Scene: Two newlyweds are found dead in their honeymoon suite.
Analysis: The bride had a stalker who tracked them down, stabbed her husband and inadvertently caused her death as well when the bed she was hiding underneath collapsed.
No, that’s not a tragedy depicted in Netflix’s latest true-crime documentary or the plot of a fictional murder mystery. It’s just one scenario concocted by a Point Park University forensic science major that was constructed beat for beat at the CSI House, a site on the university’s Downtown campus in which students are often tasked with setting up fake crime scenes for their classmates to solve.
The CSI House recently got a makeover courtesy of Point Park’s theater program. Conservatory of Performing Arts students were enlisted by Point Park forensic science coordinator Edward Strimlan and Pittsburgh Playhouse prop shop supervisors Katie Mikula-Wineman and Jim Utz to revamp that space for the next generation of fledgling crime-scene investigators.
“What they brought was real life to the scenes,” said Strimlan, who served for 21 years as the chief forensic investigator in the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office. “Now, my students get to actually process real-life experiences based on the stuff that they would expect in a normal home.”
The CSI House is located on the fifth floor of Point Park’s Academic Hall. It’s divided into themed rooms that can be transformed via an assortment of available props depending on the situation.
Strimlan has spent the last decade crafting scenes at the CSI House and challenging senior forensic science majors to design their own for freshmen to decode.
“After a while, it was getting dry,” Strimlan admitted. “I said, ‘We have a whole theater department here who are experts in staging, props and have a whole lot more resources than I did.’”
It had been at least 12 years since the last time Point Park theater students applied their scenic-design training to refurbishing the CSI House. That previous collaboration proceeded Mikula-Wineman’s arrival at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, so she was eager to help after Strimlan gave her and Utz carte blanche to redo the CSI House with all the props at their disposal.
“We don’t get to do this all the time,” she said. “It’s really good training for our scenic-design students to be able to look at: We have this amount of space, how are we going to fill it and make it feel lived in?”
Mikula-Wineman, Utz and the students they recruited settled on three room ideas: the aforementioned hotel suite, a living room adorned with Christmas decorations and a 1960s-era kitchen. They picked out the requisite furniture, soft goods, greenery and more from the playhouse’s prop shop, transported everything over to the CSI House and decked each room out with props ranging from fake food to rose petals scattered all around the hotel setup.
Wren Cannon, a junior theater production major, enjoyed imbuing the CSI House with “nitty little details” that will hopefully enrich his classmates’ educational experiences.
“A lot of us in the theater production program don’t really talk to a lot of people outside the Playhouse,” Cannon said. “It was cool to be able to set it up for a whole other side of the university, and they get to see what we get to do.”
Everyone involved with the project got to stretch their creative muscles. It was a great excuse for Mikula-Wineman to illustrate the concept of “installation art” to her students, and the whole thing reinforced Cannon’s belief that “theater doesn’t always lie on a stage.”
Forensic science students at Point Park now have plenty of new toys to play with while cooking up these imaginative (and sometimes horrific) crime scenes. Senior forensic science major Hannah Lanham said that she’s appreciative of all the work Point Park theater students put into CSI House 2.0 and said it was fun to “see the two worlds cross paths.”
She has already been given opportunities to observe a few real crime scenes through her internships with Dr. Cyril H. Wecht Pathology Associates and the Fayette County Coroner’s Office. Devising CSI House storylines “helps you pay attention to a lot more detail” because “you’re almost working backwards” from standard crime-scene procedures, Lanham said.
“It helps having the CSI House to build that knowledge,” she continued. “Whenever you’re thrown out there in the real world, you can apply that.”
Ginya Lombard, a sophomore forensic science major, genuinely enjoys “being able to investigate what other people come up with” at the CSI House. If scenarios like that honeymoon double-homicide seem farfetched, know that what goes on there is “not like some fantasy,” as Lombard put it.
“If I went into your house right now, would I recognize or understand everything I see?” Strimlan posited. “No, nobody would.”
Point Park may generally be most well-known for its arts programs, but Lombard is proud of her cohort and said it was exciting to see so many theater majors “collaborate with a smaller school such as forensics.”
“We needed a bigger emphasis on how great the forensics program is here, because you get these hands-on experiences with people like Dr. Strimlan,” she said. “I’m excited to see how I can use this educational experience in my real-life career.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: December 11, 2023, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: December 11, 2023, 5:24 p.m.
