Hunting Ground (Season 13, Episode 15)
Premise: The disappearance of a 16-year-old escort leads SVU to a beach full of bodies and a game keeper who hunts women for sport, while Benson and Haden begin dating.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 15
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), Exec. ADA David Haden (Harry Connick Jr.), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Fred Arsenault as Graham Winger, Emily Kinney as Haley Cole, Reyna de Courcy as Lizzie Zane, Alison Bartlett as Dawn Cole, Josh Mostel as Mr. Roth
- Ripped from the headlines
- Inspired by the Long Island serial killings, in which the remains of ten victims, several of them sex workers, were found near Gilgo Beach in 2010 and 2011, and by Robert Hansen, who abducted and killed women around Anchorage, Alaska, from 1971 to 1983, hunting many of them in the wilderness.
- Director
- Jonathan Kaplan
- Writers
- Story: Warren Leight; Teleplay: David Matthews; Story & teleplay: John P. Roche
Summary
“Hunting Ground” opens with Benson and Haden on a date, talking over whether to tell their bosses they are seeing each other, while a man calling himself Brewster books 16-year-old escort Haley Cole for a dinner date. Haley, a young single mother, tells her own mother she has a catering job. After dinner she gets into Brewster’s car, where his dog, Orion, waits, and is next heard begging for her life. Two days later her mother gets a recorded voicemail, played from a pay phone in Grand Central, in which Haley calls herself a prostitute; her mother is sure she was forced to say it.
Haley’s agency and a second one each lost a woman after a cash-paid date with Brewster, who booked by disposable phone; the second, Roxie, disappeared on Christmas Eve. Both advertised in the back pages of The Downtown Voice, whose Mr. Roth refuses to hand over records to Munch and Benson. Haden wants to go after the paper but tells Benson they cannot trade favors if the relationship is to last. An escort who fled Brewster, Miranda Galton, recalls glasses, a spotted dog, shovels in his gray Jeep and an oval “MB” sticker. Haley’s mother receives a second message. A Brooklyn patrol officer remembers a man walking a Blue Heeler at Dead Horse Bay on New Year’s Eve with a shovel.
The beach yields the remains of 11 women, drugged with ketamine and asphyxiated. In one body, probably Roxie’s, Warner finds acorns and ticks, which trace to Ulster County. A hospital there once treated a ketamine-dazed young woman with rope burns who kept saying Brewster. In a psychiatric facility, that woman, Lizzie Zane, describes being let loose in fenced woods, shot with tranquilizer darts, raped in a shack and given a rope to end the game; she tried to hang herself, then escaped when a storm cut the fence’s power. That points to the Hammond Island Wildlife Preserve and its game keeper, Graham Winger, whose home holds tranquilizer gear and logs of his kills.
Spoiler, the ending: In the woods Benson finds Haley drugged in a shack. Winger holds Benson at gunpoint, rails against women who notice him only when paid, and accuses her of reaching for an ankle gun; Amaro shoots and kills him, his first kill. Haley is expected to survive, and Winger’s logs list 15 hunted escorts. Cragen orders Amaro home for a few days. On the phone, Amaro tells his wife, Maria, that the killer gave himself up.
Why it stands out
- The killer’s alias comes from Brewster McCloud, Robert Altman’s film about a young man obsessed with birds and flight; Winger nurses injured birds at the preserve.
- Tamara Tunie returns as medical examiner Melinda Warner, now appearing as a guest after leaving the main cast.
- Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, where the bodies turn up, was the city’s burial ground for horses a century ago.