Stiff (Season 10, Episode 23)
Premise: A wealthy woman falls into a coma after an insulin injection, and the case turns from her husband’s secret sex game to a scheme by her daughter and her neurologist to reach her fortune.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 10, Episode 23
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- David Dukes as David Moore, Marin Hinkle as Debbie Mason, John Slattery as Dr. Richard Shipman, Susan Kellermann as Jeannie Stokes, Lee Wilkof as Eric Berner
- Director
- Jace Alexander
- Writers
- Story: René Balcer; Story & teleplay: Hall Powell
Summary
The Investigation
“Stiff” begins when David Moore rushes his unconscious wife, Joan, to the hospital in a taxi. Doctors find a fresh needle mark and a huge dose of synthetic insulin, though she is not diabetic. Joan holds the family money, and her longtime houseman says she had grown listless, lying in bed for hours. A drugstore charge leads to a prescription for selegiline from neurologist Dr. Richard Shipman, and the detectives learn Joan has fast-advancing Parkinson’s disease.
Moore offers to plead to promoting a suicide, saying Joan begged him to end her life and that a diabetic friend supplied the insulin. A guest list from her daughter, Debbie Mason, leads to psychiatrist Dr. Bertram Stokes, once caught bringing insulin in from Spain. His estranged wife, Jeannie Stokes, hands over a videotape revealing that five couples, the Moores among them, played a sexual game in which husbands put their wives into insulin shock and later revived them. Moore is arrested for attempted murder.
The Trial
Moore drops the suicide story and calls the coma an accident. Since a power of attorney gives him control of Joan’s money while she lives, McCoy backs Debbie’s bid to become her mother’s guardian, and the judge grants it, sending Moore back to jail. Estate records then show Joan had cut off funding for Debbie’s failing publishing business. A search of Debbie’s home turns up MPTP, a compound that mimics Parkinson’s, and the medical examiner finds it in Joan’s blood. The charges against Moore are dropped and Debbie is arrested.
Records tie Debbie to Shipman, a former MPTP researcher she met at a venture capital conference. Offered a deal, she says the plan was his and that he treated her mother in his office the evening of the coma; Shipman blames her. Learning that Joan may be fully conscious but frozen, McCoy wins a court fight with Moore, restored as guardian, over a risky L-dopa treatment. Just before it, Shipman pleads to second-degree attempted murder, 8⅓ to 25 years, and admits he gave Joan MPTP instead of the drug he had promised.
Spoiler, the ending: The L-dopa injection has no effect, and the doctors will not risk a second dose, leaving Joan Moore trapped in her body. Debbie Mason pleads guilty to first-degree assault and will serve at least three years.
Why it stands out
- The case changes shape three times, from an apparent mercy killing to a sex game gone wrong to a poisoning plot for money.
- The medical twist rests on MPTP, a contaminant once found in a bad batch of designer heroin that left users with Parkinson’s-like symptoms.
- John Slattery guest stars as the scheming neurologist Dr. Richard Shipman.