CSI: Miami

Season 3 - Episode 6 - Hell Night

Teleplay by Steven Maeda & Corey Miller
Directed by Scott Lautanen

On a stormy Halloween night, a bus with jurors onboard arrives at the posh estate of 34 year-old pro baseball player Donny Lopez, on trial for the stabbing death of his wife.  They are there to view the murder scene under the same conditions when the murder took place.  Donny is there with his attorney to see the evidence presented in his case.  The house is quite dark, lit only by the jurors’ flashlights.  While jurors file from one room to another, a loud crash echoes throughout the place and chaos ensues as sexy 27 year-old juror Ginger Wadley, a cheerleader type, drops to the floor in a seizure.  With all eyes focused on her, it is a moment or two before another juror notices that Donny Lopez is face-down on the kitchen floor, a meat cleaver buried in the back of his skull, and a note on his back which reads, “guilty.”

 Horatio confronts Ray Jr. and his friends in a vacant lot near the airport, where they are drinking beer and shooting a paint gun at the empty cans.  He chastises them, sending them home, but takes Ray Jr. home in his car.

 A bloody “pre-existing” print on the murder weapon matches Stacy Lopez, 14, the victim’s daughter.  She claims that she went back into the kitchen to rearrange things as they were on the night of the murder, not as her dad’s lawyers had “fluffed” them up for the jury.  She also has a cat whose hair matches that on the victim’s body.  Indentations on the “guilty” note found on the body indicate the murderer is a juror!  They match the note to the notebook of juror Carl Tepper, who said he thought Lopez’ death was “poetic justice.”  Tepper takes a handwriting test – proves he did not write the “guilty” note after all.

 During an autopsy of a homeless man, Horatio notices the victim’s clothes are dotted with blotches of red paint.  He connects this victim to Ray Jr. and his friends’ spree of the previous night.  Alexx determines the cause of death to be a heart attack, caused by the fright of being shot…by the paint pellets.  Horatio queries the boys to determine who shot the pellets at the homeless man who is now dead.  Ray Jr. claims steadfastly that they all shot the guy.

 Calleigh determines the juror who had the seizure has four previous claims against facilities where she suffered seizures.  She “fakes” attacks by taking her anti-seizure medication and was able to bring on a seizure with the mini-strobe keychain she carries in her purse.  Was she working with the killer to create a diversion?  She admits that a girl named Kelli (not a member of the jury) hired her for $5,000 to create the diversion in order to get a mistrial declared.

 Calleigh interviews Kelli, who was to be Donny Lopez’s alibi on the night of his wife’s murder.  Now involved with a wealthy old-money family guy, she didn’t want the details of her former life revealed in open court, so she hired the cheerleader to throw the trial.  A handwriting analysis proves she didn’t write the note either.

 Horatio checks with Paula Munro in Evidence, who tells him that there was a video camera in the car where the boys were.  When his audio is properly isolated, it proves that not only did Ray Jr.

 not shoot the paint gun at the homeless man, he was the only one of the boys who attempted to stop the shooting.

 Back at the Lopez house, the CSI team discovers a repaired pocket door in the butler’s pantry, which obviously took the murderer by surprise.  In the middle of the glass is a face print, and DNA from the print matches that of juror Jim Wilson, an engineer.  In confessing, Wilson explains that he lost everything because of this murder trial – his job, his wife and his kids.  With that murder solved, Calleigh realizes that Donny Lopez did not murder his wife after all.  Calleigh bases her theory on the fact that the victim, Miranda Lopez, had only one small defensive wound on her hand and only a two-inch deep wound which killed her, yet her husband was a power-hitting baseball player whose strength would have taken the knife much deeper.  Calleigh talks again to Kelli and finds out that Donny and her were fooling around in the car in the driveway while his wife and kids were inside the house the night of Miranda’s murder.  Calleigh meets with Stacy, who confesses that she saw her father and Kelli in the driveway, then told her mother about it.  When her mom wouldn’t believe her, the two got into a fight.  When Stacy pulled a knife, mother reached out to daughter, asking for Stacy to hand over the knife.  The rest, Stacy swears to Calleigh, was an accident.

 Ray Jr. confesses to Horatio that he doesn’t like Rick Stetler, just as Stetler arrives to pick up Ray Jr.