We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines—but which headlines? After each new episode, Brow Beat matches L&O’ s plot points to the events that inspired them.
May 3, 2010, “Crashers”
These Are Their Stories
When model Brenna Lane is found dead, detectives discover that she and a date had recently crashed an exclusive party at Gracie Mansion, where she was seen talking with Sen. Bryce Peterson. The police find that Brenna’s brother, Dustin Henry, argued with her at the party. At Dustin’s workplace, they find cases of expensive wine in storage; he plans to open a wine store with help from an investor. Detectives trace some of the wine to the senator’s home address, where his wife, Camille, insists she knows nothing about the wine. It turns out that the wine shop is located in the senator’s former campaign headquarters.
During an interrogation, the senator’s assistant, Andrea, claims she was having an affair with Dustin and suggests he might have killed Brenna. The DAs are convinced until they notice that someone in the office wrote a check for vaginoplasty, an operation that would only be appropriate for a post-menopausal woman or a mother, neither of which applies to Andrea. The only woman with check-writing privileges who fits this profile is Camille Peterson. Camille admits that she and 20-year-old Dustin had an affair and that she killed Brenna because she had threatened to tell the senator. Andrea had planted evidence to frame Dustin for the crime.
This Is the Real Story
In January 2010, the
New York Times
reported
that 60-year-old
Iris Robinson
, a Member of Parliament who is married to the co-leader of the Northern Ireland government, had arranged $80,000 in loans and given the money to “to her lover, Kirk McCambley, who was 19 at the time.”
According to
the BBC, McCambley used the money to launch a cafe.
