| “ | I grew up in a two-room apartment. My mother sent me and my sisters to school with mashed potato sandwiches for lunch. I pulled myself above that. No one helped me. Not Danny. People thought he was charming. When he took that $15,000 from me, it was not charming. | „ |
| ~ Denise explaining her motive for having her husband killed. |
Denise Johnson is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Purple Heart". She is a restauranteur who has her husband killed and then murders the assassin she hired when he starts blackmailing her.
She was portrayed by Lisa Gay Hamilton.
Early life[]
Denise grew up poor in New York City and dreamed of someday owning a restaurant. As an adult, she married cab driver and Desert Storm veteran Daniel Johnson, with whom she had a son, Ricky, and opened and ran a restaurant. Her marriage was a rocky one, however, because Daniel's bad investments and reckless spending drove her to the brink of bankruptcy; his debts were so large that Denise was facing losing her business even if she divorced him.
Determined never to go back to living in poverty, she hired a hitman named Dewey Lattimer to kill him, but Lattimer failed. She then hired small-time criminal Charlie Kovac, who shot and killed Daniel in his own cab.
"Purple Heart"[]
When NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Mike Logan inform Denise of her husband's death, she feigns grief and tells them that he had been out earning extra money from street fares. They learn of Daniel's money troubles from loan shark Steve Breck, to whom he owed $15,000, and talk to a homeless man who tried to use Daniel's maxed-out credit card, which he found in a dumpster along with a blood-stained shirt with plumber's compound in the pocket.
This evidence leads them to the plumbing company Kovac works for as a cover and $15,000 that he kept in his freezer, which Daniel had been carrying at the time to pay off Breck. Briscoe and Logan question Denise at her restaurant, but she denies knowing anything about Kovac or Daniel's money. Soon afterward, they find Kovac dead in his apartment, having been shot in the chest.
Briscoe and Logan then find out that Daniel had withdrawn the money from Denise's bank account with a forged check, that Kovac had called Denise three hours before Daniel was killed, and that he had done work on the restaurant where she used to work. After questioning the restaurant's owner, they find out that she never returned the key to the drawer where he kept his .22 revolver - the same kind of gun used to kill Daniel. They interrogate Denise, but she refuses to talk. When her fingerprints match those taken off of the gun, however, they arrest her for murdering Kovac and her husband.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid charge Denise with murdering Kovac and paying to have her husband killed, but they are hard-pressed to find a motive. Kincaid talks to Daniel's brother and Denise's business partner, who tell her about their unhappy marriage and the debts Daniel accrued, and Denise's former boss testifies during the trial that Denise borrowed the key to his desk the day after Daniel made a drunken scene at her restaurant. Nevertheless, her lawyer manages to have the charges against her for Daniel's murder dismissed, meaning that McCoy and Kincaid have to convict her of murdering Kovac without mentioning that she paid Kovac to kill Daniel.
Kincaid goes over the case evidence with Briscoe and Logan and discover the previous assassination attempt on Daniel, which leads them to Lattimer, who is in prison for armed robbery. McCoy and Kincaid make a deal with Lattimer to commute his prison sentence if he testifies against Denise, an offer he accepts. They then tell the judge that they now believe that Denise killed Kovac to avenge her husband's murder.
Denise testifies that she was relieved when Daniel died and did not hold a grudge against Kovac for killing him. McCoy then tells the judge he will call Lattimer as a rebuttal witness, scaring Denise's lawyer into asking for a plea bargain. McCoy tells Denise that she can plead guilty to second-degree murder or risk life in prison if the jury finds her guilty. Denise reluctantly accepts the offer and says that she paid to have Daniel killed because he was bleeding her dry, and that she killed Kovac to prevent him from blackmailing her. She is then taken to prison to begin serving a sentence of 15 years to life.
External link[]
- Denise Johnson on the Law & Order Wiki
