Nicole Wallace

Nicole Wallace is a fictional character on the TV drama ', portrayed by Olivia D'Abo. She has appeared in four episodes of the show as main character Detective Robert Goren's archnemesis.

Related Topics:
Fictional character - Olivia D'Abo - Robert Goren

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A devious, psychopathic con artist and thief, Wallace murders people who get in her way without the slightest bit of remorse. She is also an expert manipulator who finds out every painful detail of a person's life and uses it to control or destroy them.

Related Topics:
Psychopath - Con artist - Murder - Remorse - Manipulator

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Wallace's keen eye for detecting and exploiting weakness is borne from her own deeply dysfunctional childhood. She was molested by her father, a trauma she responded to by resenting her mother as a rival for his affection. She developed a lifelong inability to see other people as anything more than objects to be used for her own ends and discarded the moment they outlive their usefulness or become a threat to her happiness.

Related Topics:
Dysfunction - Molested - Trauma

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Wallace first crossed paths with Goren in 2002 while he was investigating the murder of a university professor. Wallace, then using the alias "Elizabeth Hitchens," proved herself a formidable adversary, at first shifting suspicion onto a colleague who was also her lover. Goren eventually came to suspect her, but she threw him off by confronting him about his own troubled childhood, specifically his schizophrenic mother and his father, who abandoned the family. She was arrested but released during her interrogation after the university's lawyer secured her release on a writ of Habeas Corpus. Goren and Eames later secured a warrant for her arrest but she'd emptied her apartment and disappeared.

Related Topics:
2002 - Schizophrenic

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She returned to plague Goren a year later as the brains behind a diamond smuggling ring, using a young Asian woman she had taken legal custody of to take the fall. She approached Goren and asked for a truce. Goren was deeply shaken by her reappearance, but this time he did his research and discovered not only that she had been abused, but that she had murdered her own child in her native Australia. Goren confronted her with her past during an interrogation session; her cool, detached demeanor finally shaken, she vehemently denied the charges. Infuriated, she decided to destroy him once and for all to prevent him from interfering with her new life with her accomplice, who was also her lover. (Wallace is not so much bisexual as she is sexually ambiguous, using sex and professions of love solely as mechanisms of control.)

Related Topics:
Diamond - Smuggling - Asia - Custody - Australia - Interrogation - Bisexual

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Goren and his partner, Alexandra Eames, finally found the evidence necessary to convict Wallace of the diamond scam, and Goren attempted to get to her through her accomplice/lover, warning her of Wallace's compulsion to use and destroy anyone who gets close to her. Her lover arranged to meet her at a certain pier, wearing a wire. Before police could intervene, Wallace found the wire, crushed her lover's trachea, and apparently fell out of a window into the river below. A quart of Wallace's blood was left behind, and the medical examiner said she couldn't survive in the water. Goren, however, had his doubts.

Related Topics:
Alexandra Eames - Evidence - Compulsion

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Wallace eventually resurfaced, having murdered another rich husband with a biological toxin. The psychological battle with Goren was even more intense this time, with Wallace setting up a man who had abandoned his family to manipulate Goren's resentment of his father, and belittling Eames for carrying, and then giving up, her sister's baby. Goren finally apprehended her, however, by tricking her into admitting she had used the toxin on her husband.

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She was paroled, but found herself on Goren's radar yet again when the wife of a man she was dating was murdered, along with the man's brother. Goren discovered that the daughter of Wallace's lover would someday inherit millions from a trust set up under a lawsuit, so he theorized that she was going to kill the child by infecting her with toxic doses of estrogen (to induce cancer) that her lover, a medical examiner, would have access to. Goren confronted Wallace, but she angrily insisted that she was merely trying to get her life back together with the family she had always wanted. Upon further investigation, however, Goren realized that in fact her lover was the one trying to kill the child. Goren tried one last time to reach his old nemesis, reasoning with her that she could never completely control her homicidal compulsions, making her a danger to anyone who trusted her. Wallace incriminated her lover in killing his wife and trying to kill his daughter, while tacitly admitting that she had indeed murdered the man's brother, but refused to accept that she could not be a good mother. After her lover was arrested, she kidnapped the child and fled the state, but had an unprecedented attack of conscience and let her go. She left a message on Goren's answering machine cursing him for "taking away" her last chance at a real life, and disappeared.

Related Topics:
Parole - Trust - Lawsuit - Estrogen - Cancer - Homicidal - Kidnap - Conscience - Answering machine

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