In 1994, news of a triple homicide that took the lives of a mother and her children left residents of Salt Lake City in shock and dismay.  The heinous nature of the crimes, combined with the pioneering use of forensic animation by prosecutors dedicated to bringing a ruthless killer to justice, delivered a powerfully dramatic story. Time Life, Cadence Magazine, and NPR were among the national media organizations to feature the Kastanis case and Brighton Imaging over the following year. Although it was far from the most technically complex animation taken on by Brighton experts, the 11-minute animation would remain unique. In many ways, it became a textbook example of how to employ forensic animation as a vehicle for presenting complex material evidence to jurors.

Upon arriving at the Kastanis home, investigators found a crime scene filled with an extensive and gruesome array of evidence. Blood stains and spots covered the walls. Fleeing victims had been lacerated and bludgeoned in multiple rooms and in multiple parts of the body. Long trails of blood on the floor suggested that lifeless bodies had been dragged from room to room by the killer after the crimes occurred. But most of this visual information was too brutal to present to a jury without compromising objectivity. It would be nearly impossible to expect anyone to view vivid crime scene photographs in a factual manner.

The difficulty in presenting evidence only complicated the work of forensic experts who knew that the key to unraveling the gruesome details of what happened lay in the individual pieces of evidence found at the crime scene. And there were hundreds of pieces of evidence. When woven together, the individual strands of evidence formed a pattern that revealed the killer’s actions in great detail. Even if the evidence were less brutally vivid and emotionally engaging, piecing together hundreds of pieces of evidence for the jury would be no easy task. Nonetheless, prosecutors needed to convince a jury that the many strands of separate evidence accurately pointed to a series of events. This step was crucial to winning a conviction.

Brighton Imaging devised a number of pioneering methods for presenting evidence to a jury through animation.  Among the most important resulted from applying pan and zoom and rack focus camera techniques to animation sequences based on crime scene evidence.  As the animation played out in the courtroom, these techiniques would be applied time and again to make the prosecution's case.

Brighton experts and prosecutors decided to reenact the homicides from the perspective of the killer.  The 11-minute animation begins from a third party camera shot of the killer standing in front of a toolbox, but then quickly transitions to his point of view- looking down at the toolbox, his hands reaching outward. Minutes later, the killer enters the home and starts to attack the first victim. As his knife contacts the victim, the animation clearly depicts blood splatters hitting the wall. Before the camera moves with the killer’s eyes toward his next victim, the animation briefly freezes on the animated blood splatters. With immediate impact, the animation has enabled jurors to grasp how blood splatters found at the scene directly support the prosecution’s recreation of the homicides and betray the killer’s movements. Throughout the rest of the animation, the same method is repeatedly employed to tie individual pieces of evidence to the larger sequence of events. By the end of the animation, prosecutors have had countless opportunities to pause the tape and point out where blood and other evidence is restored from the original crime scene.

In the end, forensic animation proved to be an exceptional vehicle for masking gruesome visual details while effectively demonstrating how evidence pointed to a specific sequence of events.  It would take future capital cases to refine the presentation of animation-based evidence to jurors, but with the door opened to forensic animation, future cases would never be the same.

“A trial isn’t the presentation of the truth, it’s a search for the truth.”
-  Kent Morgan, Deputy Attorney, Salt Lake City District Attorney’s Office