Girl Most Likely (Season 12, Episode 17)
Premise: The killing of a principled private-school student points first to the athletes she reported, then to a secret that her best friend was desperate to keep.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 12, Episode 17
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Röhm), DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest)
- Guest stars
- Caroline Dhavernas as Alicia Milford, Noah Fleiss as Denny Cannon, Gabriel Carpenter as John Lucero, Christopher McCann as defense attorney Drew Hamilton, John Bolger as Mark Knapp
- Director
- Steve Shill
- Writers
- Lynn Mamet
Summary
The Investigation
“Girl Most Likely” begins with high school senior Julie Cade, whose family recently moved from Boston, found dead with a fractured skull under a washer in her building’s basement laundry room. The doorman recalls a hooded figure in a dark jacket with gold-striped sleeves slipping in around 7:30 a.m., a partial print comes from a running shoe, and her sweater carries a photo-developing chemical. That leads to neighbor Mark Knapp, a magazine photographer whose darkroom is full of glamorous shots of Julie, but the pictures were for her yearbook page and he left on his bike before she died.
At Julie’s school, Strickland, varsity jackets match the doorman’s description. Her emails lead to Cherry, an online board on which two boys, Peter Grimes and John Lucero, rated girls sexually; Julie secretly named them to the headmaster, and they were suspended. Grimes says Lucero went hunting for the informer, and classmates describe Julie confronting wrestler Denny Cannon at a party when he was kissing her best friend, Alicia Milford. A call to Julie’s cell from a pay phone near Cannon’s home minutes before her death, plus her hair inside his varsity jacket, lead to his arrest.
The Trial
With a thin case, Southerlyn learns from classmate Monica Heath and a crisis-line counselor that Cannon and another boy sexually assaulted Julie in a bedroom at the party. Seeking a deal, Cannon admits the attack and says the boys stopped only when Julie told them she was gay. Lewin and McCoy weigh whether that claim matters, and when Southerlyn questions Alicia about her friendship with Julie, her parents explode and hire a lawyer.
Alicia’s fingerprints on the washer, her cheerleading jacket and her running shoes place her in the laundry room, and the prosecutors suspect Julie’s plan to press charges would have exposed a relationship between the two girls. Despite misgivings in the office, McCoy offers first-degree manslaughter and makes clear that Alicia’s sexuality would be the heart of the state’s case at trial.
Spoiler, the ending: Alicia refuses to face a trial and confesses. She says she went to persuade Julie not to go to the police, the argument turned physical, and she pushed Julie hard enough that her head struck the washing machine. Cannon and Lucero end up on probation for the assault.
Why it stands out
- Caroline Dhavernas guest stars as Alicia Milford, with Noah Fleiss as Denny Cannon.
- McCoy uses the prospect of outing a suspect in open court as plea leverage, a tactic his colleagues warn could make the office look bigoted.
- The online ranking scandal that first seems to explain the murder turns out to be a red herring; the motive is fear of being outed.