Nurture (Season 4, Episode 20)
Premise: A missing foster child turns up hidden in a basement room, and the woman who took her insists she was rescuing the girl.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 20
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Mike Logan (Chris Noth)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty), ADA Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Lisa Eichhorn as Arnette Fenady, Christine Baranski as children’s rights attorney Rose Siegal, Stephi Lineburg as Wendy Sylvester, Camryn Manheim as Beatrice Hines, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet
- Director
- Jace Alexander
- Writers
- Paris Qualles & Ed Zuckerman
Summary
The Investigation
“Nurture” opens with a missing child: 10-year-old Wendy Sylvester has not been seen for two days, and it is a worried adult, not her foster mother, who alerts the police. Foster mother Beatrice Hines works nights and last saw Wendy heading to the laundromat. Wendy’s birth mother, Peggy Sylvester, who admits to drinking, says Beatrice’s boyfriend, Brian Sprague, beat the girl. Sprague is out on bail awaiting trial for it but has an alibi, and a Children’s Services caseworker admits the abuse report led only to a stay-away order.
Wendy’s friend Janel shows the detectives the girl’s secret poems, written to an imaginary sister, and they trace the margin notes to Arnette Fenady, a volunteer poetry teacher living alone in a large family brownstone. Fenady says she has not seen Wendy since the previous term. Logan is suspicious, and a sealed 1990 arrest turns out to involve Fenady trying to take a 6-year-old student upstate. A poem about a flying dinosaur, written after Fenady says she last saw Wendy, bears her comments.
A neighbor saw Fenady with a girl on the day Wendy vanished, and a contractor says she ordered building materials for work he never did. During a second search, cable lines running through a closet floor lead to a hidden basement room, where Wendy is found unharmed.
The Trial
Fenady is charged with kidnapping, custodial interference and endangering a child. Her lawyer, children’s rights advocate Rose Siegal, wants the case dropped. Wendy says Fenady treated her kindly and threw a birthday party with a cake bearing the name Crystal. Interviewing Fenady, Dr. Olivet learns her daughter Crystal died at nine months, and Fenady appears to see Wendy as that child. Fenady refuses an insanity plea, so Stone argues she is not competent to stand trial, but after a defense psychiatrist testifies, the judge rules she is.
At trial, Siegal uses the prosecution’s witnesses to expose failures in the foster care system. Wendy then testifies that she ran away to Fenady by subway, contradicting what she told the police and Stone, and the prosecutors suspect she is protecting Fenady. In closing, Stone warns jurors against letting private citizens decide on their own to take children from their families.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury acquits Fenady on all three counts. Afterward, she applies for custody of Wendy.
Why it stands out
- Stone, not the defense, argues that the defendant is too mentally ill to stand trial, and the judge rules against him.
- The prosecution’s key witness, the 10-year-old victim, changes her story on the stand in the defendant’s favor.