New ID Series Revisits Casey Anthony And Other Cases From POV Of A CSI

Alina Burroughs saw many disturbing things during her decades working in forensic science and law enforcement, but nothing has haunted her quite like the death of Caylee Anthony, the toddler who was killed in 2008. Burroughs worked as a crime scene investigator (CSI) on the case and gave testimony in the trial of Casey Anthony, Caylee’s mother, who was tried and acquitted for her daughter’s death.

That’s why, when Burroughs was considering crimes to revisit as part of her new show Crime Scene Confidential, which bows Tuesday at 9 p.m. on ID and will stream on discovery+, the Anthony case seemed a natural place to begin.

“I know a lot of people say, ‘Why are we still talking about this case?’ But it’s been so long since we revisited this case, and this is still the number one case that people want to talk to me about,” Burroughs says. “Even though people think they know about the case, they know about it from detectives’ perspective, police perspective, the interview, the interrogation.

“They haven’t talked about it from a crime scene investigator perspective. We have not heard about it from somebody like me, who sat in the dirt on their hands and knees for 11 days on the recovery site and held that baby’s bones in my hands. So, they think they’ve heard the story, but I assure them that they have not heard about it from the evidence perspective.”

That is the difference with Confidential. It comes at the evidence not from the traditional true crime documentary or podcast point of view of the detectives or police officers, but from a crime scene investigator—one very different, Burroughs notes from those made famous on CBS’s crime drama CSI.

“This is not a dramatized crime scene investigator but the real deal,” Burroughs says. “So we’re examining from the perspective of the evidence, and I’m kind of navigating the case through the eyes of the people that were closest to the case.”

In the first episode, she speaks to detectives who worked on Caylee’s case as well as the medical examiner who declared her dead. She also speaks to Cindy Anthony, Caylee’s grandmother and Casey’s mother, conducting the interview in the Anthony home and looking at scrapbooks of Caylee.

That humanization, too, is part of Burroughs’ aim for the show. She notes that so often when we hear about crimes, we only hear about the horrific details of what happened. We don’t hear about what the person was like in life or why they were special. Burroughs hopes to change that for the families.

“The world only gets to meet their loved one through the trauma of their death. We have only gotten to know any of these people through their death into the details of this horrific tragedy. And that’s also painful to the loved ones,” she says. “They know their loved ones, their mothers and brothers and sons and daughters through the way that they loved and lived their lives and their happiness and the things they love, but the rest of the world only knows them through these horrific details of death. And that’s another tragedy.”

Future episodes feature the case of Michelle Witherell, whose fall from a balcony may have been a murder or suicide, and the case of Brian Hughes, whose death appeared to be the result of a robbery but may have been something very different.