Nationwide Manhunt (Season 17, Episode 14)
Premise: When Greg Yates and Carl Rudnick escape from prison, SVU and Chicago detectives join a manhunt across upstate New York.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 14
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), Sgt. Mike Dodds (Andy Karl), ADA Rafael Barba (Raúl Esparza)
- Guest stars
- Dallas Roberts as Greg Yates, Jefferson Mays as Dr. Carl Rudnick, Sophia Bush as Erin Lindsay, Jason Beghe as Hank Voight, Jon Seda as Antonio Dawson
- Ripped from the headlines
- Inspired in part by the 2015 escape from New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- Story: Brianna Yellen; Written by: Warren Leight & Julie Martin
Summary
“Nationwide Manhunt” begins with Benson calling Sgt. Hank Voight in Chicago: imprisoned serial killer Greg Yates now hints that some unidentified bones from the Pelham Bay burial ground belong to young women missing from Chicago. Benson wants Rollins, just back from maternity leave, kept away from him, so Voight sends Detectives Erin Lindsay and Antonio Dawson to Green Haven Correctional, where Yates needles Lindsay about Nadia, the young woman he murdered, and asks for Rollins. Rollins and Carisi go next, and the warden calls Yates a model inmate. Yates suggests that Siobhan Kelly, a former patient of his urgent care center, met her end near truck stops on I-90 outside Gary, but his price for more is a move to the Honor Block, where Dr. Carl Rudnick, the medical examiner Yates helped send to prison, is housed.
Carisi checks with Rudnick, who says he can handle Yates, and the transfer goes through. The next day Benson, Barba and Mike Dodds arrive to question Yates just as drones drop guns and drugs into the prison yards. In the lockdown Yates and Rudnick turn up missing through a hole cut in Rudnick’s cell wall. Rudnick’s cellmate, Jose Silva, says Rudnick spent months on the plan and Yates forced his way in that morning. The pair crawled out through a steam pipe shut off for utility repairs, leaving a taunting note in green nail polish, and the two utility workers who helped them are found with broken necks. With the prison blaming Rollins, the authorities call her back, and Lindsay and Dawson return to help.
Silva and a guard reveal that tools came in on lasagna trays brought by Bronwyn Wilkins, who teaches a conflict class at the prison; Benson recognizes her as Bronwyn Freed, who smuggled drugs to William Lewis at Rikers. Troopers find her locked in a car trunk. A bridge camera shows her with Rudnick, disguised as a woman, and she admits giving them her husband’s .38 and a map of the Adirondacks, and that Yates had threatened her husband. At Caroga Lake, Carisi talks troopers out of firing on a docked boat and finds Rudnick inside, his knees and ankles broken by Yates. Rudnick tells Carisi the plan was to cross the St. Lawrence River at Wellesley Island, and that Yates beat it out of him.
Spoiler, the ending: Lindsay, searching with Dodds, ignores Benson’s order to come back and heads for the border. On a county road they find a dead state trooper whose gun is missing; Yates opens fire, Dodds is hit, and Lindsay chases him on foot until she finds a small girl crying for her father. The episode ends there, with the manhunt continuing on Chicago P.D.
Why it stands out
- First half of a two-part story shared with Chicago P.D.; it wraps up in that series’ episode “The Song of Gregory William Yates.”
- Jason Beghe, Sophia Bush and Jon Seda guest star as Voight, Lindsay and Dawson; Seda had earlier crossed over to the original Law & Order as Det. Paul Falsone from Homicide: Life on the Street.
- Dallas Roberts and Jefferson Mays return as Greg Yates and Carl Rudnick from the season’s two-hour premiere.