To read the synopsis of Perfect Crime, click here.

Starring:

Mitzi Kapture

In 'Perfect Crime', Mitzi Kapture portrays a military investigator trying to convict an officer of killing his wife. Convinced the officer committed the crime but hindered by lack of physical evidence (including a body), she must interview military personnel who have differing views of the events and circumstances surrounding the murder.

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REVIEWS:

Perfect Crime received an incredible 4.4 rating. (that's a really good rating for any cable show/movie)

Mitzi Kapture unravels a "Perfect Crime" in USA cable movie

By Jay Bobbin, Tribune Media Services

Solving mysteries was her game while she was on "Silk Stalkings," and that's still her mission for now.

Mitzi Kapture has stayed out of the limelight since leaving the USA Network series, but she returns to that cable outlet Wednesday (9 p.m. ET) in "Perfect Crime," a fact-inspired drama that casts her as a Naval Investigative Services officer probing the disappearance of a Marine Corps captain (Jasmine Guy). The missing woman's alcoholic husband (Nick Searcy) is suspected of foul play in the matter, especially as others tell of witnessing his harsh treatment of her; however, with no corpse as evidence, the Navy sleuth ultimately is forced to reassess her belief that he's guilty of killing his spouse.

"A lot of things intrigued me about it," Kapture says of the film, "especially that my character was a strong, passionate human being who really believed in the difference between right and wrong. She persevered until she felt justice was done, even though that sounds kind of corny, but there are so many cases now where things get in the way. This was the first time in federal history that there was no body and no weapon found, yet a conviction was the result. That's amazing to me."

Movies like "A Few Good Men" and TV shows such as "JAG" have demonstrated how military attorneys function, and Kapture admits she "had no idea" of that until she began "Perfect Crime": "Someone said to me, 'You always think of the military as guys marching around, preparing to go to war.' You don't realize all this other stuff goes on. I spent some time with NIS agents in El Toro (Calif.), and they let me sit through some actual work they were doing, going undercover to catch a pedophile.

"All kinds of things go on when you put people from all over the country or the world together at a small base and say, 'OK, get along and go fight together.' It takes time to build that kind of unity, and all sorts of dysfunctions can come out of that. We may not be aware of those or prepared to deal with them."

Kapture consulted with her real-life "Perfect Crime" counterpart only by telephone: "The producers liked the idea that she was available and enthused about the movie, but for their own reasons, I don't think they wanted me to spend a lot of time with her. She was great when we spoke, and she gave me so much information on why she thought (the suspect) was guilty of killing his wife. There are little, subtle clues throughout the story that the audience can pick up on themselves, and I liked that."

When "Perfect Crime" was submitted to her, Kapture feared its crime-solving aspect was too close to "Silk Stalkings" for her liking. "Then, I realized if I try to stay away from playing strong female professionals, that's really going to limit me as an actress. You could say the same thing about ('Chicago Hope's') Christine Lahti, who's played several doctors in her career; they might seem like similar characters just because she's a strong, intelligent woman."

Still, Kapture did turn down a post-"Stalkings" series offer to play another homicide detective, and her reasons weren't only professional. "I took about a year off because I had a baby, and 'Perfect Crime' was really my first project after that. I didn't want to jump right back into working 14-hour days on a series, so doing TV-movies is the ideal situation for me."

Kapture's "Silk Stalkings" character Rita also was pregnant when the actress left, the child's father being her detective partner Chris (Rob Estes, who's since joined Fox's "Melrose Place"). "In other scenarios, it might have been hard to walk away after five seasons on a series," Kapture reflects, "but in the last five episodes, they had us fall in love, me get pregnant and him get killed. The intensity of that was quite depressing, and I had a lot of crying scenes, including one with Rita at Chris' grave.

"That ran very parallel to my feelings about leaving the show, so when I got in my car and drove away for the last time, I felt really resolved with it. I never looked back, and I guess that's great in a way." Kapture also directed two episodes, and fans of "Silk Stalkings" still express how much they miss her and Estes, though USA has kept the series going with Janet Gunn and Chris Potter as the current pair of sleuths. "The show has done really well," Kapture confirms, "and I think we were all surprised by that."

