From Dick Wolf’s Sick Mind To Your TV In Just 101 Days

From November 7 to February 16 — 101 days — is how long it takes for stories to make it from the headlines to Law & Order episodes:

One grim gray morning three weeks ago, two homicide detectives strode into a small Manhattan apartment and gazed up at a petite young woman dangling by her neck from a ceiling pipe rigged with a homemade nylon noose. “It’s about time,” grumbled a dreadlocked medical examiner. “You have any idea what it’s like being stuck in here with a swinger?

Objects in the room told the story of the dead woman’s promising career. Near stacks of videocassettes, the walls were decorated with posters for independent films featuring images of the young woman, an actress turned director who had been renting the apartment as an office.

If the details of the crime scene called to mind the death of Adrienne Shelly, the 40-year-old actress and director who was hanged in her Greenwich Village office in November, what happened next did not: After two police technicians cut the body down from the pipe, the corpse, played by a 40-year-old stuntwoman named Jennifer Lamb, headed into a nearby room to nurse her 4-month-old daughter.

“Law & Order” was at it again, ripping a gruesome crime from the headlines and transforming it into an hour of fast-moving, plot-driven television, which in this instance will be broadcast Friday night at 10 on NBC. Although the use of such raw source material is common on the program, this particular real-life victim had an eerie way of returning to people’s minds during production.

. . .

In reality, barely a New York minute passed between the moment Ms. Shelly’s life ended and the moment it became fodder for prime-time drama.

After Ms. Shelly’s body was found hanging from a shower rod on Nov. 1, investigators initially suspected suicide. But a footprint in her bathroom led the police to a 19-year-old Ecuadorean illegal immigrant named Diego Pillco who had been doing construction work in a downstairs apartment, and the police determined that they had a murder on their hands.

On Nov. 7 and 8, the morning newspapers were filled with macabre accounts of the crime, as pieced together by the police. According to the authorities, Mr. Pillco had struck Ms. Shelly in the face and, suspecting he had killed her, then faked her suicide by hanging her from the shower rod with a bedsheet. The police said Mr. Pillco admitted that Ms. Shelly had complained about construction noise and that after their confrontation grew violent and he pleaded with her not to call the police, he had hit her and then hanged her body, in an apparent effort to conceal his crime. The city medical examiner later ruled that Ms. Shelly had died not from a blow but from “compression of the neck.”

The story had all the earmarks of drama and sensationalism that make a successful “Law & Order” episode, and Dick Wolf, the creator of the show and its sister series, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” was hardly the only one to take notice. The morning the faked-suicide story broke, three people, including Mr. Wolf’s barber and the counterman who poured his coffee at Dean & DeLuca, brought the story to his attention as material for a new episode.

“It just screams it,” said Mr. Wolf, who reads a half-dozen newspapers a day, in part to stimulate story ideas.

Over the next few weeks, Mr. Wolf and the program’s writing “show runner,” Nicholas Wootton, batted around ways to take the apparently straightforward footprint-leads-to-the-killer story line and give it the whiplash-inducing plot twists the show is known for.

Earlier: Law & Order To Become A Show-Within-A-Show Self-Contained World.