CSI: CRIME scene investigation

Season 5 - Episode 16 - Big Middle

Written by Naren Shankar, Dustin Lee Abraham and Judith McCreary
Directed by Bill Eagles

Grissom, Greg and Sara investigate when a man is found asphyxiated in a hotel room, and it appears that he may have hooked up with someone attending a plus-sized convention. Maurice Hudson liked having sex with overweight women but didn’t like to be seen with them, which made him popular – and unpopular –with a lot of women at the convention who knew him.

 Purple silk fibers found in the victim’s mouth puts Grissom on the killer’s trail, and the custom-made lingerie the threads match narrows the suspect list to two women who admit they were with Maurice Hudson the night he died. One of them admits only to having a good time, and then leaving, with the victim still very much alive. The other suspect, Brenda Morgan, admits she liked Hudson, that he made her feel sexy, but that she became enraged when she realized he was having sex with someone else. She confesses to suffocating Hudson with a pillow after she slept with him, and then leaving the room, but the hotel surveillance tape does not confirm the time line of her story, indicating she spent the night with a dead man. And Hudson’s cause of death does not match Brenda’s explanation of how her lover died, which leads the team to try to determine what really happened that night – and why their suspect would confess to a murder she didn’t commit.

Meanwhile, Catherine, Warrick and Nick look into a gruesome killing with a sawed-off shotgun in a canyon. One major clue to the male victim’s identity – the beavers in the stream near where Russell’s body was found used $25,000 worth of C-notes to build their dam – which leads them to figure out that the dead man Kelvin Russell was a cocky sports book employee that nobody liked who seems to have made a bundle on illegal wagers right before he died. The one person who had the most to lose from Russell’s win is his former boss, sports book owner Mitch Urbana (guest star Steve Lawrence), who may just have gotten more than a little tired of Russell showing him up, and decided to settle the score once and for all.