Real-Life Sleuths Behind CSI

Hit TV series takes its cue from Vegas crimefighters

By Maggie Harbour
Star – May 15, 2001

STAR has cracked a top-secret mystery surrounding the hit CBS show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — we’ve found the real-life Las Vegas investigators the show’s lead characters are based on!
Producers tried to keep it under wraps, but forensic scientist Daniel Holstein, 37, is the inspiration for William Petersen’s character Grissom, and Yolanda McClary, 38, is the model for Catherine Willows, played by Marg Helgenberger.
“That’s us,” admits Holstein, a portly man with a degree in biochemical criminology who’s been a Las Vegas crime scene analyst for 11 years. “We’re the ones with our noses two inches away from the bodies and the maggots.”
Adds shapely, auburn-haired McClary: “We know how blood splatters, and we can land a criminal in prison as surely as a signed confession. We’re the ones doing the messy work.”
The real-life pair, whose fellow Metro crime scene analysts are the inspiration for most of the other characters on the show, were asked to provide their technical input even before the first episode of CSI aired October 6, 2000.
Helgenberger went so far as to spend time riding around with McClary to visit some of Vegas’ actual crime scenes.
Naturally, many of the real-life traits of Holstein’s team have been incorporated in the show.
Both the real-life team and the TV one are called The Nerd Squad.
On the show, Petersen often carries out unusual experiments to solve cases and so does Holstein. In a recent episode of CSI, Petersen once duplicated the circumstances surrounding the death of a woman found wrapped in a blanket by wrapping a dead pig in a blanket.
Holstein says he, too, might carry out the same kind of experiment.
“I actually have a model of a man’s head in my house and I fill it with real blood before hitting it with pipes, baseball bats, golf clubs, and just about any type of weapon I can find,” he says.
“It helps me to analyze the way the blood splatters and it’s the only way to see what the real stuff will do.”
And just like Petersen’s character, Holstein is constantly trying to draw his experimental blood from co-workers!
“We know when he’s on the lookout for blood,” jokes McClary. “The new people are always the ones we hit up because they haven’t been here long enough to know that they don’t have to comply.”
Like Helgenberger’s character, McClary, who started out as a secretary for the Vegas police, was single when she signed on for the job. But she has since married a Vegas cop.
Holstein is single just like Petersen’s character, and says he was destined to be a crime scene investigator since boyhood.
But real-life partners Holstein and McClary are totally unlike each other.
McClary carries a gun, while Holstein does not. He likes maggots and blood and getting his hands dirty; she doesn’t. Holstein has had to physically tackle someone to keep a crime scene intact; McClary hasn’t.
What they do have in common is their love for their jobs, their zest for sniffing out evidence and their determination to create stirring TV plots.
“We are in regular contact with the show and are always on the lookout for anything we think might make a good, exciting story,” says Holstein.
But he can’t take the credit for all the wacky scenes on the show.
One time the TV investigators threw a corpse off a roof to determine whether the victim was pushed or jumped. Holstein has never done that.
“But,” he says, “it was cool when they did it on the show!”     ♦