Courtroom Television Network LLC

Alan Dershowitz, born 9-1-38, a Harvard Law School professor and author, won a reversal of the conviction of Claus Von Bulow, who was charged with trying to murder his socialite wife. The case was made into the movie, "Reversal of Fortune.'' He has led the appeals of Leona Helmsley, Mike Tyson and evangelist Jim Bakker.

Alexander Campbell was one of those arrested and found guilty of murder. He admitted to being an accessory because he was present during a murder, but the court found him guilty of murder in the first degree. He continued to insist on his innocence, even as they dragged him from cell #17 to be hanged on the gallows that had been built inside the jail (the better to terrorize those who were next, according to one tour guide). Before he was physically removed, he placed his right hand against the wall and stated that its mark would remain visible there as proof of the truth of what he said: "That mark will never be wiped out. There it will remain forever to shame the country that is hanging an innocent man."

Alexander Wilson reported that Mrs. Grinder said that Lewis had been agitated during the night, but conversed with her in a calm manner. He retired, but kept talking. At some point, she heard a pistol go off in Lewis's lodgings, followed by a thump on the floor and "Oh, Lord." Then another pistol shot was heard. Moments later, Lewis knocked at her door and said, "Oh, madam! Give me some water and heal my wounds." She watched through a chink as he groped his way to a tree, and then back to the house, where he tried to get water from a bucket. After two hours, she crewed up the courage to check on him. He was in his bed but awake. He showed her where a bullet had entered his side and she could see a portion of his brain exposed. He begged her or the servants to use his rifle to finish him off. They refused, so he lasted two more hours in great pain before he finally died. Only moments later, Neelly arrived with one of the stray horses.

The Hinsdale County coroner held an immediate inquest at the site and Packer was arrested. He then escaped from prison but was eventually returned. Tried twice thanks to a legal technicality, he was found guilty first of murder and then of manslaughter, and sentenced to 40 years. After serving 16, Packer was paroled. To this day, people are still divided on the issue of his guilt, with many in Colorado declaring him a state hero. However, after Professor Starrs' team excavated the graves of the five victims in 1989 and examined the bones in an anthropology lab, they found cuts on arm and hand bones possibly indicative of defensive wounds, as well as nicks that supported the account that the men had been defleshed. Starrs said in his forensic quarterly, Scientific Sleuthing Review, that Packer was a murdering cannibal and a liar.

Carl Douglas, born 5-8-55, specializes in police misconduct cases. He is the managing attorney at the Law Offices of Johnnie Cochran, Jr., in charge of the firm's 12 lawyers. Douglas graduated from Northwestern University and the University of California, Boalt Hall School of Law.

Every married man who ever thought of cheating on his wife quaked when he saw Glenn Close as the maniacal girlfriend in the movie "Fatal Attraction." In 1989, a real life Fatal Attraction burst into the New York headlines in a terrifying combination of sex, obsession and death. Attractive and sexy heiress Carolyn Warmus goes after her man and murders his wife. Early in the trial Carolyn appeared in a short, very tight, very sexy miniskirt that had photographers snapping away and film crews tripping over each other to get a better view. A photo of Carolyn, wearing a short skirt, which exposed her nicely formed legs, appeared in the nations newspapers and news magazines over the next few months. Always dressed to perfection in designer clothes, Carolyn paraded each day into the courthouse more like a model on a runway than a murder defendant. With her blonde hair, confident style and voluptuous body, she was a femme fatale right out of 1940s film noir, a woman who broke all the rules. She was a symbol of a love gone wrong, an affair that spiraled out of control until it ended in murder and betrayal. She was the rich, spoiled heiress on trial for her life who wanted a man so much, she was willing to kill to have him all for herself.

Steven Beard, a retired television executive, was startled awake to find his innards lying where his belly should have been. Conscious but bewildered, he reached for a phone on his nightstand and dialed 911 for Austin, Texas. Who would have guessed that his wife Celeste had manipulated her lesbian lover into being the "hit man"? She thought she had gotten away with murder, but.

