What’s more dangerous: cheating on your husband or giving a sandwich to a homeless guy? SVU says: the sandwich.
Recap:
A pretty blond parties at a throbbing nightclub and grinds between a man and a woman with a suspiciously large Adam’s apple. Her battered body is found by a jogger the next day; she’s lying in a rowboat bobbing on the river behind the mayor’s mansion. The victim is in a coma, and has no ID.
First interview: the too-nervous jogger, still clutching her jogging stroller. “You were far from home. Were you going to meet your lover – with your baby?” Amanda asks, in a tone conveying that this would be pretty despicable, even by SVU standards.
But it turns out the jogger was going to buy Adderall from the two teens who were rifling through the victim’s pockets. The pimply teens are considered, then quickly dismissed as the rapists, but not before they turn over a hotel key card they found in the victim’s pockets.
The Medical Examiner makes a special guest appearance to declare: (1) the victim has scars from a hernia operation done by a surgeon who wasn’t American, (2) DNA on the victim’s body is from three different men, and (3) it would be more convenient if the victim were dead, because then we could better estimate when she’d been assaulted.
(Yikes. Many ME’s have a dark perspective, but, wow, Dr. Warner, that was cold.)
Olivia and Nick rush to the victim’s hotel and (without a warrant or subpoena) demand that the manager let them into the guest room, guest safe, wi-fi records, surveillance video and his personal office. He cowers and complies. The detectives find all the trappings of a What-Happens-In-Vegas-Stays-In-Vegas-style weekend: fishnet stockings, leather and lace lingerie, and lots of cash. They also find the woman’s passport, and are soon Skyping with her shocked but impeccably polite Canadian family.
Turns out, the victim is a music blogger married to a pleasant TV host a couple decades older than her. The sad, sweet husband flies in from Canada, and Nick has to break the news that the guy’s wife was probably in NY to cheat on him. The husband nods with resignation. “This trip was an adventure for Ariel,” he says. “She had to give up a lot of her dreams when we started a family.”
Wow, that’s an understanding husband. Did you guess he was the killer? (I did.)
But our detectives soon reconstruct Ariel’s NY adventure and find many feistier suspects. First, a meek public school principal who says Ariel asked him about moving her kids to NY. Second, a scruffy sound guy who hung out with Ariel all weekend but claims he would never cheat on his girlfriend. Third, a hunky musician named Santiago, who’s hemming and hawing to Ice-T when a sexy brunette sashays into his apartment. Amanda yanks off the brunette’s wig, revealing the meek (male) school principal beneath!
You see, the cross-dressing principal and his cousin, Santiago, enjoy threesomes, and had been hoping to enlist Ariel in one on the night she was killed. She freaked out when she detected a little extra something under the pretty principal’s skirt.
But the killer wasn’t any of these guys. In fact, Ariel didn’t cheat on her husband at all. After she had an innocent dinner with the sound guy, she offered a homeless man her leftover sandwich. The random homeless guy followed her into a park, assaulted her, and set her body adrift in the rowboat.
The moral of the story veers swiftly from: “Don’t cheat on your husband, or he just might kill you,” to: “Don’t feed homeless people.”
In a dramatic final scene, Ariel dies. Luckily, the detectives find a cell-phone video she made (moments before her assault), in which she declares her eternal love for her husband. “And, kids,” she says, in a shameless grab at your tears, “I realized that having you is the greatest adventure I ever want to have.”
Verdict: B-
What they got right:
Special victims detectives often learn the deepest, darkest secrets people keep. And these officers are often the bearers of bad news, when they have to share these secrets with the victim or perp’s relatives and loved ones. The relatives are often devastated, as the husband was tonight. The scenes between Nick and the husband accurately portrayed how hard these conversations can be, and demonstrated a gentle, competent, and sensitive way of handling this.
There was some good police work tonight, as the detectives pulled surveillance video, got DNA tested, and obtained cell phone records – all methods that would be used in real life much as they were used on tonight’s show (albeit at a much slower speed).
Perhaps the writers based this episode partly on this real-life story of political intrigue, sexuality, and riverbed murder. Mississippi’s first openly gay mayoral candidate’s body was found floating in a river this February; another man was charged with his homicide.
What they got wrong:
Amanda was working a week after she got shot?! Most cops would be able to milk that for at least a few months of paid leave.
What was the Medical Examiner doing examining the living, breathing victim? The ME is in charge of examining corpses. A live rape victim is examined by a sexual assault nurse examiner. SANE nurses are specially trained in sensitively handling victims of this most intimate crime. (And they don’t go making cracks about how it would be easier if the victim was dead.)
There is no real-life ME who can say whether a hernia operation was done by a Canadian versus American doctor. I kept waiting for Dr. Warner to say, “This was done by a red-haired, left-handed, sixty-two-year-old midget surgeon located somewhere in the Mongolian desert.” This is the sort of magical science that only exists on TV.
Why was Olivia so mean and cranky with the hotel manager? She bullied and threatened him into letting her into the guest room and his office. Just bring a warrant. It would be a piece of cake to get – and would guard against later arguments that Olivia violated the Fourth Amendment. Sure, Ariel isn’t going to move to suppress any evidence found in that room. But what if the killer had checked into the room with her? He would have a privacy right in that room, and thus standing move to have any evidence suppressed. The best practice in the situation is to stop yelling at the poor manager and just get a warrant.
What do you think, SVU fans? Can Dr. Warner determine the body-mass index of a surgeon based on the scar he leaves? Is she the one who killed Ariel? And what’s really more dangerous: charity or infidelity? Leave your comments!
