Sugar (Season 11, Episode 2)
Premise: The murder of a young woman found in a suitcase draws SVU into the world of paid “sugar” dating and the family of the website’s owner.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 11, Episode 2
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), Exec. ADA Sonya Paxton (Christine Lahti)
- Guest stars
- Eric McCormack as Vance Shepard, Melissa Farman as Chantel Shepard, Leann Hunley as Joyce Shepard, Robert Klein as Dwight Stannich, Matt Burns as Owen Cassidy
- Director
- Peter Leto
- Writers
- Daniel Truly
Summary
“Sugar” begins when two squabbling geocachers, Rusty and Ed, find a young woman’s naked body stuffed in a suitcase in a train tunnel. A cache they picked up leads to the man who hid it, a discount-store worker on Staten Island who calls himself the Master Baiter; an outtake of his promotional video shows the suitcase being tossed from a Florida-bound train. Ticket records identify the victim as Emily Keefe, 20, of Stamford, booked in a sleeper to Tampa on a train that left 45 minutes late. Her stepmother names her boyfriend, Owen Cassidy, a former Wall Street worker living on a sailboat. Fin finds a dozen kilos of cocaine aboard, but Owen was sailing back from Tampa, and he says Emily left him months ago.
Emily’s apartment, full of Tiffany boxes, leads to TastySugar.com, a site pairing young women with wealthy men. Its owner, Vance Shepard, refuses to share records without a warrant, and Emily’s profile disappears. A friend from the site, meeting a detective posing as a client, says Emily fell for Shepard. He admits the affair, claims he ended it that afternoon to test her love, and turns out to have skipped his 17-year-old daughter Chantel’s soccer game; his ex-wife, Joyce, calls him childish and cruel. His lawyer, Dwight Stannich, produces building video of Emily leaving alive at 3:47 p.m. and Shepard staying in for 90 more minutes. Paxton, after arguing with Benson over whether such arrangements are prostitution, rattles his assistant, Lysette, who returns with a bloody shirt and says he showed up for dinner late and shaken.
Shepard is arrested and starts confessing until Paxton halts the interview and calls his lawyer, and she and Stabler trade insults. At arraignment Shepard tries to plead guilty, Stannich enters a not-guilty plea and plans an extreme emotional disturbance defense, and bail is set at $1 million. Combing Grand Central footage, the detectives see that the young woman boarding as Emily is not Emily. Chantel and her father then describe what happened: Chantel strangled Emily when she let herself into Shepard’s home, and he stripped the body, packed the suitcase and sent Chantel, dressed in Emily’s clothes, onto the train so suspicion would fall on Emily’s old boyfriend. Once the delayed train finally moved, Chantel shoved the suitcase out the window. Shepard also had Lysette hand over the shirt.
Spoiler, the ending: Shepard pleads with the detectives to let him take the blame, saying any parent would do the same, and asks to see Chantel one last time. She apologizes, then attacks him, telling him he will never break another promise to her, as someone calls for an ambulance. His condition is not shown.
Why it stands out
- Eric McCormack guest stars as Vance Shepard, the chief executive behind a “sugar daddy” dating site.
- The case turns on geocaching, the GPS treasure-hunting hobby, and the squad recovers Emily’s deleted dating profile through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.