Bodies (Season 14, Episode 1)
Premise: A teenager’s murder leads to a cab driver who boasts of many more victims, and when his Legal Aid lawyer refuses to reveal where the bodies are, McCoy puts the lawyer on trial.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 1
- 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
- Alexander Chaplin as Legal Aid attorney Tim Schwimmer, Ritchie Coster as Mark Bruner, Susan Floyd as defense attorney Jessica Sheets, Mimi Lieber as defense attorney Wendy Weiss, Jill Dalton as Megan Goddard
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode dramatizes the Buried Bodies Case, also called the Lake Pleasant Bodies Case, in which two upstate New York defense lawyers kept secret where their client, Robert Garrow, had hidden the bodies of two murdered women.
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Story: Michael S. Chernuchin; Story & teleplay: William N. Fordes
Summary
The Investigation
“Bodies” opens with a teenage murder that grows into a serial killer case. Two men stopping in an Upper West Side alley find 17-year-old Sally Galan beaten and strangled; the M.E. finds she was sexually assaulted after being knocked unconscious. Her parents thought she was in Amagansett with her friend Katie Corwin, but the trip was a cover for a weekend with mechanic Kurt Lemond. Lemond admits they fought at Bobo’s, and waitress Julie confirms Sally left alone around 10:00.
The slash marks on Sally’s body resemble those on Holly Pinkston, 18, who vanished after leaving a Brooklyn library five years earlier. A sketch from that case jogs Julie’s memory of a staring loner who paid from a thick roll of small bills and left when Sally did. Missing Persons maps other girls who vanished without a trace, and the distances involved suggest a cab driver. Taxi records lead to Mark Bruner, who lives alone with no phone or TV, toys with the detectives and is picked out of a lineup by Julie.
The Trial
DNA ties Bruner to both Sally and Holly. His assigned lawyer, Jessica Sheets, withdraws because he frightens her, and Legal Aid’s Tim Schwimmer gets Julie’s identification suppressed because she saw the computer-enhanced sketch before the lineup. In plea talks Bruner boasts of 15 or more other victims and says his lawyer has seen the bodies, which Schwimmer confirms while citing privilege. The story reaches the papers and parents picket Schwimmer’s office. Bruner turns down McCoy’s offer to drop the death penalty in exchange for names, confesses to the two known killings and is sentenced to death.
Because Bruner says the bodies are under lock and key, McCoy reasons that Schwimmer unlocked and relocked a door and charges him with aiding and abetting the murders. Southerlyn warns that McCoy is putting the system itself on trial. Mothers of missing girls testify, including Megan Goddard, whose daughter Michelle disappeared almost five years earlier, until the judge demands evidence instead of emotion. Schwimmer testifies that this was his first murder case, that he viewed the bodies to negotiate a fair deal and that disclosure would break his duty to his client. He refuses McCoy’s last offer before the verdict.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Schwimmer guilty on all counts. McCoy concedes he misread him from the start; when one prosecutor predicts a week in Attica will make him talk, the other doubts it, observing that they put the system on trial and lost.
Why it stands out
- In the real Buried Bodies Case, the indictment against one of the lawyers was dismissed and both were later cleared of wrongdoing; the fictional Schwimmer is convicted.
- The defendant at the episode’s trial is not the killer but his court-appointed lawyer, prosecuted for keeping his client’s secret.
- A computer-enhanced police sketch shown to the witness before the lineup is treated like a one-photo array, and her identification is thrown out.