Ramparts (Season 9, Episode 11)
Premise: Police divers looking for a gun in the Hudson find a 1960s VW bus with a skeleton inside, and the 30-year-old murder of a campus radical turns out to involve an undercover police unit.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 11
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Michael Higgins as Darryl Grady, Mark Zeisler as Dr. Seth Bernstein, Rick Warner as Sergeant Michael Lucas, Fred Burrell as Ross McMillan, Roy Thinnes as Mr. Kushner
- Director
- Matthew Penn
- Writers
- Kathy McCormick & Lynne Litt
Summary
The Investigation
“Ramparts” is a cold-case murder that starts when divers searching the Hudson for a gun from an unrelated shooting find a VW bus from about 1968 with human remains at the wheel. The medical examiner identifies a young man in his early twenties with a bullet wound to the head and an old leg fracture. The bus is traced through its first owner to Kensington student Diana Wells and then to her boyfriend, David Bernstein, a radical who vanished in October 1968. His brother Seth confirms the old skiing injury.
Bernstein was arrested at a protest the night before students seized Kensington’s administration building. His roommate bailed him out, and his girlfriend, Tracy Howard, says he left her to go to Canada and walked toward the student parking garage. Darryl Grady, the guard on duty there that night, says he never left his post, but another guard found poker players in the garage and no sign of Grady. Archive news footage shows Grady denying that guards carried guns, and a scrap of a security badge from the bus matches his. Grady, whose son went missing in Vietnam, rails against the protesters but admits nothing.
Bernstein’s savings deposits match a rookie officer’s weekly pay, and records show he was secretly a police officer in Special Squad Three of the Bureau of Special Services, which spied on 1960s activists. Cross-checking enrollment and payroll records turns up another undercover officer, Sergeant Michael Lucas, who watched Bernstein enter the garage and a guard drive the bus out without him. Lucas reported this to his handler, Ross McMillan, and later picks Grady out of a photo array.
The Trial
Police officials refuse to release the squad’s files and urge a plea. McCoy wants the files and lets the case head toward trial, though Carmichael accuses him of using a sick old man against the department. Schiff warns him off. Grady’s lawyer, Ms. Latham, joins McCoy in opposing the department’s motion to quash his subpoenas.
McMillan testifies that Bernstein had turned against the unit and refused orders to push student leader Kenneth Stratton into an alliance with the Black Panthers. He admits supplying the blood Bernstein poured on the war memorial, and says his superiors told him to drop the lead on Grady. The judge denies the motion to quash, finding that secrecy cannot rest on avoiding embarrassment.
Spoiler, the ending: Carmichael offers second-degree manslaughter with one to three years in minimum security. Grady admits he carried a gun out of fear, argued with Bernstein over parking and fired when he thought of his own son. He says he would not have done it had he known Bernstein was a cop. McCoy holds the department responsible for provoking the death.
Why it stands out
- The victim, a long-haired campus radical, turns out to have been an undercover police officer whose handlers never looked for him after he vanished.
- McCoy and the defense jointly oppose the police department’s bid to keep its 1960s surveillance files secret.
- The case is solved by matching Bernstein’s bank deposits to a rookie officer’s exact weekly pay.