Law & Order: Los Angeles Episode 1.06 Hondo Field

It's 4:00 a.m. and two teens are skinny-dipping at an El Segundo Beach, where they discover a drowned corpse. Dawn has broken by the time TJ and Winters arrive to check out the body of Freddy Ramirez. He's got oil on his clothes, oil in his mouth, and an account at GoldShore Oil Credit Union. TJ looks up to spy an offshore drilling rig five miles out to sea. After her investigation, the coroner knows Freddy was drunk when he died, which was before he hit the water. Since the oil company records claim roughneck Freddy punched into the Hondo Field rig where he worked at 2:36 a.m., the detectives visit GoldShore's VP, who claims jurisdiction for all oil rig accidents belongs to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Insisting the beach where Freddy washed up is their jurisdiction, Winters produces his warrant, explaining he needs a copy of Freddy's personnel file and access to the rig.

TJ and Winters pore through Freddy's file. Since the rig has zero tolerance, Hondo Field employees are known to party hard on off hours and Freddy's no exception. Freddy lives in a motel room in San Pedro, and was suspended four times in the last few months for violation. On the rig, Captain Finch offers them Freddy's cap, which was just found that morning under a gangway. Winters notices a little piece of rock or dirt, which the captain identifies as likely to be drilling mud. Freddy worked on the frilling floor. TJ wants to know why no one noticed he was missing until 18 hours after he punched in. Finch figures his crew gave him a break, figuring Freddy was sleeping off a hangover. After all, the crew has worked together for five years, and they're pretty tight.

The guys on Freddy's work crew claim they trusted him with their lives. They all got together the night before they shipped out at a San Pedro bar called O'Meghan's. Freddy was pretty drunk when he told them he was walking back to his motel, and they all figured he was hooking up with a woman. Crew chief Valerie Roberts claims her crew has more balls than brains. When TJ asked if Freddy's suspensions were the result of resentment by crew members, Valerie's quick to say no. Their crew is tight, and if anything were wrong, she would know. Apologizing, Winters asks if there could have been something an "outsider" wouldn't see. Valerie testily informs him that she's a second-generation roughneck, working on a rig since she turned 19.

After Freddy's berth shows no signs that he ever unpacked, the detectives proceed to Freddy's San Pedro motel room. They find a notebook with numbers and dates, and a certificate indicating the rig passed inspection with flying colors. Winters is quick to notice a distinctive dirt/rock on the floor, which looks like the stuff he found on Freddy's hat. The hotel manager explains that he just had the parking lot tarred, and people keep tracking the little dirt/tar balls into his rooms. Convinced they're being played, Winters decides it's time to head back to the boar, where they question Lucas, who's in charge of logging the workers in and out. When Winters puts on the squeeze, Lucas admits that he got up to take a whiz, and when he got back, Freddy's ID card had been swiped - Lucas never actually saw him.

TJ gets an email: the dirt on Freddy's hat matches the tar from his motel parking lot. The deduction: the killer swiped Freddy's ID card on the rig and planted his hat to make it look like he fell overboard. TJ and Winters proceed to O'Meghan's bar to question the bartender. Freddy was hanging out with everyone on his crew except Valerie, who was having dinner with her boyfriend Zach. He also made several calls from the pay phone, then took off around 11:00 p.m. The cops trace the call to the upscale home of Doublas Kasdan, who directs them to his maid Lucy, Freddy's mother. It's the first she's hearing of his murder. Hearing her crying, Kasdan's daughter Stephanie offers Lucy comfort.

Apparently, Freddie called his mother to tell her he loved her, "just in case." The detectives take this to mean Freddy 's job was getting more dangerous than usual. Could he have had a beef against GoldShore? Thinking the feds might be useful after all, they proceed to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to meet with Mel Wilcox, who can't figure out why Freddy would have the oil rig's certificate in his possession. He does have a complaint on file from Jason Callahan, a former member of Freddy's crew, who's now working construction. Jason complained about Valerie, whom he says made his life a living hell. He did complain about her to the captain, who told him to man up or quit. She rode Freddy's ass harder than anyone else's.

TJ and Winters debate the troubles a woman has working in a male-dominated world. What if Freddy was building a case to get Valerie fired? When they return to the rig looking for Valerie, they learn the boss cut her and her crew's shift a few days short so they could attend Freddy's funeral. The detectives proceed to her berth to find a guy named Bill, who lives there during Valerie's time off. He complains that she left a real mess he had to clean up, including blood all over the floor. After calling back the crime techs and finding blood evidence on Valerie's boots, TJ and Winters arrest her for murder, figuring she kicked in Freddy's skull.

Stanton and the judge are shocked to recognize Valerie's extremely attractive lawyer, Sarah Goodwin, from her recent TV appearances. Stanton requests $1 million in bail, and the judge backs her up. Outside, Sarah is pleased to recognize and flirt with Dekker, an old law school buddy. After she leaves, a clearly upset and cringing Stanton informs that Sarah's already made her first move with a motion to exclude the blood evidence from Valerie's berth. The next day in the judge's chambers, Sarah presents her motion. The cops didn't have a warrant to search Valerie's berth. Even if Bill gave them permission, and the captain ended her shift early, Valerie had a reasonable expectation of privacy until the end of her scheduled shift. The judge reluctantly decides the blood evidence is inadmissible.

Later, TJ, Winters and Stanton are going through evidence seized from Valerie's apartment when they find a T-shirt for Zack's dive shop. TJ recalls that Valerie's boyfriend's name is Zack, and before long, they've got DNA evidence proving Freddy was on Zack's boat, and he's in the hotseat in interrogation. When Zack pushes back, claiming they can't use the evidence against Valerie, they claim they want to use it against him, as Valerie's accomplice. Zack breaks down and tells the truth. He was sleeping when Valerie called him from the bar claiming a drunken Freddy feel down and crushed his skull. She asked Zack to help get rid of the body, and that's all he'll say until he has a lawyer.

