Original air date: January 9, 1999

Written by: Andrew Dettmann & Daniel Truly

Directed by: Scott Lautanen

Jarod teaches a graduate course in the psychology of the criminal mind in order to determine which of his students murdered the previous professor.

Jarod’s Discoveries:

Jarod’s Occupations: Criminal Psychology College Professor

Jarod’s Aliases: Jarod Gardner

Behind the scenes insights and the Creator’s Take

Official Synopsis

Jarod plays a game of cat and mouse with a group of student geniuses who may have pulled off the perfect murder.

Jarod telephones Miss Parker and asks her how well she knows her father.  Before hanging up, he tells her to check her mail.  Parker searches through a stack of envelopes and comes upon one of particular interest.  Inside is a copy of a letter from her father’s attorney, which indicates that Mr. Parker is making a change in his will.

Meanwhile, Jarod, having assumed the identity of a professor, addresses a classroom of students at the University of Hanover in Connecticut.  The class is a graduate course in the psychology of the criminal mind.  The students are part of the school’s Vanguard program, and all have brilliant minds.  Suddenly, armed Sweepers storm the room.  One of them opens fire, apparently killing Jarod.  It turns out, however, that Jarod recruited three students for the mock murder.  He then asks the class to describe the shooter.  The students disagree on the killer’s physical details.  But one student, a flirtatious young woman named Claire Dunning, describes the attacker in accurate detail.  Her two friends, Grady and Matthew, smile when Claire impresses the class with her astute observational skills.  Jarod tells the class that, with their help, he intends to solve the murder of their last professor, Alden Clark, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.  Police believe Clark emptied his bank account and ran off with his mistress.  The professor’s book, The Perfect Murder, was published just prior to his disappearance.

Jarod approaches Alden’s widow, Deborah Clark.  She refuses to accept the conclusion reached by police regarding her husband’s disappearance.  At the time, she was pregnant with their son, and he wanted the baby more than anything else in the world.  Later, Detective Rusk tells Jarod that police found emails from Alden’s mistress on his computer.

Jarod turns to his class for ideas about how to commit the perfect murder.  It is eventually decided that staging a car crash—and making it look accidental—would be almost undetectable.  One of the students states that Dr. Clark drove up to his cabin in the mountains every Friday.  But later, Deborah confirms that her husband headed home from work on the day he disappeared, as he had just learned of her pregnancy.  Jarod retraces Clark’s route…and eventually discovers his overturned truck at the bottom of a gorge.  Police find plane tickets inside the wreck: one for Clark, and another for a woman named Karen Sweet, which they believe is the name of his mistress.

Meanwhile, back at the Center, Miss Parker confronts her father about his health.  It turns out that Mr. Parker isn’t dying…but is intending to marry his new girlfriend.

Jarod eventually suspects that Claire, Matthew and Grady are responsible for their professor’s demise.  He once again turns to the class for answers.  But this time, he manipulates them.  Jarod presents a scenario in which Alden was drugged with di-methyl-penol, a potent sedative.  He then proposes a role playing game, in which Claire is the killer and Grady and Matthew are her two accomplices.

In the classroom, Jarod asks the students to think of reasons why Alden was killed.  He proposes that the killers operated with one motive in mind: arrogance.  But he warns that accomplices can be unpredictable, and eventually lead to the killer’s downfall.  Jarod then reveals that photographs of Alden and his “mistress,” which were discovered inside his glove box, are fakes.  As a result, police have labeled the investigation a homicide.

Claire messengers a yellow note pad to police.  But Jarod intercepts the evidence before it falls into detectives’ hands.  The notepad contains a list, composed in Matthew’s handwriting, of step-by-step instructions on how Alden was murdered.  Jarod confronts Matthew with the list.  He insists that Grady and Claire pulled off the crime, which began as a drunken game.  But Claire and Grady acted out the fantasy.  A short time later, word of Matthew’s suicide spreads through school.

Jarod drugs Claire and Grady.  When they awaken, Claire finds herself standing on a chair, a noose around her neck; Grady is tied to a chair nearby.  Jarod informs the pair that Matthew is still very much alive.  Jarod attempts to extract a confession, but Claire maintains he has no way of proving anything.  Jarod uses a gun to blow out one of legs on Claire’s chair.  She wobbles, but manages to keep her balance and not hang herself.  Eventually Grady cracks, and confesses to his participation in the murder.  Grady claims Claire wanted to kill Alden when he refused to sleep with her.  Jarod kicks away Claire’s chair.  She drops and jerks violently, but the rope has been rigged a certain way, and she is unharmed.  Jarod then berates Claire, scoffing at her so-called genius intellect.

Back at the Centre, Miss Parker discovers that her father’s new bride is none other than Brigitte.