Bored, She Hung Herself

A Young woman is found hanged. Was it suicide or Murder?

Plot summary at "Hawaii Five-O" Bored, She Hung Herself (TV Episode 1970) - Plot Summary - IMDb TEASER As the show opens, psychiatrist Warren Parker attempts unsuccessfully to dry off his daughter Wanda with a towel after she emerges from the ocean. Parker tells Wanda to come home with him: "I promise I won't interfere with your lifestyle ... within reason, that is." He says her boyfriend Don is going to destroy her, describing him as "a cesspool of bad habits." He finally grabs her, and she yells, "I am not one of your patients." He gives up trying to persuade her and leaves. Wanda goes into the house. Her boyfriend Don Miles is hanging from the neck, and when Wanda enters the room he extricates himself from the noose (with some difficulty) by grabbing on to the rope and pulling himself up. Don wonders how the discussion with her father went. She takes a pill and he kisses her on the shoulder. Don describes her father as "a productive pillar of the establishment." He lights incense and Wanda says, "So help me, if you start chanting, I'll kick you." Despite this, he chants, saying the Hare Krishna mantra. Wanda jumps up and screams at him, "I've had it ... the whole mystic bit, the chanting, the incense, the hanging from the ceiling, the stopping of your heartbeat ... it's sick, sick sick! I can't take it any more!" She slaps him several times; he eventually strikes her back and she falls on the floor. He tries to comfort her, but she moves away, so he leaves, gets on his motorcycle and rides off. Later, Hank Weatherly (Joel Berliner), the 13-year-old neighbor from next door comes to visit Don and Wanda. He enters the house and finds Wanda hanging from the neck, dead ACT ONE A Physicians Ambulance takes away Wanda's body as McGarrett drives up to the house. Inside he finds Lt. Grayson (Herman Wedemeyer). Grayson gives his opinion that it looks like suicide. McGarrett asks if they found anything of interest, and Grayson shows some drugs, described by McGarrett as "uppers, downers," "pot buds," and "secobarbital." Grayson says, "Wouldn't you think a girl whose father is one of the top head-shrinkers on the island..." Parker arrives and McGarrett tells him that Wanda's body was identified by the neighbors. Her father is distraught: "She was beautiful inside and out ... I loved her more than anything else in the world." McGarrett says that he thinks it was a suicide. Parker is convinced that Don had something to do with his daughter's death: "She had so much to give ... unless he had so twisted her, so destroyed her ... he couldn't get a job, he couldn't wear shoes, he couldn't cut his hair, but he could teach himself to hang ... he was teaching her to hang herself ... to kill herself ... he killed my daughter ... he murdered her." In the next scene, Kono finds Don's motorcycle (license number 14540) on the beach, and he arrests Don. In McGarrett's office, Don is apprised of his rights. Apparently Don had a "little trouble" with Kono. Don says that he spent all night on the beach, and heard on the radio that Wanda was dead. McGarrett tells Don that her father thinks that Don killed his daughter. Don says, "He's right." ACT TWO McGarrett records Don's voluntary statement. Don says that he "killed" Wanda because they argued, she "couldn't take the tension" and she killed herself after he left. Wanda had a volatile personality according to Don -- she was "up and down." McGarrett asks Don, "Was she on acid?" Don says he was trying to teach her the hanging technique and says "nobody would want to kill Wanda." McGarrett tells Kono to book Don for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. Danno and Chin Ho interview Don's next door neighbors, Charles and Paula Weatherly (Eugene McDunnah and Patricia Herman). The wife says she knew "that hippie" Don spelled trouble. She can't understand what Wanda saw in him. The wife says that Don and Wanda played music very loudly. Their young son Hank knew both Don and Wanda, and they were afraid the duo were going to turn their son into a "dope fiend. Hank is interviewed, and says "Wanda was getting bagged all the time ... Don didn't dig it, it was driving him up the wall." Don and Wanda argued -- she was always getting stoned, he was always chanting. "Don's a health freak -- he doesn't believe in dropping anything unless it's organic." Hank talked to Boswell, a writer friend of Don's described as a "way-out guy" who said that "acid can be a real bummer, but pot is groovy." The father is surprised by the extent of Hank's knowledge and tells Danno and Chin Ho that Hank is "just showing off." Hank says that he talked to Don about politics and Vietnam, and that Don was into karate. Despite this, Hank says Don didn't lose his temper, but would chant rather than resorting to violence. Hank says that he saw Don in the morning and also for a few minutes around 9:00 p.m. in the evening, going away from the house on his motorcycle. McGarrett visits "Doc," the coroner (Ted Thorpe), who says that Wanda was strangled and assaulted (presumably