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| “ | I told him where my mother hid the jewelry. He got mad when it wasn't there. He was stoned out of his head. I didn't know he was going to shoot everyone. | „ |
| ~ Jenna implicating Chester Manning in the murders of her mother and brother. |
Laura Weber is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Savior". She is a teenage girl who pays her boyfriend to kill her mother, and who unintentionally implicates her father in the murder.
She was portrayed by Ellen Pompeo, who also portrayed Laura Kendrick in a later Law & Order episode.
Early life[]
Jenna was the oldest child of Ron and Joyce Weber, with a 10-year-old brother named Billy. Her father spoiled her by giving her all the expensive presents he could afford, but she often clashed with her mother, who tried to set rules and boundaries that got in the way of Jenna getting what she wanted. When Ron learned that he was about to lose his job and began drinking heavily, she was often left alone with her mother, which made their power struggle more intense.
Both of her parents disliked her boyfriend, Chester Manning, a juvenile delinquent with a criminal record for armed robbery and drug dealing whom she liked for his macho, "bad boy" swagger. When Ron and Joyce forbade her to see him, she decided to have her mother killed. She paid Chester to break into her family's house while Ron was out drinking, shoot her mother dead, take her jewelry, and wound her superficially so it would look like a burglary gone wrong. Chester goes into a frenzy, however, and kills Billy as well, something she did not intend.
"Savior"[]
Laura Cochran, Joyce's sister and Jenna and Billy's aunt, arrives the next morning to take Billy to school, walks in on the bloody crime scene, and calls the police. NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis question Ron after he returns home from an all-night drinking binge, and they find it suspicious that he cannot remember much of the previous night; Briscoe, a recovering alcoholic, suspects that Ron killed his wife and son in a drunken rage.
After Cochran tells Briscoe and Curtis that her sister and brother-in-law were having money problems, Jenna jumps to Ron's defense, saying that he had a good job. When Briscoe and Curtis talk to Ron's boss, however, they find out that he was fired and kept it from his family for months, only for Joyce to find out days before the murders.
They bring Ron into their station house to interrogate him, but he steadfastly says that he is innocent. After Lieutenant Anita Van Buren learns that Ron had filed a $500,000 claim on Joyce's life insurance policy two days after her death, Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid gets Briscoe and Curtis a search warrant for Ron's office, where they find Joyce's jewelry and arrest him for murder.
Kincaid's law school classmate Margot Bell represents Ron against Kincaid and Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, even though she personally thinks that her client is guilty. Ron still insists that he did not kill his wife and son, however, so McCoy and Kincaid have forensic psychiatrist Elizabeth Olivet examine him. She finds that he fits the profile of a "family annihilator", a narcissist who murders his family after suffering a financial setback, like losing a job, because he cannot bear the thought of them believing he is a failure and believes that they cannot survive without him.
Laura testifies in her father's defense, claiming that she lied to the police about closing the door before going to bed because she feared they would suspect him. Ron also testifies in his own defense and sobbingly denies having killed his family. Olivet later tells McCoy and Kincaid that a typical family annihilator would have confessed immediately under pressure, which puts his guilt into question.
Olivet interviews Ron and Kincaid interviews Cohran; both say that Jenna fought with Joyce about Chester. Briscoe and Curtis question Chester, who protests his innocence; after looking over the evidence again, Kincaid hypothesizes that Jenna told him where to find the key. McCoy and Kincaid meet with Ron in prison and tell him that Jenna may have orchestrated the robbery. They threaten to arrest her unless he helps them get the truth out of her.
Jenna joins her father for a meeting with McCoy and Kincaid. Ron pretends to accept a plea bargain in which he would serve 30 years in prison for two counts of first-degree manslaughter. Jenna intervenes and says that she told Chester where to find the jewelry so he could rob the house, but McCoy stops her and asks why she did not simply take the jewelry herself. When Jenna says nothing in reply, McCoy says that he must have been there with the sole intention of murdering her mother, and only she could have told him to do that. He tells Jenna that Chester will testify against her for a better deal, leaving her no choice but to confess to what she did. She is then imprisoned for murder.
External links[]
- Jenna Weber on the Law & Order Wiki
