Exposed

A "CSI: Miami" Actress Crosses Paths With A Real Serial Killer

(CBS)  Alina’s father Carl went looking for her and found his daughter alone with Bradford in an alley.

"My dad stood next to him and started taking pictures of me like he was another photographer. He just wanted to make sure I was safe," Alina remembers. "And Bill said, 'Excuse me, can you get out of here?’ And my dad didn’t even say anything, just kept taking pictures. And then he got really agitated and he was like, 'You know what? I am out of here.' He got mad and left."

Twenty-two years later, when the sheriff’s poster came out, Carl was shocked to see photos of both his daughters. "It really tore me up. I thought, this predator had pictures of my girls. Maybe he was thinking of them as the next victim," he says.

For Capt. Peavy, the pictures tell stories. "I look at their faces, I look at the smiling faces and I say, ‘What was going on in their minds? What was he telling them at the time?' And then I look at some of the other pictures, where the women actually look terrified. And I wondered, what was he doing to them? What was he saying to them to cause them to have this look?' And was that the last look they ever had?"

And now the case is going places Peavy never even considered.

The dream of becoming a famous actress or model is an old one although it looks a lot different when imagined by the creators of CSI: Miami.

Eva La Rue, an actress on the show, says she and her sister Nika had the same dream back in the 80s when they traveled to amateur modeling competitions, looking for attention.

"It’s a big ego stroke to have someone say 'You look like a model, I could really help you,'" Eva says.

Because there was no Internet back then, the girls willingly gave the photographers their home phone numbers and addresses in order to get copies of the photographs. That’s exactly what Bradford was hoping for when he met and photographed Eva and Nika as teenagers. Years later, it was a Bradford photograph of Nika that would eventually wind up on the L.A. County sheriff’s poster.

Asked what she thought when her sister's picture turned up, Eva says, "I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t think that I was thinking. You are looking at a picture of your little sister, of your baby sister who is found amongst the cache of missing and unknown girls that came from a serial murderer.

Eva called the police to identify her sister and she did tell the story to the writers at CSI: Miami.

John Haynes, a writer for the show, used Eva’s real life tale as inspiration for an episode titled "Dark Room" that airs Monday, Nov. 13.

"Our killer on the show is an amateur photographer who tries to take advantage of his position locating naïve girls, promising certain things, fulfilling their dreams, and then ultimately taking advantage of them," Haynes says.

Haynes wrote a big part for Eva’s character, who learns that her sister has been abducted by a rogue photographer. "It was stunning for me," Eva says of shooting the episode. "I had hit an emotional wall in the scene because I couldn’t be connected to it, as crazy as that might sound because I hadn’t yet connected to it for myself."

Seeing the problems Eva was having, the show’s star David Caruso stepped in to help. "David was the one who sort of pulled me aside and he actually gave me a really great note," she says.

Whatever Caruso said, it worked.

Fortunately for Eva, Bradford never got any closer to her real-life sister Nika than through the camera lens.