Execution (Season 3, Episode 15)
Premise: With a serial killer days from execution, Stabler races to prove he also murdered a schoolgirl whose case went cold a decade earlier.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 15
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong)
- Guest stars
- Nick Chinlund as Matthew Linwood Brodus, Ty Burrell as Alan Messinger, William Hill as Allen Cooper, Laura Hughes as Hannah Cooper, Anthony Chisholm as Leroy Russell
- Director
- Alex Zakrzewski
- Writers
- Judy McCreary
Summary
“Execution” begins when Allen and Hannah Cooper ask Stabler to reopen the murder of their daughter, Debbie, abducted on her way home from school almost 11 years earlier, a case he worked with his late partner, Dave Rosetti. They believe the killer is Matthew Linwood Brodus, a serial killer set to be executed in New Jersey in three days, because he publicly named Debbie’s old school. Stabler is given until the execution to pursue it.
Debbie had been bound with plumber’s tape and tortured, Brodus once worked as a plumber’s apprentice, and the lab ties the fibers to plumbers’ uniforms and the tape to the New Jersey murders, though too little blood remains for DNA. Unlike the Jersey victims, Debbie’s eyes were pierced, suggesting she knew her killer. Stabler clashes with Dr. George Huang, who is running FBI interviews of Brodus’s former cellmates and will not offer deals, and New Jersey prosecutor Alan Messinger, an old acquaintance of Cabot’s, refuses New York any access to Brodus.
Promised a transfer, cellmate Robert Rule persuades Stabler to phone the mother of his young daughter, but the woman is the victim Rule raped at 16, and Brooklyn detectives arrive to confront Stabler. Brodus’s other cellmate, Leroy Russell, a death row inmate who has converted to Islam, talks after the father of the boy he killed asks him to, saying Brodus spoke of blinding and killing a girl close to home. Munch finds teacher Vivian Parish, who dated Brodus and says he gave Debbie a ride home once or twice.
Cabot asks a judge to halt the execution so the truth does not die with Brodus, and his lawyer, Wade Harris, welcomes the delay. Before the ruling, Messinger allows an interview if New York agrees not to prosecute. With hours left, Stabler and Huang press Brodus about his victims and the mother who left him, and he lets Debbie’s name slip.
Spoiler, the ending: As the execution approaches, an alarm sounds and Brodus attacks Huang, saying Debbie did not fight back. Huang is kept in the hospital overnight but expected to recover, while Brodus ends up in a coma on a ventilator, and the state cannot execute a man in that condition. Stabler says he did get a confession to Debbie’s murder, but Messinger doubts the families will care.
Why it stands out
- Ty Burrell, later a two-time Emmy winner as Phil Dunphy on Modern Family, plays New Jersey prosecutor Alan Messinger.
- Pleading with Cabot, the Coopers invoke Ottis Toole, the serial killer who confessed to the 1981 murder of Adam Walsh but was never convicted; Toole died in prison in 1996, and Florida police officially closed the case in 2008.