Family Values (Season 5, Episode 4)
Premise: A wealthy publisher disappears in an apparent suicide, and the case exposes her husband’s affair with her teenage daughter.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 4
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Mike Logan (Chris Noth)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Stephen Shellen as Steve Martell, Sarah Paulson as Maggie Conner, Will Lyman as Victor Conner, Anna Holbrook as Christine Whitburn
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- René Balcer & William N. Fordes
Summary
The Investigation
“Family Values” opens on the 59th Street Bridge, where two teens trying to hot-wire an abandoned Mercedes are caught by police. The car belongs to Laura Madsen, heir to Madsen Publishing, and her shoes and jacket are still inside. Her husband, house painter Steve Martell, says she once overdosed, and police begin to treat it as a possible suicide.
Briscoe and Logan look first at Laura’s ex-husband, Victor Conner, who once pleaded no contest to assaulting her. He had been holding out for money before letting their daughter, 17-year-old Maggie, attend school in Switzerland, and he was late for his car to the airport that night. Then Laura’s body surfaces in the East River. She died from a blow to the head before entering the water, and the currents suggest she went in near her Gramercy Park home.
Martell’s story falls apart: he left work early, kept a separate apartment for affairs, and showed up at a bar near a dumpster where a paint-stained drop cloth was found. Blood traces turn up in the home’s bathroom. Maggie then admits she was with Martell that night; Martell had been having a sexual relationship with her.
The Trial
Martell is arrested for murder, but blood on the pantyhose Maggie wore that night ties her to the scene, and McCoy has her arrested too. Martell offers to plead to obstruction, saying Maggie pushed her mother during a fight and forced him to help hide the body. A client, Christine Whitburn, gives him an alibi. Maggie refuses to believe Martell would abandon her.
Against Schiff’s warnings, McCoy puts Maggie on trial and calls Martell, who denies the affair. During a recess, Maggie tells prosecutors that Laura confronted Martell, hit him, and he punched and threw her. To prove the affair, Maggie describes her intimate time with Martell in front of Whitburn, who recognizes it and takes back her alibi.
Spoiler, the ending: With his alibi gone, Martell is left with McCoy’s offer of first-degree manslaughter, and the final scene shows the deal done at 8⅓ to 25 years. McCoy remarks that Martell did not simply come along; the family invited him in.
Why it stands out
- The episode was later remade for Law & Order: UK as “Fatherly Love.”
- McCoy and Kincaid charge the daughter herself to force out the truth about the stepfather, a gamble Schiff warns could cost them.
- The prosecution offers a plea to the man it believes is lying, then uses the daughter’s testimony to break his alibi.