The REAL Crime Scene Investigators of New York City

Backstory: I’ve been exploring some of my old writing from high school and thought it would be fun to share to celebrate how far I’ve come as a writer. This one was a final for my college forensics class in high school. In the assignment I had to create a short story on how crime scene investigations really work (my old teacher was not a fan of any CSI shows except for Bones because the way evidence is actually processed is quite different). As a very sleep-deprived high school overachiever, I jumped at the chance to use the creative side of my brain in a science class and this is what I came up with (and also I got an A+ in case anyone cares).

Content warning: It is supposed to be an accurate depiction of what forensics technicians go through, so some of it may be triggering. Reader discretion is advised.

The Crime Scene

I remember the case like it was yesterday. It had been my first couple of months working as an evidence technician for forensics lab in New York City that worked very closely with police precinct (I’d tell you what the name was, but then I’d have to kill you).

We got to the scene and I was so new to the whole thing I almost had to duct tape my mouth shut to prevent myself from screaming or gagging or doing anything that would have contaminated the crime scene- or made me look unprofessional. But that was really hard because there was blood at the crime scene. Lots of blood. There was a reason why I didn’t become a doctor. I went to college to be a forensic scientist. You know- the people that do the work in the lab, where there isn’t the smell of blood and death everywhere. But, in this economy, when you’re lucky enough to get a job offer, you can’t be picky. It could have been worse, I suppose. At least it didn’t require entomology (and there is nothing more disgusting than studying maggots from cadavers, except maybe being the person that collects them. Thankfully, I am not that person).

I was still so new to the whole crime scene investigation thing that I would go through the crime scene processing steps- PPPSCRIPT- in my head because I was still so nervous. Being the person that collects the evidence and records the scene is kind of an important job. Ever since the sensationalized OJ trial, where the majority of the evidence was mishandled, miss-packaged, or otherwise contaminated (seriously- who lets the criminal handle the evidence because the lawyer said “If the glove doesn’t fit you MUST acquit”?), and the CSI effect took over America, forensic science has been put under a microscope (no pun intended) and everything has to perfect and presented to the jury in a package with a bow on it. That’s why there was a need to create a methodical way to process a crime scene. The steps went as follows:

Step One: P- Preserve life- the ambulance had already been called and taken the victim away, so that was taken care of. The outline of the victim was already made and the crime scene tape was up as well (got to love those first arriving officers).

Step Two: Second P- Protect the crime scene- that wasn’t really my part of the job, but it was still important to make sure the officers were stopping unauthorized personal from stomping all over any evidence.

Step three, four, and five: P, S and C- Photograph, Search for, and Collect anything that looks like evidence. That was the job so lovingly bestowed on me and my partner, Ginger. Ginger was the person that had actual training to use a camera for forensics, but I always brought one too just in case (even though anytime I took pictures, it just meant we had doubles of what she had already taken). When it was a case like this, I always made sure the she had taken pictures of anything that could have been evidence, like the foot print, we had found imprinted so we didn’t run into any

“Hey, Ginger!” I shouted when I walked up to the pool of blood next to the body’s outline. “You got pictures of this, right?” Collecting evidence 101: take pictures of everything- and I do mean everything. If you think you’ve got more crime scene pictures than a teenage girl has pictures of herself, you’re golden.

“Yeah that was the first thing I got.” Ginger shouted back from the broken window. “What do you think this is- my first crime scene?” She had been working in forensics since she was born (and she was only a few years older than I was). That’s what happens when your parents are both criminalists, though- you just kind of grow up with it all. My parents were dentists. She was as afraid of blood spatter as I was of root canals (okay, maybe less than that).

“Okay, I’ll collect it then.” I could practically hear her rolling her eyes; having Ginger as a partner was kind of like having an older sister that hates your guts around.

Before I could actually call it blood evidence, I had to do one of the presumptive blood test. There were two tests to choose from and I had picked the Hemastik color test. All I had to do with that test was use distilled water to moisten the strip and place it on the stain to see a color change. It turned green, which meant that I was right and it was in fact a blood stain, so I packaged it in a paper bag to be sent to the serologists for testing (but I’ll explain what they do later).

