
CALLER: We just found our neighbor dead!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm the victim's brother.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We already briefed your older brother, but I'll give you a little bit of -- obviously we're in the very early stages of an investigation right now. They found him. Unfortunately, he's deceased. We believe it's foul play.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SANJAY GUPTA, HOST (VOICE-OVER): This is the real CSI, a lot different than what you see on TV. How different? That's what this hour is all about.
We'll take you behind the scenes of the Hollywood version and follow detectives on a real homicide case.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening, again. We're going to spend the next hour in Miami, the backdrop for "CSI: Miami," one of the blockbuster dramas about forensic science.
Tonight we'll take a look at the anatomy of murder, see how a real murder investigation takes place, with a particular focus on what the body can tell us. It's a focus that's changing law enforcement and has made the CSI franchise such a hit.
CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us through the investigation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MOISES VELAZQUEZ, MIAMI CITY HOMICIDE: We have a homicide that not simply was the victim killed; he was bound at the hands, bound at the feet, a sheet wrapped around his head, the bedroom ransacked, his cell phone missing. We believe now that his jewelry is also missing.
GUPTA (VOICE-OVER): It's a murder with no witnesses. Miami city homicide detective Freddy Ponce and Sergeant Moises Velazquez head up the investigation and immediately call on the team of CSI technicians.
They spend the next 10 hours processing the crime scene, finding clues to help detectives piece together what happened the night 60- year-old Thomas Clark was killed.
VELAZQUEZ: We find a bolt and kitchen knife here on the chair next to the door. There's no forced entry into the apartment, but there's forced exit out of the apartment.
We believe what happens is is that our suspect comes in with the victim. Sometime during the night, the murder takes place, then he wants to exit the apartment and get away. However, he finds that the door is locked.
It looks like that just simply by habit, once the victim comes in, he automatically locks the door behind him. The suspect had to use the knife to unscrew the deadbolt and actually force his way out of the apartment.
This is a person that's desperate. He's not concerned with wearing rubber gloves and, you know, making sure he collects his hair samples and everything else. So we got him inside the vehicle.
So the eyewitness says he wasn't counting on is going to be forensic science.
We find some black sunglasses. According to the victim's girlfriend, he doesn't wear sunglasses. Also, the victim does not smoke. And we find a cigarette butt inside the ash tray. I believe that the drapes are partially pulled down because the offender may have been looking for a way out.
GUPTA: Hours into the investigation, the medical examiner arrives to examine and remove the body.
What's the motive? No one here knows. Thomas Clark was one of 14 brothers and sisters and a resident of this apartment for 25 years. He was also the superintendent and kept drugs and crime out. Not this time.
Detectives are optimistic. They say the criminal was sloppy.
VELAZQUEZ: Our suspect is leaving traces of himself inside this location.
GUPTA: Every place he touches might leave a fingerprint or palmprint.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we call a right lower hand.
GUPTA: Just last year, Miami started a palmprint database similar to the National Fingerprint Database, another tool to track a suspect.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This was already superglued, but now I'm trying to see if I can get some prints on it.
GUPTA: Superglue is a tried and true method to grab and seal a print. CSI technician Kevin Pratt...
KEVIN PRATT, CSI TECHNICIAN: Yes, it locks it in. It fixes it so we can process the item over and over again without the fingerprint deteriorating.
GUPTA: Grabbing a good print isn't as easy as it is on TV. Heating up the superglue to adhere to a print is the same, but finding a well-defined print...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're not that lucky. Not much detail on this one.
VELAZQUEZ: I don't see anything on there. Jesus Christ. There's another one there.
GUPTA: Simple swabbing picks up DNA on everything from door jams to blood.
VELAZQUEZ: See, also what's significant is that it looks like a single blood drop on the back of the shirt. So it could be several explanations for that. It could be that the offender himself is bleeding.
GUPTA: DNA has revolutionized CSI. Nowadays, even trace amounts can nab a killer.
Unfortunately, getting a DNA profile isn't as instant as the "CSI: Miami" TV show portrays.
WILLIAM STUVER, MIAMI-DADE CRIME LAB: It's futuristic. And that's Hollywood.
GUPTA: In real life, it requires sending samples to sophisticated labs. In this case, it's the Miami-Dade Crime Lab. There's a lot of waiting.
STUVER: A sample removed from a crime scene usually takes about a week from the time we first open the specimen until we actually have DNA profiles coming off the machine.
GUPTA: DNA testing is so popular, labs are backlogged with cases. In the future, robots might help speed up the process. The FBI crime lab uses them to process blood samples from federal offenders and expects one day robots will be able to take DNA from all types of evidence.
ARMANDO MARTINEZ, CAPTAIN, MIAMI POLICE: The homicide we had the other night...
GUPTA: Back in Miami, City Police Captain Armando Martinez makes the call.
MARTINEZ: We need it expedited if you can. OK?
GUPTA: Because this is a homicide, the county crime lab agrees to put this case ahead of others and process DNA ASAP. But it will still take days.
Detective Ponce is called to the medical examiner's office for the autopsy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought there was some abrasion here, but it looks like it's just this skin blistering. I really think he suffocated.
GUPTA: A tiny bone in the neck, like this one, is what makes this case a homicide. It's called the hyoid bone. The ME discovers that Clark's hyoid bone has been fractured.
GUPTA (ON CAMERA): So the hyoid bone, if someone is strangled like this, very likely this bone is going to be broken?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right, good possibility that it'll be broken.
GUPTA: This isn't Thomas Clark's hyoid bone, but this is what made you convinced this was a homicide.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's correct. The fracture occurred right here.
GUPTA: Can you say for sure without a doubt that this man was murdered?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
GUPTA: If Clark suffocated, why is the blanket that was wrapped around the victim's head so bloody?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The decomposition fluid can look like blood. And I have a feeling most of that is just decomposition fluid.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do we have a time of death?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
GUPTA: Programs like "CSI: Miami" make it look easy. But in reality, determining the exact time someone dies is almost impossible, especially if the body is decomposing, which Clark's was. Dr. Chundru estimates Clark was killed 18 to 33 hours before he was found.
DR. SATISH CHUNDRU, MEDICAL EXAMINER: The state he was in, the decomposition, it's hard to even narrow that down. The shows on TV, they say, yes, he died between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. It's unrealistic, but it makes for a good TV show.
GUPTA: Back at police headquarters, fingerprint examiners hit a snag. Prints from the crime scene aren't matching any in a national database. Police are convinced the suspect has a criminal record and should show up in the database.
Fingerprint analysis is not as high-tech as the TV shows would imply. Even with a hit, trained eyes and experience are still needed to make a match.
GUILLERMO MARTIN, MIAMI CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT: Remember, this is just a tool. It doesn't make the identification. We do. (INAUDIBLE) You got to like it. It's a very tedious job.
GUPTA: By the end of the second day, there are no leads. The Clark family can't understand who would do this.
VELAZQUEZ: If anybody could think of anything of anyone that Thomas might have had a problem with?
HELEN CLARK, VICTIM'S SISTER: You know, he always was there no matter what. He knew everybody.
GUPTA: Back at the Miami Police Department, technicians start processing the victim's car. Neighbors say they saw him drive in with a stranger. Maybe there's a clue outside or inside. With no witnesses, no suspects, which piece of evidence, if any, will crack this case?
MARTIN: It's like hunting down a ghost. Nobody knows him. Nobody's seen him before. And it's just picking on a face out of millions.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Coming up, the detectives find a tantalizing clue.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE). That's the victim, that's the offender right there.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: But next, we go behind the yellow tape in Hollywood. Behind the scenes with "CSI: Miami."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SOPHIA CHOI, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Sophia Choi in Atlanta. NEWSNIGHT will continue in just a moment. But first, at about a quarter past the hour, the latest from HEADLINE NEWS.
And we begin with Army Specialist Sabrina Harman. A military jury convicting her late this evening on six of seven counts of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Ms. Harman is featured in a number of the most notorious photographs of abuse. She faces up to six-and-a-half years in the stockade.
