Misleader (Season 1, Episode 17)
Premise: When a conservative Christian college president’s pregnant daughter-in-law is found strangled in a Manhattan hotel, a burglar’s trail gives way to an affair inside the family.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 17
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Monique Jeffries (Michelle Hurd), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek)
- Guest stars
- Robert Foxworth as Dr. Ben Hadley, Anne Twomey as Sharon Hadley, Bo Foxworth as Ben Hadley Jr., Richard Thompson as Brad Weber, Norbert Leo Butz as John Fenwick
- Ripped from the headlines
- Loosely based on the 1999 Hillsdale College scandal, in which the daughter-in-law of college president George Roche III said she had had a years-long affair with him.
- Director
- Richard Dobbs
- Writers
- Story: Nick Harding & Wendy West; Story & teleplay: Nick Kendrick
Summary
“Misleader” opens at the Versailles Hotel, where a maid finds Sylvia Hadley strangled in her ransacked room, her arms folded after death. There is no sign of forced entry, and the rape kit shows she had sex before she died. She is the daughter-in-law of Dr. Benjamin Hadley, the influential president of Midvale College, in town with his wife, Sharon, for a conference of Christian colleges. Hadley blames the city’s crime, and Sylvia’s husband, Ben Hadley Jr., says he was home in Baltimore.
Hotel security points to a burglar working rooms with electronic locks, and a guest at another hotel reports that the thief masturbated in her underwear. After a turf fight with a burglary task force that never alerted SVU, the squad catches John Fenwick, a programmer fired by a lock maker, in the act, but he has an alibi: on the night of the murder he was stealing a jeweled dog collar at another hotel. The autopsy shows Sylvia was two months pregnant. A bartender saw her flirting with endowment manager Brad Weber the night before; Weber says they only kissed at her door and that their extra meetings were about a huge balloon payment from Hadley’s purchase of the college coming due; his DNA does not match, and he resigns.
A philosophy professor whom Hadley pushed out describes a leader who reshaped the curriculum to please wealthy donors. When detectives tell Sharon Hadley about the pregnancy, she reveals that her husband carried on a two-year affair with Sylvia. Det. Ken Briscoe, sorting the hotel’s untimed elevator tapes by guest events, spots Ben Jr. in the building on Sunday afternoon, and a train ticket and an ATM withdrawal confirm that he was in New York.
Spoiler, the ending: Skin found under Ben Jr.’s fingernail matches Sylvia’s throat, while the semen matches his father. Ben Jr. confesses that he came to catch her with a lover, that she ridiculed him for owing his job to his father, and that he choked her. Hadley denies making up the robbery story to shield his son. Sharon then tells him in front of the detectives that she is divorcing him and that he fathered his own grandchild.
Why it stands out
- The episode opens with a notice that it was inspired in part by a true incident.
- In the real case, the daughter-in-law died by suicide; the episode makes her death a murder.