sexually). She was already dead when she was hung. Her time of death is estimated to be between 6 and 8 p.m. The coroner says that "she went down fighting," because there is some unidentified substance under her fingernails. The Five-O team visit Don in his jail cell, where he is again chanting. McGarrett tells Don he wants help to find out who murdered Wanda. Don tells the story that he related before, where he took off after the argument with Wanda and didn't come back until the next day after he heard about her death on the radio. But Danno points out that Hank saw Don near the house around 9:00 p.m. the night before. Don admits that he lied, he returned to the house and found Wanda there, and then panicked. He says, "I couldn't believe that she was dead." McGarrett asks what time this was, and Don says between 8:30 and 9 p.m. McGarrett visits Don's writer friend Wilson Boswell, who has a job working at the Waikiki Shell outdoor auditorium. Boswell, who describes himself as suffering from "elephantiasis of the imagination," says he saw a "streak of the savage" in Don and describes Wanda as a "wanton." Boswell says that Don visited him and left at exactly 8 p.m. McGarrett estimates it takes around half an hour to get from Boswell's place to Don's pad. McGarrett contacts Danno through Central Dispatch, telling Danno to release Don from custody. ACT THREE Parker visits McGarrett in his office, wondering why Don was released. McGarrett says because Don had a bona fide alibi. When McGarrett says the alibi is Boswell, Parker describes him as "that freak." Parker says Don has a motive, he has access and he has a history of violence. McGarrett says that he wants hard facts, which results in Parker threatening McGarrett. McGarrett visits the Weatherlys. The father says that he got out of his office after 8 p.m., and came home around 8:30-8:45. The evening of Wanda's death, his wife was playing bridge elsewhere with friends and Hank was staying at a neighbor's until later. The father seems confused about whether he picked up Hank to bring him home that night. He argues with his wife who is upset that Don is back living in the house next door. He says that "being different doesn't mean 'worse'." Parker visits Don who is chanting. Don is glad to see Parker, saying that he went to Parker's house after Wanda's death, but couldn't bring himself to ring the doorball. He wants Parker to know how much he loved Wanda. Parker suggests that Don returned to the house and killed Wanda but didn't mean to, which could get a plea of temporary insanity in court. Parker records much of Don's conversation with a small tape recorder, creating a scenario about what happened after he left Wanda the previous day, telling Don to "get it all out." Don is very confused, saying he doesn't remember what happened, while Parker says that Don killed her and strung her up in the noose. Back in McGarrett's office, Parker plays the tape he made with Don, but McGarrett denounces it as a "ridiculous confession" that "won't stand up in court." When Parker says he will take the confession to "someone who will listen with an open mind," McGarrett says you can't extract a confession with "a rubber hose." McGarrett makes Parker listen to the confession again, asking him if the information was "freely" and "eagerly volunteered." McGarrett finally tells Parker that the psychiatrist needed a "scapegoat" to make up for the fact that his daughter was sick and couldn't be reached. Parker is furious, saying he will have McGarrett's job. ACT FOUR Che Fong (Harry Endo) determines that the substance under Wanda's fingernails was black cashmere. At Weatherly's house, it turns out that Weatherly owns a black cashmere sweater. He says he has several of them and suggests that Don stole the sweater from him and then returned it after the "murder." Weatherly makes himself out to be a lady-killer, saying he could have the pick of any of the women in his office, and that "Wanda was a great-looking girl." McGarrett and Danno pick holes in Weatherly's alibi that he left work late and got home around 8:30. Five-O checked with the security guard at Weatherly's company and determined that he signed out around 6:15 p.m. Weatherly says that he decided to have a drink at a nearby bar and went back to work and the security guard was not there, but this contradicts what the security guard said. When McGarrett says that Weatherly got home around 6:30 p.m. and visited Wanda, Weatherly says that Wanda was making "a big play for me ... she made it clear that she was available." When asked why he killed Wanda, Weatherly says that he didn't mean to hurt her, but "she kept leading me on ... then she turned me down." As McGarrett tells Danno to contact HPD, Weatherly breaks down, sobbing. McGarrett meets Parker at Don's house, where Don is just about to hang himself. McGarrett tells Don that his neighbor confessed to the murder. Don says he was trying to get the courage to end it all, but now he says "I want to live ... isn't that wild?" McGarrett says, "Yeah ... I think it's wild," as Don runs out of the house and splashes in the ocean outside.