All the blood on the wall resembles forward spatter that occurred when a gunshot made an exit wound, and the stains on the floor (not including the huge stain from where her body hemorrhaged to death after getting shot) simulated the black-spatter that always came from the entry wound. This all meant that the victim’s body had been perpendicular to the wall when she was shot. Later, after the autopsy report came in, it was deduced that she had been facing her murderer when she was shot in the chest.

Once I took notes on all that, I turned my head towards the door and shouted to the third part of our CSI team- the intern. “Stan! Can you give me a bag so I can get the blood samples?” In he came, running over to me with a plastic zip lock. “No, Stan. Not that kind- I need a paper bag. You know, because its blood evidence.” Stan turned around and went back to the car to fetch the bags, kind of how a golden retriever looks (in the real world, “internship” is actually code for “doing the grunt work for free”). He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he always did what I told him, so I liked him. When he came back with the right kind of bag, I then got to scrap the dried blood off the floor so we could send it to the lab to figure out if it was the victim’s blood or the assassin’s.

Step six: R- Record the scene. That was the second part of my job. After the pictures were all taken, the second part of my job began- taking notes and sketching the scene of the crime. This was the most meticulous and monotonous part of the job because it required measuring everything. I hated that part the most, even though it was the reason I got the job in the first place. See, my college advisor, who was also my forensics teacher, had written a letter of recommendation around the fact that I'm a detail oriented kind of perfectionist. When my boss read it, he thought “What better job for an obsessive compulsive?” The rest, as they say, is history. I get to draw the map of the rooms and measure everything (and when I say everything, I mean everything- from the length of the walls to the bullet holes next to the monkey lamp). I loved that part of my job so much. I think the best part of all was that half the stuff I had to measure, like the bookshelves and desks, wasn’t remotely related to the actual case and wouldn’t help us do anything. But I did it anyway, because it was easier than explaining to a jury why the diagram of the crime scene didn’t completely match up to the pictures. Drawing the sketch was the easy part- I had minored in art at college.

A lot of times when I would measure the walls, I would take notes of anything I found- like bullet holes, blood spatter, and the locations of any other physical evidence. I could tell that this crime was done by a high velocity weapon because the blood on the wall was a fine mist. We had gotten pictures, so I, or one of the real lab technicians, could trace the point of common origin later (which was easy because all it really involved was drawing a straight line in the direction you thought the blood came from; the point where all of the )

I wrote down that the wall opposite to the door seemed to have high velocity blood spatter, which had to have come from some type of gun because there was a bullet hole in the wall just below where the blood was, and there were shell casings a few feet from where the body had been. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that one. Recording the scene was the key part to the investigation, though. You have to write down as much as you could once you got there because otherwise you would have to get a warrant if you wanted to come back later. If you didn’t get the warrant, you could still go look for evidence- but anything you found couldn’t be used in court, so you basically did all that work for nothing. The exclusionary rule was more for the cops than the detectives though.

The next three steps I usually took care of when I had to measure things using the triangulation method (which was just a fancy word for saying that anything not pressed up against the wall was measured by how far it was from two fix points). Those steps were letters I, P, and, T- Identify, Package, and Transport the evidence. Another fun aspect of my job- you know all of the blood, DNA, hair, and bullet cartridges that go to the lab on CSI? I’m the lucky person that gets to collect it all.

When you’re at the crime scene, you have to make sure you collect as much information as possible. Knowledge is power. The evidence you find could end up being the difference between finding the murder and putting an innocent man in jail.

The fingerprints were getting taken care of. We had had some other people dusting for fingerprints, but they only found partial prints, mostly on the doorknob. Whoever did it may not have been smart enough to wear gloves, but they knew enough to try to wipe off the fingerprints. Clearly, they were no amateur to crime. We also found shoe prints that were made by the dust near the welcome mat at the front door.

