CSI:New York

Season 4 - Episode 5 - Down The Rabbit Hole

Written by  Peter M. Lenkov and Sam Humphrey
Directed by Christine Moore
Special Guest Star: AJ Buckley as "Adam Ross"
Guest Star: Robert Joy as "Dr. Sid Hammerback"
Also Guest Starring: David Burtka as "David King", Hank Harris as "Johnny O'Dell", Kam Heskin as "Suspect X" Jonno Roberts as "Samson Rowe"

As a janitor finishes up his nightly rounds, he discovers the body of a costumed female in a pile of mannequins. The victim has orange contact lenses, a green wig, anime-like features and a bullet through her head. Mac notices that there is surgical tubing around her wrists and odd cuts in her neck – she appears to have been tortured. Dr. Hawkes finds a male doll wearing a shirt that says “Johnny” at the crime scene. The CSI team sets to trying to discover this doll’s connection to the murder.

Adam recognizes the victim as an avatar from Second Life, an online community. She was an Internet celebrity. The makers of Second Life identify “Venus” as Cheryl Miller. From Cheryl’s hard drive, Danny finds out that she was having an online relationship with someone called Don Juan-2-3, and they had plans to meet the night before. “Don Juan” is identified ad Johnny O’Dell. His driver’s license photo looks just like the doll that Dr. Hawkes found at the scene.

To locate Johnny, Mac creates a Second Life avatar and tries to talk to him long enough to track where his signal is coming from. After locating Johnny, they find that he works at a comic book store. Johnny tries to escape when they arrive, but once they catch him he says that he ran because he had purchased a gun illegally and that he had no idea that Cheryl was dead. He had created the doll for Venus so that she would know who he was, but chickened out and not met her the night before. He also tells Stella that he had just talked to Venus on Second Life, meaning someone had stolen her Internet identity and was masquerading as Venus.

Mac sets to trying to discover who is pretending to be Venus. This person’s signal is bouncing from place to place. Another avatar accuses Venus of not being who she claims to be. Mac follows this avatar, finds his real world address and tracks him until his connection goes dead. Once they get to the address that is associated with that avatar, they find the door open and Johnny dead, shot in the head, inside. The same type of bullets killed both Johnny and Cheryl. An unsolved murder of a high profile judge in New Jersey also has the same bullet.


Mac later discovers that Venus had a “hot date” with an avatar named Mr. TCB – her next victim. Mac encounters Venus’ avatar again on Second Life. He asks to speak with her, and she leads him to a creepy corridor. She knows his true identity, and she infects the CSI’s computer systems with a strange virus before disappearing. The CSI team is able to locate Mr. TCB’s real identity, Congressman Devane, and finds his phone number and address. The team rushes there to find someone dressed like Venus ascending towards Devane’s apartment. The woman beats them there and kills Devane, then performs an elaborate escape before the CSI’s can capture her. They have just been confronted with a contract assassin.