The prosecution's expert, Charles Van Amburgh, re-examined the evidence in 1923, with state-of-the-art bullet comparison technology. He enlarged the photos of the fatal bullet and the bullets fired from Sacco's revolver, insisting that they were identical. Hamilton tried to pull off a sleight-of-hand that would prove his point. He brought in Sacco's .32 and two new Colt revolvers. There in court, he disassembled them all and tried to exchange one of the new barrels with the one from Sacco's gun. Judge Thayer saw what he was doing and told him to return the original barrel for Sacco's gun. Thayer then denied the motion for another trial. A committee was appointed to review the case and they contacted Calvin Goddard in 1927, who had worked with Charles Waite at the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York . He used a comparison microscope and helixometer to make a rigorous examination. In the presence of one of the defense experts, he fired a bullet from Sacco's gun into a wad of cotton and then put the ejected evidentiary casing on the comparison microscope next to casings found at the scene. Then he looked at them carefully. The first two casings were no match, but the third one was. Even the defense expert agreed that these two bullets had been fired from the same gun. A second original defense expert also concurred, so the defendants were executed. A subsequent investigation with better technology in 1961 supported Goddard's findings. Yet in 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation for the innocence of both Sacco and Vanzetti. That was tantamount to saying that ballistics experts had no grounds for their conclusion. During the 1980s, Starrs re-examined the work of experts George Wilson, Marshall Robinson and Larry Paul, who all had been involved in making the firearms re-determination. He, too, confirmed their opinions and published his findings.

Cheri Lewis, born 8-8-52, is assisting in the research and preparation of prosecution motions and pleadings. She has successfully tried eight murder cases during her five years with the District Attorney's Office. She previously worked in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office. She earned a law degree from the University of La Verne College of Law, San Fernando Valley Campus, an undergraduate degree from California State University at Northridge.

Christopher Darden, born 4-7-56, is co-counsel. He has taken more than 19 homicide cases to jury since becoming a Los Angeles County prosecutor in 1980. Darden became a deputy district attorney in 1981 and completed a six-and-a-half year assignment with the Special Investigations Division before joining the prosecution team. He is a graduate of San Jose State University and Hastings College of the Law.

Claudine Longet, the pretty French songbird, and handsome, virile ski star Spider Sabich were a beautiful couple. That is, until he was at hot end of a smoking gun and she was at the other. During the funeral, she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and now and then her shoulders convulsed. On one hand, she had a right to be there. No one doubted that Spider had once been in love with Longet. On the other hand, she was utterly out of place. She was, after all, the woman who killed him. She said it was an accident. His friends and family were not so sure. A search for the truth would play out over the ensuing year. Before the last breathless gossip was whispered and the final expose written, the Sabich-Longet affair would develop into one of the decade's most riveting celebrity spectacles.

In 1997, a Texas court found Darlie Lynn Routier guilty of probably the worst of human crimes: killing two of her natural children in cold-blood. Motive is still a mystery, but the prosecution painted her as a shrewish, materialistic young woman who, sensing her lavish lifestyle crumbling, slew her two sons Damon and Devon in a mad attempt to resuscitate her and her husband's personal economy. In all fairness, Darlie Lynn Routier, despite some extremely damaging evidence, may be innocent, say many. Fingerprint evidence and trial errors create some doubts about her guilt.

Hank Goldberg, 31, joined the District Attorney's Office in 1985. He worked for a private civil law firm in Los Angeles from 1988-1989 before returning to resume his career as a prosecutor. As a deputy district attorney, he has prosecuted about 30 felony trials including eight murder trials. He helped prosecute Catherine Thompson, convicted of killing her husband for his insurance money and sentenced to death in 1992. Goldberg also prosecuted Jose Guerra for the murder of as registered nurse who was attacked in her home. Goldberg is a graduate of UCLA and the Loyola Law School.

His involvement in a case about firearms and ballistic analysis soon led to his work on the assassination of Louisiana Governor Huey Long and his alleged assassin, Carl Weiss. The convoluted path of that investigation is fully documented in A Voice for the Dead, and its eventual resolution brought even more opportunities to the professor for exhumations.

During the mid-1980s, James Starrs published two papers about the work of firearms experts in the historic case of Nicola Sacco, 29, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 32, who were arrested for the shooting murders on April 15, 1920 , of two security guards delivering payroll money to a shoe company. The killers escaped with $16,000, but left behind shell casings from their guns. At that time, expertise in firearms was still in its primitive stages, making it possible for pseudo-experts to dupe juries - and they sometimes did. In a sensational trial like this one, where the firearms interpretation made the entire case, there was pressure to make statements with an air of certainty. People around the world were following the trial. The facts were these: the killers had driven off in a black Buick. Eyewitnesses described them as "Italian-looking" and one of them had a handlebar mustache. Investigators recovered six ejected shell casings from the sidewalk and traced them to three manufacturers: Remington, Winchester , and Peters. They also found the getaway car, abandoned, and linked it with an earlier robbery. Police looked for an Italian thug named Mike Boda, but he'd gone to Italy , so they arrested his associates: Sacco and Vanzetti. They had illegal pistols on their person and Sacco's was the right caliber - a .32 Colt automatic - to be the murder weapon. Sacco also sported a handlebar mustache and had two dozen bullets on him made by the three manufacturers. Both men were also members of a radical anarchist group that supported violence to resolve injustice.