Time to examine the bullet in the wall: The circumference was only a few millimeters, which narrowed down what kind of gun was used to about a billion other choices. I knew enough about bullets to know that there was definitely a gun there. I also knew that it had definitely been a gun shot that killed this person (okay, maybe I had heard that from the officer that had actually seen the body, but I would have figured it out anyway, I promise!) and the bullet hole in the wall was from a miss fire or “stray bullet”. However, I was no ballistics expert and I didn’t play one on TV, so I packaged what I could and left that investigation to the experts in the ballistics unit.

I had been measuring how far the victim’s body was from the wall with the bullet hole when I saw something on the ground next to the body that looked like it was- a clump. It looked like hair. A clump of blonde hair that had been ripped out from someone’s head. That’s funny, I had thought, the police said the victim’s hair was brown… And that was when I realized that it wasn’t from the victim- it was from the person who killed her. But if the victim was killed by a gun shot, then- why, or how, would she have ripped out some of their hair? If only walls could have talked…

The rest of the evidence collection I can’t really recall because they all blur together at some point, but I do remember Ginger rolling her eyes at me when she saw that I had actually taken notes about the hair and collected it as a piece of evidence. She told me that a piece of hair wouldn’t make a difference because it was such a miniscule piece in the grand scheme of things. But that’s the funny thing about forensics- everything is just another piece of the puzzle.

By the time we got back to the crime lab it was about noon and I had started talking to my friend Amy, one of the lab technicians. I had known her a little bit because we had gone to the same college, but she had graduated before I did (which explained why she had the job that I so desperately wanted because I had way more qualifications for it than she did- but her advisor had liked her better an wrote a reference letter about more than her organizational skills). I liked Amy, she reminded me of one of the scientists on the show Bones (except she was actually nice to everyone and not just smart people),

Halfway through my repartee about evidence inventory, I realized that it was almost twelve thirty. “I’m sorry Amy! I have to run.” I said as I started backing down the hallway. "Eliza's going to be mad. I'll tell you more about the case when I come back from lunch!"

“Wait, where are you going?” Most people in forensics tend to only have friends that are “in the bizz,” so it was kind of weird to hear that someone was going to lunch someone that didn't work in a lab.

“I have to run. I’m meeting Eliza for lunch in an hour.” Eliza Mayer had been my roommate in college since forever, and now she’s gotten a job working for the same network that produces the show CSI. Every week we have lunch- no, I’m sorry a business luncheon to discuss the show. You would think that this meant that she was pumping me for information on forensics so they could get it right on the show. However, you would be mistaken. She usually asks one or two questions about forensics and then we spend the rest of time catching up. Sometimes I think the real reason she wants to have lunch is so she can order the most expensive thing on the menu and charge it to the company because “it’s business meeting”. I would have asked her, but you know- how could I say no to having a fancy lunch for free?

By the time I got to the restaurant, Eliza had already gotten a table and was halfway through the breadsticks. She got up to give me a big hug as I apologized profusely for being late.

“Oh, it’s fine, darling.” Yes, you read that right. Eliza was one of those people that call everyone darling. It’s a show business thing. She was just so Hollywood that I couldn’t believe she survived in New York. “So, what’s new in the world of real CSI?” Eliza, even though I found her glamorous entertainment career choice vastly more intriguing than mine, was completely fascinated by science. I guess that was what had kept us friends for so many years, because other than watching the show Bones, we really didn’t have anything in common. When we first met and I found out that I had an English and film studies student as roommate at Hofstra, I thought that any friendship we would have would never last. And yet here we were six years later, having another one of our weekly lunches.

“Well,” I started to say as I poured the Purell that I always carried around with me all over my hands to try to get the scientific-latex glove smell off of my hands. “The reason why I was a little late was because I was giving crime scene evidence to the physical science unit and biology unit of the lab.” Yes, that’s right- forensics labs have different, specialized units. It’s not all done by just one person like on TV. Most forensic labs, like the one I worked for, have units in everything varying from anthropometry to handwriting to ballistics. I was part of the evidence collection unit (which was why I had just spent like four hours of my life analyzing evidence instead of sleeping), even though my specialty was actually in biology. After the evidence was collected, it was my job to go through the chain of custody and make sure the evidence got to the lab intact.

