CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 4 - Episode 1 - Assume Nothing

Written by  Anthony E. Zuiker & Danny Cannon
Directed by Richard Lewis

A couple is found murdered on the Strip under particularly gruesome circumstances – the wife is found in their hotel room, throat slit, without a trace of useable evidence as to who killed her in what looks like an almost loving way. The CSI team is even more puzzled when her husband turns up dead in the hotel parking garage, with the murder weapon in the seat beside him. If he killed his wife, who killed him?

The CSIs suspect there are only two reasons why people wind up dead in Vegas – money or sex. In this case, it appears that the dead couple may have been into swinging, and the team’s only clue to what may have happened comes from the hotel surveillance videos. Two probable suspects, a man and a woman, who appear on the video the night of the murder may have lured their victims to their doom with untold, lurid promises.

 But the investigation becomes even more complicated when a second couple is found dead at a seedy motel far from the glamour and glitz of Las Vegas Blvd. The wife was killed in exactly the same way as the first woman, but the husband is found fatally stabbed – with the murder weapon – in the motel’s ice machine. Unfortunately, Grissom thinks he knows why the killer may have changed his or her M.O. – Nick, bragging to an acquaintance about the investigation, let slip some key information that may have tipped the murderer off, forcing a change of venue.

When the original surveillance video finally helps them track down possible witnesses – another couple, the Rifkins, also into the swinging scene – Grissom discovers that they may have lucked out when they started bickering in front of the suspects. The male suspect asked Kent Rifkin: “How much do you love your wife?” His manner, the Rifkins claimed, was so creepy they instantly sobered up, and when they started to argue in front of the suspects, they were asked to leave. “That might have save your life,” Grissom tells them. It is clear to him that the suspects forced the husbands to kill their wives, but how horrible must the alternative have been that the husbands agreed to their sick command?

 Grissom and Nick return to the scene of the first murder, and Grissom realizes that the Magic Fingers on the bed may hold a clue – he and Nick dismantle the coin box from the vibrating bed, and the prints they find on the coins lead them to their suspects, the very creepy Mandy and Cameron Klinefeld. But the writing judge will not issue a search warrant on the Klinefelds until Grissom and his team come up with something more concrete. When Grissom objects, worried that the sexual serial killers may murder again, and challenges the judge about warrants he has granted on less evidence, the judge hits him between the eyes. He points out that Sam Braun’s conviction has been overturned because of Catherine’s sloppiness, so Grissom knows what he has to do. The evidence never lies – he just needs more of it – so he tells the team they have to start from the beginning, assuming nothing, and questioning everything.