Wealth and Class 28 Law & Order episodes
Rich defendants, inheritance fights and the gap between social classes.
- Season 1 · Episode 7
By Hooker, by Crook
An unconscious man in Central Park turns out to have spent his last evening with a high-priced escort, not with a mugger.
- Season 1 · Episode 21
Sonata for Solo Organ
An apparent mugging victim turns out to be missing a kidney, removed by someone with surgical skill.
- Season 2 · Episode 14
Blood Is Thicker...
A society wife’s killing seems to fit a string of muggings, until her husband’s alibi and his mother’s influence start to look suspicious.
- Season 3 · Episode 3
Forgiveness
A college student is bludgeoned the night before she leaves for Italy, and her boyfriend confesses but says he cannot remember the attack.
- Season 3 · Episode 12
Right to Counsel
A widow’s much younger boyfriend pleads guilty to her murder, but a detail in his confession sends Robinette after the lawyer who sent him his defense attorney.
- Season 4 · Episode 5
Black Tie
An anonymous caller says a Manhattan millionaire was murdered, and a hard-won exhumation points to his wife, until a ruling on a private investigator’s search undoes the case.
- Season 4 · Episode 6
Pride and Joy
A Manhattan building superintendent seems to die stopping a burglary, until the evidence points to his gifted teenage son, who says he was defending himself from an abusive father.
- Season 4 · Episode 12
Snatched
A real estate magnate caught carrying millions in cash says his son has been kidnapped, but the case turns back on the son himself.
- Season 5 · Episode 4
Family Values
A wealthy publisher disappears in an apparent suicide, and the case exposes her husband’s affair with her teenage daughter.
- Season 5 · Episode 11
Guardian
A young heroin addict from a wealthy family is found dead outside a daycare center, and the trail leads to the man who manages her family’s money.
- Season 5 · Episode 13
Rage
A Wall Street executive’s staged suicide leads to his top trader, whose lawyers argue that a lifetime of racism drove him to kill.
- Season 5 · Episode 16
Wannabe
The shooting of a corporate turnaround expert leads to a subway track walker whose son was expelled from an elite private school.
- Season 7 · Episode 13
Matrimony
A wealthy philanthropist is strangled in his townhouse, and suspicion falls on his 22-year-old wife, a former stripper whose marriage was arranged by his lawyer.
- Season 7 · Episode 22
Past Imperfect
A former supermodel is found dead before her own surprise birthday party, and a DNA clue points investigators toward a blood relative.
- Season 9 · Episode 6
Scrambled
An embryologist dies when she walks in on a break-in at a fertility clinic, and the trail leads to a wealthy woman who wanted her late ex-husband’s frozen embryos gone before his young widow could carry them.
- Season 10 · Episode 4
Merger
A teenage heiress is found dead behind her neighbors’ townhouse as her sister’s wedding approaches, and the investigation exposes secrets in two wealthy families.
- Season 10 · Episode 14
Entitled
In the second half of a crossover with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a mob hit man reveals that a killing pinned on a serial gunman was staged to protect a powerful family’s daughter.
- Season 10 · Episode 23
Stiff
A wealthy woman falls into a coma after an insulin injection, and the case turns from her husband’s secret sex game to a scheme by her daughter and her neurologist to reach her fortune.
- Season 13 · Episode 14
Star Crossed
The beating death of a luxury car manager leads to a dishwasher with limited intellect and the fashion student he steals for, and McCoy suspects the confession he accepted was a lie.
- Season 13 · Episode 20
Kid Pro Quo
The admissions director of an elite Manhattan private school is beaten to death with her own cane, and her fight for a rejected scholarship applicant exposes a chain of favors that bought a kindergarten seat for a pornographer’s son.
- Season 14 · Episode 17
Hands Free
Body parts in East Village garbage lead to the victim’s supposedly deaf neighbor, who turns out to be Eli Madison, a wealthy heir long suspected in his wife’s disappearance, and when a jury acquits him, McCoy charges him with his wife’s murder.
- Season 14 · Episode 23
Caviar Emptor
A wealthy Persian Jewish caviar dealer dies in bed the day after his wedding, and a family fight over an autopsy opens a murder case against the daughter he was about to move out of his house.
- Season 15 · Episode 12
Mammon
A wealthy venture capitalist is beaten to death in his renovated townhouse, and suspicion falls on his young wife and the contractor who installed the alarm system and shared her bed.
- Season 16 · Episode 14
Magnet
A gifted scholarship student at a Manhattan magnet school is strangled with a cello bow, and the wealthy classmate charged with killing him claims his attention deficit medication made him do it.
- Season 16 · Episode 16
Cost of Capital
A junior investment banker’s body is dumped far from where he died, the trail leads to the boss he was secretly sleeping with, and the murder case ends up depending on what her teenage daughter overheard on a late-night call.
- Season 19 · Episode 10
Pledge
A 12-year-old and his family’s housekeeper are killed in the boy’s home, and a magazine fact-checker’s fixation on the boy’s mother turns out to stem from a college sorority party three decades earlier.
- Season 19 · Episode 11
Lucky Stiff
When the owner of a struggling trucking firm is shot in the street, the trail leads to a green-energy broker who sold the same trucks again and again, and the broker’s own murder after his conviction leaves a fortune for his heirs to fight over.
- Season 20 · Episode 20
The Taxman Cometh
An heiress’s heroin death points detectives to a fringe cancer clinic where wealthy patients all died in 2010, the one year their heirs owed no federal estate tax, and to the accountant who sent them there.