“Oh! What kind of case was it? Was it a murder? Robbery? Suicide? Assault?” Did I mention she had a freakish obsession with my job? “How long had she been dead? Did you have to look at the rigor mortis? Livor mortis? Alger mortis?” Jeez, you read some Sherlock Holmes books and suddenly you think you know all about forensics… Eliza had no idea what she was talking about.

“Um- well, it was definitely a murder alright, but she had been killed just before the neighbor called the police, so there was no stiffening of muscles like in rigor mortis. They thought she still had a chance at making it, but the bullet killed instantly.” That tends to happen when the bullet goes through your heart. “We think it was a gun because the neighbor heard a gunshot from inside the house and saw some people run out to the car in front and drive off.” Legally, I couldn’t tell her that it had been the kind of black mustang that members of the Irish mafia drove, or that the victim had been Samantha Haymitch, the famous actress that moved her from Hollywood with her “crazy, Arthur Miller wanna-be” boyfriend, who suspiciously hadn’t been there when the ambulance came to pick up Samantha. “It wasn’t a forced entrance because there wasn’t any glass evidence in or outside the house.” Fun fact: stress marks on the edge of a radial crack near the point of impact are always parallel to the side the force was applied. So, if something like a hammer or a bullet hits the glass from the outside of the window, there would be glass fragments on the inside the house and vice versa. But everything that could have been used to enter the house, all the doors and windows, were perfectly intact. “So it seemed like whoever killed her was someone she knew.”

“Wait a sec- was the victim that movie star that moved here? Samantha what’s-her-face? I think I had seen something about that from my CNN alert app.” Before I could deny the ability to tell her anything, Eliza had already started tapping away on her phone- an iPhone of course, because no existed without a smartphone anymore.

I hated when people did that in the middle of a conversation. “What are you doing?”

“Shh! I’m reading something.” Eliza was lucky that the waiter came by with the food because the lobster ravioli was the only thing keeping her alive at that point. I took a break from glaring at her rudeness and started to eat so I could get back to the case as soon as possible. It was about five minutes before she said something again. “Did you know that she was going out with Daniel Shaw, the playwright?” I nodded, because I felt I knew far too much information about the boyfriend from hearing the cops talk about the neighbor’s testimony during the ride back to the lab. “It says here that he had been a theater in downtown Manhattan working on the blocking for his newest play during the time of the murder. She was supposed to be staring in it.”

“What?” This was the first I had heard anything about an alibi or backstory. “Who said that?”

“The New York Times, see?” She handed me her phone so I could look for myself. Leave it to the New York Times to research a case more than the forensics team assigned to it.

“What else does it say?” Not being fortunate enough to have an iPhone (my upgrade wasn't until the following June), I had no idea how to work her phone and gave it back before I broke it.

She scrolled down a bit and turned it sideways “Um, let’s see- she was going to be starring in her boyfriend’s play, but quit the project because of something to do with family connections to the plot? Hold on-" she searched for a different article, “This one is from the NY Post. It says that there were rumors that the plot of the play had something to do with the Irish mafia?” I could see from the scrunched up look on her face that she had heard something else about that.

“Oh, yeah! There had been whole scandal about her family- I think it might have been her brother or uncle- someone that had gotten in legal trouble because of a gang or the mob or something. They were going to run it at the ABC news station, but one of Samantha’s crisis management people called us before we could.”

“Interesting, interesting...” I pondered.

“What?” She looked puzzled, like she was playing Sudoku. “You didn't know about that?”

