Castoff (Season 8, Episode 13)
Premise: A beloved Harlem social worker is shot dead outside her community center, and her secret life in the S&M scene leads to a former kept man killing wealthy past partners across the country.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 8, Episode 13
- 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
- Mitchell Lichtenstein as Eddie Chandler, Dennis Boutsikaris as defense attorney Neil Pressman, Dennis Kelly as Rep. Fred Maxwell, Edmund Genest as Warren Stevenson, John Benjamin Hickey as Charles Thatcher
- Ripped from the headlines
- Based on the Andrew Cunanan case.
- Director
- Gloria Muzio
- Writers
- David Black & Harold Schechter
Summary
The Investigation
“Castoff” opens with the murder of Jennifer Gaylin, a social worker adored at her Harlem community center, who is shot in broad daylight, with a second shot to the groin. Her father, Doug Gaylin, who owns her building, quietly cleared her apartment first, and the detectives find prescription drugs, bondage gear and images of people in masks. An S&M club owner links her to TV newscaster Stu Steiner, who is soon found dead, tortured with a knife and then shot; a tall brunette signed in to see him that day.
A view of Chelsea Piers in a tape from Steiner’s apartment leads to a third participant, who says Steiner mainly wanted men. A federal database turns up similar killings in San Francisco, Aspen and Chicago, all of rich, single, Ivy-educated people from the same scene. One phone number appears in several victims’ address books and belongs to Charles Thatcher, who fears his old lover Eddie Chandler. When Chandler comes by asking for money, he runs from the police and is caught with a .38 that ballistics ties to both killings.
Judge Carl Samuel suppresses the gun, finding the chase unjustified. Chandler’s former patrons describe a young man passed from rich lover to rich lover, and history professor Warren Stevenson admits lending him a car, in which police find a dark wig and a dress.
The Trial
Harvard law professor Neil Pressman takes over the defense, and Chandler, refusing life without parole, casts his victims as predators who ruined him at 17. Stevenson will not testify, so McCoy charges him as an accomplice, which makes his account admissible and restores the gun under inevitable discovery.
Pressman argues that a lifetime of violent television drove Chandler to kill and calls Congressman Fred Maxwell, a crusader against TV violence, who says he would accept an acquittal to advance the cause. McCoy presses the difference between correlation and cause, gets Chandler to admit he never saw such torture on TV, and argues in closing that people still choose.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Chandler of second-degree murder for Gaylin and first-degree murder for Steiner. Ross then finds that Pressman submitted a law-review article on the TV-violence defense a month before taking the case, and McCoy concludes the trial was an experiment.
Why it stands out
- The episode is based on the Andrew Cunanan case.
- A sitting congressman who campaigns against TV violence is called as a witness for the defense of a serial killer.
- McCoy wins a ruling by charging a reluctant witness, so the witness’s own admission comes in against the defendant.