Slaughter (Season 12, Episode 19)
Premise: The stabbing of a student looking into a meat plant leads McCoy past the killer to the fast-food executive who kept buying tainted beef.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 12, Episode 19
- 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
- Jesse Doran as Arthur King, Philip Casnoff as Bill Talbot, Gerrit Graham as defense attorney Mr. Hutchins, Stephen Bogardus as Jim Dittmar, Jill Dalton as Roberta Miller
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Rob Wright
Summary
The Investigation
“Slaughter” opens with the stabbing of a young man found behind a Chelsea pizzeria, his wallet gone. A sealed protest arrest identifies him as Andrew Hatcher, a Stuyvesant College senior, and his roommate admits the two bought marijuana in the area. Calls from Hatcher’s missing cell phone lead to a teenager who bought it from Jimmy Gaines, a hustler who says he found it in a dumpster beside the bloody wallet. A denim shirt pulled from a sewer carries Hatcher’s blood mixed with raw cow’s blood, pointing to the Meatpacking District, and the wound fits a curved boning knife.
Workers at Elite Meats say Hatcher, a volunteer with a student public-interest group, came asking for a former employee, Mike Bledsoe, and film Hatcher left at a photo shop shows owner Arthur King wearing a denim shirt. King is arrested. Bledsoe will not talk because of a confidentiality agreement drafted by lawyers for AgriStar Enterprises, and a USDA inspector says Elite gutted carcasses so carelessly that much of its beef was exposed to E. coli.
The Trial
McCoy persuades a judge to release a sealed lawsuit showing that Elite supplied patties to Big Bill’s, a fast-food chain owned by AgriStar, and that five young children died of E. coli infections. Over his superior’s reluctance, McCoy targets AgriStar CEO Bill Talbot for manslaughter. In exchange for a reduced plea, King confesses that he stabbed Hatcher while trying to take his film after Talbot warned him about the activist, and he says Talbot knew Elite was cutting corners to meet AgriStar’s quotas.
Talbot’s side proposes new safety pledges in return for dropping the case, and Southerlyn rejects them. At trial, defense attorney Hutchins attacks King’s credibility as a convicted killer, and Talbot testifies that balancing risk against cost is responsible business. Citing that argument, McCoy readies Roberta Miller, whose four-year-old daughter died, and the other parents as rebuttal witnesses.
Spoiler, the ending: Facing the parents’ testimony, Talbot pleads guilty in chambers to criminally negligent homicide, with two years for each child, and AgriStar’s board quickly distances itself from him. King’s plea on the Hatcher killing stands.
Why it stands out
- Confidentiality agreements from a civil settlement block a murder investigation until a judge reviews the sealed file and releases it to prosecutors.
- McCoy turns a single stabbing into a prosecution of a corporate CEO over the deaths of five children.
- The CEO’s own cost-benefit testimony opens the door for the victims’ parents to take the stand against him.