Clarice – Ugly Truth

By: Kelly Kearney

In the seventh episode of Clarice, everyone’s favorite gal-pals team up to investigate the cold case of a missing teenager found hidden behind a concrete wall. The discovery of the entombed boy leads to a myriad of emotions from the team, most notably Murray, who is a loose cannon for reasons we find out later. As the two agents start to strip away the layers of this case, another case is starting to come together. Clarice identifies the mystery man from her abduction as Joe Hudlin, friend and lawyer to her boss, Paul Krendler. Things are heating up at the bureau. Thankfully, Mapp and Starling, the two most competent agents in D.C., are on the case!

A Boy, A Tomb and a Killer Case for ViCAP

After a ten month search for local teen Cody Phelps (Tyson Kirk) the FBI gets the heart wrenching news his body was found behind a concrete wall in a newly purchased home under construction. During the renovations air made its way into the makeshift grave leading to a swarm of flies, a call to an exterminator and the horrific discovery of Cody’s body. The tragic finding put an end to the FBI’s nationwide manhunt for the teen they assumed was abducted. After the person they pinned as the possible suspect wound up dead, the search for Cody slowed to a halt and now the FBI has to tell the family the news no parent wants to hear: their son wasn’t missing – he was murdered.

Born to a single mother of two, older brother Cody was the venerable man of the house. Now his mother Linda (Maria Syrgiannis) has the unfortunate job of IDing her only son, the boy who helped keep her life together. She is devastated by her loss and takes comfort in ViCAP’s promise that her son didn’t suffer, but after ten months of hoping he would one day come home she is beside herself with grief. As the team watches her fall apart, they manage to take some DNA samples from Cody’s body and the results just create more questions. The sample is unidentifiable, but thanks to Ardelia’s (Devyn A. Tyler) expertise in cold cases she is able to match it to another child murder. It is a boy named Bobby Larkin who was also found buried in a wall of an abandoned house, although the similarities end there since both boys are of a different race and from different locations. This puts the serial part of this killer puzzle to question. What they do learn is the DNA is mitochondrial, which is passed down from mother to child and could belong to more than one relative suspect.  Agent Mapp fills Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz) in on the science behind the evidence and then offers her expertise on the case. Since she made the connection between Bobby and Cody, she wants to be in on the credit when they bring in their killer. She is still struggling to break through the glass and racial ceiling and tired of her hard work being credited to her white male counterparts at the bureau. Paul hesitates to add her on the team since he doesn’t want to be accused of stepping on Cold Case’s toes; not to mention he has his hands full with Clarice (Rebecca Breeds) who just identified his lawyer as the mystery man behind the whistleblower killings! Clarice spotted a photo of Joe Hudlin (Raoul Bhaneja) on Paul’s desk and, not surprisingly, he doesn’t believe her. After all, she was drugged and traumatized, and Joe is Paul’s friend. Krendler accuses her of confusing his lawyer with somebody else and tries to shelf Clarice’s accusations, but Agent Stubborn Starling is not about to give up. She knows what she saw and she does not appreciate her boss assuming she doesn’t. Clarice goes to Ardelia for support since she too is often pushed aside by the higher ups at the bureau. Unfortunately, if Krendler isn’t willing to look into Hudlin, Clarice has no other choice but to concentrate on the current case of Cody Phelps.

Friends and More

After a night of Krendler frustrations, Ardelia and Clarice focus their energies on the teen killings. Knowing that the people closest to a victim are usually a sure bet when it comes to finding a suspect leads the police to request DNA samples from Bobby Larkin’s family. His mother, Fran (Chandra Galasso), immediately agrees to the test, but her brother (Carson Durven) isn’t so cooperative. Bobby’s Uncle Terrance claims the police never looked for his nephew because he had been selling drugs out of the abandoned house. Considering the reputation of the police when dealing with people of color, Bobby’s uncle assumed it was a cop that killed him because it wouldn’t be the first time, they roughed up a black kid accused of crime. Because of that, the uncle does not trust the police or their tests. That i, until Ardelia and Clarice show up asking questions. He assumed Bobby’s death wasn’t just low priority, but no priority at all and Ardelia understands his skepticism. A white boy gets murdered four miles away and the whole town is mourning him, but a black boy turns up dead and nobody sheds a tear but his family? The injustice of this justice system is a glaring reminder of what Ardelia deals with at work and in her personal life, so she understands where this man is coming from.