Next to southern Baghdad, where a pair of car bombs went off just minutes apart today. It happened at a market place. Police say nine Iraqi soldiers died, along with a number of civilians. By day's end, attacks across the country had taken at least two dozen lives.
And after deadly violence in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not to mention storm clouds in Washington, "Newsweek" has taken it back. It retraced a story saying interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated the Koran flushing one copy down the toilet. The White House calls it a good first step. As for the protesters, many aren't buying it. Now back to NEWSNIGHT.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: This looks like a big city crime lab, but it's actually a Hollywood set where they shoot most of the scenes for "CSI: Miami." When we came out here, we learned that every "CSI" show relies heavily on real cops and forensics experts. In fact, the supervising producer for "CSI: Miami" had more than a decade of experience cracking real crimes.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Quick rehearsal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And action!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, man. What the hell are you doing?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've been lying to me for months.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't be stupid. Put the gun down.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cut!
GUPTA (voice-over): Here is what a day on the job looks like for Elizabeth Devine in the middle of the Florida Everglades, followed by a CNN news crew.
For this show, the "CSI" crew set fire to the Everglades, a controlled burn with real firefighters standing by. They go to great heights to get the shot, as air boats race by below.
Check out the finished product -- the chase scene.
The story is fictional drama. A serial killer on the loose, but parts of it inspired by real life and Devine's days as a top-notch criminalist. She works closely with the director and the actors, giving them advice from the field. ELIZABETH DEVINE, "CSI: MIAMI" SUP. PRODUCER: I wanted it to seem like that guy's going to be the problem.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cut! Next.
GUPTA: The labs on "CSI" and "CSI: Miami" are modeled on this, the L.A. County Sheriff's Crime Lab.
DEVINE: So this is my old stomping grounds.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A little different than your new place, probably.
DEVINE: Yes, it's not as fancy as the "CSI" lab.
GUPTA: Now when you do television, I mean, does it feel funny to take some of those stories or some of your experiences and put it into entertainment type programming?
DEVINE: I don't -- we don't do anything that I think is gratuitously violent as entertainment, even if it is entertaining. What we want to do is show the reasons people become desperate enough to kill, and then try to twist and turn it through the evidence analysis. So you really don't know who did it.
The man that hired me out of grad school.
BARRY FISHER, DIR., LA COUNTY SHERIFF'S CRIME LAB: (INAUDIBLE).
GUPTA: So how much -- I got to ask you -- how many of your colleagues have you lost to the world of Liz Devine and Hollywood?
FISHER: Well, she is a serious drain on forensic science over here. We've lost four full-time people.
GUPTA: For 15 years, Elizabeth worked on some high-profile and often grisly cases.
DEVINE: This was a blood stain on his shirt. And I was able to prove that it was the victim's handprint. And the victim grabbed his shirt while she was still alive.
GUPTA: Stabbed him while he was...
DEVINE: She grabbed it and grabbed it like that.
GUPTA: Blood spatter in the whole...
DEVINE: Yes, yes.
GUPTA: She says that while she doesn't miss dealing with the tragedies or the long hours, the adrenaline rush was hard to give up.
DEVINE: When you get out there and you find the key piece of evidence, it's so exciting, because you know, this is it. This is the piece of evidence that's going to tell me who did it. GUPTA: A lot of "CSI", the original "CSI" is based on some of the stuff you worked on here and you saw here at the crime lab here?
DEVINE: My whole life is on that show. Everything that happened to me.
GUPTA: Divorced with three children, Devine says it was tough to leave her former job. It was a steady paycheck and provided the security she needed.
DEVINE: You can't really do -- you can't do the Hollywood thing temporarily. You really have to get all the way in. The hours are 12 hours minimum every day. And there's no way to do that part-time at all.
GUPTA: Back home in L.A. is where the ideas for the smash TV series are born.
Beautiful house, it really is.
DEVINE: Thank you. Thank you. I like it here. Sort of like not being in L.A.
GUPTA: Swimming pool, we've got the mountains, but it's all very private.
One of her favorite episodes is from the original "CSI" and came about after she first met the executive producer.
DEVINE: I'm really fond of blood drops, which was my first episode that I wrote with Ann Donahue. And actually, I got story credit. And she wrote it. But it was really very factually based. And I met her. And I had just been working this crime scene.
And she said, well, I'm writing a "CSI" episode on this case. And she held up the paper. And I said, well, that's -- I've just been working on that for the last five days.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Female Caucasian. Appears to be one stab wound to the throat.
DEVINE: It was probably one of the most realistic crime scenes that had ever been on TV at that time, because it was from my experience. And crime scenes being very lonely, quiet places, which is never what you see on TV.
GUPTA: And for Devine, it seems that going Hollywood is in her DNA. Her uncle, Dr. Ronald Hornbloom, lives with her. He was L.A. County's chief coroner and a technical adviser for "Quincy." He still believes that show set the standard.
RONALD HORNBLOOM, UNCLE: I thought it was great. I don't think "CSI" is as great.
DEVINE: What? Are you kidding me?
HORNBLOOM: Yes.
DEVINE: How can you say that on camera? God.
GUPTA: Still, he was the inspiration for his young niece.
DEVINE: Kill her. Cut.
GUPTA: And continuing a family tradition, Devine's youngest daughter is already following in mom's footsteps.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I see fingerprints all over that.
DEVINE: Look at that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do not cross.
DEVINE: Wow.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just ahead, we return to the scene of the crime. Detectives examine the first clues in the brutal murder of a 60-year-old man.
And then, a cold case; a body without a face; a family looking for answers. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
FREDDY PONCE, MIAMI HOMICIDE UNIT: This is Thomas Clark. He was pulled in his apartment in the early morning hours. And he was last scene with an unknown black male at approximately 1:00 in the morning.
GUPTA (VOICE-OVER): Day three into the investigation, detectives get a clue that could break the case wide open. It's something a neighbor sees the night Clark is strangled.
PONCE: He's sitting in his car and he sees the victim and a male. They don't go into the apartment, but they go straight to the store.
This is the store with the video right here.
GUPTA: The store security cameras were on and recording.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hot off the presses.
PONCE: There it is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rock and roll.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good job.
PONCE: This victim was coming into the store...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right. PONCE: The offender's right behind him.
GUPTA: On the "CSI: Miami" TV show, technology works flawlessly. In reality, there's often a glitch.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think you're going to have to upload this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go to your tool thing so you can press play.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The computer won't read it. You're going to try in the DVD machine.
GUPTA: In this case, it takes an hour to get the disk to play, but it's worth the wait.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the kid. Stop. That's victim. That's the offender right there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there are the glasses.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Definitely saw the glasses.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There he goes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There he is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the victim. See the gold chain? And there's the offender.
GUPTA: They now have a suspect, but whether or not he is the actual offender is still not known.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stop it. Back up. Beautiful.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's our man.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the sunglasses.
GUPTA: They say the glasses on the suspect appear to match those at the crime scene. The video image is blurry, a far cry from the high resolution images the "CSI: Miami" TV shows portray. And in real life, it's rare to zoom in on clues like this.
But detectives say this image is good enough.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If this was your brother or your partner that you hang out with, you're going to go: I know that guy. That's what somebody's going to tell me when I show it to them. They go, "Oh, look who it is." That's what they're going to say.
GUPTA: Now detectives face a decision: Do they release the photo right away, possibly tipping off the suspect or do they wait for DNA results, which could take weeks?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Submit it to the database. Hope that he's in the database and get his identification that way. Let's go that route...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, yes, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's do that route first...
GUPTA: In the end, they wait.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's got to be in the DNA database.
GUPTA: Unlike most TV shows, there are no rewrites. And everyone is left wondering if the weeks of waiting will let the murderer get away.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: The DNA evidence, along with evidence from at least a dozen other killings a month, is handled here in the Miami-Dade Crime Laboratory. Its warehouse contains literally millions of pieces of evidence.
