Trophy (Season 12, Episode 7)
Premise: A rape-murder suspect’s box of keepsakes points to attacks from 1970, leading Benson to a woman who learns, as Benson once did, that she was conceived in a rape.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 12, Episode 7
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Gillian Hardwicke (Melissa Sagemiller), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Maria Bello as Vivian Arliss, R. Lee Ermey as Walter Burlock, Joseph Sikora as Jason Gambel, Alex Kingston as Miranda Pond, Charlie Tahan as Calvin Arliss
- Director
- Donna Deitch
- Writers
- Ken Storer
Summary
“Trophy” opens at an industrial laundry, where workers find a young woman’s body in a load of hospital linens. Warner finds she was raped, cut repeatedly and bled out from a slashed throat. She is Samantha Millerton, 23, an environmental artist who had been raiding oil executive Nicholas Turner’s trash for a protest effigy. Street video shows a man in an old Volvo snatching her outside Turner’s company offices and later leaving her in a laundry cart at Mercy Hospital. The car belongs to a dead man whose son, paroled embezzler Jason Gambel, is caught after shots are fired at the detectives from his house. His box of keepsakes holds Samantha’s bracelet and items from other women.
Cragen orders Benson and Stabler to see Huang for evaluations after the shooting. Gambel’s basement holds a padlocked torture room, but an engagement ring in the box belonged to Joan Arliss, raped near Barnard in February 1970, and the other items match attacks from about 40 years ago, before Gambel was born. His lawyer, Miranda Pond, offers his story for immunity, and Hardwicke refuses. Benson visits Joan, who has advanced Alzheimer’s, and her daughter Vivian, a tattooed recovering addict with a son, Calvin, realizes she was born nine months after the attack. Benson tells Vivian her own mother was raped, then comes to believe they may share a father and, over Huang’s doubts, tests Vivian’s DNA. The real link is Walter Burlock, Gambel’s cellmate for five years, freed two weeks earlier, and the detectives find him at a strip club running up a tab on Gambel’s credit card.
Gambel then blames Burlock for Samantha’s rape and murder and for the shots, and Pond produces records showing Burlock raped and beat him for years in prison before moving into his house after release. Because Burlock lived there, Hardwicke rules the search needed a warrant and lets him go. Vivian arrives at the squad room high, says her mother died the night before and wants help finding her father. Burlock, on his way out, taunts her, and Benson confirms he raped Joan, adding that the DNA shows she and Vivian are not sisters. Vivian tells her to go to hell.
Spoiler, the ending: Watching Gambel’s house, the detectives see him come home and find Burlock dead, his skull smashed with a cast-iron pan. The blood has been drying for hours, and suspicion turns to Vivian. Her friend Sarah Hoyt says she does not know where Vivian has gone. Then Calvin turns up alone at the precinct with an envelope from his mother: a notarized transfer making Benson his legal guardian. Vivian has vanished, and the killing is left unsolved.
Why it stands out
- Maria Bello makes the first of two appearances as Vivian Arliss, whose story continues in the season’s tenth episode, “Rescue”; Charlie Tahan plays her son, Calvin.
- R. Lee Ermey plays Walter Burlock, and Alex Kingston plays defense attorney Miranda Pond.
- Benson’s suspicion that she and Vivian share a father draws on her own history as the child of a rape; her father is named in the episode as Joe Hollister.