Starting thread because the
Adrienne Shelley episode of Law & Order airs tonight.
In reality, barely a New York minute passed between the moment Ms. Shelly’s life ended and the moment it became fodder for prime-time drama.
After Ms. Shelly’s body was found hanging from a shower rod on Nov. 1, investigators initially suspected suicide. But a footprint in her bathroom led the police to a 19-year-old Ecuadorean illegal immigrant named Diego Pillco who had been doing construction work in a downstairs apartment, and the police determined that they had a murder on their hands.
On Nov. 7 and 8, the morning newspapers were filled with macabre accounts of the crime, as pieced together by the police. According to the authorities, Mr. Pillco had struck Ms. Shelly in the face and, suspecting he had killed her, then faked her suicide by hanging her from the shower rod with a bedsheet. The police said Mr. Pillco admitted that Ms. Shelly had complained about construction noise and that after their confrontation grew violent and he pleaded with her not to call the police, he had hit her and then hanged her body, in an apparent effort to conceal his crime. The city medical examiner later ruled that Ms. Shelly had died not from a blow but from “compression of the neck.”
The story had all the earmarks of drama and sensationalism that make a successful “Law & Order” episode, and Dick Wolf, the creator of the show and its sister series, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” was hardly the only one to take notice. The morning the faked-suicide story broke, three people, including Mr. Wolf’s barber and the counterman who poured his coffee at Dean & DeLuca, brought the story to his attention as material for a new episode.
“It just screams it,” said Mr. Wolf, who reads a half-dozen newspapers a day, in part to stimulate story ideas.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Wolf and the program’s writing “show runner,” Nicholas Wootton, batted around ways to take the apparently straightforward footprint-leads-to-the-killer story line and give it the whiplash-inducing plot twists the show is known for.
― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus), Saturday, 17 February 2007 01:42 (seventeen years ago) link