“Nope. We're not supposed to know any details about the case because otherwise it could affect how we analyze the evidence.” That was one of the rules that, even though I hated it, actually made sense. Because, think about it- if you thought you knew who did it, wouldn't you just try look for proof that you were right? That was only I remembered from psychology- when people jump to conclusions the only thing they look back to see is the reasons why they were right, not the truth. That was kind of illustrated with the Chicago confessions vs. DNA evidence controversy- even though the DNA results proved that the people convicted of the crime hadn’t been there, people like the DA still insisted that the people that had signed confessions (without knowing their rights or the fact that it was illegal for the cops to force them to) had done it.

“I think someone else wrote a report about it too, it was in Newsday or something, but it didn’t make the front page news for some reason.” That “some reason” was probably bribery. Think about it- if you had the money to pay the paper not to make your family the headline, wouldn't you use it?

The rest of our lunch hour was spent finding out as much about Samantha’s life as possible (even though I was kind of breaking the rules by doing it). We found out that Samantha's brother, Roger Haymitch, had recently been reported as an associate or contact from one of the gangs in the city (and by gang, I don't mean one from West Side Story- if anything it was like the Mafia). A local bar owner had recently reported him for starting a fight with someone- rumored to be Sam's boyfriend, Daniel- one night in the alley way adjacent to the kitchen. Supposedly it was over whatever project Dan had been working on, but no one knew for sure (writers getting in fights wasn't exactly a new occurrence, if you catch my drift). Daniel hadn't pressed charges though, despite the black eye and broken rib he had gotten as a result.

In our investigation, we also found out what Daniel's play was about. Samantha was going to play Cecile, the wealthy flapper sister of a 1920s gangster that tries to escape the family's life of crime once she meets a poor boy one night at the club who shows her the chaos and mayhem her family is causing. The destitute hero of the play, James Caraway, dies in his lover's arms at the end of the show just after he realizes that Cecille's brother, Wolfgang, was the one that killed his father during a shoot-out at one of the speakeasies that 1920's mobsters were so famous for. The play, like so many others, was somewhat autobiographical of the writer's life. One review of it talked about how the writer had used the 1920s to show the parallelism between the past and present, creating a social commentary on how the world we live in is still dominated by gangs and drug lords and how ignorant human nature is towards the chaos they cause. Another review said that it was the writer's life just set in the 1920s, because Daniel's father, a police officer just like his protagonist's father, had been killed during a drug bust a few years earlier. One of the producers had told Playbill magazine in an interview that there had been a “rift between the leading lady and the writer” over something in plot that had made Samantha quit the project completely. There were also paparazzi pictures and stories about her kicking her boyfriend out a few days before the murder.

“Interesting…” was all I had to say about it.

At the lab

By the time I had gotten back to work, I found out orders from the police chief: ‘Find out who did it. Who killed Samantha Haymitch?” As if we were just going to sit around and stare at the sun to find the answer. I was assuming that the reason behind his redundant order was media driven. Whenever there’s a high profile murder, there are always hound-dog reporters demanding to know what happened. It was probably a good thing that they never really talked to evidence collectors like me because I probably would have said something along the lines of “Yes. I can immediately tell you who did it- I’ll just get out my crystal ball and get the winning lottery numbers too!” Forensics is a science, not magic, but the CSI frenzy tended to make people mix the two up.

The cops and investigators were out looking for family members and the mysterious boyfriend, Danny, for questioning. They were convinced that it had been the boyfriend- going after the cliché that she was going to leave him so he killed her and left, which was why he hadn’t been there when the ambulance came. They just assumed he was guilty, especially from the opinion- I mean, account that they had gotten from the neighbor about Danny, who called him crazy. They also assumed that because the neighbor’s testimony said (and we all know just how reliable those eye-witnesses can be) that the boyfriend drove a dark car, that it just HAD to be the same car that the murder drove (because it’s not as if black is common car color choice or anything). But you know what happens when you assume things. That’s where the lab work comes in: we can clarify, falsify, and validate any testimony given to us, usually. After some subtle brown nosing, I convinced Amy to let me help her with the lab work for the day, since one of the technicians was out any way and there wasn’t a temp to fill her place in hair analysis. Luckily, trace evidence was one of my favorite things to investigate so I was more than willing to analyze that while Amy took care of the shoe print we had gotten. I later found out that, even though she couldn’t tell what specific shoe they were from, she found out that it was actually two prints on top of each other- one a men’s boots size nine and a half, same as the boyfriend’s shoe size, and the other a men’s dress shoe size ten. Both shoes were made in China and had an imprint of the logo used by the company Clarks. There were only two stores that actually sold those shoes.