While we wait for the lab results, we focus our attention on another case. When this one began, both the killer and the victim were a mystery.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MOISES VELAZQUEZ, MIAMI HOMICIDE UNIT (VOICE-OVER): So I was called into the office and told: This is your murder, the skeleton. It will never be solved. Just do what you can.
VELAZQUEZ (ON CAMERA): The body was found in a very badly decomposed state. The medical examiner ultimately ruled that it was a homicide.
GUPTA: As police were trying to figure out who this victim was, a family 300 miles away wondered about their 29-year-old son, Tyshon. He hadn't called in weeks and they were worried.
CHERYL BROWN, TYSHON'S MOTHER: Tyshon was very -- he was hilarious.
GUPTA: He was also the father of three children.
BROWN: He was very loving of people. From the time of3 years old, he always had his cousins around. He always had friends around. Funny guy. You never seen him depressed. You know, he never -- he saw good in every body.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Coming up, putting a face to the victim, the balancing act between science and art.
And still to come, separating fact and fiction on "CSI: Miami." Don't go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
GUPTA: When a body was discovered in a Miami warehouse in the winter of 2003, police couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman, let alone who it was.
But just down the hall here at the Miami-Dade Crime Lab, they would solve the puzzle.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA (voice-over): In "CSI" talk, it was a cold case. The body found in this warehouse had been there more than a week, not enough skin for a fingerprint, no clues to identify who this person was or why he or she was murdered.
ARNOLD YEN, MIAMI CITY P.D.: We were at a dead end. We had no way of hoping to find this person.
GUPTA: Around the same time, in Jacksonville, Florida, Cherilyn Gregory Brown (ph) called police to report their 29-year-old son, Tyshon, missing.
The last time they saw him, he was not his upbeat self.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was the week before Christmas, 2003. That was the most serious I had ever seen my son.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just figured that he was just, you know, hanging out with his friends, and I just kept thinking in the back of my mind, he'll call.
GUPTA: In Miami, homicide detectives had never heard of Tyshon Brown. They had a victim without an identity, literally without a face.
Enter crime scene technician Arnold Yen, Sergeant Velazquez and Lieutenant Joe Schillaci, all determined to find the killer.
YEN: It is almost like an insult. You can't just have somebody come into your city or your backyard and kill somebody and expect to get away with it.
LT. JOE SCHILLACI, MIAMI HOMICIDE UNIT: Somebody, just irresponsibly, just with hatred, takes another individual's life, to me, it becomes personal. And I'm going to look for him. I am going to look for him.
GUPTA: On "CSI: Miami," computers often do the heavy lifting. In reality, the human touch is vital. Without other evidence to solve the mystery, investigators turned to the bones, and forensic anthropologists at the University of Florida.
To help us understand how it all works, we turn to Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.
She goes to her own closet of bones from her old cases and shows us how to read them.
KATHY REICHS, FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST, UNC CHARLOTTE: This was a homicide, and this may also have involved a decapitation. If you look at the base of the skull here, this is a knife mark running across the base of the skull.
GUPTA: Reichs also uses this science in her best-selling crime novels, including her new one, "Monday Mourning." There is a lot you can learn from bones.
REICHS: This is a man. And looking at the skull, the brow ridges here are very large and bulbous. The muscle attachment back here is very large. This tends to be a little female. But the brow ridges are small, the orbits are sharp. It's more childlike-looking, actually. Which has nothing to do with behavior.
GUPTA: The skull can help determine a person's sex or race. Whites, for example, have a flatter profile than blacks, Asians have wider cheekbones, although with mixed races it gets more difficult.
REICHS: This little boy is about 12. This is typical black. The low nasal bridge, the projecting lower face.
GUPTA: Anthropologists look at growth plates, areas at the end of the bone. How they deteriorate helps determine a person's age.
Back in Miami, forensic artist Samantha Steinberg shows us how she put a face on the warehouse mystery.
SAMANTHA STEINBERG, FORENSIC ARTIST: She says that it's a black male, but he may have white mixed in, no younger than 30, about six feet tall.
GUPTA: It's a mixture of science and art. Thirty-two so-called markers are pasted on the skull. They vary in size, showing where the skin surface lies. In the warehouse case, the face is round, not long. The cheeks are full, not sallow. Guided by the anthropologist's notes, the face starts taking shape.
STEINBERG: The human eye on average is 25 millimeters, which is the same size as a U.S. quarter. So it's sort of a handy tool or reference that we can use.
We kind of follow the bony clues. Like this line right here along the ridge of the orbit is usually prominent in black males. The lower portion of the face sort of protrudes forward. The point where your lips, your top and your bottom lips meet, it doesn't meet here where the teeth end, your front teeth, the top teeth. It's just a little bit elevated. But the best reference you honestly have in doing a reconstruction is your own face and your own skull, so we do kind of poke around on our own faces and feel for things.
GUPTA: As the unidentified victim's face is fleshed out, the Brown family waits for word about their missing son.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He is missing. We haven't heard from him. We want to know where he is. We need help.
GUPTA: In the future, help may come quicker through better technology. The FBI lab in Virginia is testing new software to help artists. It has never been shown to the public before. In a sample case, a computer reads a CAT scan of a skull and compares it to other skulls, examining 10,000 points on the skull, compared to the 32 markers used today. The resulting facial image is still vague.
MICHAEL TAISTER, FBI LABORATORY: The computer will be able to tell you where the lips are located and will be able to place a nose for you and be able to put the eyes in the sockets as they should be. But it might take a little adjustment and that's where the artist comes in, to make those final details, adjustments.
GUPTA: The FBI is also using 3D scanners to duplicate the skull. This technology updates an old technique where a face is molded with clay right onto the original skull, possibly damaging it.
Steinberg says innovations like these might help but will never replace the artists.
STEINBERG: How do you know what shape the eye should be or what shape the nose should be or how the lips should be if somebody is not making that decision?
GUPTA: That's the art. But is she drawing a face that family or friends would recognize? Kathy Reichs is skeptical about using facial reconstructions. She says they are too subjective. To make her point, she had seven different artists reconstruct the face of a mutilated body.
REICHS: We had seven different reproductions done at different labs around the world, and it looked like seven different guys. And if you get it wrong, people can be distracted by having a detail wrong.
YEN: I disagree with it. I disagree with it. It may not be 100 percent close to what the person is, but there is one tiny feature that may click something in somebody's mind.
STEINBERG: We are pretty confident that we get it right. I think the trick for us is the right person has to see it.
GUPTA: And that's exactly what happened in the case of the body from the Miami warehouse.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And I was just sitting and watching TV and they showed the composite.
GUPTA: Within 48 hours of releasing this sketch to the media, Tyshon Brown's father Gregory recognized a familiar feature in that face. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When I first saw the picture, to me it didn't look anything like Tyshon. Nothing like him. And -- you know, except for the chin. That was the only thing that was similar to him. But I just had to clear it up in my mind to eliminate it, and so I just called down there.
GUPTA: The family called police, who, after checking dental records, were able to confirm that the body in the warehouse was Tyshon Brown. He had been murdered.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's tough because of the fact that my son is gone and somebody telling me that he's gone...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It is unfortunate to be the ones to have to deliver that news to a family, but at least this way they get some sort of resolution.
GUPTA: Two years after Tyshon's body was found, his killer is still at large.
SCHILLACI: What we can say about this case at this point is that I have full confidence that we have identified the offendant (ph) in this case. What we don't have are all the missing pieces to the puzzle so that we can bring this case to trial, and I am confident that we will get it. No doubt about it. We will get it.
ANNOUNCER: Next, the man who inspired David Caruso's lead role in "CSI: Miami," along with the true story behind an explosive episode.
And later, tracking a real murder mystery in Miami. A drop of blood becomes the star witness.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CHOI: Hello again. I'm Sophia Choi in Atlanta. More from Miami in a moment.
First, at about a quarter till the hour, the headlines.
Sweet news for big wine lovers and small wineries, too. By a vote of 5 to 4 today the Supreme Court today struck down state laws banning customers from placing orders with out-of-state vineyards. The decision overturns legislation in 24 states and potentially creates a bonanza for sales on the Internet.
