Know It All (Season 18, Episode 15)
Premise: A data-mining executive suspected of disguising his girlfriend’s murder as a serial killer’s work uses hacked secrets to blackmail a forensic expert and Barba.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 18, Episode 15
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), ADA Rafael Barba (Raúl Esparza)
- Guest stars
- Chris Diamantopoulos as David Willard, Megan Murphy as Laura Knowles, Jason Bowen as Det. Marcus Perry, Max Baker as Forensics Technician Dr. Colin Bennett, Bill Dawes as Alex Ryan
- Director
- Jonathan Herron
- Writers
- Story: Brianna Yellen & Robert Brooks Cohen & Céline C. Robinson; Written by: Ed Zuckerman & Kevin Fox
Summary
“Know It All” finds SVU heading a joint task force with Homicide’s Det. Marcus Perry on the “Second Avenue Strangler,” who has raped and strangled three drunk women walking home from bars, tied their hands with rope and shaved a lock of hair from each neck. A fourth victim, Jennifer Knowles, turns up at a construction site more than a week ahead of his pattern. Her sister, Laura, a recovering alcoholic, says Jennifer never drank and was breaking up with her boyfriend and boss, David Willard, head of a data-mining company called Attention. Willard, who greets Rollins and Carisi by reciting their backgrounds, calls the breakup mutual and Laura paranoid.
Cab driver Alex Ryan is caught when a passenger recognizes him from the sketch. Faced with the evidence, he boasts about the attacks and claims all four, though he seems not to know Jennifer’s face. The ME finds no alcohol in her blood, semen that is not his, and a fatal blow to the head before she was strangled. Perry calls the case closed; Benson does not. In Jennifer’s apartment CSU finds a trace of blood and rope under the sink, which rope expert Dr. Colin Bennett first matches to her bindings, then disowns, blaming mixed-up samples. Computer Crimes finds that someone hacked the sisters, the NYPD and Bennett, and Bennett, found holding a gun, admits an anonymous caller blackmailed him into changing his report.
Barba then suddenly takes himself off the case without saying why, and Benson gets her warrant for Willard’s computers from another prosecutor. When Willard calls Barba her friend, the squad decides he has been reading their email. A burner phone from his trash shows calls to Bennett, to Barba’s office and to Ashtonja Abreu, a young woman in the Bronx. Barba explains that years ago his only witness against a man who raped and killed two women, Ashtonja’s mother, came to court too high to speak, and he lent her money knowing she would buy heroin. She testified, convicted the man and died of an overdose that night, and Barba has helped her daughter ever since. Willard had cast the payments as paying for sex.
Spoiler, the ending: Willard’s laptop holds hidden-camera video of him and Jennifer, and Laura recalls Jennifer saying she had covered herself. At the apartment, a TARU technician finds that Jennifer’s smart TV recorded the night she died: Willard boasts of reading her texts and email, strikes her and then finds she will not get up. He is arrested, says it was an accident, and is held on $1 million bail. Barba tells Benson he would do it again and awaits the DA’s decision.
Why it stands out
- Barba risks his career over a secret from an old case, and he is taken off the prosecution.
- Produced before “Genes” and “Net Worth” but aired after them.