Double Blind (Season 7, Episode 6)
Premise: A former university janitor is shot with homemade mercury-tipped bullets, and the student who confesses turns out to be a subject in a psychiatrist’s experimental drug study.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 6
- 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
- Mark Bateman as Alan Sawyer, John Bedford Lloyd as Dr. Christian Varick, Jennifer Van Dyck as Jill Perry
- Director
- Christopher Misiano
- Writers
- Jeremy R. Littman & William N. Fordes
Summary
The Investigation
“Double Blind” begins with the murder of Greg Franklin, a widowed janitor found shot three times in his Greenwich Village apartment. The killer pulled the fuse, used a drop cloth and a pillow, and glued the lock shut behind him. The .32 bullets carried tips of fulminate of mercury, and an aging hit man known as Jimmy the Pin tells Briscoe and Curtis the method comes from a mail-order book, “The Assassin’s Technical Manual.”
McCoy threatens the publisher with a criminal facilitation charge until he hands over his mailing list, which shows a copy sent to Franklin at Hudson University after he quit. Franklin had left after being accused of stealing tranquilizers from the psychiatry department. A chemistry student steers the detectives to Alan Sawyer, a history major in the campus mailroom who had quizzed her about mercury salts. Sawyer also does paid data work in the lab of psychiatric researcher Dr. Christian Varick.
Sawyer has an answer for each coincidence until CSU finds the mercury switches missing from his dorm’s thermostats, with his prints on them. Under arrest, he confesses: he framed Franklin for the drug theft, then shot him because, he says, King Philip and Pope Clement told him the janitor was a 600-year-old Knight Templar out to kill him.
The Trial
Varick reveals that Sawyer is a diagnosed schizophrenic enrolled in his double-blind study of an experimental drug, T489, and insists the drug has cleared his symptoms. Because Sawyer twice asked for his parents, including his lawyer father, during questioning, the judge suppresses the confession and dismisses the charges. Sawyer’s father owns a .32 Ruger that is now missing, and his parents describe a recent breakdown that Varick called an anxiety attack.
McCoy and Ross seek an involuntary commitment, but Varick testifies that Sawyer is not dangerous and the judge sides with him. Ross learns that research assistant Jill Perry signed every glowing evaluation. Warned she will take the blame, Perry admits Sawyer had relapsed, had spoken of orders to kill Franklin, and was kept on T489 to please the drug company funding the study. Sawyer accepts criminal detention at Bellevue, and McCoy charges Varick with second-degree manslaughter.
Varick rejects a plea that would cost him his license. His budget lists PET scans that appear in no patient file, and Sawyer recalls one scan, taken after his symptoms returned. The images show a brain tumor, not schizophrenia.
Spoiler, the ending: Confronted at a plea conference, Varick admits he skipped the scans to meet the drug company’s deadline and kept quiet about the tumor once he found it. Sawyer holds Varick responsible for both deaths, and McCoy plans to add a depraved-indifference murder count. The episode ends before Varick’s case is resolved.
Why it stands out
- The killer’s case collapses on a Miranda ruling: asking for his parents counts as asking for counsel because his father is a lawyer.
- McCoy shifts his target from the shooter to the psychiatrist, charging him with recklessly causing the janitor’s death through doctored research data.
- The murder method comes from a mail-order assassination manual, and McCoy uses a facilitation charge as leverage to pry loose the publisher’s customer list.