House of Cards (Season 16, Episode 7)
Premise: A recovering addict is found dead and her five-day-old son missing, and the search leads to an Upper East Side woman who hid a miscarriage from her husband.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 16, Episode 7
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Alexandra Borgia (Annie Parisse), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Wendy Moniz as Arlene Tarrington, Victor Verhaeghe as Frank Stoll, Anthony Holds as Steve Monroe, Becky Ann Baker as defense attorney Carolyn Walters, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet
- Director
- Michael Pressman
- Writers
- Wendy Battles
Summary
The Investigation
“House of Cards” opens with the murder of Chelsea Hagerty, 20, whose sister finds her body and discovers that Chelsea’s five-day-old son, Nicky, is gone. Chelsea was beaten and then smothered around midday, and her lungs show crack despite more than a year of reported sobriety. Her partner, drug counselor Steve Monroe, met her as her counselor at Phoenix House and says he was at work that afternoon. A former dealer steers Fontana and Green to her ex-boyfriend Frank Stoll, who got her hooked. Lured out by a waitress he sees, Stoll admits he dropped by that morning and argued with Chelsea, but says he left before her sister was due.
A neighbor saw a woman in expensive maternity clothes hurry out of the building carrying a newborn. At the dry cleaner where Chelsea worked, staff remember a pregnant customer named Arlene who gave her a pregnancy book and a toy bear, and a print on the book matches a bloody print on the crib. A teenage mother, Lindsay Doyle, says a pregnant woman called Arlene tried to walk off with her baby in a nearby park a month earlier. A baby-store receipt leads to Arlene Tarrington, whose husband, Stuart, just home from Tokyo, believes the infant is their own son. The hospital has no record of any birth, and Arlene is arrested for kidnapping.
The Trial
Through attorney Carolyn Walters, Arlene says she found Chelsea already dead and took the crying baby. The judge allows Lindsay to testify, and the defense pleads postpartum psychosis, revealing that Arlene miscarried at seven months and hid it. Dr. Elizabeth Olivet tells McCoy that the careful planning argues against psychosis, though Arlene would have been badly depressed. On cross, Lindsay is shaken, and she later admits Arlene offered $50,000 for her son. Borgia finds that Arlene phoned Stoll three days before the killing, and Stoll, now owner of a new plasma TV, files a paternity claim to the baby.
Branch warns that the move is risky, but McCoy offers Arlene a kidnapping plea of 15 years in exchange for testimony. She says Stoll sold her the baby for $50,000, fled the building in a state of alarm, and left her to discover Chelsea’s body. DNA confirms that Stoll is Nicky’s father, devastating Monroe. At Stoll’s murder trial, defense lawyer Daniel Tracer casts Arlene as the real killer, a desperate woman who snapped when the sale collapsed.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Stoll not guilty of second-degree murder. Monroe then disappears with Nicky, leaving his apartment empty. When Stoll demands to know what is being done to find his son, the prosecutors suggest the police take the weekend off before resuming the search.
Why it stands out
- Dr. Elizabeth Olivet weighs in on the postpartum-psychosis defense, and the lawyers spar over Andrea Yates, the Texas mother then awaiting a new trial.
- A court-ordered DNA test shows that the man raising the baby is not his biological father.
- McCoy’s gamble fails: he trades a kidnapping plea for testimony against Stoll, and the jury acquits Stoll of murder.