SVU Episode #13-4: Double Strand

Recap: Blond women along the east coast are being terrorized by the Atlantic Coast Rapist. In tonight’s episode, our SVU detectives seem to have caught him at last! The man’s DNA is a perfect match, the victims pick him out of a lineup, and the timeline of his job transfers perfectly correlate with the geography of the rapes. “Wish all my cases were all this easy,” the DA says. But something isn’t sitting right with our new detective, Nick. The suspect seems like a nice fella. Munch waxes nostalgic for the glory days when DNA didn’t get in the way of what your “gut” told you. Turns out, the rapist is actually the twin brother of the suspect. The suspect didn’t realize he had a twin because he was adopted. But the evil twin had learned it, and based his entire decades-long crime spree on pinning it on his brother. SVU is flummoxed – how can we prove the rapist is the evil twin and not the good twin? They bait a trap: conveniently blond new detective Amanda jogs through the park where the evil twin works. He chases her, holds a knife to her throat and tries to rape her in broad daylight. He is arrested, and Amanda then extracts a sobbing confession from him in the final scene.

Verdict: B-

What they got right: There really was an East Coast Rapist, who preyed on women in cities along (you guessed it), the east coast. His DNA was found at some rapes, but there was no match in CODIS, the national database of convicted felons. Police across several states launched a massive and laudably creative manhunt for him. They enlisted the help of the press and launched a website devoted just to him. The Washington Post ran a big article on his habits and MO. A civilian read the article, thought the guy sounded familiar, and tipped off the police. The police followed the suspect, picked up a cigarette butt he dropped, and DNA tested it. It was a match. That man is now in custody, charged with a series of rapes. No evil twin has been implicated in that case.

It’s also true that identical twins have the same DNA as each other, but different fingerprints. Whenever a prosecutor has a case based on DNA, she has to make sure her suspect doesn’t have a twin. (Conditioned this way, I shouted “He’s a twin!” sometime after the first commercial break, but that’s kind of obnoxious, and I vacillated about admitting my outburst here on the blog. But we’re all friends, so there you go.) There was a set of twin brothers in D.C. who got away with a series of small-time crimes for a period by constantly pointing to the other twin (creating reasonable doubt) or having their twin create an alibi for them. After a while, though, they got caught. If you’re considering a life of crime, it definitely helps to have a twin.

What they got wrong: There’s a serial rapist who likes blonds – okay, let’s send a blond running past him! He’ll have to try to rape her, right? This ploy is just plain ridiculous. But it comes up so often on SVU. Last season, there was a guy who had a fetish that compelled him to cut women’s hair. So SVU sent Olivia into a park, where she sat on a bench flipping her hair for a few minutes and – wham! – the Haircutting Horror popped up to snip off a lock. I’ve never heard of a trap like this being used. It wouldn’t be effective. Even the East Coast Rapist – the guy so horrific he got his own website – only struck once or twice a year, at the most. Real crime is way to random, sporadic, and unpredictable to be able to bait a trap like they do on SVU.

And DNA testing is way more effective than anyone’s “gut.” Munch might be nostalgic for the old days. But would you prefer the heartfelt opinion of a lovable but slightly crazy, conspiracy-theorist detective, or a nice solid DNA match? ‘Nuff said.