See you next week for the season finale.
Stefi says
16 May, 2013 at 11:00 amI thought this was a much better episode than last week, and like you I suspect the (seemingly) cuckold husband. I hoped it would because I wanted to know whether he would have been charged with murder 1, murder 2 (and what tariff 15, 20 or 25), voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter, and the reasoning behind it.
In Italy, he would be looking at very little jail time. In fact, award winning Italian journalist Marco Travaglio pointed out that it would be technically possible for a man to murder a cheating wife without serving a day in jail. And in in 2007 Renato Di Felice was sentenced to social service in Palermo for murdering his wife because his children testified their mother was disrespectful. He only served two days in jail awaiting trial. However, a rape-homicide now carries a mandatory life sentence in Italy.
Stefi says
16 May, 2013 at 12:42 pmAlthough, I liked the episode there were parts that annoyed me. The medical examiner really annoyed me. The use of stainless steel sutures in a hernia operation (tension repair) is probably less common in Canada than the USA because Canada has had a universal heath care system for some time. And the dental work in third world countries has varying degrees of standards, much like the USA. There are plenty of Americans with poor or no dental work because they can’t afford good dental work. But my main issue was the vaginal examination: neither the victim nor her family consented to a vaginal examination, and they didn’t have a court order. I know she predicted she was going to die but that doesn’t give her the right to treat her like a corpse.
Also, what is with the assumption that bite marks on the breast and vaginal bruising indicate sexual assault? A little bit of tit-biting during sex is hardly uncommon and neither is vaginal bruising The average anterior and posterior vaginal walls in a post-pubescent girl are 25 mm and 90 mm, whereas the average penis of a post-pubescent male is 160 mm in length and 130 mm diameter, but there are guys with 230 mm length and 165 mm diameter. Some good hard sex or masturbation with a dildo can easily cause vaginal bruising. At best that’s just suggestive of recent intercourse.
But what annoyed me the most was the abduction and interrogations of Jasper and Todd. I say abduction because although Amanda Rollins implied jasper was under arrest she didn’t tell him what he was under arrest for or read him his Miranda rights, and Fin Tutuola just stuck a gun in Todd’s face and assaulted him. Todd was arrested half way through his interrogation by Amanda Rollins again she didn’t tell him the charge or read him his rights. Then they interrogate the pair without lawyers presents and Rollins and Tutuola stand up and sit on the desk when asking Todd questions. I don’t know what the rules are in NY but that is clearly duress. It would make a welcome change to see suspect lawyered up and giving no comment interviews.
James Pollock says
16 May, 2013 at 10:04 pmI don’t think you understand how Miranda warnings work.
Police don’t have to read you a Miranda warning when they arrest you, and failure to read a Miranda warning doesn’t invalidate an arrest. These are common misunderstandings amongst Americans caused by watching too many police shows on TV, because TV cops were seen reading Miranda cards to people they’d just arrested for four decades (nowadays, it’s often skipped because it’s a waste of screen time).
Miranda has nothing to do with arrest at all. Miranda is about interrogation while in custody. The police have to read you a Miranda warning before they can interrogate you, if they want to use the information you give against you. They don’t need to read you a Miranda warning if they aren’t going to interrogate you, and they don’t need to give you a Miranda warning if they’re only trying to obtain information that can be used against other people.
Stefi says
17 May, 2013 at 12:42 amJames, I’m aware of that but at no point were either Jasper or Todd read their rights and they were both questioned as suspects, nor were they informed why they were under arrest, and Todd wasn’t even arrested until the interrogation. During the interrogation these two were the prime suspects in a rape and a potential homicide, so they should have been proceeding on the basis that any information obtained would be used against the pair at trial. Also, whilst the cops have no obligation to inform suspects of their rights until they question them, it is imperative that do so as soon as practically possible after the arrest because they may say something incriminating. I would expect detectives in SVU to be particularly aware that having evidence thrown out or a case collapsing due to abuse of process will deny the victim justice.
James Pollock says
17 May, 2013 at 4:00 pmAmerican TV shows rarely show Miranda warnings any more… we just assume they were read off-camera.
Toko Bali says
16 May, 2013 at 1:16 pmXTC or MDMA makes you a lot of things, but it most definitely won’t make you hungry, so the whole “grab-a-bite-with-the-sound-engineer-because-she-was-hungry” story, although not strictly impossible, is very unlikely. Also, would you really make a video for your husband and kids when you’re rolling on some good stuff?
Carl N. Brown says
16 May, 2013 at 7:52 pmRandom murder of an innocent victim by a stranger. It happens. Usually people who are murdered are in some sort of mutual combative relationship, or involved in criminal behavior, usually involving drugs. (In a recent year 91% of murder victims in Baltimore had police records themselves.) But random murder of an innocent victim by a stranger does happen. Hope it doesn’t become a cliche on SVU (half-dozen red herring suspect them bam! random starnger) like every other perpetartor or instigator being a debutante. Women are 1 out of 7 violent offenders but it seems the ratio is higher on L&O:SVU.
Stefi says
17 May, 2013 at 1:07 pmThe FBI records 15 rape-murders and 9 sexual-assault murders in 2011, of which 8 of those murders were carried out by acquaintances, 6 by unknown individuals, 5 by strangers, 2 by boyfriends, 2 by blood relatives, and 1 by a neighbour. Interestingly no husbands are recorded as having murdered their wives following a rape or sexual assault. When we consider that the victim might not have known the neighbour and how broad the definition of acquaintance it’s more likely that she would be murdered by a stranger or someone she barely knew.
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