Law & Order: SVU (3/21/2007) It's Easy to Confess When You Are Dying

The show opens with Detective Elliot Stabler and his family at church. His daughters openly show their anger toward their father, while his son is an altar boy who proudly waves to his father after the ceremony. You would think that a man who makes his living by investigating sex crimes would know better than to let his son be an altar boy in a Catholic Church, but apparently “parenting" isn't one of Stabler's strong points. At the end of the service, Father Dennis asks to Stabler to speak with a dying man, who is staying at his hospice, the Haven House. The priest thinks the man has something he wants to confess.

Detective Stabler goes to the Haven House to interview the dying man. The man is Judson Tierney, played by Brian Dennehy, who is in his final days of a losing battle with lung cancer. Unfortunately, there are no miraculous healing cocoons at the Haven House, but there is plenty of morphine, which is just as fun and is also covered by his health insurance. Judson Tierney says he does have something to confess and promises to reveal everything if Stabler can get his daughter to visit him. Stabler is intrigued and resists asking Tierney, “Do I look like the Make-A-Wish Foundation?" By the way, the Make-A-Wish foundation is a fraud because they denied my wish to hunt baby panda bears with Ted Nugent on the grounds that chlamydia is not a terminal disease and that I am not a needy child. Really? Because just about every girlfriend I have ever had would testify that I am.

Detective Olivia Benson meets Stabler at the station. She cannot find any criminal record on Judson Tierney, but is already convinced that he molested his daughter, Sheila. They go to interview Sheila but aside from insisting that she won't see her father, no matter how dead he almost is, she isn't very helpful. Olivia presses her about possible abuse but she denies it and finally tells them that there is a box in the basement that belongs to her father. I am sure that Olivia thought “a box in the basement that belongs to my father" was a tasteless reference to Sheila's vagina but, alas, it wasn't. The detectives open the box and find countless cards addressed to Sheila from her father. Each card contains a $100 bill and a note asking for forgiveness. Sheila asks that the detectives take them to her father to show him that she never opened them or spent the money and Olivia at this point is ready to literally jam a rape kit down her throat.

The Detectives take the cards to the lab to examine the DNA. Olivia, finally getting to meet Tierney, immediately accuses him of molesting his daughter. He denies it and Olivia, ironically, cannot accept that no means no. The lab finds Judson Tierney's fingerprints in the system and, it turns out, he was arrested under an alibi decades ago for a few burglaries. Even more interesting is that all of the $100 bills in the cards were on the FBI's “watched currency" list. The money can all be traced back to a string of unsolved bank robberies committed by “The Fedora Bandits." Detectives Stabler and Benson confront Judson Tierney about the bank robberies and he doesn't deny it, but tells them that there is still much more to be learned and repeats his request to see Sheila.

Detectives Benson and Stabler go to interview Sheila again to see if she knew about the bank robberies, and so that Olivia can ask her again if she had been molested by her father. Sheila tells the detectives that her hatred for her father stems from all the lies and secrets in their household. When Sheila was eighteen, she stole her birth certificate so that she could get a passport to visit Europe. She discovered that her biological mother was a woman named Suzanne Molinax and not Lenore Tierney, as she had been brought up to believe. When she confronted her father about it, he explained that Molinax was his mistress who accidentally got pregnant, as if mistresses ever “accidentally" get pregnant. Since Lenore was unable to have kids, they adopted Sheila and raised her as their own. Sheila blames this for what she considered was extremely unaffectionate treatment from her mother, er, her fake adopted mother. Could be she was just a bitch.

The detectives get impatient with Tierney's excruciatingly slow pace at revealing what it is exactly that he wants to confess. Dr. George Huang suggests that Olivia has become a symbol of Sheila to Tierney and that if she wants him to cooperate she needs to display anger towards him like his real, er, fake daughter would. Olivia jumps at the chance to be more pushy, and tells Tierney that she is done talking to him.

Tierney then takes her to Lenore's gravesite. At the grave, Olivia finds a set of keys. Stabler finds that the keys open a bomb-shelter in Tierney's backyard. The bomb-shelter contains two trunks, one has millions of dollars and the other has the mummified corpse of the other Fedora Bandit (Oooh it reminds me “Let's Make a Deal." Pick the first trunk!). Dr. Melinda Warner does a thorough examination and concludes that yes, this crypt-keeper look-alike in a fedora probably has been dead for over thirty years.

Olivia confronts Tierney about the corpse of his partner. Tierney doesn't deny it, but tells her, “Jack had it coming." Tierney identifies his partner as Jack Colino and Detective Stabler goes to notify his wife. The former Mrs. Colino tells Stabler that she thought her husband had run off with his mistress, Suzanne Molinax. Molinax had shown up at their home with a baby and begged her to leave Jack Colino so that they could be together--always a good plan that NEVER ends badly. Tierney then tells Olivia the full story. He received a call from Jack, where he claimed to be out of gas at his mistress' house. Tierney brought over a can of gasoline and found Jack had killed his mistress, Suzanne Molinax. Jack then told Tierney that he killed her because she was going to tell the police about their bank robberies if he didn't leave his wife to marry her. Figuring that divorce is a sin, Jack shot her, probably figuring that the murder of a mistress would actually add up to less Hail Mary's. Jack then began dousing the house with gasoline and told Tierney that he was going to burn everything to the ground, including the baby. Tierney then shot Jack to prevent him from murdering the child. He brought the child home and confessed everything to his wife. They then raised Sheila as their own daughter.

Wow, what a great guy Tierney is. Except for the fact that Suzanne Molinax's ex-husband was on year thirty-five of a life sentence he falsely received for the crime that was committed by Jack Colino. Casey Novack steps in and states that she can get him out of prison if she can get Tierney on the record confessing to the crimes. Tierney is willing to do it but is so full of morphine that anything he says will not be allowed as evidence and he is so doped up he is ready to confess to crucifying Jesus. The only person who can authorize the Narcan shot that will suck the morphine out of him is his next of kin, Sheila. Sheila agrees to it and Tierney gives his statement to free Molinax. Molinax isn't out of jail yet though. He was involved in a murder during a riot between opposing gangs in the prison and the warden of the prison wants to try him for his role. Molinax claims that it was self-defense (it was a black man that he killed, after all) but Novack doesn't have the jurisdiction to get him out of it. Through some political maneuvering, it is arranged for Molinax to plead guilty to the jailhouse murder and be sentenced to the time he already served.

Olivia tells Tierney that Molinax has been freed from prison so he can go ahead and die now because his usefulness to society is up. Tierney quietly dies. Sheila shows up after her father, er, fake father, is dead and weeps at his bedside. Olivia fights the urge to ask her, “Are you sure he never touched you inappropriately? I mean, he's not really your father so even a kiss or some questionable bath-time behavior would count...Did you ever sit on his lap?"