Evil Breeds (Season 14, Episode 18)
Premise: A 78-year-old Holocaust survivor is killed in a push-in attack while helping the government deport a former SS camp guard, and McCoy tries the old man alongside a young neo-Nazi record producer whose prints are on her door.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 14, Episode 18
- 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
- George Bartenieff as Stefan Anders, Logan Marshall-Green as Kyle Mellors, William Atherton as defense attorney Dan Jensen, Patrick Collins as Dennis Mendenhall, Shirl Bernheim as Leah Glaser
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Story: Barry Schindel; Story & teleplay: Noah Baylin
Summary
The Investigation
“Evil Breeds” begins with the murder of Leah Glaser, 78, found by a takeout deliveryman in her apartment, the door’s security chain torn from the jamb. She fractured her skull in a fall and was then smothered by hand, and a full set of prints on the doorjamb matches no one on file. A string of push-in robberies of elderly St. Andrew’s hospital patients leads to their home caregiver, Pauline Morris, whose fiancé, ambulette driver Joe Vasquez, admits fencing stolen goods but has an alibi for Glaser’s death.
Vasquez’s dispatcher says another driver, Johnny Fagan (called Kagan in the episode), took Glaser to Federal Plaza days earlier. Her daughter, Rebekkah Meisner, explains that her mother survived a camp in Poland and that her silver locket, holding a photo of her parents, is missing. Dennis Mendenhall of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations reveals that Glaser was his key witness against Stefan Anders, a German immigrant he believes was the SS officer in charge at Bobrek, a satellite camp of Auschwitz, where Glaser saw him shoot six prisoners.
A search of Anders’s East 91st Street home turns up the locket, which he says someone mailed to him, and his 1948 visa photo, which matches the picture in his SS file. Anders admits serving at Bobrek but denies harming anyone. His sweat is found on Glaser’s door, yet the doorjamb prints are not his. A sign-in sheet from his preliminary hearing points to Kyle Mellors, whose Heritage Records sells white-power music and raises money for Anders’s defense. Mellors’s prints match the doorjamb, and he is arrested.
The Trial
Anders’s lawyer, Dan Jensen, seeks to bar the word Nazi and proposes to offer evidence that the Holocaust never happened, but the judge will not allow it to be disputed. Mellors rejects a second-degree murder plea carrying a hate-crime enhancement, insisting Anders was not involved, so both are tried for first-degree murder. A forensic witness places Mellors’s prints on the doorframe and locket and Anders’s on the locket, but concedes Anders may have come on a different day. Mellors’s business partner calls their music a moneymaker, and McCoy reads him lyrics calling for killing Black people and Jews.
Anders testifies that he spoke to Glaser through her closed door on another day, then left, and that she confused him with another guard. In rebuttal, over defense objections, McCoy plays Glaser’s videotaped Holocaust testimony, in which she describes a coldly polite officer named Anders shooting a prisoner who fell and then five women who wept, among them her younger sister, Rebekkah.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds both Mellors and Anders guilty of first-degree murder.
Why it stands out
- The murdered witness gets the last word: McCoy calls her videotaped Holocaust oral history as a rebuttal witness after the former guard testifies.
- The judge rejects the defense’s attempt to put Holocaust denial before the jury, refusing to let the historical record be disputed in court.
- A 1948 visa photo found in the defendant’s home matches his SS personnel file from Soviet archives, enough on its own to get him deported.