Directed by Richard J Lewis
Written by Anthony E. Zuiker, Josh Berman & Eli Talbert
A woman's dismembered leg is found by some fishermen. A college student dies while being hazed during a fraternity initiation.
This episode provides examples of:
- Accidental Murder: The fraternity leader takes a prank too far, causing the pledge to choke to death. He then fakes the scene to make it look like the victim hung himself.
- An Arm and a Leg: The leg had been cut off by a boat propeller after the woman fell into a lake.
- The Body Parts That Must Not Be Named: At autopsy, the frat leader's girlfriend's signature is found on the victim's penis. Part of the fraternity initiation was for the pledges to get sorority girls to sign their names on various parts of their bodies for points. The more intimate the signature, the more points they earned. Throughout conversations with the fraternity members, both the investigators and the students use the term "Johnson" to refer to the organ.
- Deadly Hazing: A pledge chokes to death on a strip of raw liver that he was asked to ingest as a last-shot hazing attempt. However, it's revealed that this was actually a front by the fraternity leader, who found out his girlfriend had signed the pledge's penis. The pledge choked on it when the string the leader tied to it to yank it back out broke.
- Fiendish Fraternity: The frat leader makes things increasingly difficult for a specific pledge he doesn't like so he'll come in last in their point-standings and not get in. He first makes him sit in a large vat of ice wearing only his boxers, while handing out cold beer to everyone else. But, after the guy makes a surprise comeback in points, the leader makes him do a private trust exercise — swallowing a chunk of raw liver on a string and trusting him to pull it back out. When the string breaks and the guy chokes to death, the leader and another member stage the death as a suicide by hanging.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: Catherine wants to go to the lake to see where the victim's boat had ended up. Grissom, believing that it can't be found that way, sets up an elaborate reconstruction in the lab, complete with a model boat in a makeshift pool with fans aimed at it to simulate wind currents he researched from weather reports. Catherine makes the trip anyway, finds the boat, and calls him at the lab just as he finally determines where to look.
