Kid Pro Quo (Season 13, Episode 20)
Premise: The admissions director of an elite Manhattan private school is beaten to death with her own cane, and her fight for a rejected scholarship applicant exposes a chain of favors that bought a kindergarten seat for a pornographer’s son.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 20
- 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
- Roger Rees as Wyatt Scofield, Jeffrey DeMunn as defense attorney Norman Rothenberg, Curtis McClarin as Marvin Waters, Josh Mostel as Harvey Anchin, Daniel Oreskes as Merrill “Bud” Rush
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode reportedly draws on the controversy involving financier Sandy Weill and the 92nd Street Y.
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Eric Overmyer
Summary
The Investigation
“Kid Pro Quo” begins with a murder on a park bench, where two tennis instructors find a woman with her skull crushed and a bloody cane with a green-eyed rabbit handle beneath the bench. Rodgers finds a recent hip replacement, so the cane was the victim’s own. Her cell phone leads to the exclusive Knowles School, where staff identify her as Dr. Debra Landon, a longtime kindergarten teacher whom headmaster Wyatt Scofield made admissions director after a motorbike accident shattered her hip. Her ex-husband, who owed her alimony, and a married nutritionist she had been seeing are questioned; the nutritionist says the admissions season was consuming her.
Threatening voicemails lead to parents of rejected children. Clarissa Wagner says she was house-hunting in Greenwich, and an anonymous caller proves to be Marvin Waters, a single father and bus dispatcher whose gifted daughter, Cassie, was moved to the waiting list. His partial print is in Landon’s home, and he says she told him the headmaster overruled her. Scofield confirms he did. He wears powder blue cashmere like the fibers found on the cane, a doorman says he went out again that night until nearly 1 a.m., and a pay phone near his building called Landon. Her email warning him that he was compromising admissions was erased after her death by someone with a master password, and Scofield is arrested at a school auction.
The Trial
Scofield is charged with second-degree murder, and friends pay for his lawyer, Norman Rothenberg, who says the People have no motive. The prosecutors learn that Cassie’s place went to Jared Anchin, son of pornographer Harvey Anchin, and that Scofield stopped paying rent when his building went co-op. Its owner, Merrill “Bud” Rush, gave him an apartment worth over a million dollars after Anchin cut Rush’s cement costs through supplier Scarpio, an investor in Anchin’s films.
At trial, Beck matches the fibers to Scofield’s sweater but concedes fiber comparison is not exact. Waters testifies that Landon planned to take Cassie’s rejection to the board and then to the newspapers. Anchin and Rush describe trading a cheaper cement deal for a kindergarten seat and an apartment. Scofield calls the apartment a gift and argues that a quarter century of service would count for more with the board than any complaint, but McCoy’s cross draws out his $60,000 salary, about three kindergarten tuitions, until Scofield declares that the school would be nothing without him and owes him.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Scofield guilty of second-degree murder. Afterward the prosecutors note that the headmaster is gone while the Anchin boy keeps his seat at Knowles, and Southerlyn concludes that money beats merit, a point Branch only underlines.
Why it stands out
- Roger Rees plays headmaster Wyatt Scofield, with Jeffrey DeMunn as his defense attorney.
- The motive is a three-way swap: cheaper cement for a developer, a free apartment for the headmaster and a kindergarten seat for a pornographer’s son.
- McCoy’s cross contrasts the headmaster’s $60,000 salary with the $20,000 kindergarten tuition his school’s families pay.