UC Davis entomology chair Lynn Kimsey’s star turn on cable TV’s Animal Witness is scheduled to debut next week on the Animal Planet network.

The half-hour program, titled “Bugs In My Alibi,” is about Kimsey’s forensic work on behalf of the prosecution in a Kern County murder trial in 2007. The jury ultimately convicted Vincent Brothers in the slayings of five members of his family in Bakersfield in 2003.

The defendant claimed he was in Ohio at the time. To help prove otherwise, authorities asked Professor Kimsey to identify insect remains on the radiator and other parts of a rental car that Brothers had used in Ohio — to see if the car had been taken out of the state.

Authorities delivered the car parts to the university’s Bohart Museum of Entomology, where Kimsey serves as director, and she and senior museum scientist Steve Heydon went to work picking off the bugs.

Kimsey would testify that several of the insect species are found only in the West. The territory of one of the species, a paper wasp, is west of the 100th meridian, a historic dividing line between the western and eastern continental United States. Further, the wasp’s “center of abundance” is California, Kimsey said.

The other bugs included a large grasshopper found in the Great Plains and on the eastern slope of the Rockies, and two insects known as true bugs, in the order Hemiptera and found only in the West — in California, Arizona and Utah.

In five hours of testimony, illustrated with a photographic slide show, Kimsey showed the distribution of the insects on a map, and compared photos of bugs from the car with specimens from the Bohart museum.

“The insects we found were consistent with two major routes to get to California from the East,” said Kimsey, adding that court testimony revealed “4,500 unaccounted-for miles” on the rental car.

Deputy District Attorney Lisa Green said: “The insect evidence corroborated with the mileage on the vehicle, which had to have been driven west. The defendant said he was in Columbus, Ohio, and never traveled out west. Dr. Kimsey’s testimony, combined with the mileage, strongly suggested this was not true.”

Brothers, a former elementary school vice principal, now resides on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Dates and times

The Animal Witness Web site gives these times for “Bugs In My Alibi”: 11:30 a.m. April 6 and 11 a.m. April 10 (Pacific daylight saving time). Check your local listings to be sure of the times on your cable system.

Read more about Kimsey and the Brothers murder case.

Kathy Keatley Garvey, communications specialist with the Department of Entomology, contributed to this report.