The Ledger

3.18 Animal Instinct

In this episode (3.18), a professor is killed at the university lab where she experiments on animals. At first, it looks like animal rights activists might be to blame, but then when it is discovered that her husband and a colleague may have been having an affair, the focus of the investigation shifts. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and Stone and Robinette lead an ill-fated prosecution until they figure it all out.

The episode begins with the discovery of the victim, Fay Walsh, in her lab. Pro-animal graffiti ("Innocent Victims") adorns the walls. Briscoe and Logan talk to her husband, and he says she received threats from animal rights groups. They focus on Dirk Chesney, an activist with a violent past. They get a warrant for his apartment and search it when he's not there. They don't find too much, but he turns up in the middle of the search and he's carrying a gun. For some reason, he starts to flee, and they take him to the precinct.

During questioning, he just makes a lot of political speeches and offers an alibi: he was getting acupuncture. It turns out his gun was not the murder weapon, so they have to keep looking for suspects.

The murder weapon was a small shotgun, a "410," they call it, and they find that the university has access to one of these guns. They use it for killing birds in the field so they can bring in specimens. They find the gun in a locked closet. It's been cleaned but they can tell it's been recently fired.

They start looking for people associated with the university ("Manhattan Institute of Technology") who had a grudge against the victim. They talk to a biology department administrator, Susan Boyd, who tells them to check the victim's grade book. That doesn't go anywhere, but they learn Walsh had hired a private investigator to explore the possibility that her husband was having an affair.

They talk to the investigator, Mr Riggs, who says that it appeared Mr Walsh was having an affair with Susan Boyd. They talk to the husband and he says that Boyd once flirted with him but he never pursued a relationship with her. But, Riggs gave them a recording he made of Boyd leaving a steamy message on Mr Walsh's answering machine. They question Boyd and she admits the affair. It also turns out that she bought ammo for that shotgun down in New Jersey, identifying herself as Mrs Walsh.

They interrogate the husband and Boyd separately. You begin to get the impression that Boyd is obsessed with Walsh. Walsh continues to deny the affair and seems believable. But not believable enough: Stone decides to prosecute Mr Walsh for murder and make a deal with Boyd to testify against him. Walsh's lawyer, Wesley Burke, gets the tape of the steamy message suppressed, though, so they case is weak before it even starts.

A trial (38'), things aren't going very well. Stone and Robinette prepare Boyd for her testimony, and it's clear she's nervous and is having trouble with her story. Finally she turns to Stone and says, "What should I say?" He hesitates and reluctantly tells her to say she was home alone the night of the murder, even though she had previously told police she was with Mr Walsh. On the stand the next day, Burke questions her about her whereabouts that night and she looks at Stone before answering that she was home alone. Burke picks up on this and asks whether Stone told her to say that. She says he did. Uh oh. After a meeting in chambers, the judge tells the jury (off camera) they can choose to disregard her testimony.

Apparently, they do, and Walsh is found not guilty of his wife's murder (44').

So that leaves the DA with no one to prosecute, since they had made a deal with Boyd already. Then a judge named Feldman from New Jersey calls Robinette to talk about Boyd. They meet in Jersey and he says he knew her as Susan Daly, and she was once a clerk for him. He said she became infatuated with him, even though he was married. She moved to be closer to him an everything. Robinette later learns that Boyd has a history of fraud, and she wasn't even a lawyer, but she was good enough that she convinced this judge otherwise.

They finally get around to talking to Olivet about Boyd, and she (without meeting her) says Boyd probably suffers from "erotomania" which causes her to have imaginary romantic relationships with all these men, and to think that the men are sending her coded messages through mundane behavior. They learn that Boyd had an apartment on Cape May right near Mr Walsh's home there. They search it and find the ammo and a sort of shrine to Mr Walsh. They arrest her (54')

They all meet in the DA conference room. Walsh is brought in to tell Boyd he doesn't love her. She ignores him. Then -- in what is probably the best bit of the episode -- she tells Stone that he wrote her love letters saying that he wanted to get rid of his wife so he could be with her. She produces this letter and Stone reads it aloud: it's a memo to the entire office written just before the murder requesting extra security in the building because his wife would be working alone and animal rights activists had been threatening them lately.

It's clear she's crazy, but she refuses to acknowledge that she is of diminished capacity, even though it would save her many years of jail time. When her lawyer tells her she should take the deal, she fires him and represents herself.

The episode's closing scene features Stone reviewing the latest of her 16 pre-trial motions, and he says she's using an outdated prison library but her motions are better than what high-priced law firms produce. Schiff says, "Truth is ugly, so we put our prophets in prison." Stone guesses that Oscar Wilde said that, but Schiff says no, it was Charles Manson.

The episode is one of those that starts off seeming to be about one thing, but then ends up being about something else altogether. At the beginning, you think you're getting an episode about animal rights, but soon enough (the end of the first act, really), you learn that it's another fairly conventional crime-of-passion episode. Sometimes I think the writers of the show lack the courage to stick to the original issues they raise in their scripts, so they back off and write more standard stuff for the episode's later parts. But, this episode remains entertaining because you want to find out if the woman really is crazy, and her performance is pretty good.

The credits on TV Tome say Lawrence Pressman plays the recurring defense attorney "Nicholas Burke," but I think he is referred to as "Wesley Burke" several times in the episode.

Posted by adm at August 26, 2004 09:24 AM

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