CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 4 - Episode 12 - Butterflied

Written by David Rambo
Directed by Richard Lewis

A nurse is found with her throat slashed and posed in a suggestive position in her bathroom shower, slumped over far enough to reveal a red thong and a butterfly tattoo on the small of her back. For Grissom, it is a particularly unsettling crime scene – the victim looks a lot like Sara Sidle.

Her best friend – and a nosy neighbor – quickly set the scene. Debbie Marlin had been seeing an intern from the Palm Desert Hospital where she worked, but she may have had an open-door policy when it came to her social life and good-looking doctors.

If Michael Clark did indeed killed Debbie, he was smart enough to clean up after himself – both inside the bathroom where Debbie bled to death, and outside her house. Grissom and Catherine discover that the entire bathroom – all four drains, the sink and the tub, have been bleached clean, as well as every inch of tile, the vanity, the walls and the mirrors – everywhere but in the shower where Debbie was found. And all the cleaning tools in the house are gone as well. “He thinks he’s smarter than the evidence,” Grissom says, and he intends to prove the killer wrong.

When Sara and Warrick search the neighborhood garbage cans, they find the missing cleaning solvents and towels – and the neatly dismembered remains of another victim, this one male. Dr. Robbins determines that it would take 12 hours for someone to dissect a human body with the skill and precision that this killer used. “Your butcher is a doctor,” Catherine concludes.

The CSIs don’t give up. The bleach the killer poured down the tub drainpipe missed one strand of hair with a skin tag that can still be read for DNA, which they believe might nail Dr. Clark. They do get the ID – but not only does the lone hair belong to Dr. Clark, so do the body parts. Their intern is the second victim. “So instead of looking at who wanted to kill her,” Grissom says, “we’re looking at who wanted to kill them.”