CSI: Miami

Calleigh Duquesne, played by Emily Procter

Calleigh Dusquesne was born in rural Louisiana in a "shotgun" shack not long after her parents' shotgun wedding. Her mother came from a proud, once-wealthy family. Her father was a dashing young public defender. But it was not a match made in heaven

Calleigh grew up watching her parents drown their disappointments. Her mother retreated into fantasies of her family's faded affluence. What they lacked in wealth, her mother made up with an alcohol-infused imagination, while her father drank away what money they had, fueling not his imagination but his rage. To avoid their daddy's belt, Calleigh and her brothers learned to survive many nights away from home.

But when her father was sober, Calleigh was the center of his world. He shared his wisdom with her, and she was eager for his attention. She learned to master a gun, that a woman can do everything a man can, and that protecting justice was the highest calling of all. Like most children of alcoholics, she saw only his better angels. She wanted to grow up to be just like him.

With the help of a teacher, Calleigh enrolled at Tulane University with a full scholarship. Reinventing herself, she took her mother's name -- Dusquesne -- and used her charm to enter the lifestyle her mother had always dreamed about, choosing a degree in the sciences far from her narrow-minded past. But in the vacuum after graduation, she couldn't escape everything her father had taught her. Protecting justice became the call of her life.

While walking a beat for the New Orleans Police Department, her knowledge of firearms gained her the reputation as the "bullet girl," and she was soon asked to join their crime lab. Not long after that, her boss received a call from an old friend in Miami, Horatio Caine. Miami-Dade was looking for a ballistics expert.