What happened to Jenny Shepard in NCIS? (Why did Lauren Holly leave the series?)

During NCIS Season 3, two new female characters were brought into the series. Lauren Holly’s Direct Jenny Shepard was one of them, and it was soon clear that she had history with Gibbs.

Cote de Pablo was the other new addition to the series. She would remain on the series until Season 11, but Holly would leave the series after just three seasons. What happened to the character, and why did Holly leave the show so quickly?

Why Lauren Holly left NCIS

It turns out that the decision to leave was on Holly’s end. She was feeling restless in her role as Director Jenny Shepard, and she wanted to do something new. She’d just returned to acting work and now she was ready to go at it every way she could.

It was just up to the show in how that exit would happen. Holly wasn’t all that upset about the decision to permanently write the character out of the series.

What happened to Jenny Shepard in NCIS?

Jenny was written out of the series in the final episode of NCIS Season 5. It was done in a shocking way, similar to the way Sasha Alexander’s Caitlin Todd was written out. There was no coming back from this.

The writers opted to kill Jenny off. She was injured in a gunfight at an abandoned diner. That shootout spanned from Jenny’s need to get revenge for the death of her father. During the fourth season, we watched as Jenny pursued Rene, a man she blamed for her father’s death. During that pursuit, she was assigned to kill a Russian arm dealer’s fiancé, but she didn’t complete that.  That led to the shootout, which led to Jenny dying from her injuries.

And it turned out that even had Jenny survived, it wouldn’t have been for long. Jenny’s autopsy revealed a terminal illness. Jenny made sure her death was on her own terms, even though it was horrific and shocking for fans to watch.