Patsy (Season 10, Episode 7)
Premise: A woman left in a coma after an apparent rape had long accused one man of killing her sister, and the DNA case against him begins to look like a setup.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 10, Episode 7
- 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
- Sebastian Roché as Ken Taylor, James Rebhorn as defense attorney Charles Garnett, John Hillner as Larry Taylor, Clare Hoak as Tina, Heather Robison as Emily Wehner
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- René Balcer & Lynne E. Litt
Summary
The Investigation
“Patsy” opens when a building super and an exterminator find travel agent Cecilia Knowles beaten, choked and barely conscious in her apartment. She slips into a coma from brain injury, and doctors find she was injected with Demerol, though no syringe is at the scene. Her phone records show years of calls to Queens police about her younger sister, Julie Gorham, who vanished after flying to LaGuardia to see her boyfriend, Ken Taylor, a state press aide who now lives two blocks from the hotel bar where Knowles spent her last evening.
Taylor, long the main suspect in Gorham’s presumed murder, first claims barely to know Knowles. Her former Albany colleagues say she complained that he followed her, and he moved to the city a month after she did. He takes Demerol for an old back injury, and drops of semen at the scene match his DNA. Taylor insists the result is impossible, but he is charged.
The Trial
Before the grand jury, Taylor claims Knowles framed him by obtaining his semen through a call girl, and he is indicted anyway. Facing the evidence, he agrees to plead to the assault and pay for Knowles’s care. Carmichael keeps the detectives on the escort angle, and a woman named Tina admits Knowles paid her to sleep with Taylor and hand over the condom. Knowles also invented the stalking, moved first on purpose and took the Demerol from a co-worker, so the assault case is dropped.
McCoy then notices a barn on Taylor’s list of assets that was never searched in the Gorham case. Police find Gorham’s remains buried there in a sail bag that carries marks from his brother’s boat, and Taylor goes on trial for her murder. Barred from using Knowles’s psychiatric records or the frame-up, Garnett still argues that Knowles killed her sister out of jealousy and took her seat on the plane, and in summation he hints that she fooled McCoy before. McCoy responds by defying the judge’s rulings and telling jurors why Knowles is in a coma.
Spoiler, the ending: The judge holds McCoy in contempt and declares a mistrial, so no verdict is reached. Police later find the car Knowles traded in, now in Ohio, with two of Gorham’s hairs inside, possibly from the trunk. McCoy says they will ask Knowles when she wakes up, leaving open who killed Julie Gorham.
Why it stands out
- The assault turns out to be staged: the victim manufactured the evidence against the man she blamed for her sister’s death.
- McCoy’s closing argument defies the judge’s evidentiary rulings, earning him a contempt citation and ending the trial in a mistrial.
- The final scene leaves it unresolved whether Taylor or Knowles killed Julie Gorham.