Hands Free (Season 14, Episode 17)
Premise: Body parts in East Village garbage lead to the victim’s supposedly deaf neighbor, who turns out to be Eli Madison, a wealthy heir long suspected in his wife’s disappearance, and when a jury acquits him, McCoy charges him with his wife’s murder.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, 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 Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Henry Stram as Eli Madison, Dennis Boutsikaris as defense attorney Al Archer, Ronnie Farer as Diane Wharsey, Sonia Manzano as Barbara Benitez, Kathleen McNenny as Jennifer Shelby
- Ripped from the headlines
- The episode is based on real estate heir Robert Durst, whose first wife vanished in 1982 and who was acquitted in 2003 of murdering his Galveston, Texas, neighbor Morris Black, whose dismembered remains were found while Durst was living disguised as a mute woman.
- Director
- Gloria Muzio
- Writers
- Janis Diamond
Summary
The Investigation
“Hands Free” starts with a dismemberment case in the East Village, where a boy digging through restaurant garbage for his retainer finds a severed hand, and more remains turn up in nearby trash. Rodgers says the man, about 50, was cut up after death and drained of blood; he had arthritic knees, walked with a cane and had recently used mentholated hand sanitizer. A trash bag holding a running magazine with a page cut out leads the detectives through local shopkeepers to a cranky customer named Roger.
The missing page carries an ad featuring Evan Barry, who identifies Roger Barry as the abusive father he has not seen in ten years. Barry’s apartment has blood in the tub drain, and his neighbors loathed him. One points to Barry’s deaf girlfriend across the hall, Jennifer Shelby, whose apartment holds a 1979 prep-school yearbook and a large knife bearing Barry’s blood. The real Jennifer Shelby is a Park Avenue wife who is not deaf.
Money orders, a Narcotics Anonymous group and a gallery showing one of “Jennifer’s” paintings lead to a studio on Avenue C, where the impostor is taken into custody. The impostor is Eli Madison, a wealthy heir whom former DA Adam Schiff could never indict when his wife, Caroline, vanished ten years earlier, since her body was never found.
The Trial
Defense attorney Al Archer loses a bid to move the trial to Suffolk County but gets the judge to bar any mention of Caroline. He attacks the DNA testing and the knife, and the medical examiner concedes the cause of death is unknown. Madison testifies that Barry, his lover, discovered he was neither a woman nor deaf, beat him with his cane and then collapsed, apparently of a heart attack; fearing the police, Madison cut up the body with Barry’s own metal cutter. Pressed by McCoy, he bursts out that everyone thinks he killed his wife. The jury acquits him.
McCoy then turns to Caroline’s disappearance. His first wife, Diane Wharsey, mentions his close friend and alibi witness Dwayne Evans, who died in a hiking accident near Taos, New Mexico, before he could testify in a wrongful death suit. A “Jennifer Shelby” flew into Albuquerque days earlier, and Evans checked into an inn with a woman matching her description. Exhumed, Evans has Madison’s skin under his fingernails. Madison says they were lovers and Evans hiked alone. McCoy lists every death Madison failed to report, and the innkeeper testifies that Evans drove off early that morning with a passenger and that “Miss Shelby” walked back alone and dusty around noon.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Madison of second-degree murder in Caroline’s death, giving McCoy a homicide conviction without a body.
Why it stands out
- Former DA Adam Schiff is recalled as having been unable to indict Madison for his wife’s disappearance a decade earlier because her body was never found.
- After losing the dismemberment case, McCoy convicts Madison of murdering his missing wife by treating the death of Madison’s alibi witness as evidence of the original crime.