Love Eternal (Season 20, Episode 22)
Premise: A reality show’s cameras arrive for a fashion makeover and find a murder scene, and the victim’s eccentric widow, whose first husband also died suddenly, becomes the obvious suspect.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 22
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Anna Gunn as Marielle Di Napoli, Reg Rogers as Joshua Felner, Michael Bunin as Marty Ashcroft, Alysia Reiner as Amy Felner, Joanna Adler as defense attorney Barbara Speight, Ernie Hudson as Frank Gibson
- Director
- William Klayer
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman
Summary
The Investigation
“Love Eternal” begins with a crew from the makeover show Fashion Victim arriving to surprise Marielle Di Napoli. Instead they find her husband, David, handcuffed inside a locked dog cage and stabbed through the bars, and his 1940s comic books gone; Marielle was at a college reunion in Connecticut. Marty Ashcroft, who recently asked a dealer about several of the missing titles, says he lost heavily investing in comics with David. Ashcroft is being sued by Joshua Felner, whose wife, Amy, nominated Marielle for the show and says Josh told her David planned a divorce.
Marielle, who wears her cremated first husband, Larry, as a diamond ring, calls David her soul mate. The show’s footage leads to a shop where she bought pink handcuffs and a sword on the day of the murder. She says the cage and sword were sex games, and Westhampton police recall years of odd calls, once including David’s claim that she tried to kill him. Larry fell from a window seven years earlier, and leftover ashes from the diamond maker test positive for thallium. Marielle says David poisoned Larry with thallium from his company’s plant in China, then confessed.
Felner denies the divorce talk, but the prosecutors find that he, Ashcroft and David traded supposedly ruinous investments that actually gained value, hiding money ahead of divorcing their wives. Felner says Marielle found out and phoned him in a rage the day before the killing, and she is charged with murder. She refuses a plea, saying David was reclaiming his money to buy the Westhampton house where they first got together; a broker confirms they were about to bid and that Felner had called posing as David’s business manager.
The Trial
Marielle agrees to approach Ashcroft, and when he lets slip that he has some of David’s comics, she stabs him with a steak knife. A search of his home turns up the whole collection, some of it flecked with blood. Ashcroft says David had quit the scheme and threatened to tell the wives, that Felner promised to deal with it, and that Felner handed him the comics after the murder. The charge against Marielle is dropped, and Felner goes on trial.
Defense attorney Barbara Speight goads Marielle into an outburst on the stand. Felner testifies that David gave the comics to Ashcroft for safekeeping because he was leaving his wife, citing the cage, the sword and the pink handcuffs. A receipt shows the handcuffs were bought only on the day of the murder, and their color was never made public.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Joshua Felner of second-degree murder. Marielle thanks the prosecutors, and one of them later receives her gift of diamond earrings made from David’s ashes.
Why it stands out
- In a first for the detectives, they obtain an exhumation order for a piece of jewelry: the diamond made from Marielle’s first husband.
- An ion-beam test on leftover cremated remains finds thallium, pointing to poisoning before the first husband’s fatal fall.
- Three friends try to cheat their wives in divorce by trading staged losing investments, and the scheme’s collapse supplies the real motive for murder.