You never know what you will find when researching a case on the internet. This morning I found the following article in the online edition of a newspaper in New Zealand- it concerns the Law and Order episode that bore a resemblence to these killings. I am posting because there are a few quotes I have not seen elsewhere:
" On a late-winter day about a year ago, someone - his identity and motive are still unknown - entered the home of William and Claire Hunter in Omaha.
In his wake, two people were stabbed to death: the couple's 11-year-old son, Thomas, and the family's housekeeper, Shirlee Sherman (57).
Witnesses said they saw a young, well-dressed man carrying a briefcase or satchel enter and leave the residence about the time of the murders.
The bodies were discovered by Thomas' father, a physician and college professor, as is his wife.
Today, the police investigation drags on. Theories have been floated and abandoned. Nothing.
There was, however, this: On January 21, 10 months after the killings, NBC's Law & Order, the venerable cops-and-courts drama, aired an episode about a double homicide.
The victims were a young boy and his family's housekeeper, both stabbed to death in the boy's home.
Their bodies are discovered by the boy's parents, both of whom are college professors.
The chief suspect: a well-dressed man with a briefcase.
After watching the programme later, William Hunter said he found it "eerily reminiscent".
How would you feel if a traumatic personal event suddenly appeared as the plot of a prime-time entertainment programme?
During 19 seasons of Law & Order (and four spin-off series), a few hundred people have found out.
One of TV's longest-running and most honoured programmes, Law & Order uses real, "ripped-from-the-headlines" events - celebrity trials, political scandals, notorious crimes - as the basis for its crime-and-punishment plots.
Although the stories tend to wander into make-believe, they rely on the lightly-disguised depiction of real people and events for their immediacy and sense of authenticity.
The real people? They feel blind-sided and used.
No-one in the Hunter family saw the double-homicide episode, called "Pledge", when it aired.
Rob Hunter, the Hunters' 23-year-old son, began getting the first calls about it from friends.
"Did you see that?" they asked.
"Did you know about this? Wasn't it creepy?"
He did not. And it was.
"If the story was pure fiction," Rob Hunter says, "it would be less sick."
Joanne Banks, Shirlee Sherman's mother and a fan of Law & Order, was so disturbed by a description of the programme that she has not watched it.
She says flatly, "It's not something I would want to see."
William Hunter downloaded the episode from iTunes after friends and colleagues mentioned it.
He could not finish watching.
"It's uncannily similar to what happened here," says the elder Hunter, a pathologist who teaches at Creighton University's medical school.
"It's just very disturbing. We're trying to heal, and to have it constantly dredged up is painful."
The most disconcerting part, the family members say, is that no-one from the network or the programme contacted them.
Omaha police say they, too, were never alerted by the programme's producers.
"My instant reaction was, how come we didn't know about it?" says Rob Hunter, a website designer in New York City.
"How could they write something like that without talking to any of us? They never let the families know before they pushed something like that out to hundreds of millions of people.
"You see the warning that it's all fiction," he says.
"The fact is, it's not all fiction."
NBC will not confirm that the programme was based on the Hunter-Sherman deaths.
Representatives of the network and the show's producer, Dick Wolf Productions, say the same thing, repeatedly, in response to questions: all stories on Law & Order are fiction.
The show carries this standard disclaimer: "The preceding story was fictional. No actual person or event was depicted."
That is more than just boilerplate.
It is a legal argument, with important implications for NBC and Wolf.
Since 2004, the network and the show's creator have been fending off a lawsuit that claims there was just too much reality in one of the show's dramatisations.
New York lawyer Ravi Batra says he was libelled by a November 2003 episode called "Floater" that revolved around a murder and judicial-bribery scandal.
Batra claims that one of the villains of the story - a prominent, bald, Indian-American lawyer named Ravi Patel - was a barely camouflaged version of himself.
Batra is an Indian-American lawyer prominent in New York City legal circles.
He is also bald.
Batra's name was in the New York press several months before the "Floater" episode aired; he was linked to a bribery scandal in Brooklyn involving another lawyer and a judge.
Batra was never charged in the case, which, unlike the TV programme, did not include an act of violence.
With a little spicing up, Batra's lawsuit against Law & Order might itself make a compelling episode in the series.
The suit, seeking $US15 million ($NZ26.7 million) in damages, turns on the legal principle of "libel in fiction", the idea that a fictionalised depiction can damage a real person's reputation.
Batra said he was harmed because the name, ethnicity and appearance of the character were so similar to his.
His suit noted that there were only six lawyers named Ravi in the New York area.
Although libel-in-fiction claims rarely succeed, a New York State Supreme Court judge shot down a defence motion last year to dismiss Batra's suit, clearing it for trial.
There was "a reasonable likelihood that the ordinary viewer, unacquainted with Batra personally, could understand Patel's corruption to be the truth about Batra," Justice Marilyn Shafer wrote.
The matter is still awaiting trial.
"They hired a look-alike for me, and that's their killer," says Batra in an interview.
"If they hired Bob Dole to play the character, no problem. But to get someone who looks like you, acts like you and has a name like you, well, excuse me . . .
"Their defence is worthless, because their claim to fame is that they are a reality-based show. How could they not know it was me?"
Rob Hunter, meanwhile, struggles to find some silver lining in the episode that was so chillingly close to his family's tragedy.
Maybe, he says, the reflected attention of the TV show could renew interest in the real crime.
Maybe it might shake loose a reluctant witness or put more pressure on investigators.
Maybe.
As is, the trail seems to have gone cold, despite the offer of a $US75,000 reward and continuing publicity on an Omaha website.
"My frustration comes back to the fact that the case is unresolved," Hunter says.
The producers could have put something at the end of the show, he says, "something helpful, to tell people about the real [crime] and where to contribute information."
Instead, he says, "it just looks like they want to make money off of this."
I understand some of this story doesnt relate to the case under discussion but I left it in for continuity.
