Caretaker (Season 20, Episode 7)
Premise: A father and his two children are stabbed in their beds, and suspicion moves from the family’s devoted nanny to the children’s mother.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 7
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), ADA Peter Stone (Philip Winchester), Judge Felicia Catano (Aida Turturro)
- Guest stars
- Sasha Alexander as Anne Mill, Gary Basaraba as Billy O’Boyle, Soleidy Mendez as Delores Alverez, Michael Laurence as Tom Bernstein, Cesar J. Rosado as Emilio Alverez
- Director
- Jono Oliver
- Writers
- Jordan Barsky
Summary
“Caretaker” opens as young Charlie Mill wanders a street, bleeding from a stab wound. Inside, his father, Julian, and sister, Rachel, lie stabbed to death in their beds, and Charlie soon dies at the hospital. Detectives break the news to his mother, Anne Mill (called Anna in the episode), a lawyer whose firm is preparing for an IRS audit. With no sign of a break-in, suspicion falls on Delores Alverez, the family’s nanny of ten years, who has not shown up for work. Detectives find her at her brother Emilio’s home in the Bronx; the knife and freshly washed clothes turn up at her apartment. Delores says she found the bodies, picked up the knife without thinking and ran in fear. Her diary and neighborhood gossip hint that she was close to Julian.
Benson doubts that Delores is a killer. An angry voicemail leads to Julian’s old friend Tom Bernstein, who says Anne vetoed a writing trip for the two poets and let the family’s Vail ski lodge go into foreclosure. Julian, it emerges, was the sole owner of GBT, a consulting firm that billed Anne’s clients more than $3 million over six years. In Anne’s office desk the detectives find sneakers bearing Rachel’s blood, matching a print beside the girl’s bed, and Anne admits she killed her family, saying they are better off. Rollins, who gets flowers from Al, and Benson admit to each other that the case has left them watching their children sleep for hours.
Defense attorney Billy O’Boyle enters an insanity plea for Anne, citing mental defect. She tells a psychologist that she had to save her children before they fell, like a cockroach she watched drop onto a diner grill. The expert calls her a family annihilator, someone who believes the killings were necessary while knowing they were wrong, which means she is legally sane. Delores recalls that Anne kissed her and said goodbye the night before, evidence that she planned the killings. On the stand O’Boyle gets Benson to concede she cannot say what Anne’s state of mind was during the stabbings. Anne testifies that she watched another woman kill her family to spare them an imperfect world, and under cross-examination admits she did nothing to stop that woman. O’Boyle blames the impossible demands placed on women; Stone replies that Anne knew what she was doing and let the nanny take the blame.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury acquits Anne of murdering Charlie and Rachel but convicts her of murdering Julian. The split verdict is put down to jurors unable to believe that a legally sane mother could kill her own children. Benson then gets a call: Anne has hanged herself in her cell.
Why it stands out
- Sasha Alexander guest stars as Anne Mill, a high-earning lawyer who kills her husband and children.
- Rollins’s relationship with Dr. Al Pollack, a storyline that runs through the season, surfaces when he sends her flowers at work.