There was one piece to all this that was the most important part- there were two people there when she died. Both must have been male, and she had to have known one of them.

I know what you're wondering about the- DNA evidence. Ever since all those forensic shows came out, all people care about it the DNA. Not if the boyfriend had an alibi and the brother didn’t, not if the boyfriend didn’t own the same gun the bullet came from (or any gun at all because he was a self-proclaimed “lover, not a fighter”), which the investigators had already looked into and verified by the time we were done with the . No all the jury members and reporters cared about was the DNA, never mind the fact

The hair would have given us an answer- only if it had the root attached. Without the root in the hair, the only relevant thing you can find out is the species from the cuticle pattern hair. Analyzing the hair under the microscope was the easy part of the job. It was also the most annoying part. Before I started to look up how many natural blondes were actually in the tri-state area, I needed to figure out what species it was first (because it would be a huge waste of time to try to track down a person that had that hair when in reality it came from a dog). To do that, I had to make a cast of the cuticle and compare it to the known species, because all species have the kind of cuticle structure. Under the microscope, I had already determined it was in fact human, and definitely not from the victim. I could along tell by the way some of the ends were bent and torn that the clump had been ripped out during a struggle. A few of the hairs had the roots still attached, so I was able to send that out for DNA testing.

What really brought the case together were the results from the serologists and DNA analysts. After they determined that what we found at the scene was human blood from the precipitin test results, they figured out all the blood evidence from the scene and the victim’s clothes was all the same blood type and also the same type as Samantha- AB (a rather uncommon blood type in America, by the way). But when they did the Multiplex PCR test on the DNA (which uses 13 different markers to detect a combination of short tandem repeats in the same DNA sample), they saw that the skin and blood that was found under her fingernails during the autopsy wasn’t hers. And yet it matched (well half matched, since mitochondrial DNA was from the maternal genes) the mitochondrial DNA from the blonde hairs I found at the scene of the murder. What was worse was that all that DNA had been put in CODIS from a previous crime. The answer had been there all along.

“It was her brother.” I felt ill as I said it, even though it was the truth. It was sick to think of family killing family, but it was the only thing that put all the pieces together. Someone that had been walking her dog around the block had recently reported seeing the brother, Roger, in the passenger seat of the mustang when they drove away. He had brought dress shoes that were the same size and style as the one of the shoes from the prints we had taken. His hair and DNA was at the scene of the crime and found on the victim’s clothes. The type of gun that had the shot both the bullet that went in the wall of the house and the victim’s chest was the same gun that had been used by another mobster in another killing, but they couldn’t figure out who it belonged to. Roger and this mystery murderer from the mob came to her house and shot her. “But why?”

The idea of murder was gruesome enough, but murdering a family was unthinkable for me. I had been raised to love your family and put them in first in your priorities, not put them in a coffin. How could he murder his own family? A family member that did whatever was possible to keep them safe and out of the spotlight? Why would he have just killed his own sister? Or let his friend kill her? And what made him get into that fight with her boyfriend? None of the why’s made any sense.

I’m pretty sure I had been going through that whole inner monologue out loud because when I rushed out of the lab to find one of the investigators that was on the case, Amy and the other scientists kept shouting after me “Where are you going? What just happened? Okay, that's cool- just walk out the door mid-sentence... whatever...” I didn’t pay them any mind though. I was too focused on making sure they arrested the right guy.

I finally saw one of the two detectives on the case right outside the interviewing room.  The other one was talking to the boyfriend and asking about his rather sketchy alibi and why Samantha had kicked him out of the house a few days before she was killed.

