Melancholy Pursuit (Season 17, Episode 8)
Premise: When a 15-year-old girl vanishes after swim practice and is found dead, a partial DNA match leads SVU through the secret children of a dead man.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 8
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), Sgt. Mike Dodds (Andy Karl), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Jonathan Judge-Russo as Gary Ryan, Nick Cordero as Robby Marino, Brian Avers as George Marino, Carolee Carmello as Brendan’s Birth Mother, Angelica Page as Mrs. Evans
- Ripped from the headlines
- Inspired by the 2010 murder of 13-year-old Yara Gambirasio in Italy, where a mass DNA search traced the killer through relatives of a man who had died years earlier to his secret illegitimate son, Massimo Bossetti.
- Director
- Michael Pressman
- Writers
- Story: Brianna Yellen & Samantha Corbin-Miller; Teleplay: Warren Leight & Julie Martin
Summary
“Melancholy Pursuit” opens with Benson in a playground with Noah while Sgt. Dodds, in his first weeks, interviews the parents of Lily Evans, 15, who left swim practice that morning and never reached school. Treating her as a likely runaway, Dodds learns she has been skipping class and sexting an older man named Diego; Benson arrives and tells him he should have called her sooner. Diego, a fitness instructor arrested at a party, has explicit photos of Lily on his phone but a solid alibi. Then a can collector, Stan, tries to use Lily’s debit card, her bag turns up under the West Side Highway, and her body is found nearby wrapped in a moving blanket.
Warner finds that Lily died hours after a blow to the back of the head; there was no rape, but her clothes were torn and her attacker’s DNA was on her body. Stan was in an emergency room all day. Warner’s looser familial search finds a partial match: Brendan Cahill, in the database for jumping a turnstile, who was adopted. His birth mother names his father as Ray Marino, a married bus driver from City Island who died five years ago and had two sons. George Marino, a lawyer, admits he told his brother, Robby, a roadie once acquitted of sexual assault, to claim they were together. After six hours of questioning, Robby is close to agreeing with the detectives’ version, but Benson has it stopped: neither brother’s DNA matches.
Ray’s exhumed remains show he fathered Brendan, George and Robby, plus another son, probably the youngest, with yet another woman. His widow, Camille, will not believe it, but George remembers his father doting on a woman named Stella and her twins. Stella says her son died years ago and that Ray was also seeing her best friend, Helen Ryan, who has three sons and denies any affair. After the brothers’ Sunday dinner at their mother’s, the squad runs a staged sobriety checkpoint, takes DNA from the breath tests and matches Gary Ryan, a beverage deliveryman who restocks vending machines at Lily’s pool.
Spoiler, the ending: Dodds tackles Gary after a chase. Gary tells Benson that he gave Lily a drink, she got into his van, and when she refused his kiss and screamed, he covered her mouth and shook her until her head hit the floor; after dark he left her body under a ramp. Benson tells the Evanses she has no better reason to give them, and later advises a shaken Dodds to go home and not let the job become his whole life.
Why it stands out
- Carolee Carmello, Nick Cordero and Ali Wentworth guest-star; Wentworth plays a mother Benson chats with in the playground.
- Rollins does not appear; she is on bed rest after collapsing in the previous episode, and the squad heads to her apartment with dinner at the end.