Tonight, CBS televised their first of six episodes of ’48 Hours: NCIS where they will feature reviews of real NCIS cases.

As we watched the show we found it to be much more like a documentary with police officers and NCIS agents describing a case and telling of the outcome. In the featured murder case, female Navy Petty Officer Elise Makdessy was training to be an air traffic controller. Her coworker was Navy Petty Officer Quincy Brown. The only witness was Elise’s husband Eddie Makdessy. According to the evidence presented on the show, Eddie claimed to the authorities that he was jumped and tied up by Quincy Brown, who then raped and killed Elise. Eddie asserted that he broke free in time to shoot Quincy Brown, but not in time to save Elise’s life, as he reported Quincy had already killed her.

The show confirmed what we often say in our critiques of the NCIS show: If a crime occurs outside a Navy or Marine Corps base, then the local police are the ones to conduct the investigation. Fans of the fictional show realize Gibbs’ team investigates murders in downtown Washington, D.C. instead of the Metropolitan Police, while the case featured tonight was investigated by the Virginia Beach, VA Police Department until several years later when they requested the assistance of NCIS. It was NCIS who brought in an expert from the Army Criminal Investigations Division (the Army’s version of NCIS) to help solve the case.

We are interested in the response from NCIS fans that watch the fictional episodes each Tuesday night. Did you find the 48 Hours show interesting? Will you watch the next episodes? Were you surprised by the complexity of the investigation and how long it took? We found the involvement of the television reporter interesting.

In future, we expect we’ll watch again to see if the next case is one that is done totally by NCIS and if the case involves all Navy personnel. There has been a really interesting case in which several high ranking Navy officers have been convicted of cavorting with and supplying sensitive information to a foreign contractor of provisions for Navy ships in foreign ports. It will be interesting to see if this is one of the cases featured.

Be Blessed, Diane and David Munson