A couple of dead girls show up with evidence of sexual and physical abuse and drugs pumped into their systems. A young man (Peter Ball) is suspected of having committed similar pecadilloes before and when his current girlfriend (Ellen Pompeo), a sister of one of the dead girls, winds up in the hospital battered and bruised, Ball is scooped up by Detectives Jerry Orbach and Jesse Martin.
Polaroid photos show up indicating that Pompeo herself was involved in a threesome -- or, if you include Peter Ball, a foursome I guess. It develops that Pompeo was pimping for her sister and the other victim and one of the girls died by accident, so the other one had to be killed. That seems to stretch the concept of group sex a bit too far for me, but things happen.
I hope this is clear because, as usual, there are meanders that leave oxbow lakes behind. Essentially, Ball and Pompeo together have abused and killed two innocent girls, one of them Pompeo's young sister. Pompeo had willing sex with the others while Ball took pics, and then he ravaged them and killed them.
The evidence is conclusive and Ball is in a vice. Okay, so he's a sadist, a rapist, and a murderer, but the real culprit here is his blond main squeeze, Ellen Pompeo, who did for Ball what Catherine did for her husband, Sebastian Venable, in "Suddenly Last Summer." Pompeo is by far the most interesting character. She apparently enjoyed bringing girls to Ball. She eagerly involved herself in the sex games. She went one on one with her drugged out younger sister and later permitted her to be murdered. In the middle of this investigations, with everyone harried, she asks with manifest serenity, "If the police are finished with the apartment, can they tell me if they found a pair of my red earring?" The term "psychopath" is flung around too loosely but when shrinks use it among themselves they know what it means -- and it applies here.
Of the two miscreants, Ball isn't much of an actor and with his muscular neck, hefty jaw, and boyish good looks, he seems to have just graduate from prep school and gotten a football scholarship to Columbia. But Ellen Pompeo is perfectly cast. She's a decent actress and has one of those faces that could go either way, rather like Rosamund Pike. Pretty, yes, but possibly venomous.
Of course each of the criminals blames the other, but the righteous Assistant DA McCoy solves the problem by a kind of trickery that I won't describe.
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