Now, a moment from a quarter century of news from CNN: a moment when a young woman by the shame of Shannon Faulkner got into college and the whole world was watching.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHOI: She took on the tradition-bound, all-male bastion of the Citadel and won. The military academy in South Carolina accepted Shannon Faulkner in 1993 after she omitted all gender references from her application. The school reneged after finding out Faulkner was female, setting off a bitter legal battle.
SHANNON FAULKNER: I will fight it the whole way.
CHOI: Faulkner finally earned the right to join the Citadel's corps of cadets in August 1995.
I never, ever thought of backing out of this. There's never been a doubt in my mind that I would be at the Citadel.
The 19-year-old had much to prove and it proved to be too much. Six days later she was done. The first woman cadet the Citadel became the first woman to quit.
Faulkner finished her degree at tiny Anderson College in Western South Carolina and is now a high school English teacher in suburban Greenville.
Although her career at the Citadel was short, she opened the door for other women. Currently 120 women are enrolled as cadets at the Citadel, and 73 have graduated since 1999.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: I'm standing in a crypt at the largest coroner's office under one roof in the world. About 8,000 to 10,000 bodies come through here a year. Right now the body count is at 343.
GUPTA (voice-over): Most of the work is routine but when they need to identify a body, it's often Jose Hernandez that gets the call. He is a forensic technician. In this case, all he has got is a finger.
JOSE HERNANDEZ, FORENSIC TECHNICIAN: The quality of the fingers is very, very hard.
GUPTA: It was found in the desert, bone dry; too dry, too stiff to get a print. That won't stop Hernandez. He dips it in a chemical solution.
GUPTA (on camera): So this finger will look like that finger.
HERNANDEZ: This finger will look something like that, yes.
GUPTA: And now you can get a fingerprint off of it.
HERNANDEZ: Yes.
GUPTA (voice-over): Rolls the tip in ink and voila.
There's a fingerprint.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah. You see?
GUPTA: That's pretty good. All in a day's work.
GUPTA (on camera): The morgue is a grim place but on television it is like everything else, shiny and sleek. This is the Hollywood version of an autopsy theater. And here we'll let the "CSI Miami" team explain the dance between fiction and reality.
GUPTA (voice-over): Each week, another murder, another investigation. The bodies are brought here, to the "CSI Miami" autopsy theater, where all the equipment is state of the art, stuff you would be hard-pressed to find even in a well-equipped hospital.
Khandi Alexander plays medical examiner Alex Woods on "CSI Miami."
KHANDI ALEXANDER, ACTRESS: This is a real autopsy table. This is real. This is where the organs go. Up here is where students will come and watch an autopsy. And here, of course, is where we keep our dead bodies. Yes, all the stuff is real in here.
GUPTA (on camera): The special effects are just incredible for you, even, when you are standing right here. What is that like?
ALEXANDER: It is really wonderful because all of the organs are made out of silicone, so they are the exact texture and weight of a real organ so when you are cutting with a scalpel or when you are removing brain or matter, it feels real. So as an actor that just lends to your performance.
I love the blood.
GUPTA: We got that on tape? She loves the blood.
ALEXANDER: I love the blood. It's my favorite.
GUPTA: Liz Devine is the supervising producer. Before going Hollywood, she spent 15 years as a criminalist with the L.A. County's Sheriff's Department.
(on camera): Your role is to make sure everyone gets it right, but are you sort of, you know, do you give leniencies, you say, you know, it's OK, you can do it like this, because it makes better television?
DEVINE: In DNA, everybody has masks on, gloves on, lab coats. We forego the masks when we have our characters in here, because it realistically is very difficult to understand what someone is saying if you can't see their lips. And frankly, people want to see Emily Procter's face.
GUPTA: Devine works closely with an old friend, John Haynes, a former L.A. police detective, who was the model for Horatio Caine, David Caruso's character.
Haynes' police career ended after a bomb blew up in his hands. They drew on his bomb squad days for the episode "Freaks and Tweaks." DEVINE: This is based on the case that John and I actually worked, where we were at a crime scene and we were actually searching a vehicle and found a bomb, and literally had to evacuate. And so we decided to make that the beginning of an episode, of a murder in a methamphetamine lab.
And anywhere you have methamphetamine, you have chemicals, and anyplace you have volatile chemicals, obviously you could have an explosion or a fire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Run!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody, run!
GUPTA: For Liz Devine and John Haynes, brain-storming and mining memories together is proving to be a good second act.
(on camera): Ever think that you would be doing this sort of work here?
JOHN HAYNES, FORMER LAPD DETECTIVE: Never. Never. Not in a million years.
DEVINE: Nope. It's all about timing and whatever the mood is.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When we return, it is back to the mean streets of Miami, where police are hunting for a killer. The dramatic conclusion of a real crime scene investigation.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: On "CSI: Miami," the crime scene investigators always get their man. Now back in the real Miami, they have been working hard to catch the killer of Thomas Clark. Here is the dramatic conclusion of our story.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to the crime scene? What do you want to do?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, we're going to the crime scene to start that search.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, I'll meet you out there.
GUPTA (voice-over): Sergeant Moses Velazquez (ph) and Detective Freddy Ponce (ph) continue their pursuit of a suspect, confident they will find the person who bound, gagged and strangled Thomas Clark. They say the suspect was sloppy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They left a lot of evidence in there.
GUPTA: Police have a suspect's picture, but haven't released it. They are still hoping for a DNA match from samples taken at the crime scene, holding off so they don't alert the criminal they are on the trail.
In the meantime, the Clark family mourns their loss.
(MUSIC)
GUPTA: This funeral fills the church with family and friends.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Only five years he worked in that church, and now something like that could have happened to him.
GUPTA: Out on the streets, Ponce sees someone he thinks looks a lot like the surveillance picture and brings him in for questioning. Examiners check his prints. They do not match any at the crime scene. A false lead. They let him go. Their frustrations will last another two weeks.
Finally, the lab delivers news. DNA from the crime scene matches someone's in the database and a suspect is identified, 36-year-old Michael Murchison (ph). He is already in the Miami jail, arrested for an unrelated burglary.
Before they charge him with murder, detectives test another piece of evidence, a drop of blood on the victim's back. If it belongs to Murchison, police say, it will not only link him to the apartment, but directly to the murder. Again, the lab says Murchison is a match.
Detectives pay a visit to Thomas Clark's brother.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: William, we found the man who killed your brother. He is in jail.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the guy? You're sure? You're confident?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely. There's no doubt about that.
GUPTA: This is where a "CSI Miami" TV show would end, but in real life police still have to prove their case in court.
On March 28th, Michael Murchison is charged with Thomas Clark's murder.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A plea of not guilty...
GUPTA: On April 18th, Murchison enters a not guilty plea for second degree murder and robbery. He is now awaiting trial. His attorney Scott Sakin (ph) says he will conduct his own DNA investigation, how it was collected, how well Murchison's DNA matches the sample from the crime scene. Any DNA expert will tell you some matches are better than others.
Before detectives release details of the murder to the public, they brief William, and for the first time he hears how his brother was killed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your brother was tied up in the apartment, OK? And he was beat up by this person and he broke his neck. That means that we believe that he strangled him. Just so you know, you might hear that on TV when they read the arrest form, OK? And we believe that your brother fought back and that's how he got cut somehow and his blood (INAUDIBLE).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I appreciate you guys' involvement and how you handled it. You handled it with the expertise and I thought it was done very professional.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We understand what it is not to have some kind of closure, and so it's important, and I'm glad that we could bring that to you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It won't bring my brother back, I'm just glad some type of closure comes to it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Television would have us believe that every case is wrapped up in an hour. It rarely happens, of course.
What is true, however, is that police are coming up with more and more powerful techniques to catch the bad guys in the world. We on the other hand, only have an hour. Thanks for joining us, and good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired May 16, 2005 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: The following program contains images and storylines that may be disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
911 OPERATOR: Hello?
CALLER: Oh my God.
