Sharon Perleen (Melanie Smith) is the main villainess from the Matlock episode Dead Air.
She is an evil woman who murders her boyfriend Ray Wallace and another woman, after she believes that they are seeing each other behind her back. She is cold hearted and shown to be willing to resort to murdering innocent people in order to cover her tracks.
She and her boyfriend Ray are in bed early in the episode, when the neighbour’s car pulls in to the drive, with the lights of the car shining through the window of the two lovers. Sharon gets up and says she’ll go and get some wine. The neighbours are shown getting out of the car and gunshots are then heard from Ray’s bedroom. The neighbour runs over to the window to find the bloody corpse of Ray, with Sharon walking in just seconds later and screaming as she “discovers” the body in front of the witness. In reality, Sharon knew about the bright lights of the car shining in the window every time the neighbour came home, and used the situation to shoot Ray to death. She then feigned that she discovered the body when the neighbour ran to the window to see what the noise was all about. Off screen it is revealed that she also murdered the woman she suspected Ray to be seeing, by faking that she had taken an overdose and/or committed suicide.
After initially believing her to be a grieving girlfriend, some investigating leads Matlock and the female detective he’s working with, to suspect Sharon as the killer. She is called in to be interviewed, where it is revealed that her stepmother was shot to death when she was younger, and that her father overdosed and/or committed suicide afterwards. It is heavily implied that Sharon was responsible for this, although never confirmed. Once the interview is over, she gets up and gives a seductive wink through the two-way mirror to Matlock on the other side. Matlock tells the female detective that Sharon was toying with her and that this is all a big game to her.
Later in the episode Matlock visits Sharon’s house, where she greets him dressed in a bikini. The two go in to the garden where Sharon lies down on a sun chair and asks Matlock to rub lotion on her back and legs. Matlock talks to her about the murder as he rubs lotion on her and then stops while talking, Sharon tells him not to stop and to keep rubbing lotion on her. Matlock tells Sharon that he suspects her for the murder and explains how he thinks she did it, causing her to ask him to leave.
After some more investigating, Matlock and the detective set a trap for Sharon, firstly she is called to court to be interviewed by Matlock, where she makes all kinds of excuses for why her car was discovered in a place of interest. During this scene a homeless woman is brought in to the court as a potential witness, this woman was spotted near Ray’s house during the murder, and Sharon believes that she may have seen something that could be incriminating.
Court ends for that day, and the homeless woman’s interview as a witness will have to wait until tomorrow. But evil Sharon doesn’t want this to happen and follows the homeless woman out of court and through the streets in to an alley. There Sharon pulls out a knife and attempts to murder the homeless woman, only to discover it was the female detective in disguise, and that she had set a trap for Sharon. The two women have a short fight which involves Sharon ramming a shopping trolley into the detective and trying to stab her with the knife. Eventually other police arrive to the scene of the trap, and Sharon is quickly arrested and taken away.
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