People who claimed to be descendants of John Wilkes Booth had petitioned Judge Joseph Kaplan to allow the remains in the grave in Baltimore , Md. , marked as Booth's to be dug up and examined. They had accepted the claim of historians who contended that Booth successfully escaped while another man was buried in the family plot. Instead of being shot and killed in Garrett's barn eleven days after the 1865 assassination, as history indicates, Booth supposedly lived another 38 years. The theory, Starrs states, was based on a hoax perpetrated in 1907 by a man who claimed he owned Booth's mummified body, as well as on disputes involving inconsistent details: The man shot in Garrett's barn had the initials JWB tattooed on his left wrist, while Booth's were said to have been on the right wrist.

The eyes that stare out from the Florida prison mug shot are unmistakably those of Joyce Lemay Cohen. Once as pretty as a fashion model, she has retained some of her attractive features umber-colored eyes, lush lips and noble cheekbones. But her hair is shorn, and she has gone gray. Something she would never have tolerated in the lavish life she once led. But after 15 years in prison, any remaining glimmer of glamour went dull long ago for Cohen. At age 24 she married a rich older man, Stanley Cohen, who introduced Joyce, his fourth wife, to a jet-set way of life. They lived in an historic mansion overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami's ritzy Coconut Grove section. They drove Jaguars and flew in their own jet. They vacationed in one adult sandbox after another the Bahamas, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, Las Vegas and Cancun, Mexico. Mrs. Cohen became accustomed to the fine things in life designer clothing, satin sheets, servants. She enjoyed her husband's wealth. She enjoyed his "Miami Vice" lifestyle. She enjoyed his social status. But over time the marriage began to lose its sheen. He was playing around on her and she was doing too much cocaine.

Katherine Mary Knight, though not the first person to skin and eat her lover, was arguably the most depraved monster in Australia's grizzly homicidal history. Once a loving little girl, she grew up around and, from a young age, worked in slaughterhouses. Her most cherished possession was a set of razor sharp boning knives, which she kept in pride of place above her bed. Given her future violence, is fair to say that this period in her life played a major role in the molding of the monster that she would become. But even today, the many visitors to Aberdeen's murder house still ponder how a middle-aged housewife, mother and grandmother could perpetrate such evil.

Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D. has published twenty-five books. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, and philosophy. Currently she teaches forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. After publishing two books in psychology, Engaging the Immediate and The Art of Learning, she wrote Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. At that time, she had a cover story in Psychology Today on our culture's fascination with vampires. Then she wrote guidebooks to Anne Rice's fictional worlds: The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, The Witches' Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches, The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice's Erotica, and The Anne Rice Reader. Her next book was Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography, and then she ventured into journalism with a two-year investigation of the vampire subculture, to write Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today. Following that was Ghost, Cemetery Stories, and The Science of Vampires. She has also written for The New York Times Book Review, The Writer, The Newark Star Ledger, Publishers Weekly, and The Trenton Times. Her background in forensic studies positioned her to assist former FBI profiler John Douglas on his book, The Cases that Haunt Us, and to co-write a book with former FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary, The Unknown Darkness. She has also written The Forensic Science of CSI, The Criminal Mind: A Writer's Guide to Forensic Psychology, The Science of Cold Case Files, and Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers and she pens editorials on breaking forensic cases for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Recently, she co-wrote A Voice for the Dead with James E. Starrs on his exhumation projects, and became part of the team. She also contributes regularly to Court TV's Crime Library and has written nearly three hundred articles about serial killers, forensic psychology, and forensic science. Her latest book is The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation.

Lisa Kahn, born 12-28-57, is the DNA coordinator for the district attorney's office. She joined the District Attorney's Office 10 years ago and is a member of the Organized Crime Division. She successfully prosecuted the first DNA evidentiary jury trial in California. She received her law degree from Southwestern University School of Law and is a graduate of the University of Southern California.

