Hilary Marsden

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Hilary Marsden is a fictional character on the TV drama Law & Order: Criminal Intent, portrayed by Dana Wheeler-Nicholson.

Marsden was born into a wealthy family, but became alienated from them during her stay in Hong Kong in 1985 and got engaged. Despite an expensive search for their daughter, the Marsdens were never able to relocate her.

The man Marsden described as her soulmate was Bernard Fremont, a charismatic, Charles Manson-like criminal svengali. The romance dissolved, due mostly to Fremont's infatuation with Nicole Wallace, another of his accomplices. Fremont and Wallace attempted to flee Thailand after robbing and killing eight men, but Marsden planted two of their victims' passports in their luggage. Fremont and Wallace were incarcerated.

Fremont served only eight years in prison (two fewer than Wallace) because Marsden used her wealth to buy his freedom. During Fremont's imprisonment, Marsden had many plastic surgery procedures to increase her own resemblance to her rival.

Fremont began operating out of New York City after learning of Wallace's periodic tangles with Detectives Robert Goren and Alexandra Eames there. Marsden began posing as a real estate agent in order to scout out wealthy tourists and their oppulant homes. She and other associates working for Fremont (some of them other lovers he had taken on) would then kill their prey with lethal doses of heroin and strip their homes bare. Around this time, Fremont took Marsden's still-wealthy sister as his newest "protegé," and grew to favor her, igniting in Marsden another fit of furious jealousy.

When Goren and Eames unraveled their scam, Marsden refused to inform on Fremont, even though it meant she would go to prison for murder. Goren tricked Fremont into believing that Marsden had turned on him, provoking an unintentional admission of guilt that led to his arrest. Marsden's sister bailed him out, but Wallace ambushed them (offscreen) as they left the courthouse, killing Fremont with a poisoned syringe before escaping.