The Ledger

9.9 True North

In this episode (9.9), a woman kills a wealthy man and his young daughter, but it looks like the man's ambitious Canadian wife might be behind it all. Briscoe and Curtis investigate.

The episode begins with some uniformed police officers storming a townhouse where a neighbor reported hearing 3 shots. When they enter, the find the man, a Mr. Harker, and his daughter shot dead. The nieghbor says he saw a woman running from the scene. For some reason, the first place Briscoe and Curtis check is the woman's parking garage, I guess to see whether she has fled the scene. They learn from the attendant, after some pressuring, that the woman let another man share one of her spots in the garage. They visit this guy, a small-time drug dealer named Petoskey, who they catch with a toilet-tank full of drugs. They learn from him that Mrs. Harker has a friend named Doris Nichols who she might be staying with, so they set about trying to find her. They find a cab driver who called 911 after seeing Nichols bloody and armed. They trace her to a bar, and find her dead. Mrs. Harker killed her.

Mrs. Harker tells the detectives that Nichols told her she had killed her husband and step-daughter, and that she was going to kill her next. Harker says she got the gun away and killed Nichols. Briscoe and Curtis have to further investigate to check out her story, but they don't arrest her.

They talk to the late Mr Harker's lawyer who says that Mrs Harker is bad girl, a drug addict, and an adultress. And she's Canadian. "The new DA" Abbie Carmichael also joins the investigation. She delays ordering Briscoe and Curtis to arrest Harker, and this causes a problem, because by the time they finally do get permission to arrest her, Harker has fled, apparently to Canada.

They eventually get the Ontario Provincial Police to track down and arrest Harker, and McCoy and Carmichael suspect that Mrs Harker paid Nichols to kill Mr Harker. This makes it Murder 1, a capital offense, but Canada refuses to extradite Harker because they don't want to subject her to the death penalty. Schiff settles the dispute by ordering McCoy to tell them they won't seek the death penalty in the case.

As the investigation continues, they learn from Petoskey that he provided the gun to Harker, not Nichols, which bolsters the theory that Harker was ultimately responsible for the murders. The plot thickens, however, when they learn that Mrs Harker was Mr Harker's second wife, and that the first Mrs Harker was killed under mysterious circumstances -- she was run over by a red Ford Escort in Buffalo. They begin to suspect that the second Mrs Harker might have been the one behind the wheel. Carmichael talks to Mrs Harker's father to determine if this might be the case, but he isn't much help. She tracks down another friend of Harker's in the city whom she pressures into giving information about an ex-boyfriend of Harker's who owned a used car lot and used to let Mrs Harker borrow cars (before she was Mrs Harker). Briscoe and Curtis head up to Buffalo to question the car dealer who remembers letting her borrow the Ford Escort, and remembers that it was banged up when she returned it. (She said she had hit a deer.) With this new information, Schiff decides to seek the death penalty. Canada gets upset and refuses to provide some financial evidence that would have supported the case against Harker, but AC visits a NYC branch of the Canadian bank they need access to and pressures them into releasing the data they need.

The trial begins at 41 minutes in, and it goes pretty well for McCoy. It goes even better when Harker takes the stand, and McCoy gets her all worked up and shows everyone what a bad and angry person she is. Apparently, she killed her husband for the money, and was in a way acting out the anger she felt over being dumped by a rich boy when she was younger. No explanation as to why the step-daughter was killed, though. Anyway, the jury returns a guilty verdict and shortly thereafter Harker is sentenced to death.

Posted by adm at April 14, 2004 02:56 PM

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