Wanderlust (Season 1, Episode 5)
Premise: A travel writer is found dead in the room he rents from a lonely landlady, and suspicion moves between her, her secretive boyfriend and her teenage daughter.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 5
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Monique Jeffries (Michelle Hurd), Det. Brian Cassidy (Dean Winters), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek)
- Guest stars
- Lynn Collins as Virginia Hayes, Patricia Richardson as Annabel Hayes, John Dossett as Tom Dayton, Bruce Barney as Richard Schiller, Henry Strozier as Jon Freeman
- Director
- David Jones
- Writers
- Story: Wendy West & John Chambers; Written by: Wendy West
Summary
“Wanderlust” opens in the house of Annabel Hayes, who has found her longtime tenant, travel writer Richard Schiller, 42, naked and dead in his room, his mouth taped shut and a pair of women’s lacy underwear lodged in his throat. There is no sign of a break-in. Schiller’s editor, Jon Freeman, and his ex-wife describe a decent man who could never stop traveling. Hayes, a receptionist at a publishing house, says her teenage daughter, Virginia, did not come home that night.
Police pick Virginia up for shoplifting at a train-station newsstand, where she claims she went swimming and then rode the wrong trains for hours. She calls her mother a drinker who chased Schiller without success, and identifies the underwear as her mother’s. A former tenant confirms that Hayes would not leave him alone. Hayes admits she once wanted Schiller, but says she now has a boyfriend, department-store clerk Tom Dayton, who argued with her about Schiller that evening.
The real Thomas Dayton died in 1987. The boyfriend is his older brother, Scott, who uses Thomas’s Social Security number and was convicted in Seattle in 1990 on two counts of child molestation. Dayton insists he never touched Virginia and claims Schiller was the one drawn to her, and Stabler’s questioning turns heated. Virginia then tells the detectives that Dayton abused her at night, that Schiller once threw him out of her room, and that she found Schiller dead after a swim. She admits she was wearing her mother’s underwear that day.
Benson doubts her, since Virginia cannot describe how the body lay. The medical examiner reports that Schiller had sex shortly before he died and that the traces on him match the underwear; Dayton never touched her. After a hostile interview, Virginia is hospitalized following a suicide attempt, and her mother threatens to sue. As Stabler and Benson argue, Benson says she was almost 17 when she fell in love with a man about the age she is now.
Virginia finally tells them that she and Schiller had been sleeping together since July. When she learned he was leaving for Romania without her, she pressed her knee against his throat until he went still, then put the underwear in his mouth and left.
Spoiler, the ending: Virginia is set to be arraigned on a second-degree manslaughter charge. Stabler, who recently watched Maureen leave for homecoming with a football player, admits he saw Virginia only as a victim, the way he sees his own daughter, and is told that feelings come with the job.
Why it stands out
- Patricia Richardson, who played Jill Taylor on the ABC sitcom Home Improvement from 1991 to 1999, guest stars as the landlady, Annabel Hayes.
- Benson reveals a piece of her past: she was almost 17 when she fell for a much older man.