In Memory Of (Season 2, Episode 7)
Premise: Workers renovating a brownstone find a child’s skeleton, and a 30-year-old missing-person case comes back to life.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 7
- Detectives
- Sgt. Phil Cerreta (Paul Sorvino), Det. Mike Logan (Chris Noth)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty), ADA Paul Robinette (Richard Brooks), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Mary-Joan Negro as Julie Atkinson, Michael Higgins as Thad Messimer, Tresa Hughes as Mrs. Doris Keegan, Richard Hamilton as Ed Conover
- Director
- Ed Sherin
- Writers
- Story: Siobhan Byrne; Teleplay: Robert Stuart Nathan; Story & teleplay: David Black
Summary
The Investigation
“In Memory Of” opens with a construction crew breaking through a basement wall on East 84th Street and finding the bones of a young boy wearing a 1960 campaign button. Working through old missing-person files, Cerreta and Logan identify him as Tommy Keegan, an eight-year-old who vanished from the block in 1962 and was killed by a blow to the head. A retired detective remembers that suspicion back then fell on two men who lived together in the building, one of whom, Ed Conover, is still alive and furious at being accused again.
The detectives also find Julie Atkinson, who grew up in the same building and played with Tommy as a child. She faints when she sees his picture. Working with police psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Olivet, Julie slowly recovers a buried memory from the night Tommy disappeared: her father, Thad Messimer, scrubbing a bloody sweater in the bathtub.
The Trial
Stone charges Messimer with murder, knowing the case rests on a fragile witness. The prosecutors learn that Messimer had lost his insurance job over drinking and that a colleague once saw him accused of propositioning a teenage boy, but that earlier incident can’t be used at trial. Julie’s mother pressures her to recant, and the defense has a hospital stay for paranoid delusions to use against her. Tommy’s mother, Doris Keegan, helps Julie find the strength to go on.
On the stand, Julie describes what she saw that night, and the defense attacks her memory, her family relationships and her psychiatric history. Before taking the stand, she tells the prosecutors that Messimer waited outside her building the night before to ask her not to testify.
Spoiler, the ending: Rather than face Julie’s return to the stand, Messimer pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter and admits he struck Tommy with a wrench and hid his body in the wall. He is sentenced to 8⅓ to 25 years. Stone explains that he took the plea so Julie would know for certain her memory was real.
Why it stands out
- The case depends on a recovered childhood memory, which the defense attacks as fantasy.
- Old police assumptions about the gay neighbors nearly point the investigation the wrong way.
- The episode shows how a decades-old case can be rebuilt from paper files and a single witness.