911 OPERATOR: What's the matter?
CALLER: We just found our neighbor dead!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm the victim's brother.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We already briefed your older brother, but I'll give you a little bit of -- obviously we're in the very early stages of an investigation right now. They found him. Unfortunately, he's deceased. We believe it's foul play.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SANJAY GUPTA, HOST (VOICE-OVER): This is the real CSI, a lot different than what you see on TV. How different? That's what this hour is all about.
We'll take you behind the scenes of the Hollywood version and follow detectives on a real homicide case.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening, again. We're going to spend the next hour in Miami, the backdrop for "CSI: Miami," one of the blockbuster dramas about forensic science.
Tonight we'll take a look at the anatomy of murder, see how a real murder investigation takes place, with a particular focus on what the body can tell us. It's a focus that's changing law enforcement and has made the CSI franchise such a hit.
CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us through the investigation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MOISES VELAZQUEZ, MIAMI CITY HOMICIDE: We have a homicide that not simply was the victim killed; he was bound at the hands, bound at the feet, a sheet wrapped around his head, the bedroom ransacked, his cell phone missing. We believe now that his jewelry is also missing.
GUPTA (VOICE-OVER): It's a murder with no witnesses. Miami city homicide detective Freddy Ponce and Sergeant Moises Velazquez head up the investigation and immediately call on the team of CSI technicians.
They spend the next 10 hours processing the crime scene, finding clues to help detectives piece together what happened the night 60- year-old Thomas Clark was killed.
VELAZQUEZ: We find a bolt and kitchen knife here on the chair next to the door. There's no forced entry into the apartment, but there's forced exit out of the apartment.
We believe what happens is is that our suspect comes in with the victim. Sometime during the night, the murder takes place, then he wants to exit the apartment and get away. However, he finds that the door is locked.
It looks like that just simply by habit, once the victim comes in, he automatically locks the door behind him. The suspect had to use the knife to unscrew the deadbolt and actually force his way out of the apartment.
This is a person that's desperate. He's not concerned with wearing rubber gloves and, you know, making sure he collects his hair samples and everything else. So we got him inside the vehicle.
So the eyewitness says he wasn't counting on is going to be forensic science.
We find some black sunglasses. According to the victim's girlfriend, he doesn't wear sunglasses. Also, the victim does not smoke. And we find a cigarette butt inside the ash tray. I believe that the drapes are partially pulled down because the offender may have been looking for a way out.
GUPTA: Hours into the investigation, the medical examiner arrives to examine and remove the body.
What's the motive? No one here knows. Thomas Clark was one of 14 brothers and sisters and a resident of this apartment for 25 years. He was also the superintendent and kept drugs and crime out. Not this time.
Detectives are optimistic. They say the criminal was sloppy.
VELAZQUEZ: Our suspect is leaving traces of himself inside this location.
GUPTA: Every place he touches might leave a fingerprint or palmprint.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we call a right lower hand.
GUPTA: Just last year, Miami started a palmprint database similar to the National Fingerprint Database, another tool to track a suspect.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This was already superglued, but now I'm trying to see if I can get some prints on it.
GUPTA: Superglue is a tried and true method to grab and seal a print. CSI technician Kevin Pratt...
KEVIN PRATT, CSI TECHNICIAN: Yes, it locks it in. It fixes it so we can process the item over and over again without the fingerprint deteriorating.
GUPTA: Grabbing a good print isn't as easy as it is on TV. Heating up the superglue to adhere to a print is the same, but finding a well-defined print...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're not that lucky. Not much detail on this one.
VELAZQUEZ: I don't see anything on there. Jesus Christ. There's another one there.
GUPTA: Simple swabbing picks up DNA on everything from door jams to blood.
VELAZQUEZ: See, also what's significant is that it looks like a single blood drop on the back of the shirt. So it could be several explanations for that. It could be that the offender himself is bleeding.
GUPTA: DNA has revolutionized CSI. Nowadays, even trace amounts can nab a killer.
Unfortunately, getting a DNA profile isn't as instant as the "CSI: Miami" TV show portrays.
WILLIAM STUVER, MIAMI-DADE CRIME LAB: It's futuristic. And that's Hollywood.
GUPTA: In real life, it requires sending samples to sophisticated labs. In this case, it's the Miami-Dade Crime Lab. There's a lot of waiting.
STUVER: A sample removed from a crime scene usually takes about a week from the time we first open the specimen until we actually have DNA profiles coming off the machine.
GUPTA: DNA testing is so popular, labs are backlogged with cases. In the future, robots might help speed up the process. The FBI crime lab uses them to process blood samples from federal offenders and expects one day robots will be able to take DNA from all types of evidence.
ARMANDO MARTINEZ, CAPTAIN, MIAMI POLICE: The homicide we had the other night...
GUPTA: Back in Miami, City Police Captain Armando Martinez makes the call.
MARTINEZ: We need it expedited if you can. OK?
GUPTA: Because this is a homicide, the county crime lab agrees to put this case ahead of others and process DNA ASAP. But it will still take days.
Detective Ponce is called to the medical examiner's office for the autopsy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought there was some abrasion here, but it looks like it's just this skin blistering. I really think he suffocated.
GUPTA: A tiny bone in the neck, like this one, is what makes this case a homicide. It's called the hyoid bone. The ME discovers that Clark's hyoid bone has been fractured.
GUPTA (ON CAMERA): So the hyoid bone, if someone is strangled like this, very likely this bone is going to be broken?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right, good possibility that it'll be broken.
GUPTA: This isn't Thomas Clark's hyoid bone, but this is what made you convinced this was a homicide.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's correct. The fracture occurred right here.
GUPTA: Can you say for sure without a doubt that this man was murdered?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
GUPTA: If Clark suffocated, why is the blanket that was wrapped around the victim's head so bloody?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The decomposition fluid can look like blood. And I have a feeling most of that is just decomposition fluid.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do we have a time of death?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
GUPTA: Programs like "CSI: Miami" make it look easy. But in reality, determining the exact time someone dies is almost impossible, especially if the body is decomposing, which Clark's was. Dr. Chundru estimates Clark was killed 18 to 33 hours before he was found.
DR. SATISH CHUNDRU, MEDICAL EXAMINER: The state he was in, the decomposition, it's hard to even narrow that down. The shows on TV, they say, yes, he died between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. It's unrealistic, but it makes for a good TV show.
GUPTA: Back at police headquarters, fingerprint examiners hit a snag. Prints from the crime scene aren't matching any in a national database. Police are convinced the suspect has a criminal record and should show up in the database.
Fingerprint analysis is not as high-tech as the TV shows would imply. Even with a hit, trained eyes and experience are still needed to make a match.
GUILLERMO MARTIN, MIAMI CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT: Remember, this is just a tool. It doesn't make the identification. We do. (INAUDIBLE) You got to like it. It's a very tedious job.
GUPTA: By the end of the second day, there are no leads. The Clark family can't understand who would do this.
VELAZQUEZ: If anybody could think of anything of anyone that Thomas might have had a problem with?
HELEN CLARK, VICTIM'S SISTER: You know, he always was there no matter what. He knew everybody.
GUPTA: Back at the Miami Police Department, technicians start processing the victim's car. Neighbors say they saw him drive in with a stranger. Maybe there's a clue outside or inside. With no witnesses, no suspects, which piece of evidence, if any, will crack this case?
MARTIN: It's like hunting down a ghost. Nobody knows him. Nobody's seen him before. And it's just picking on a face out of millions.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Coming up, the detectives find a tantalizing clue.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE). That's the victim, that's the offender right there.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: But next, we go behind the yellow tape in Hollywood. Behind the scenes with "CSI: Miami."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SOPHIA CHOI, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Sophia Choi in Atlanta. NEWSNIGHT will continue in just a moment. But first, at about a quarter past the hour, the latest from HEADLINE NEWS.
And we begin with Army Specialist Sabrina Harman. A military jury convicting her late this evening on six of seven counts of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Ms. Harman is featured in a number of the most notorious photographs of abuse. She faces up to six-and-a-half years in the stockade.