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Civilian woman solves 'Perfect' military crime

BY LON GRAHNKE TELEVISION CRITIC

July 9, 1997

Actress Mitzi Kapture, best known as Palm Beach Police Sgt. Rita Lee Lance in the sexy "Silk Stalkings" detective series, doesn't fool around in her new cable drama.

She's deadly serious as a civilian working for the Naval Investigative Service in the engrossing "Perfect Crime," premiering at 8 tonight on USA. Kapture combines telegenic star power with a forceful performance as relentless Joanne "Jo" Jensen, the real-life cop who cracked a landmark federal case in 1991.

Married to a Marine officer, Jo knows how to deal with the military mentality. Her boss assigns her to find Darnell Russell, a dedicated Marine captain who didn't report for duty as usual on a Monday morning in 1989.

As the senior NIS agent, Jo takes control of the investigation. She questions men and women who worked with Darnell on the base in Quantico, Va. Each witness admires and respects the captain. Jo suspects foul play, especially after she meets Darnell's husband.

Alcoholic womanizer Bob Russell, a former Marine captain who resigned in disgrace after marrying Darnell, says his wife "couldn't take the pressure." She snapped under stress and went AWOL, he says.

"I don't put much faith in military investigations," he tells Jo.

Bob teaches special education classes for children with Down syndrome. Jo thinks he killed Darnell, and she intends to prove it. She has no body, no murder weapon and no physical evidence. The NIS and the FBI agents attached to Jo's case want to close the investigation, but she refuses.

The detective intends to use circumstantial evidence to prove motive, means and opportunity in a federal homicide case against Bob. A federal murder conviction does not require the victim's body.

Bob loses his job after Jo asks too many questions at his school. "You're doing a good job of ruining my life," he tells her. She won't be intimidated by the sexist stalker. He challenges her to a war of wits.

"You probably think about me more than you do your own husband," taunts Bob. She finds herself stuck in a "contest" with a dangerous, trained killer.

She knows that Bob abused Darnell, and the captain served divorce papers on her husband a few hours before she disappeared.

"I feel like I have to watch myself, so everyone doesn't think I'm on some feminist crusade to avenge battered women," Jo tells her husband. When the key clue surfaces after almost two years, she's ready to pounce. Nick Searcy crafts a chilling characterization as arrogant Bob, a lethal bully and expert liar. Jasmine Guy displays impressive depth in flashback scenes as the doomed Darnell. "I just loved the wrong man," she tells her Al-Anon group. "It happens. It doesn't mean my life is over."

The real Jo Jensen continued with the NIS until 1992, when it was renamed the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Now specializing in narcotics cases, she commands the special-operations squad for the NCIS.

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Wednesday July 9 8:10 PM EDT

'Perfect Crime' with a flaw

UPI Arts & Entertainment _ Scott's World (800) (release at will) By VERNON SCOTT UPI Hollywood Reporter

HOLLYWOOD (UPI) - If you believe you can commit the perfect crime, don't be dumb enough to write it all out on a computer before you start.

That would seem to be the moral of "Perfect Crime," the new USA network movie starring Mitzi Kapture, Nick Searcy, Jasmine Guy and Scott Alan Campbell.

The story is based on the real-life crime tabbed "The Computer Disk Murder" involving a white Marine Corps captain who murdered his black wife, who also was a Marine captain.

The murderer was undone when it was discovered that he had written an outline titled "26 steps to murder" on his computer and saved the disk two years before the slaying took place.

An item about the crime in a Virginia newspaper came to the attention of filmmaker Robert Lewis who decided it would make an intriguing movie.

"It wasn't your ordinary murder story," said Lewis, who produced and directed "Perfect Crime."

"The police uncovered the disk and confronted the husband, Robert Russell, with it. Russell claimed he was writing a novel with his mother and the disk was just background for the book."

"Investigators couldn't find any trace of a novel. And many of the circumstances of the murder were similar to the 26 steps found on the disk. That was the key piece of circumstantial evidence."

