Secrets (Season 2, Episode 12)
Premise: The rape and murder of a dedicated teacher exposes her secret sex addiction, and the search for her killer runs through her students, her lovers and the sex clubs she visited.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 12
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March)
- Guest stars
- Dean Nolen as Philip Montrose, Neko Parham as Ethan Chance, Daniel McDonald as Byron Marks, Mark Pinter as Jordan Owens, Omar Scroggins as Marcus
- Ripped from the headlines
- Inspired by the early-1970s murder of Roseann Quinn, a New York teacher of deaf children whose case also inspired Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
- Director
- Arthur W. Forney
- Writers
- Story: Wendy West & Dawn DeNoon & Lisa Marie Petersen; Story & teleplay: Robert F. Campbell & Jonathan Greene
Summary
“Secrets” begins when a building super, Jimmy, comes to fix a toilet and finds English teacher Marnie Owens, 37, raped and strangled in her bedroom with the radio playing. Nothing suggests a break-in. Owens, an award-winning teacher at a rough city high school, tutored struggling students at home for free, and her last session was with Ethan Chance, a former corner drug dealer now on track for college. Ethan skips school the next morning, his mother says Owens shouted at him, and a neighbor saw a young man in a brown jacket go in that evening and heard loud voices.
In Ethan’s room the detectives find a nude photo of Owens, and he is caught fleeing her memorial service. Ethan says a classmate, Marcus Cole, found the picture in an online sex ad and meant to pass it around school; when Ethan warned her, Owens ordered him out, and he called her a name he now regrets. Marcus agrees to a blood test. Owens’s brother, Jordan, describes her as a sex addict, tracing it to their father’s sexualized attention to her as a girl, and her computer holds an ad that drew 162 replies.
A swingers club, Flings, says it banned Owens over an affair with Byron Marks, a married surgeon. Marks admits he saw her the night she died, after she called him upset about the photo, but a doorman puts him home by 10. A raid on a rougher club, Dante’s Inferno, turns up a regular partner of hers, Philip Montrose, who had been arrested in a Connecticut stalking case and lied about his alibi. A security officer chased him from her school, and Ethan recognizes him as the bystander outside her building who told him a woman had been killed.
A search finds a scrapbook of telephoto pictures of Owens, and his DNA is linked to her body. Ethan tells the grand jury that Montrose described the rape and strangling at a time when only the police and the killer knew those details. Before the vote, Montrose’s lawyer invokes his right to testify, and a judge allows it. Montrose says Owens came to him for sex that night, then, under Cabot’s questioning, launches into a tirade blaming her for her own death.
Spoiler, the ending: The grand jury indicts Montrose, but for first-degree manslaughter rather than second-degree murder, unable to get past the victim’s sex life. One of the squad fears he will escape a murder conviction; the charge can still bring 15 to 25 years.
Why it stands out
- Munch recalls his Baltimore days, when an ex-girlfriend made a wall-sized nude photograph of him the centerpiece of a gallery show.
- The grand jury fight turns on Section 190.50 of New York’s Criminal Procedure Law, which lets a defendant testify as long as no indictment has been filed.