Bound (Season 5, Episode 23)
Premise: The strangling of a wealthy, terminally ill widow links two older murders to a home-nursing company run by a doctor and his sister.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 23
- 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 Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), Judge Lena Petrovsky (Joanna Merlin)
- Guest stars
- Jane Krakowski as Emma Spevak, Anthony Rapp as Matt Spevak, Callie Thorne as Nikki Staines, Richard Easton as Richard Sutton, Philip Bosco as Judge Joseph P. Terhune
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Barbie Kligman
Summary
“Bound” opens with a real estate agent showing a brownstone and finding its owner, 70-year-old Donna Brooks, strangled, and a stranger to her family, Richard Sutton, collapsing with a heart attack nearby. Sutton has buried three wives and left a fourth, Alexis, who has Alzheimer’s, in a run-down home in Queens, and Donna’s circle includes tango teacher Harvey Cohen and young lover Ben Pawler. Writing answers from his hospital bed, Sutton notes that Donna always opened her windows to exercise, and Warner moves the time of death from 10 p.m. to about 6 a.m.
Huang identifies the ligature as climbing rope, and an FBI database search turns up two earlier victims, Susan Zelman and Claudia Wooding, older women strangled at home. All three had cancer and were clients of RDH, a home-care company owned by Dr. Matt Spevak, whose sister, Emma, is the nurse manager. Records blame fired nurse Gary DeVaal, but his signatures prove to be photocopied forgeries. Each victim left money to Spevak’s Golden Memories Foundation, which he has been draining to pay gambling debts, and his apartment holds matching rope. Stabler is sure of his guilt; Huang doubts the money motive. Spevak is arrested and makes bail.
Emma is then found half-strangled and blames her brother. Detectives next find Spevak shot dead in the bedroom of a patient, Vivian Calas, who also lies dead. Warner finds a needle mark on Vivian’s neck: injected air caused her stroke. Spevak died hours before Emma called 911, and the angle of the rope marks on the first victims shows a killer shorter than they were, like Emma. Novak interrupts Judge Joseph Terhune at his poker game for an order to exhume the Spevaks’ mother, Margaret, and her neck also shows a puncture.
Spoiler, the ending: Following Huang’s advice to give Emma an ally, Stabler stages a sexist tirade against both women, and Benson, speaking of her own alcoholic mother, wins Emma’s trust. Emma admits she strangled the three women with her brother’s rope and killed her mother with a shot of air, and says that as a nursing student she ended the lives of dozens of other mothers.
Why it stands out
- Jane Krakowski and Anthony Rapp guest-star as the Spevak twins, Emma and Matt.
- Philip Bosco plays Judge Joseph Terhune, whose late-night poker game also includes Judges Petrovsky, Bradley, Wyler and Ridenour.
- Benson draws on her mother’s alcoholism to get through to the killer.