Next to southern Baghdad, where a pair of car bombs went off just minutes apart today. It happened at a market place. Police say nine Iraqi soldiers died, along with a number of civilians. By day's end, attacks across the country had taken at least two dozen lives.
And after deadly violence in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not to mention storm clouds in Washington, "Newsweek" has taken it back. It retraced a story saying interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated the Koran flushing one copy down the toilet. The White House calls it a good first step. As for the protesters, many aren't buying it. Now back to NEWSNIGHT.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: This looks like a big city crime lab, but it's actually a Hollywood set where they shoot most of the scenes for "CSI: Miami." When we came out here, we learned that every "CSI" show relies heavily on real cops and forensics experts. In fact, the supervising producer for "CSI: Miami" had more than a decade of experience cracking real crimes.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Quick rehearsal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And action!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, man. What the hell are you doing?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've been lying to me for months.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't be stupid. Put the gun down.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cut!
GUPTA (voice-over): Here is what a day on the job looks like for Elizabeth Devine in the middle of the Florida Everglades, followed by a CNN news crew.
For this show, the "CSI" crew set fire to the Everglades, a controlled burn with real firefighters standing by. They go to great heights to get the shot, as air boats race by below.
Check out the finished product -- the chase scene.
The story is fictional drama. A serial killer on the loose, but parts of it inspired by real life and Devine's days as a top-notch criminalist. She works closely with the director and the actors, giving them advice from the field. ELIZABETH DEVINE, "CSI: MIAMI" SUP. PRODUCER: I wanted it to seem like that guy's going to be the problem.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cut! Next.
GUPTA: The labs on "CSI" and "CSI: Miami" are modeled on this, the L.A. County Sheriff's Crime Lab.
DEVINE: So this is my old stomping grounds.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A little different than your new place, probably.
DEVINE: Yes, it's not as fancy as the "CSI" lab.
GUPTA: Now when you do television, I mean, does it feel funny to take some of those stories or some of your experiences and put it into entertainment type programming?
DEVINE: I don't -- we don't do anything that I think is gratuitously violent as entertainment, even if it is entertaining. What we want to do is show the reasons people become desperate enough to kill, and then try to twist and turn it through the evidence analysis. So you really don't know who did it.
The man that hired me out of grad school.
BARRY FISHER, DIR., LA COUNTY SHERIFF'S CRIME LAB: (INAUDIBLE).
GUPTA: So how much -- I got to ask you -- how many of your colleagues have you lost to the world of Liz Devine and Hollywood?
FISHER: Well, she is a serious drain on forensic science over here. We've lost four full-time people.
GUPTA: For 15 years, Elizabeth worked on some high-profile and often grisly cases.
DEVINE: This was a blood stain on his shirt. And I was able to prove that it was the victim's handprint. And the victim grabbed his shirt while she was still alive.
GUPTA: Stabbed him while he was...
DEVINE: She grabbed it and grabbed it like that.
GUPTA: Blood spatter in the whole...
DEVINE: Yes, yes.
GUPTA: She says that while she doesn't miss dealing with the tragedies or the long hours, the adrenaline rush was hard to give up.
DEVINE: When you get out there and you find the key piece of evidence, it's so exciting, because you know, this is it. This is the piece of evidence that's going to tell me who did it. GUPTA: A lot of "CSI", the original "CSI" is based on some of the stuff you worked on here and you saw here at the crime lab here?
DEVINE: My whole life is on that show. Everything that happened to me.
GUPTA: Divorced with three children, Devine says it was tough to leave her former job. It was a steady paycheck and provided the security she needed.
DEVINE: You can't really do -- you can't do the Hollywood thing temporarily. You really have to get all the way in. The hours are 12 hours minimum every day. And there's no way to do that part-time at all.
GUPTA: Back home in L.A. is where the ideas for the smash TV series are born.
Beautiful house, it really is.
DEVINE: Thank you. Thank you. I like it here. Sort of like not being in L.A.
GUPTA: Swimming pool, we've got the mountains, but it's all very private.
One of her favorite episodes is from the original "CSI" and came about after she first met the executive producer.
DEVINE: I'm really fond of blood drops, which was my first episode that I wrote with Ann Donahue. And actually, I got story credit. And she wrote it. But it was really very factually based. And I met her. And I had just been working this crime scene.
And she said, well, I'm writing a "CSI" episode on this case. And she held up the paper. And I said, well, that's -- I've just been working on that for the last five days.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Female Caucasian. Appears to be one stab wound to the throat.
DEVINE: It was probably one of the most realistic crime scenes that had ever been on TV at that time, because it was from my experience. And crime scenes being very lonely, quiet places, which is never what you see on TV.
GUPTA: And for Devine, it seems that going Hollywood is in her DNA. Her uncle, Dr. Ronald Hornbloom, lives with her. He was L.A. County's chief coroner and a technical adviser for "Quincy." He still believes that show set the standard.
RONALD HORNBLOOM, UNCLE: I thought it was great. I don't think "CSI" is as great.
DEVINE: What? Are you kidding me?
HORNBLOOM: Yes.
DEVINE: How can you say that on camera? God.
GUPTA: Still, he was the inspiration for his young niece.
DEVINE: Kill her. Cut.
GUPTA: And continuing a family tradition, Devine's youngest daughter is already following in mom's footsteps.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I see fingerprints all over that.
DEVINE: Look at that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do not cross.
DEVINE: Wow.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just ahead, we return to the scene of the crime. Detectives examine the first clues in the brutal murder of a 60-year-old man.
And then, a cold case; a body without a face; a family looking for answers. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
FREDDY PONCE, MIAMI HOMICIDE UNIT: This is Thomas Clark. He was pulled in his apartment in the early morning hours. And he was last scene with an unknown black male at approximately 1:00 in the morning.
GUPTA (VOICE-OVER): Day three into the investigation, detectives get a clue that could break the case wide open. It's something a neighbor sees the night Clark is strangled.
PONCE: He's sitting in his car and he sees the victim and a male. They don't go into the apartment, but they go straight to the store.
This is the store with the video right here.
GUPTA: The store security cameras were on and recording.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hot off the presses.
PONCE: There it is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rock and roll.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good job.
PONCE: This victim was coming into the store...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right. PONCE: The offender's right behind him.
GUPTA: On the "CSI: Miami" TV show, technology works flawlessly. In reality, there's often a glitch.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think you're going to have to upload this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go to your tool thing so you can press play.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The computer won't read it. You're going to try in the DVD machine.
GUPTA: In this case, it takes an hour to get the disk to play, but it's worth the wait.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the kid. Stop. That's victim. That's the offender right there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there are the glasses.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Definitely saw the glasses.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There he goes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There he is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the victim. See the gold chain? And there's the offender.
GUPTA: They now have a suspect, but whether or not he is the actual offender is still not known.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stop it. Back up. Beautiful.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's our man.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's the sunglasses.
GUPTA: They say the glasses on the suspect appear to match those at the crime scene. The video image is blurry, a far cry from the high resolution images the "CSI: Miami" TV shows portray. And in real life, it's rare to zoom in on clues like this.
But detectives say this image is good enough.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If this was your brother or your partner that you hang out with, you're going to go: I know that guy. That's what somebody's going to tell me when I show it to them. They go, "Oh, look who it is." That's what they're going to say.
GUPTA: Now detectives face a decision: Do they release the photo right away, possibly tipping off the suspect or do they wait for DNA results, which could take weeks?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Submit it to the database. Hope that he's in the database and get his identification that way. Let's go that route...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, yes, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's do that route first...
GUPTA: In the end, they wait.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's got to be in the DNA database.
GUPTA: Unlike most TV shows, there are no rewrites. And everyone is left wondering if the weeks of waiting will let the murderer get away.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: The DNA evidence, along with evidence from at least a dozen other killings a month, is handled here in the Miami-Dade Crime Laboratory. Its warehouse contains literally millions of pieces of evidence.
