Sideshow (Season 9, Episode 14)
Premise: A former White House staffer is found dead in Battery Park, and a joint investigation with Baltimore homicide draws McCoy into a fight with an Independent Counsel who wants his secret witness.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 14
- 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
- Richard Belzer as John Munch, Michael Michele as Detective Rene Sheppard, Željko Ivanek as Ed Danvers, George Hearn as Independent Counsel William Dell, Meg Gibson as Faye Wellington
- Director
- Ed Sherin
- Writers
- René Balcer
Summary
The Investigation
“Sideshow” is a crossover murder case that begins when a family touring Battery Park finds a woman shot in the head. The medical examiner finds she was smothered first, hard enough to break her nose, and was shot after death. She is Janine McBride, a federal official recently moved from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers to a Social Security post in Baltimore. Her former boyfriend Ned Burks has an alibi, and blood in her Baltimore parking garage suggests she was killed there.
Briscoe and Curtis team with Baltimore detectives John Munch and Rene Sheppard. Her escort, Senate aide Brett Nelson, turns out to be gay, and McBride was a lesbian. A draft letter on her computer threatens to go public over a transfer she blames on a personal matter. Her old boss in Washington recalls an anonymous caller who accused her of harassing junior staff, and the man behind the calls proves to be Pentagon official Frank Wellington.
Wellington’s estranged wife, Labor Department official Faye Wellington, agrees to talk only if her identity is protected. She admits an affair with McBride, which is why her husband harassed her, and says she saw McBride drive off from a Washington club with a young woman she took for a prostitute. She picks out Chesley Purcell, a parolee living in Baltimore.
The Trial
Independent Counsel William Dell, whose long-running inquiry concerns the administration, demands the witness’s statement and subpoenas McCoy before his grand jury in Washington. A federal judge, Judge Childers, refuses to quash the subpoena. Schiff offers McCoy little sympathy.
Before the grand jury, McCoy refuses to name his witness. Dell attacks his record, raising his past romance with a fellow ADA and Briscoe’s history, and McCoy asks whether Dell has no shame. Dell seeks to have him held for contempt and obstruction. Meanwhile, the detectives trace a girl who collected Purcell’s suitcase to a Harlem building and capture Purcell as she reaches for a shotgun. McCoy tells the judge the suspect is in custody, and she reserves decision on contempt.
Spoiler, the ending: Purcell is offered 20 years to life, but FBI agents arrive with a federal court order: Dell claims her as a grand jury witness, which would likely mean immunity. Before she can be taken to Washington, Ned Burks, tipped off by a newspaper reporter, shoots her dead, saying she took McBride from him. Purcell never stands trial, and Burks’s case falls to McCoy.
Why it stands out
- The story is the first half of a crossover that finishes on Homicide: Life on the Street.
- It was the last Law & Order crossover with Homicide, which was cancelled at the end of that season.
- Munch’s long-awaited FBI surveillance file turns out to be a single page dismissing him as harmless.