The Ledger

15.2 The Dead Wives Club

Uh oh -- they're only on the second episode and the season already has taken a turn for the worse.

In this episode (15.2), a woman whose firefighter husband left her for a 9/11 widow kills the widow by pushing her off the Staten Island ferry moments before it crashes into the dock. Fontana and Green investigate, and McCoy prosecutes with more ardor than Southerlyn cares for.

This episode is one of the most exploitative and insensitive in the show's history, and I can't believe they would air it at all, let alone this close to the 9/11 anniversary and this early in the season.

If you live in NYC, you will immediately recognize two plot elements "ripped from the headlines": the Staten Island Ferry crash, which killed 10 people, and the phenonomenon of firefighters leaving their wives to marry the widows they grew close to after 9/11. The episode gives short shrift to the ferry crash story, and portrays 9/11 widows exclusively as either deranged murderers or money-hungry home-wreckers. It's a lazy and insulting episode.

The episode begins at a ferry dock. A couple of guys are talking about an MP3 player (that looks like an iPod), and one is asking how the other can afford it when he still owes him $100. iPod guy gets something from a vendor, and gets upset because he gets a Canadian quarter back as change. As he starts to dispute this, the ferry crashes into the dock, a calamity somewhat effectively captured on screen.

Fontana and Green show up and learn that there are many injuries, and one DOA, a white woman named Donna. A DOT investigator shows up and gives the detectives a hard time for investigating the case. A uniformed officer turns up some gin in the ferry's pilot house, and then they learn the DOT guy let the pilot/captain slip away.

The detectives head over to the captain's house, and the feds are already there. The captain isn't at the house, either, and the feds claim jurisdiction of the case, which Fontana and Green don't seem to mind too much. Fontana conveniently notices some boat paint in a trash barrel and from that deduces that the captain is seeking refuge on a boat somewhere. Off camera, they determine that his wife owns a boat, and they head to the marina, where they find the captain on his boat, dead. Apparently he shot himself.

Fontana gets all upset because his expensive Italian shirt got ruined by the captain's blood -- he mentions it about 10 times -- and they get back on the case, trying to figure out how the woman, Donna, died. They talk to a witness from the ferry who says he heard a scream, a splash, and then the ferry crash. This is strange, they say, because you'd think the crash would be first. It seems to me that a person might jump off a boat they thought was going to crash, but who knows.

Anyway, they check in with ME Rodgers, who says the victim was alive when she hit the water, but had bruises on her body and a severe head injury from hitting a railing on the way down. They begin to surmise that she was pushed overboard. But by whom?

They talk to her husband, Mr Ed McClean, an ex-firefighter who was at the WTC on 9/11. When one of his daughters calls him "Ed," Fontana brilliantly deduces that the child is probably his step-daughter, as opposed to his natural daughter. They look into it and learn that Ed married Donna sometime after Donna's husband Joe was killed on 9/11. Naturally, they want to see what's up with Ed's ex-wife, Collette.

They go to visit her, but she's not around, so they end up talking to her neighbor. In the episode's only decent scene, the neighbor invites them inside and tells them how the neighborhood has fallen apart since 9/11. She says families got torn apart on that day but also in the aftermath, as people became too stressed out to deal with each other. She explains how some firefighters encouraged to console the spouses of dead firefighters got too involved, and ending up leaving their own wives. This subject has received a lot of coverage in the local NY papers in the last few years. Her own husband, she says, has been incapacitated by leukemia, which she says he got from the toxic environment at Ground Zero, where he spent several weeks. But she never got any 9/11 settlement money because they can't prove the connection.

She goes on to explain the "Dead Wives Club," a group of women who have received sizable financial settlements as a result of 9/11 and who, she says, parade their money and act better than everybody else. She says the dead woman, Donna, was one such woman.

In case you've gotten confused by this point, as I did, let me recap: Donna was married to Joe. Joe died. His best friend, Ed, also firefighter, left his wife Collette and his twin sons and married Donna. Collette and Donna were also best friends once.

They talk to Collette and she says she isn't bitter. She has a fractured wrist, which she says happened when she fell in a subway station. They talk to forensics who says they have DNA from a palm print they believe belongs to the murderer, but they need a sample from the murderer to match it against.

Van Buren and the dets talk things over and they marvel over Fontana's fancy car (Mercedes?). (I wonder if Fontana's mysterious source of wealth will become an issue later.) They suspect Collette is involved in the murder, so they talk to her again. Trying to get her to open up, Fontana lies to her and says he has two teenage sons, Eric and Taylor. She looks like she might break soon, but she says she's innocent.

They talk to a medical worker who treated Collette's wrist fracture. Without going into specifics, she says that Collette's fracture did not happen the way she said it did. They go out to the ferry to re-enact the murder, and determine that Collette left the palm print of the ship's railing and then probably fractured her wrist after falling backwards and bracing her fall during the ferry crash.

They bring Collette in for questioning and try to bluff her by making up witnesses, but just as they're starting to get somewhere, her lawyer enters. Her lawyer is Ms. Galliano (Roma Maffia), who is very loudmouthed and obnoxious and unpleasant for me to watch. Galliano prevents them from getting a DNA sample from the coffee cup Collette was drinking from.

The big issue in the case then becomes trying to get a DNA sample from Collette. After a bunch of boring legal decisions, they finally trick her into unknowingly giving them a sample via a mailed-in payment for parking tickets.

Once it's inevitable that the DNA evidence will be admitted, Loudmouth says Collette's new defense will be Extreme Emotional Disturbance because of PTSD caused by 9/11. Fine. So she talks to Skoda, who says yeah, she's really stressed out, and because she can't fight terrorists, she killed her homewrecking best friend.

McCoy talks this over with SS and Branch, who both seem sympathetic to the defense, which leads to what may be the most outrageous Serena Southerlyn moment in history. McCoy says, Don't forget this woman just killed the mother of two young girls, who already lost their father on 9/11. And Southerlyn goes --- get ready --- "Don't you think there's some room for leniency here, Jack?" Oh god, she is toooo much. Southerlyn is like the Nora Lewin for the new millennium. (Lewin, Branch's predecessor, was always angling to get serial killers off because they got spanked when they were younger.)

At trial (46'), McCoy gets Collette to break down and basically admit that she was in a complete psychotic daze every time she lied to the police, so that pretty much invalidates her EED defense.

SS is upset over McCoy's harsh cross-examination of Collette (more table-setting for SS's imminent departure from the show), and Jack tells her to go back to the office if she can't deal with it.

Unsurprisingly, the jury returns a verdict of guilty.

I'm really stumped by the writers' decision to paint such an unflattering portrait of 9/11 widows. It's like they were thinking, let's put these women through even more hell than they've already been through. And to do such a poor job handling the ferry crash, too, just makes matters worse.

The episode's title comes from a New York magazine article about 9/11 widows moving on with their lives, which itself is a pun on the book First Wives Club.

Posted by adm at September 23, 2004 03:39 AM

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