"What made this case so fascinating was the victim's body was never found. They never recovered a murder weapon or found physical evidence at the presumed scene of the crime."

"To this day Darnell Russell's body has never been discovered."

Lewis contacted a friend, Joseph E. Miller, who became co-executive producer of the picture. Miller had been in military intelligence during the Vietnam War.

"Joseph is very good at ferreting out material," Lewis said. "He uncovered tons of newspaper clippings and did a lot of other research. It was a very big story at the time.

"Russell was posing as a bereaved widower demanding that the FBI and the naval investigative service find his wife.

"He insisted that his wife had just gone missing and that a crime was never committed. It went on like that for quite some time until they discovered the computer disk."

"We focused our story on a naval investigative officer named Joanne Jensen, a real person played by Kapture. She is still in that service working out of Washington. But at the time she was stationed at the Marine Corps base in Quantico."

"The suspected murderer was mister charm, but he was a real dummy. When Jensen first interviewed Russell she suspected that he had killed his wife."

"She found him arrogant with traces of anti-black sentiment despite the fact he was married to an African-American."

"The only thing that mattered to Russell was his military career, and he had been drummed out of the Marine Corps. He was involved in some petty irregularities and other trouble. His dismissal from the corps had far-reaching consequences. He couldn't stand the fact that he was out of the service and his wife was still in it."

"We finally concluded his motivation for killing Darnell was her determination to leave him."

After Miller provided background material, he and Lewis wrote a number of treatments to try to sell the story to television.

"We had difficulty finding a buyer," Lewis said, "and we were concerned that even though Russell was convicted, the conviction might be overturned on appeal."

"So we hung onto the project for five years. When Russell had lost all his appeals we went ahead trying to sell it. The major networks turned it down because of the black-white element, which was the major reason USA bought it."

"Then we hired a marvelous writer, Selma Thompson, who took a procedural outline about how Robert Russell was found guilty and created the emotional underpinnings of the story."

Lewis is no stranger to directing fictional and real-life murder stories for television. Among the most prominent of his 45 TV movie credits are "Fallen Angel" and "Agatha Cristie's A Caribbean Mystery" with Helen Hayes.

"I kind of gravitate to offbeat themes," he said. "In the last 10 years I've been developing, producing and directing my own projects for TV."

"This is an industry with 8,000 directors in a very competitive environment. So it has become a necessity for some of us to go out and find and develop our own properties."

"That is my way to make it happen. You can't just sit back and wait to be approached. When I saw the story about the two Marine captains it occurred to me it would make a great movie."

"I've run more film through the camera than William Wyler, who I started with years ago in 'Friendly Persuasion.' But these days you're either a TV director or a movie director. It's almost impossible to do both."

"I've done a lot films for USA Network because we agree on what we think entertains people."

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Copyright 1997 by United Press International.

All rights

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'Perfect Crime' Is Far From Clueless

By Steve Parks. STAFF WRITER

No body. No murder weapon. No confession. Not much of a case, right? Wrong.

Of course, it helps that the murderer recorded on computer floppy disk just how he planned to kill his wife. Still, in "Perfect Crime," a made-for-cable movie based on a landmark 1991 murder conviction, it's tempting to contrast this slender reed of evidence with the incriminating forest that failed to win a criminal conviction against O.J. Simpson.

"Perfect Crime," Wednesday night at 9 on USA Network, tells the more-or-less-true-life story of the first federal murder conviction in the United States without physical evidence or a confession. Though the verdict is the climactic moment in the case, this is no courtroom drama. The story belongs to Joanne Jensen (Mitzi Kapture of "Silk Stalkings"), a civilian Naval Investigative Services officer whose intuition and tenacity bring a suspect to justice under circumstances that ordinarily would not even have resulted in charges being brought against him.

The victim is U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Shirley Gibbs Russell (Jasmine Guy), whose name here has been changed inexplicably to Darnell Russell. After years of stormy marriage to ex-Marine Robert Russell (Nick Searcy), she decides to leave him. Just after the two of them clean out their apartment, Darnell disappears and is presumed dead.Jensen, assigned to investigate the case, suspects the husband early on.

