Avatar (Season 17, Episode 2)
Premise: Photos of a murdered mother posted on a teen social networking site lead to a mentally ill man who abducts her daughter, then insists the girl recruited him online to kill her mother.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 2
- Detectives
- Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin), Det. Nina Cassady (Milena Govich)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Brianna Steinhilber as Molly Preston, Devin Ratray as Richard Elam, Robert Stanton as Douglas Preston, Callie Thorne as defense attorney Stuart, Jay Wilkison as Gregg Robinson
- Director
- Vincent Misiano
- Writers
- David Slack
Summary
The Investigation
“Avatar” begins as an online murder mystery: a boy browsing the social networking site B-Frendz.com finds photos of a dead woman dressed as a streetwalker, posted by a user called REwind99. She is Caroline Preston, a Murray Hill homemaker killed while her husband, Douglas, and 16-year-old daughter, Molly, were at a gymnastics meet in Hartford. The site cannot identify the poster, and her former lover, Bill Walker, has an alibi. The medical examiner finds she was force-fed a lethal dose of an antipsychotic, Depaquel, and that her toes were broken to fit shoes two sizes too small.
The lingerie came from a Times Square shop, whose clerk recalls a heavy man who muttered to himself and left to find an ATM. Checking nearby ATMs leads to Richard Elam, whose profile photo shows the same neck scar as REwind99’s. His apartment holds Depaquel and printouts of Molly’s B-Frendz pictures, and Molly is missing from her home with no sign of a break-in. Elam’s mother says he has paranoid schizophrenia. An e-mail traced to a café near New Paltz and an AMBER Alert sighting send Green and Cassady upstate, where they chase down a carjacked sedan and rescue Molly.
The Trial
Charged with murder, kidnapping and rape, Elam claims through his lawyer, Walt Gaines, that Molly asked him to kill her mother and offered herself as payment. An archived version of her page, changed two days before the murder, calls her mother a whore, pleads for someone to be rid of her and lists REwind99 as a friend. Branch lets prosecutors question Molly, who says she was only venting, but a classmate describes constant fights at home, and deleted instant messages recovered from a cyber-café computer show plans to meet face to face. Once the messages surface, Molly is arrested at school.
Her lawyer, Stuart, turns the trial on B-Frendz, showing that owner Jason Rundberg ignored e-mails warning about Molly’s page. Prosecutors notice that a fourth complaint was cut down before it was handed over, and McCoy threatens the company with 66 indecency charges over explicit images minors could see in order to get the original. Its author, 21-year-old Gregg Robinson, testifies under immunity from a statutory rape charge that he answered Molly’s post and slept with her, then refused to kill her mother, after which she threatened to accuse him of rape. Molly turns down ten years for manslaughter in a furious outburst at her father.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Molly of second-degree murder. Elam is serving 15 years for his part, and Douglas Preston files a wrongful-death lawsuit against B-Frendz.
Why it stands out
- Prosecutors turn a 16-year-old kidnapping and rape victim into the defendant, charging her with soliciting her mother’s murder through her social networking page.
- McCoy uses the threat of 66 indecency counts to force the website’s owner to surrender an altered complaint e-mail.
- The defense puts the social networking site itself on trial, using warning e-mails its owner ignored.