When I first asked to go in, the detective (I can't tell you his name because it’s confidential, so I'll use a common one, Bob) almost tackled me to the ground to prevent me getting to the door. Then I explained what we had found out from analyzing the evidence and getting the Multiplex PCR test results told us that one of the murderers was the brother (knowing fully well that he probably wouldn't have believed me if there hadn't any mention of DNA) and he let me in to help the other investigator (let's call him Sean) with the questioning, which Sean agreed to after getting the reader's digest version of the evidence report I had just given.

Recalling what I had previously learned during my lunch with Eliza (which I could actually call a real business lunch for once since all we did was talk about my job), I started asking Daniel about Samantha's brother and his involvement in the Irish Mafia and what  that had to do with his current literary project. Daniel confirmed that all of the rumors about the gangs, the fight in the alley, and the play had been true. He also was kind enough to reveal why Samantha had quit and broken up with him a two days before she died.

“It had been one night, I think last summer, when she told me about her brother,” He said. “She had been up all night on edge because of a gang fight she had heard about on the news, but she wouldn't tell me why. Then he dad called at midnight and she just broke down crying. I didn't know what to do, so I gave her a hug and asked if it something had happened in her family. She told me everything- her family's involvement with the mafia since the turn of last century, her brother's recent arrests for drug possession and getting into fights with the other rival gangs, and that he murdered a guy once. She told me that one night when the police showed up at one of the ‘club meetings’ her brother got caught in a shoot-out and killed the officer. She didn’t know that the cop her brother killed in the line of duty was my father. All she cared about was her family though- any time something happened to them, she did whatever she could to help out. She was always giving money, paying medical bills, and bribing the reporters to keep their family names out of the headlines.”

“So her brother killed your father, just like in your play?” I asked. I knew writers liked to be autobiographical, but talking about the mob was just plain dangerous, no matter what century the show was set in. "Did that have anything to do with Samantha leaving the project?”

“That had everything to do with it.” He told me. “She had told her brother what I was writing bout and he attacked me in an alley. I wanted to press charges, but she begged me not to so I left it alone. When I wouldn't change the plot, she quit, saying that the project was a 'disgrace to her family'. She tried to seem like she was doing it out of family loyalty, but really she was scared. Her brother was getting reckless and hanging out with the kind of people that killed in cold blood. She said that if I wasn’t going to change anything, then she didn’t want to be near the ‘ticking time bomb’ that it was. She knew they would want to kill whoever leaked the information to a writer, and she was write I guess.” Apparently there were more details about the Irish mafia in this play than just the murder- he had people, dates, meeting procedures- everything about the mobsters from now and back in the twenties down to a T. No wonder the gangsters were mad. Once the play came out, everyone- rival gangs and police officers alike- would know how they operated.

After the fight in the alley took place and Roger realized he couldn't get Daniel to change his mind, he turned to his sister to do it. When she failed, he took matters into his own hands.

At the courts

At the trial, I got together with some of the computer lab people to create a digital sequence of events that put together the sequence of events at the crime scene:

Samantha Haymitch, while doing work or packing up her boyfriend’s things in a different part of the house, heard a knock on the door and let her brother and his friend, who was later identified as Niles Buchanan, into her house. They stood in the living room, most likely talking about the matter of the play’s plot and character make up that resembled their organization so much. When she wasn’t able to tell them what they wanted to hear, her brother went after her, trying to physically harm her, but she fought back, drawing blood from digging her fingernails into his flesh. She elbowed him in the gut, which was why he had bruised ribs the next couple of days after the crime, and managed to push him away. She screamed and yelled for help, which was what her neighbor had drawn her attention to the house next door. As she screamed, Niles loaded the gun and shot at her twice. The first shot grazed her elbow and went into the wall, and the second one went into her chest. The second she dropped to the floor, bleeding, her brother, who claimed to be in shock that his sister had been shot at, and friend fled the house and raced out to the car to drive off.

They thought that they left no trace behind, but they didn’t know the first rule of forensics: Everything leaves a trace behind.