Director Robert Lewis allows the screenplay by Selma Thompson to unfold without distracting dramatic embellishments. The flashbacks to the Russells' last hours together play out as a low-key prelude to violence. The unease of the victim and the perpetrator seems palpable, and the murder itself an expression of the male character's warped sense of manhood. Without even saying so, Robert, played with a seething but tightly controlled rage by Searcy, delivers the misogynist, no-woman-is-going-to-walk-out-on-me motive. His wife, the victim, is played with a bit too much ingratiating charm by Guy.

Refreshingly, the racial aspect of the case - the murderer is white and the victim black - goes almost unmentioned except as a defense theory that bigots who despise mixed-race marriages might have killed Darnell.

Kapture plays Joanne Jensen with a high-strung edge masked by the cool veneer of a professional. She convincingly captures, if you will, the sense of determination you might expect of an investigator with a black-and-white sense of right and wrong. And though we get a peek into her personal life - Jensen is happily married - and into the philandering Robert Russell's as well, the story is never diverted by suggestive sex scenes that so many TV movies of the week seem unable to resist.

The break in the murder investigation comes just as the FBI, which has been brought in to examine forensic evidence that is never found, recommends closing the case without filing charges.

Following up a routine check on the circumstances of Robert Russell's resignation from the Marines, Jensen learns that the suspect had been investigated previously, when it was charged that alcohol had begun to interfere with his duties. Rather than face court-martial, Russell resigned and abruptly left the base, leaving many of his belongings behind. Sorting through a storage bin, Jensen finds several computer disks of Russell's, one of which contains a file entitled "26 Steps to Murder Your Wife."

Convinced she has a case, Jensen reminds a U.S. district attorney that federal law doesn't require physical evidence in a murder trial.

Robert Russell is currently serving a life sentence without parole in a Pennsylvania federal penitentiary.

Although we know the outcome of the case from the start, "Perfect Crime" is not without its dramatic tensions. The scenes between Searcy and Kapture fairly sizzle with contempt. So confident is the suspect that the lack of evidence will get him off scot free that he even taunts his pursuer with sexual innuendo.

In this season of reruns, you can do a lot worse than studying the criminal imperfections that led to the unraveling of this "Perfect Crime."

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KAPTURE RETURNS TO USA NETWORK

by John Crook -- Inland Valley Daily Bulleting July 6, 1997

Retyped and posted by Lia (Drmchaser)

Fan favorite Mitzi Kapture, formerly of USA Network's "Silk Stalkings," makes her post-maternity return to acting in "Perfect Crime," a fact-based USA original drama premiering on Wednesday.

"Crime", which also stars Jasmine Guy (A Different World) and Nick Searcy (folksy deputy Ben Healy on "American Gothic," in chilling form here), chronicles the landmark 1991 murder conviction of Robert Russell, an alcoholic ex-Marine found guilty of killing his estranged wife, Shirley (renamed Darnell in the movie). Russell currently is serving life without parole in a Pennsylvania prison, the first time in American history that a defendant successfully was prosecuted without the recovery of a body or other physical evidence.

Kapture is strikingly good as Joanne Jensen, the Naval Criminal Investigation Service civilian attorney who played the key role in investigating this landmark case.

Strong performances and a compelling story, however, are not the only things USA expects will bring a big audience to this TV movie. The cable channel's programmers and executives know that, where USA Network audiences are concerned, Kapture is an authentic superstar.

The 33-year-old California-born Atlanta-bred actress confessses she still is a little startled and overwhelmed by the mail that continues to flow in regarding her work on Stalkings," the sleek and sexy USA mystery series in which Kapture and co-star Rob Estes (Melrose Place) starred for 100 episodes.

As Sgt. Rita Lee "Sam" Lance and Sgt. Chris Lorenzo, Kapture and Estes investigated crimes of passion in wealthy Palm Beach, Fla. When the show premiered in 1991 (CBS aired it in a late-night slot along with USA for the first two seasons), most of the attention focused on how sexy "Stalkings" was.

But a funny thing happened during the series' run, as the writers made Rita and Chris more complex and less reliant on their high-octane sex appeal.

