A Question of Truth

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

A Question of Truth
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
February 23, 2007; Page W3

Early in November 2006, actress-director Adrienne Shelly was found hanging from a shower rod in the bathroom of the Manhattan apartment she used as an office. With no signs of forcible entry or evidence of a struggle, initial police reports suggested a suicide -- a conclusion the dead woman's grieving husband persistently rejected. He was proved right a week later, when Diego Pillco, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador working in the building, confessed to the murder of the 40-year-old woman, and described, in unforgettable detail, how he had staged the suicide scene by hanging her the way he had learned to hang pigs on the farms he worked in Ecuador. Enraged by her complaints about construction noise and her threats to call the police, he followed her to her apartment, hit her, and concluded that he had killed her. Then, unaware that she was still alive, he decided on the suicide ruse -- the hanging that in fact did kill her.

(snip)

In the "Law & Order" version of the Shelly case, introduced, like all episodes, with the disclaimer that this show is fictional, we had not only a pitiable illegal immigrant as a suspect -- an earnest, sensitive youth bent only on supporting his impoverished mother and family back in Colombia -- but a young Muslim sound engineer who worked for the (fictional) dead woman. In short, a perfect storm of the kind of victims now perceived, on prime time, as chief objects of maltreatment by government, police and a malignant society generally.

As it turns out, neither of these persecuted and open-hearted youths were to be charged: The real killer was none other than the rich businessman owner of the construction firm. Having discovered that his worker -- the sensitive youth from Colombia -- had hit the actress and caused, he thought, her death, the boss decided to stage the suicide to protect his millions gained from exploiting undocumented laborers.

(snip)

It is of course futile to expect plots on prime time to adhere to the requirements of reason, and the spirit of truth at least. Still, it took a lot for a viewer aware of the actual murder of Adrienne Shelly to sit through the falsifications in this version that exculpates the confessed killer. It can't have helped that the embittering story Dick Wolf and company ripped from the headlines had and still has a peculiarly raw power. The life of Adrienne Shelly -- a woman, a mother of a 3-year-old, a New Yorker -- had come to its sudden ghastly end because she did what people do every day: They go downstairs, or upstairs, to complain about construction noise, and even threaten to call the police. It is a poignantly familiar picture that touches any number of raw nerves. This confident woman could scarcely have imagined that she was going down to confront a man incapable of tolerating a complaining woman -- but who would be capable of slugging her, and of everything else that followed. (In the "Law & Order" version, the worker only gets to push the "lady," as he calls her.) That, it would seem, is not the kind of truth, and not the kind of perpetrator, that interests the creative minds at "Law & Order."

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