White Lies (Season 25, Episode 3)
Premise: A hedge-fund activist dies under a taxi’s wheels, and the man who pushed him turns out to be a respected drug researcher guarding his CEO’s secret and his daughter’s hope of a cure.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 25, Episode 3
- Detectives
- Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn)
- Guest stars
- Eric Ladin as Kevin Goodall, Tom Irwin as Norman Munson, Katrina Lenk as defense attorney Brenda Fallon, Walter Coppage as Preston Kane, Kate Mason as Rachel Goodall
- Director
- Milena Govich
- Writers
- Jennifer Vanderbes
Summary
The Investigation
In “White Lies,” activist investor Tom Hardiman, head of Broadchurch Investment Fund, is shoved into the path of a taxi on West 43rd Street and killed. The driver saw only a figure of medium build in a brown hat, and male DNA from a stranger is found under Hardiman’s nails. His estranged wife, Lisa, sends detectives to his girlfriend, professor Ariana Maher, whose husband, life coach Marc Maher, admits confronting Hardiman over the divorce he was funding. Marc has an alibi and recalls a man attacking Hardiman outside a restaurant. That man is Carlos Guzman, a Mercy Hospital nurse who blames Hardiman’s staff cuts for patient deaths and whose mother died there; he too is cleared.
Hardiman’s last meeting was at WellPoint Therapeutics, where he held a 24% stake and wanted founder and CEO Norman Munson replaced so research would shift from rare diseases to more profitable drugs. Munson and his research chief, Kevin Goodall, call the session cordial. But board chairman Preston Kane received a voicemail from Hardiman right afterward boasting that he finally had the means to oust Munson, and Ryan Elliott, an aide Hardiman fired, tells Riley and Brady a successor had already been chosen. Video shows Goodall heading toward the scene and pulling on a brown hat, his DNA matches, and he is arrested.
The Trial
Goodall makes bail, and defense attorney Brenda Fallon gets the DNA suppressed because it came from samples he had given his employer for lab work; the judge also bars a fresh warrant. Kane testifies that a new CEO would have fired Goodall, but concedes Goodall had other offers and a $12.7 million home. Munson’s ever-present assistant will say nothing about the meeting because he is Munson’s nurse, and payments to a neurologist show Munson has dementia, which Hardiman apparently noticed.
At a hospital running WellPoint’s pediatric trials, detectives find Goodall’s wife, Rachel, with their daughter, Emily, who has Batten disease; that research was on Hardiman’s list of programs to cut. Fallon counters that Hardiman never had the board votes. Over Maroun’s objections, Price offers second-degree murder with a 15-to-20-year recommendation, promising Munson’s condition will stay private, and Fallon refuses. Price then schedules Munson for late in the day and, after an hour of questions, asks how he got to court. Munson cannot say and drifts into memories of an old blue convertible.
Spoiler, the ending: The parties meet in chambers, and Goodall pleads guilty to second-degree murder with a recommended 15-year sentence. As he is led away, he tells Rachel there was no other way and asks her to tell Emily he loves her.
Why it stands out
- The episode was directed by Milena Govich, who played Det. Nina Cassady in Season 17; Milica Govich plays Judge Leanne Dreben.
- Price wins the plea by exposing a bystander’s dementia on the witness stand, a tactic Maroun argues against.
- The key DNA match is thrown out because it came from samples the defendant had given his own company for research.