Concurrently, Kapture began to notice that the volume and tone of her fan mail began to change and found, to her surprise, that her work in this little cable series was beginning to touch female readers across the board.

"Some of the initial mail I got early on was about the sexiness of the show, and then it moved into (Chris') and my relationship," she recalls. "Then, amazingly, a lot of the mail I got, and still get, was from young women, like12 to 17. They're having a hard time in their life. They don't know whotheir mother is. This one girl who had run away said that my character helped her see that a woman really can turn her life around, that she can achieve what she wants to achieve - and that gave her hope.

"That really means so much (to me), when you're in a 14-hour workday and you're going, 'What am I doing? I am so exhausted.' Then you read a letter like that and realize you're having an impact, even in a show that you don't think is likely to have that effect."

Youngsters weren't the only fans, however. Nursing home residents wrote that "Stalkings" got them through many a restless night. Kapture and Estes realized that their show had an authentic cult following.

As the fifth season rolled around, however, dramatic changes were in the air. The 100 episodes the show needed to merit optimum marketability in syndication soon would be in the can, and Estes previously announced he planned to leave the show at that point.

Kapture was pregnant and announced she, too, was leaving and would take a year off after the birth to be with her newborn.

Their characters, Chris and Rita, were married in the fall of 1995, but shortly thereafter, Chris was fatally shot and Rita walked off to face an uncertain future. Producers overhauled the show and hired two new leading actors, but fans loudly rejected the new team. (Executive producer Stuart Segall blames the fact that the new characters were too reminiscent of Chris and Rita. A second revamp with new characters played by Chris Potter and Janet Gunn has proven more successful).

Madison Kapture made her grand entrance on Jan. 24, 1996, and, while the actress jokes that producers were hovering around the delivery bed asking whether she was ready to go back to work, Kapture made good on her vow to spend time with husband Bradley and her baby daughter for a full year. Now, at almost 18 months, precocious Madison has developed a strong independent streak.

"She already know what she wants to wear - picks out her clothes every day,"Kapture says. "On her birthday, she went from taking a few steps holding my hand to, within two weeks, walking by herself. She didn't want to hold my hand anymore."

Taking the hint, the actress is looking for work again. She has a couple of projects in development, and is even contemplating a new series role.

"I would love to be in an ensemble piece, where it's not just me and another person all day in every scene," she says. "I just think it would be fun to work with a lot of different actors. What's most important is how passionate the other people are about their work."

With Kapture's track record and proven viewer appeal, she should find any number of prospects.

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Mitzi Kapture is drawn back to the limelight of acting.

The former star of Silk Stalkings returns in USA Network's Perfect Crime

by Richard Huff New York Daily News

Posted by David Quiroz

After nearly two years away from the small screen, Mitzi Kapture has gotten the acting bug again. Kapture, cable fans will recall spent five years as Sgt. Rita Lee Lance on USA's steamy drama Silk Stalkings before leaving at the end of the 1995 season. Since then, she hasn't thought much about acting because she has been preoccupied with her daughter, Madison born 17 months ago.

"I'm just really starting to get the (acting) itch," Kaputre said recently. Despite having been part of a series for half a decade,Kapture said she didn't miss the spotlight until last year. The result can be seen in the movie "Perfect Crime," airing at 9 p.m. Wednesday on USA Network. In it, Kapture plays a real-life civilian Naval Investigative Services officer who attempts to prosecute for murder the estranged husband of a missing marine (played by Jasmine Guy).

"I love doing movies," Kapture said. "It's such a great, intense situation. You get together anywhere from four to 12 weeks with people,then you get to rest." Not that "Perfect Crime is done, Kapture is stepping up her acting and entertainment activities. In addition to working in front of the camera, she's developing some projects, including a movie based on a children's book.

"I love what I am doing," she said. "I want to write more, I want to direct more, I want to act more. Maybe it's part of having a baby, but I have a real need to create and be involved more than being an actress. "Doing 'Silk' I got letters from real young girls saying the show changed their lives," Kapture added. "That showed me that no matter what project you're involved with, you're sending out messages. You really have to take responsibility with that."

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