While we wait for the lab results, we focus our attention on another case. When this one began, both the killer and the victim were a mystery.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MOISES VELAZQUEZ, MIAMI HOMICIDE UNIT (VOICE-OVER): So I was called into the office and told: This is your murder, the skeleton. It will never be solved. Just do what you can.
VELAZQUEZ (ON CAMERA): The body was found in a very badly decomposed state. The medical examiner ultimately ruled that it was a homicide.
GUPTA: As police were trying to figure out who this victim was, a family 300 miles away wondered about their 29-year-old son, Tyshon. He hadn't called in weeks and they were worried.
CHERYL BROWN, TYSHON'S MOTHER: Tyshon was very -- he was hilarious.
GUPTA: He was also the father of three children.
BROWN: He was very loving of people. From the time of3 years old, he always had his cousins around. He always had friends around. Funny guy. You never seen him depressed. You know, he never -- he saw good in every body.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Coming up, putting a face to the victim, the balancing act between science and art.
And still to come, separating fact and fiction on "CSI: Miami." Don't go away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
GUPTA: When a body was discovered in a Miami warehouse in the winter of 2003, police couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman, let alone who it was.
But just down the hall here at the Miami-Dade Crime Lab, they would solve the puzzle.
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GUPTA (voice-over): In "CSI" talk, it was a cold case. The body found in this warehouse had been there more than a week, not enough skin for a fingerprint, no clues to identify who this person was or why he or she was murdered.
ARNOLD YEN, MIAMI CITY P.D.: We were at a dead end. We had no way of hoping to find this person.
GUPTA: Around the same time, in Jacksonville, Florida, Cherilyn Gregory Brown (ph) called police to report their 29-year-old son, Tyshon, missing.
The last time they saw him, he was not his upbeat self.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was the week before Christmas, 2003. That was the most serious I had ever seen my son.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just figured that he was just, you know, hanging out with his friends, and I just kept thinking in the back of my mind, he'll call.
GUPTA: In Miami, homicide detectives had never heard of Tyshon Brown. They had a victim without an identity, literally without a face.
Enter crime scene technician Arnold Yen, Sergeant Velazquez and Lieutenant Joe Schillaci, all determined to find the killer.
YEN: It is almost like an insult. You can't just have somebody come into your city or your backyard and kill somebody and expect to get away with it.
LT. JOE SCHILLACI, MIAMI HOMICIDE UNIT: Somebody, just irresponsibly, just with hatred, takes another individual's life, to me, it becomes personal. And I'm going to look for him. I am going to look for him.
GUPTA: On "CSI: Miami," computers often do the heavy lifting. In reality, the human touch is vital. Without other evidence to solve the mystery, investigators turned to the bones, and forensic anthropologists at the University of Florida.
To help us understand how it all works, we turn to Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.
She goes to her own closet of bones from her old cases and shows us how to read them.
KATHY REICHS, FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST, UNC CHARLOTTE: This was a homicide, and this may also have involved a decapitation. If you look at the base of the skull here, this is a knife mark running across the base of the skull.
GUPTA: Reichs also uses this science in her best-selling crime novels, including her new one, "Monday Mourning." There is a lot you can learn from bones.
REICHS: This is a man. And looking at the skull, the brow ridges here are very large and bulbous. The muscle attachment back here is very large. This tends to be a little female. But the brow ridges are small, the orbits are sharp. It's more childlike-looking, actually. Which has nothing to do with behavior.
GUPTA: The skull can help determine a person's sex or race. Whites, for example, have a flatter profile than blacks, Asians have wider cheekbones, although with mixed races it gets more difficult.
REICHS: This little boy is about 12. This is typical black. The low nasal bridge, the projecting lower face.
GUPTA: Anthropologists look at growth plates, areas at the end of the bone. How they deteriorate helps determine a person's age.
Back in Miami, forensic artist Samantha Steinberg shows us how she put a face on the warehouse mystery.
SAMANTHA STEINBERG, FORENSIC ARTIST: She says that it's a black male, but he may have white mixed in, no younger than 30, about six feet tall.
GUPTA: It's a mixture of science and art. Thirty-two so-called markers are pasted on the skull. They vary in size, showing where the skin surface lies. In the warehouse case, the face is round, not long. The cheeks are full, not sallow. Guided by the anthropologist's notes, the face starts taking shape.
STEINBERG: The human eye on average is 25 millimeters, which is the same size as a U.S. quarter. So it's sort of a handy tool or reference that we can use.
We kind of follow the bony clues. Like this line right here along the ridge of the orbit is usually prominent in black males. The lower portion of the face sort of protrudes forward. The point where your lips, your top and your bottom lips meet, it doesn't meet here where the teeth end, your front teeth, the top teeth. It's just a little bit elevated. But the best reference you honestly have in doing a reconstruction is your own face and your own skull, so we do kind of poke around on our own faces and feel for things.
GUPTA: As the unidentified victim's face is fleshed out, the Brown family waits for word about their missing son.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He is missing. We haven't heard from him. We want to know where he is. We need help.
GUPTA: In the future, help may come quicker through better technology. The FBI lab in Virginia is testing new software to help artists. It has never been shown to the public before. In a sample case, a computer reads a CAT scan of a skull and compares it to other skulls, examining 10,000 points on the skull, compared to the 32 markers used today. The resulting facial image is still vague.
MICHAEL TAISTER, FBI LABORATORY: The computer will be able to tell you where the lips are located and will be able to place a nose for you and be able to put the eyes in the sockets as they should be. But it might take a little adjustment and that's where the artist comes in, to make those final details, adjustments.
GUPTA: The FBI is also using 3D scanners to duplicate the skull. This technology updates an old technique where a face is molded with clay right onto the original skull, possibly damaging it.
Steinberg says innovations like these might help but will never replace the artists.
STEINBERG: How do you know what shape the eye should be or what shape the nose should be or how the lips should be if somebody is not making that decision?
GUPTA: That's the art. But is she drawing a face that family or friends would recognize? Kathy Reichs is skeptical about using facial reconstructions. She says they are too subjective. To make her point, she had seven different artists reconstruct the face of a mutilated body.
REICHS: We had seven different reproductions done at different labs around the world, and it looked like seven different guys. And if you get it wrong, people can be distracted by having a detail wrong.
YEN: I disagree with it. I disagree with it. It may not be 100 percent close to what the person is, but there is one tiny feature that may click something in somebody's mind.
STEINBERG: We are pretty confident that we get it right. I think the trick for us is the right person has to see it.
GUPTA: And that's exactly what happened in the case of the body from the Miami warehouse.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And I was just sitting and watching TV and they showed the composite.
GUPTA: Within 48 hours of releasing this sketch to the media, Tyshon Brown's father Gregory recognized a familiar feature in that face. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When I first saw the picture, to me it didn't look anything like Tyshon. Nothing like him. And -- you know, except for the chin. That was the only thing that was similar to him. But I just had to clear it up in my mind to eliminate it, and so I just called down there.
GUPTA: The family called police, who, after checking dental records, were able to confirm that the body in the warehouse was Tyshon Brown. He had been murdered.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's tough because of the fact that my son is gone and somebody telling me that he's gone...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It is unfortunate to be the ones to have to deliver that news to a family, but at least this way they get some sort of resolution.
GUPTA: Two years after Tyshon's body was found, his killer is still at large.
SCHILLACI: What we can say about this case at this point is that I have full confidence that we have identified the offendant (ph) in this case. What we don't have are all the missing pieces to the puzzle so that we can bring this case to trial, and I am confident that we will get it. No doubt about it. We will get it.
ANNOUNCER: Next, the man who inspired David Caruso's lead role in "CSI: Miami," along with the true story behind an explosive episode.
And later, tracking a real murder mystery in Miami. A drop of blood becomes the star witness.
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CHOI: Hello again. I'm Sophia Choi in Atlanta. More from Miami in a moment.
First, at about a quarter till the hour, the headlines.
Sweet news for big wine lovers and small wineries, too. By a vote of 5 to 4 today the Supreme Court today struck down state laws banning customers from placing orders with out-of-state vineyards. The decision overturns legislation in 24 states and potentially creates a bonanza for sales on the Internet.