This classic has to be one of the most enduring murder mysteries America has ever produced. Elderly Andrew Borden, still in his heavy morning coat, reclines on a mohair-covered sofa, his boots on the floor so as not to soil the upholstery. As he naps, his wife, Abby, is on the floor of the guestroom upstairs, dead for the past hour and a half, killed by the same hand, with the same axe, that is about to strike him, as he sleeps. The bloodiness of the acts is startling. Along with the gruesome nature of the crimes is the unexpected character of the accused, not a hatchet-wielding maniac, but a church-going, Sunday-school-teaching, respectable, spinster-daughter, charged with parricide, the murder of parents, a crime worthy of Classical Greek tragedy. Many people believed she killed her father and stepmother, but recent forensic research suggests that she didn't.

Thanks to his public criticism, he has been called into several significant court cases on certain forensic methods that he believes have not been sufficiently tested to pose as science. Among these is the technology for fingerprint analysis. After nearly a century of admissibility in courts across the country, one judge started asking some hard questions early in 2002. In a pretrial ruling for a multiple murder case, Judge Louis H. Pollak, a senior federal judge in the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania, entertained a motion to evaluate fingerprint evidence against U.S. Supreme Court standards set in 1993 in Daubert V. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The resulting standards gave judges guidelines to bar junk science from the courtroom. It wasn't the first such attempt.

Marcia Clark, born 8-31-53, is the lead attorney in the case. She is assigned to the Special Trials Division. She joined the District Attorney's Office in 1981 and has prosecuted about 60 jury trials, including 20 murder cases. She successfully prosecuted Robert John Bardo for stalking and murdering actress Rebecca Schaeffer. She is a graduate of the Southwestern University School of Law.

Marie Hilley is a mystery. Her presence still hovers over her family and friends, and with it the deeply painful questions with no answers. What made her do such ghastly things? What motivated her complicated stories and alibis? Was there anybody that she truly loved? And, finally, who was the real Marie? Those who should have known her best knew her least. Marie murdered her husband, but it didnt stop there. She poisoned her daughter and other close relatives. Her murderous escapades undermined what should have been the most sacred of family relationships. When it appeared she would finally be brought to justice for her crimes, she disappeared and began life anew with an assumed identity. One persona after another, discarded when it no longer suited her needs. The story of Marie Hilley is a study in deceit, pathological obsession and serial murder.

Mark Ebner is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered all aspects of celebrity and crime culture for Spy, Rolling Stone, Details, Los Angeles, Premiere, Salon, Spin, Radar and New Times, among other national and international publications. He has repeatedly positioned himself in harm?s way, conducting more than 50 in-depth investigations into such subjects as Scientology, pit bull fighting in South Central Los Angeles, the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, celebrity stalkers, missing porn stars, sports groupies, college suicides and Hepatitis C in Hollywood. Ebner has produced or appeared as a journalist-commentator on NBC, ABC, MSNBC, A&E, The BBC, Channel 4 (UK), National Public Radio, Court TV, FX, VH1 and E! Entertainment Television. He has been a featured guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Today, Inside Edition, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, Fox & Friends, Catherine Crier Live and many other television and radio programs in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Asia. In 2000, Ebner hosted his own nationally syndicated radio program, Drastic Radio, and co-authored the New York Times/Los Angeles Times bestseller, Hollywood, Interrupted in 2005 with Andrew Breitbart of the Drudge Report. Ebner recently consulted on the Emmy-nominated "Trapped in the Closet" episode of South Park for Comedy Central, consulted for NBC Dateline on the "Paris Hilton Tapes" report and field-produced a one-hour VH1 special on the same topic. In addition to hosting "Rich & Reckless" on truTV, Ebner is penning the Hollywood crime book Six Degrees of Paris Hilton for Simon & Schuster. He also writes a blog on breaking news from the corner of Hollywood & Crime at HollywoodInterrupted.com.