In Superior Court, Sarah tries to block Zack's testimony, claiming Dekker must produce corroborative evidence, which he can't, since the blood evidence is inadmissible. In a sleight-of-hand move, Dekker reads off the transcript of Zack's interview with the cops. Zack never admits to helping her, so Dekker won't charge him as an accomplice. The judge gleefully denies Sarah's motion, and allows Zack to testify against Valerie. Sarah pulls a surprise move. She wants to file a notice of affirmative defense, asserting that Valerie killed Freddy in self-defense when Freddy tried to rape her, the culminating act in a vicious campaign of sexual harassment waged against her by the oil rig crew and abetted by GoldShore Oil.

Dekker watches Sarah Goodwin and Valerie Roberts interviewed on TV. Roberts talks about how her dad was her hero, telling her she could be tough and a girly-girl all at the same time. Sarah Goodwin says that this case is just more evidence of blue-collar women working in hostile environments surrounded by men who resent their presence. This case, she insists, is about them, it's for them. In court the next day, Dekker tells the jury that there is no evidence of a rape, no bruises on Ms. Roberts, no call to the police. What there is, is evidence that Ms. Roberts tried to stage Freddy's death to make it look accidental: using his ID to create a false work record, planting his bloody hat in the rigging, and asking her boyfriend to help dump the body in the ocean. He will ask them one simple question: is that how a victim acts?

Sarah Goodwin attempts to paint a picture for the jury of Ms. Roberts working on the rig, oppressed by hardened oil rig workers daily harassing her with an endless stream of sexual innuendo. Then, she says, one night it got serious. There Ms. Roberts was in the dark with a drunken Mexican... make that a drunken illegal Mexican... Dekker calls for an objection, and an irate judge insists that Ms. Goodwin meet her in her chambers. Goodwin produces evidence that Freddy Ramirez was brought to America from Mexico when he was five. Dekker insists that this has no relevance to the case, and that it's just using prejudice to turn the jury. He calls for a mistrial, but the judge denies him.

Later, Goodwin tries to chat Dekker up in a Mexican joint, but he asks her to please not act like they're best friends. She gets to the point, insisting that she isn't racist. When he gives her a look, she changes tack. Maybe she is, she says, maybe it's in our DNA to suffer from all the "isms", egotism, ageism, sexism. She tells him all she needs is one woman on the jury to turn, just one, and the case is over. Dekker asks her, what about the truth? She reminds him of their days together in law school, and how bad he was at corporate taxation law. She asks him why he never asked her for help when she was acing the class, why he always went to his friend Mike. He insists it wasn't sexism, it was just that she and he didn't click.

The next day one of Freddy's co-workers describes a situation where Roberts was asking Freddy to use dangerously expedient methods on the oil rig, and then laying in to Freddy when these same methods led to unfortunate consequences. They talked about trying to get her fired but knew the company would never take action for fear of being sued. Then Goodwin asks this same co-worker if it wasn't true that they broke in when Roberts was taking a shower once. He admits yes, but that it was just a part of treating her like one of the boys. When she asks him if he would do the same to a male co-worker and he says no, she's got him where she wants him.

Stanton tells Dekker that Goodwin hit the trifecta: a woman afraid of being raped, an illegal alien, and a big bad oil company. Dekker asks Stanton if she's reached out to Freddy's mother. She gives him a number, but when he calls it he gets Stephanie Kasdan, the Kasdans' daughter, on the line. When they interview her, they find out that she and Freddy had a relationship that she was hiding from her parents, afraid of what they'd think about her dating their illegal maid's son. She says there was no way Freddy would have raped Valerie Roberts. It was actually Roberts oppressing Freddy, constantly making him do endless errands for her, dangling the threat of firing him over his head. It was so bad, the day before he was killed he'd had to get a new phone and number so she couldn't reach him.

In court, Roberts describes a horribly oppressive, sexist situation on the oil rig. Goodwin asks her why she didn't leave. Roberts says it was a good, well-paying job, and she liked it. The night Freddy died, she insists that she found him drunk outside a bar, and felt obligated to help him home to his hotel. She says that he'd tried to drag her into his room, molesting her, and telling her that if she tried to get him arrested, he'd just leave for Mexico. Out of fear, she kicked him until he let go. Then she saw he was dead and panicked. It was after this that she tried to stage it like an accident.

Dekker asks Roberts if that was the first she'd heard that Freddy was an illegal worker. She says yes. Then Dekker starts to flash on a screen in the courtroom - displaying the texts she sent to Freddy's cellphone. At first they are demands that he fix her car or her garage, then they become threats that if he doesn't do what she wants, she'll send him and his mother back to Mexico. Finally, the texts turn sexual in nature, and Dekker produces a sexually provocative picture Roberts had sent to Freddy two days before he was killed. Dekker insists it was Roberts who was sexually harassing Freddy, subjugating him like she felt subjugated by the other men on the rig, and when he threatened to expose her, she killed him.

Roberts bursts out, saying Dekker just doesn't know what it's like, constantly working with men who didn't want her on the rig, men who could kill you, toss you off the rig at night and no one would care. She had sweated and bled for that job since high school, but she was still the chick and the men would never let her forget it. Then it suddenly dawns on her that she is, in effect, confessing to murder. When the jury reconvenes, they find her guilty. Later, Dekker talks about how Roberts had found the one man over whom she could wield some power. Stanton says there are a lot of women like that, who haven't learned power won't be given to them, they just have to take it. Gloria Steinem, asks Dekker? No, she says: Roseanne Barr.