Shangri-La (Season 13, Episode 2)
Premise: A new teacher is found stabbed in a high school closet, and the student caught on the security tape, who is sleeping with her drama teacher, turns out to be an adult who has spent years passing as a teenager.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 2
- 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 Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Stephi Lineburg as Fiona Reid/Marguerite Sampson/Lorelei Savage, Rob Campbell as Gary Bergan, Susan Floyd as defense attorney Jessica Sheets, Hallie Foote as Margaret Chapman, J. K. Simmons as Dr. Emil Skoda
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Michael S. Chernuchin
Summary
The Investigation
“Shangri-La” begins with a teacher’s murder: Valerie Keenan, 27, in her first term teaching ninth-grade English at a tough city high school, is found stabbed in a janitor’s closet beside bloody rags. She was killed elsewhere, and her skin bears traces of a gel used to strip off heavy stage makeup. Before this job, Keenan taught at a private school in Milford, Connecticut.
Students point to drama club director Gary Bergan, who had been drinking with Keenan. The overnight security tape looks clean, but nobody on it carries an umbrella on a rainy day, so the detectives realize its date was reset. The real footage shows Keenan letting student Fiona Reid in at 8 p.m. and Fiona leaving alone two hours later. Fiona claims she came for SAT tutoring, yet her mother, Margaret Chapman, says Fiona already scored in the top 2 percent on the PSAT. The bartender admits serving Fiona with Bergan, and she has been lying to her boyfriend about her weekends.
Detectives find Bergan and Fiona half-dressed in his apartment, and her backpack bears the victim’s blood type. He is arrested for third-degree rape and she for murder.
The Trial
Defense lawyer Jessica Sheets wants Fiona sent to Family Court. McCoy believes Bergan urged her to kill Keenan to save his career; Southerlyn suspects jealousy. At the transfer hearing, Mrs. Chapman reveals that Fiona is a foster child placed through her church, a former runaway whose parents prostituted her at 12, and McCoy gives in. For three years in a juvenile facility, Fiona says Bergan told her Keenan would cost him his job and promised to doctor the tape.
Offered a manslaughter plea, Bergan reveals that Fiona once hit a Milford-area bartender with a bottle and that he paid the man $1,000 to drop it. Southerlyn finds Fiona in a Milford prep school yearbook as Marguerite Sampson, class of 1998, and the FBI matches her prints to Lorelei Savage, paroled in Florida in 1994 at age 18. She is 26, and Keenan could have exposed her. Since she was never a juvenile, the Family Court ruling is void and double jeopardy does not apply. Sheets pleads insanity: Dr. Emil Skoda calls Fiona a con artist, a defense psychiatrist diagnoses dissociative fugue, and Fiona testifies that she is 16 and that Bergan forced her. Charges against Bergan are dropped.
Spoiler, the ending: McCoy confronts Fiona with Bergan’s account and the Marguerite Sampson license she used in the Milford bar. She drops the act, boasting of her knack for showing people what they hope to find, but McCoy notes her lawyer cannot let her lie to a jury. The episode closes with Fiona set to serve 8⅓ to 25 years; no verdict is shown.
Why it stands out
- A Family Court disposition is declared void because the defendant was never a juvenile, so double jeopardy does not block an adult murder prosecution.
- J. K. Simmons appears as Dr. Emil Skoda, who concludes the defendant is a con artist rather than mentally ill.
- The title refers to the legend of Shangri-La, where people stay young until they leave, a comparison made in the final scene.