Only three years later, on October 11, 1809, Meriwether Lewis, 35, was dead. At the time, he was governor of the Louisiana Territory and had been traveling to Washington with his unpublished journals in order to plead for the government to pay debts incurred on behalf of the U.S. He set out on September 4 in the company of his servant, Pernier, and became ill along the way. He rested for a time and then left again on horseback September 29, accompanied by Major James Neelly, Indian Agent to the Chicasaw Indians. They arrived at a footpath, the Natchez Trace, on October 8, but when two of their horses wandered off, Neelly went to find them, so Lewis traveled on to the next white way station. He arrived on October 10 at Grinder's Stand, where Mrs. Robert Grinder offered him lodging. There he died. The three accounts of his death vary, but many historians believe they all agree on suicide. In the first one, Mrs. Grinder reportedly told Major Neelly that Lewis had been acting in a "deranged" manner, and at 3:00 a.m. , she heard two pistol shots. She and her servants found Lewis wounded, with one pistol wound to the head and one beneath his breast. But he was conscious and supposedly said to Pernier, "I have done the business my good Servant, give me some water." He lived only a short time after that and was buried there. The other accounts supported this, with a few added details.

Sacco was tried for robbery in the earlier case and found guilty. He was later tried with his partner, Vanzetti, for the murder of Alessandro Berardelli, one of the murdered security guards. That trial began on May 31, 1921 , and public opinion was against them. Yet many foreigners sided with them and the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee called the whole ordeal a witch-hunt based in prejudice.

Peter Neufeld has taught and litigated extensively in both the "hard" and behavioral forensic sciences. Along with Barry Scheck, he directs "The Innocence Project," which currently represents more than 200 inmates seeking post-conviction release through DNA testing. Neufeld teaches trial advocacy at Fordham University School of Law. He is co-chairman of the National Association oif Criminal Defense Lawyers DNA Task Force. Neufeld is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the New York University School of Law.

The millionaire dermatologist, 47, was charged in 2000 with the murder of his estranged wife, Karen, whom he repeatedly claimed to have loved. He was alleged to have gone to her home with a shotgun one evening, stood in the doorway, and shot her in the chest as she stood in the foyer. He then disposed of the gun, which he had stolen, and fled to New Hampshire. The prosecutor said it was an intentional, premeditated homicide to prevent his wife from taking his money in a divorce. That team worked hard to present Sharpe as a controlling manipulator as evidenced by his inattentive behavior throughout the trial. Sharpe's actions prior to and after the incident, it was claimed, indicated awareness of guilt and appreciation of right and wrong from the way he had parked his car that night to the way he orchestrated his behavior and appearance at his trial. A ballistics analysis showed that the murder weapon was a different gun from the one reported stolen, which added to the prosecutor's case that Sharpe's theft was merely part of his attempt to stage the premeditated incident as a heat-of-the-moment act. The defense team said that the defendant was suffering desperately over the abandonment by his wife of 26 years and he had lost control. They offered an insanity plea, claiming he was temporarily deranged by stress and panic. Both sides had psychiatric experts to support their respective cases. The defense presented an abused childhood that had rendered Sharpe incompetent to appreciate what he was doing on the day he killed his wife. The three children testified for the prosecution that Sharpe had been verbally and sometimes physically abusive with their mother. His recreational cross-dressing was revealed, making daily headlines and defining him for America as unstable and sexually-confused, but this activity was not considered evidence of a serious mental illness. He ended up just looking like a pathetic man who had nevertheless acted with clear intent.

Robert L. Shapiro, one of the nation's best-known attorneys, is a co-founder of LegalZoom. He is currently a partner of Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro, LLP, a full-service law firm with approximately 120 attorneys. As Co-Founder, Mr. Shapiro provides LegalZoom with the ex-perience gained from over 31 years of legal practice. He is actively involved in public relations, marketing and legal consulting for the company. The highlights of Mr. Shapiro's legal career are numerous and include serving as lead counsel in United States of America v. Samango, the leading 9th Circuit case on grand juries, and such high-profile cases as People v. Christian Brando and People v. O.J. Simpson. Although known for his representation of celebrities, Mr. Shapiro has also represented corporate clients such as Mobil Oil, Northrop and Lawrence Engineering. Mr. Shapiro is also a noted lecturer and has made presentations at major universities, before the Practicing Law Institute, California Trial Lawyers Association and California Public Defender Association. He is also the author of "On Second Thought" (California Lawyer Magazine, 1997), "For the Defense" (Loyola Law Review, November 1996), The Search For Justice: A Defense Attorney's Brief on the O.J. Simpson Case (1996), "When The Press Calls: A Lawyer's View" (California Litigation, Fall 1991) and Misconception (June 2001). He received his law degree from Loyola University and holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from UCLA. Mr. Shapiro is a member of the California Bar and is admitted to practice in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Federal Courts for the Northern, Central and Southern Districts of California.