Now, a moment from a quarter century of news from CNN: a moment when a young woman by the shame of Shannon Faulkner got into college and the whole world was watching.
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CHOI: She took on the tradition-bound, all-male bastion of the Citadel and won. The military academy in South Carolina accepted Shannon Faulkner in 1993 after she omitted all gender references from her application. The school reneged after finding out Faulkner was female, setting off a bitter legal battle.
SHANNON FAULKNER: I will fight it the whole way.
CHOI: Faulkner finally earned the right to join the Citadel's corps of cadets in August 1995.
I never, ever thought of backing out of this. There's never been a doubt in my mind that I would be at the Citadel.
The 19-year-old had much to prove and it proved to be too much. Six days later she was done. The first woman cadet the Citadel became the first woman to quit.
Faulkner finished her degree at tiny Anderson College in Western South Carolina and is now a high school English teacher in suburban Greenville.
Although her career at the Citadel was short, she opened the door for other women. Currently 120 women are enrolled as cadets at the Citadel, and 73 have graduated since 1999.
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GUPTA: I'm standing in a crypt at the largest coroner's office under one roof in the world. About 8,000 to 10,000 bodies come through here a year. Right now the body count is at 343.
GUPTA (voice-over): Most of the work is routine but when they need to identify a body, it's often Jose Hernandez that gets the call. He is a forensic technician. In this case, all he has got is a finger.
JOSE HERNANDEZ, FORENSIC TECHNICIAN: The quality of the fingers is very, very hard.
GUPTA: It was found in the desert, bone dry; too dry, too stiff to get a print. That won't stop Hernandez. He dips it in a chemical solution.
GUPTA (on camera): So this finger will look like that finger.
HERNANDEZ: This finger will look something like that, yes.
GUPTA: And now you can get a fingerprint off of it.
HERNANDEZ: Yes.
GUPTA (voice-over): Rolls the tip in ink and voila.
There's a fingerprint.
HERNANDEZ: Yeah. You see?
GUPTA: That's pretty good. All in a day's work.
GUPTA (on camera): The morgue is a grim place but on television it is like everything else, shiny and sleek. This is the Hollywood version of an autopsy theater. And here we'll let the "CSI Miami" team explain the dance between fiction and reality.
GUPTA (voice-over): Each week, another murder, another investigation. The bodies are brought here, to the "CSI Miami" autopsy theater, where all the equipment is state of the art, stuff you would be hard-pressed to find even in a well-equipped hospital.
Khandi Alexander plays medical examiner Alex Woods on "CSI Miami."
KHANDI ALEXANDER, ACTRESS: This is a real autopsy table. This is real. This is where the organs go. Up here is where students will come and watch an autopsy. And here, of course, is where we keep our dead bodies. Yes, all the stuff is real in here.
GUPTA (on camera): The special effects are just incredible for you, even, when you are standing right here. What is that like?
ALEXANDER: It is really wonderful because all of the organs are made out of silicone, so they are the exact texture and weight of a real organ so when you are cutting with a scalpel or when you are removing brain or matter, it feels real. So as an actor that just lends to your performance.
I love the blood.
GUPTA: We got that on tape? She loves the blood.
ALEXANDER: I love the blood. It's my favorite.
GUPTA: Liz Devine is the supervising producer. Before going Hollywood, she spent 15 years as a criminalist with the L.A. County's Sheriff's Department.
(on camera): Your role is to make sure everyone gets it right, but are you sort of, you know, do you give leniencies, you say, you know, it's OK, you can do it like this, because it makes better television?
DEVINE: In DNA, everybody has masks on, gloves on, lab coats. We forego the masks when we have our characters in here, because it realistically is very difficult to understand what someone is saying if you can't see their lips. And frankly, people want to see Emily Procter's face.
GUPTA: Devine works closely with an old friend, John Haynes, a former L.A. police detective, who was the model for Horatio Caine, David Caruso's character.
Haynes' police career ended after a bomb blew up in his hands. They drew on his bomb squad days for the episode "Freaks and Tweaks." DEVINE: This is based on the case that John and I actually worked, where we were at a crime scene and we were actually searching a vehicle and found a bomb, and literally had to evacuate. And so we decided to make that the beginning of an episode, of a murder in a methamphetamine lab.
And anywhere you have methamphetamine, you have chemicals, and anyplace you have volatile chemicals, obviously you could have an explosion or a fire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Run!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody, run!
GUPTA: For Liz Devine and John Haynes, brain-storming and mining memories together is proving to be a good second act.
(on camera): Ever think that you would be doing this sort of work here?
JOHN HAYNES, FORMER LAPD DETECTIVE: Never. Never. Not in a million years.
DEVINE: Nope. It's all about timing and whatever the mood is.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When we return, it is back to the mean streets of Miami, where police are hunting for a killer. The dramatic conclusion of a real crime scene investigation.
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GUPTA: On "CSI: Miami," the crime scene investigators always get their man. Now back in the real Miami, they have been working hard to catch the killer of Thomas Clark. Here is the dramatic conclusion of our story.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to the crime scene? What do you want to do?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, we're going to the crime scene to start that search.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, I'll meet you out there.
GUPTA (voice-over): Sergeant Moses Velazquez (ph) and Detective Freddy Ponce (ph) continue their pursuit of a suspect, confident they will find the person who bound, gagged and strangled Thomas Clark. They say the suspect was sloppy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They left a lot of evidence in there.
GUPTA: Police have a suspect's picture, but haven't released it. They are still hoping for a DNA match from samples taken at the crime scene, holding off so they don't alert the criminal they are on the trail.
In the meantime, the Clark family mourns their loss.
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GUPTA: This funeral fills the church with family and friends.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Only five years he worked in that church, and now something like that could have happened to him.
GUPTA: Out on the streets, Ponce sees someone he thinks looks a lot like the surveillance picture and brings him in for questioning. Examiners check his prints. They do not match any at the crime scene. A false lead. They let him go. Their frustrations will last another two weeks.
Finally, the lab delivers news. DNA from the crime scene matches someone's in the database and a suspect is identified, 36-year-old Michael Murchison (ph). He is already in the Miami jail, arrested for an unrelated burglary.
Before they charge him with murder, detectives test another piece of evidence, a drop of blood on the victim's back. If it belongs to Murchison, police say, it will not only link him to the apartment, but directly to the murder. Again, the lab says Murchison is a match.
Detectives pay a visit to Thomas Clark's brother.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: William, we found the man who killed your brother. He is in jail.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the guy? You're sure? You're confident?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely. There's no doubt about that.
GUPTA: This is where a "CSI Miami" TV show would end, but in real life police still have to prove their case in court.
On March 28th, Michael Murchison is charged with Thomas Clark's murder.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A plea of not guilty...
GUPTA: On April 18th, Murchison enters a not guilty plea for second degree murder and robbery. He is now awaiting trial. His attorney Scott Sakin (ph) says he will conduct his own DNA investigation, how it was collected, how well Murchison's DNA matches the sample from the crime scene. Any DNA expert will tell you some matches are better than others.
Before detectives release details of the murder to the public, they brief William, and for the first time he hears how his brother was killed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your brother was tied up in the apartment, OK? And he was beat up by this person and he broke his neck. That means that we believe that he strangled him. Just so you know, you might hear that on TV when they read the arrest form, OK? And we believe that your brother fought back and that's how he got cut somehow and his blood (INAUDIBLE).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I appreciate you guys' involvement and how you handled it. You handled it with the expertise and I thought it was done very professional.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We understand what it is not to have some kind of closure, and so it's important, and I'm glad that we could bring that to you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It won't bring my brother back, I'm just glad some type of closure comes to it.
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BROWN: Television would have us believe that every case is wrapped up in an hour. It rarely happens, of course.
What is true, however, is that police are coming up with more and more powerful techniques to catch the bad guys in the world. We on the other hand, only have an hour. Thanks for joining us, and good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.
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