Legacy (Season 7, Episode 10)
Premise: A professional hit man’s near miss on a T-shirt printer leads to the grandmother who hired him, and to her son’s death five years earlier.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 10
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Frances Sternhagen as Estelle Muller, Bradley White as Jimmy Shepherd, Jenny Robertson as Robin Shepherd, Tom Riis Farrell as Howard Philips
- Director
- Brian Mertes
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Jeremy R. Littman
Summary
The Investigation
“Legacy” begins as Jimmy Shepherd walks home from his parking garage after his stepdaughter Darlene’s eighth birthday dinner and is shot in the head. The bullet skids around inside his skull and he survives. Ballistics link the gun to the killing two years earlier of Jeffrey Zabner, who owed money to a now-dead loan shark named Morelli. Zabner’s widow remembers only a man with a small dog, the same dog walked by a bystander who called himself Dr. Paul Sackett at the Shepherd scene.
A bartender recalls the dog owner’s cigar, bourbon and lemon meringue pie, and a cigar shop leads the detectives to Howard Philips, a hit man who hid the gun in a dog-waste bag. Two calls went from the restaurant’s pay phone to an untraceable cell phone during dinner. The diners were Shepherd, his wife Robin and Estelle Muller, the mother of Robin’s first husband, Rick, who died in a drunken rock-climbing fall in Central Park while with Shepherd. Estelle has always blamed Shepherd, and her late husband, a criminal lawyer, once won Morelli’s appeal.
Morelli’s old associate, Bronson, admits putting Estelle in touch with the shooter. Briscoe poses as a replacement hit man, and Estelle pays him $4,000 to finish the job. She and Philips are arrested.
The Trial
Federal prosecutors take Philips as a cooperating witness. Estelle offers to plead guilty if Shepherd is prosecuted for Rick’s death. Rick was never autopsied, so McCoy has the body exhumed, and the medical examiner finds a second skull fracture that fits a baseball bat, not the fall. Shepherd is arrested for murder.
At trial, Shepherd’s former roommate backs away from what he told Ross about Shepherd’s interest in Robin. Hotel records place Shepherd in Harrisburg the weekend Robin attended her high school reunion there, but her classmates account for her time. McCoy shows Shepherd filed no expenses for the supposed business trip, and Robin then testifies that he kissed her and urged her to leave with him at a New Year’s Eve party while Rick was alive.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Jimmy Shepherd in about an hour and a half, and Robin serves him with divorce papers as he leaves the courtroom.
Why it stands out
- Briscoe goes undercover as a hit man to catch the woman who hired the first one.
- The attempted-murder victim becomes the defendant after an exhumation shows a skull fracture consistent with a bat.