Monk Wiki
Advertisement

Sarah McNally was an incidental character in "Mr. Monk and the Wrong Man".

Biography[]

Sarah was a resident of Anderson and a neighbor to John and Valerie Davis, a married pair of jewelers. In 1993, while on the phone with a friend, Sarah was alerted by Valerie's screaming and watching through a window, she saw a man, later identified as Max Barton, casually stroll away from their house. She then went to the Davis residence and discovered through the open door that the couple had fallen victims to a brutal day-time home invasion, during which the couple was tortured and murdered, while their wall safe was cracked open and empty. Sarah immediately ran for the street and called out for help. Through an investigation headed by Detective Adrian Monk of the San Francisco Police Department, aided by Sarah's testimony, Max was charged and sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison without parole.

14 years later, in 2007, DNA retrieved from the crime scene was found to have not belonged to either the Davis family nor Max Barton. Since the case mainly relied on circumstantial evidence and witness testimony, it was concluded that there had been a miscarriage of justice, lead to Max being cleared of murder. Adrian Monk, who had by this point left the service, did everything in his power to rectify his apparent mistake and helped Max in every way possible, even as the ex-con barely held back his continued disdain for Monk.

Sarah, however, remained convinced of what she saw that day and having heard of Max's release, she spied on him, and inadvertantly on Monk, for the next few days. Eventually, she confronted Monk after he had tracked down Max's ex-wife Cheryl at her second wedding and convinced her to take Max back. Although she was initially shrugged off, Sarah proved her reliability as a witness by showing that she, much like Monk, possessed photgraphic memory by recalling several specific details from the murder investigation, from Monk measuring the distance from her house and the Davises' to ensure that she was within distance, to the name and badge number of the officer who interviewed her, down to the way Max non-chalantly left the crime scene with his hands in his pockets. Through this last detail, Monk remembers that the safe at the Davis house was unlocked with a chemical spray, which they were unable to find at the scene, meaning that if Max didn't have it with him when leaving, another person must have taken it. Due to the foreign DNA, that he had worked with an accomplice who opened the safe, while he was indeed the one who killed John and Valerie. It is later shown that the DNA was a match for security guard Paulie Flores, who was found dead shortly after Max's release, hanged with a belt. Monk and company have to crash a second wedding to uncover Max's guilt, but are able to prove that Paulie was in fact hung with Max's only belt.

Advertisement