After talking with the Larkins, the two agents head home just in time to find Ardelia’s Grandma Rose (Bola Aiyeola) on their doorstep for a pop-in visit. The three ladies have a blast of a night laughing, drinking and marinating themselves in those good granny vibes. As the evening draws to a close, the two level up their gal-pal relationship when a drunken conversation in bed about their fathers leads to a moment that appears to be a heading towards a kiss! Brace yourselves fans because these ladies have more chemistry in one glance than Buffalo Bill has with an entire basement of plus-sized skin suits. The roomies are tight and if you saw sparks flying between them you are not alone, but you will have to wait for that inevitable smooch because their impromptu dip in the lady pool gets interrupted by a call from the lab. The DNA results are back and they found a match! Marybeth Kern (Vickie Papavs), who was close to Mrs. Larkin, offered up her DNA to help in the case and it was her mitochondrial DNA they found at both crime scenes. This means someone in her family is the killer.

A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother

From here the case goes from a simple double homicide to a dueling Deliverance of banjos when we learn that Marybeth gave birth to Gerry Junior (Dylan Roberts) who she claims went to live with his father after their divorce. Clarice realizes this is a lie when she uses a trip to the bathroom as cover to snoop the house for clues about the Kern son. She finds what she needs in a photo she spots in Gerry’s probable bedroom. It is a picture of junior and his mother, but the pose is anything but familial. Who Marybeth claimed was her husband in the photo was actually her son! Incest is not the best if you hope to raise a well-adjusted child and Gerry definitely doesn’t fit that category. Quickly, Mapp and Starling uncover the truth about this grotesque abuse and realize Marybeth has been molesting Gerry since his father left them at age fourteen. She blamed her son for her husband leaving and forced the then boy to fill his father’s husbandly duties as punishment for the divorce. No wonder Gerry’s DNA popped up at the scene of two dead teen boys! A lifetime of abuse can lead some victims to psychopathy. In Gerry’s case, that road ended in the deaths of Cody and Bobby. Gerry, who on top of the molestation seems to be suffering from a developmental delay, is worried that Cody and Bobby (who were also considered “the man of the house”) were also being abused. Killing them was freeing them from the horrors he himself was experiencing. Gerry killed them to protect them, but also to protect his secret after the boys found out what went on the Kern house. Junior had no one to talk to and when he confided in two people he thought would understand, they didn’t and he panicked. Cody and Bobby’s mothers loved them appropriately and whatever was going on between Gerry and Marybeth was twisted and should have been dealt with by law enforcement and intense therapy, not by two teenagers who probably heard the confession and tormented Junior over it.

Case Closed

After Gerry comes clean about what happened to both teens, he and his mother are arrested, and nobody is happier to see a conclusion to this case than Murray (Nick Sandow). We learn from a conversation between Shaan (Kal Penn) and Tomas (Lucca De Oliveira) that Murray’s sister went missing when he was a teenager while he was supposed to be watching her. The trail of clues to what happened to her died after a possible sighting in a porno movie, leaving Murray to assume his sister was sex trafficked. Since then he has dedicated his life to scouring the internet porn world looking for anything that could lead him to his missing sister. At least Bobby and Cody’s family can rest knowing their sons found justice, but Murray has not been so lucky.

Speaking of Shaan, while Clarice and Ardelia were working on the cold case he was following Hudlin! He followed him to Lockyer Labs, proving Clarice right. He is tied to the whistleblowers found dead in the river and now they have proof! Unfortunately, Paul Krendler disagrees and orders Shaan to disband the stakeout because he knows his friend Joe and he isn’t a killer. But he does know he is a blackmailer and tied to the case because when he confronts Joe, instead of denying it, he admits to being a part of it proceeds to blackmail Paul to keep quiet about it! If Paul lets on that Joe is tied to the whistleblowers, then he will tell the feds about that false autopsy report on their suspect. Paul tampered with evidence to protect Tomas from losing his job when a mistake was made and now that decision is coming back to bite him in the backside. Joe reminds him of his custody case, like the final nail in Paul’s coffin, because no court is going to hand over the kids to a man who was fired from the FBI. Paul Krendler is stuck between his own career and catching a killer, if only he would have listened to Clarice!