Send in the Clowns (Season 19, Episode 17)
Premise: A teenage piano prodigy disappears during a school trip to New York, and the case against the butcher last seen with her goes to trial without a body.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 19, Episode 17
- 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 Peter Stone (Philip Winchester)
- Guest stars
- Mallory Bechtel as Haley Sadler, Will Sasso as Chris Sadler, Wendy Hoopes as Anna Sadler, Erik Jensen as James Turner, Eric Tabach as Vincent Drago
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- Story: Brianna Yellen & Robert Brooks Cohen & Céline C. Robinson & Elizabeth Rinehart; Written by: Julie Martin & Brianna Yellen
Summary
“Send in the Clowns” opens at a circus-themed club, where Haley Sadler, a 16-year-old piano prodigy from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, on a spring-break trip with her music class, dances with a man in a clown mask and disappears. In the squad room, Fin is celebrating his birthday with his son, Ken, Ken’s husband, Alejandro, and their baby when the trip’s head chaperone, music teacher James Turner, and Haley’s friend Jenni Hanson arrive to report her missing. A video sent from Haley’s phone that night, found in her father Chris’s spam folder, shows her frightened in a car and leads the detectives to a Brooklyn butcher, Vinny Drago.
Drago says Haley went home with him and was gone when he woke. Her blood turns up in his apartment and car, with traces of bleach, her necklace is in his trunk and her phone and purse are in a trash can on his block. He has a record of domestic violence and once threatened a girlfriend with a cleaver. Cameras place him at a Red Hook waste site at 2 a.m., where a witness saw him dragging a heavy bag that he says was spoiled meat sold to a buyer named Jose, but the site’s dumpsters were hauled away before searchers could reach them. Without a body, Stone tries Drago for second-degree murder; Jenni identifies him as the masked man, and Chris tells the jury Haley would never run away.
When Turner fails to appear as a witness, Rollins and Carisi drive to his home and find a love song he wrote for Haley. His former songwriting partner, Alan Hubert, admits lending him a house in Oyster Bay, where they find Turner with Haley. She says she faked her own death, cutting herself to leave blood and sending the video, and chose Drago because he looked like a criminal; she and Turner planned to move to Vienna.
Spoiler, the ending: At the squad, Haley’s mother, Anna, reveals that she slept with Turner 17 years earlier and that he is Haley’s father, and Chris attacks him. Haley says that explains the bond she always felt. Turner pleads guilty to second-degree rape, kidnapping, endangering a minor and incest. Stone tells Benson his sister, Pamela, has schizophrenia and lives in a facility upstate, and that the weekly visits their late father made are now his. When he visits, Pamela calls him Daddy.
Why it stands out
- Will Sasso and Wendy Hoopes play Haley’s parents, Chris and Anna Sadler, with Mallory Bechtel as Haley.
- Fin’s son, Ken Randall (Ernest Waddell), and Ken’s husband, Alejandro Pavel (Migs Govea), bring their baby son to Fin’s birthday party in the squad room.
- Amy Korb first appears as Stone’s sister, Pamela; Stone, a former Chicago prosecutor, came to SVU from Chicago Justice.