Scavenger (Season 6, Episode 4)
Premise: A copycat reviving a 1970s serial killer’s riddles and methods sends the squad on a race across the city to save his next victims.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 4
- 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)
- Guest stars
- Doug Hutchison as Humphrey Becker, Anne Meara as Ida Becker, Elizabeth Franz as Jeannette Henley, Remy Auberjonois as Eric Liebert, Madison Arnold as Morty Graf
- Ripped from the headlines
- Inspired by the BTK Killer, who murdered at least ten people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991 and sent taunting letters to police and the press.
- Director
- Daniel Sackheim
- Writers
- Dawn DeNoon & Lisa Marie Petersen
Summary
“Scavenger” opens in Central Park, where a jogger and his trainer find a baby in a stroller with a printed rhyme taped to him: the mother has been abducted and will die unless police find the “mean man” by the next day. The note is signed Rupert Daniel Kilmore, the name of a Staten Island clockmaker who knows nothing about it. While detectives question him, the killer calls and faxes a new verse from a copy shop down the street. A homeless addict paid to carry the next message remembers only five nonsense words, which turn out to be an anagram of the return address on a package that reaches the squad holding the mother’s severed ear. Her husband, Eric Liebert, identifies the earring.
The anagram points to a pay phone at Mott and Grand, and a Roman-numeral clue gives the time of a call already missed. The detectives trace it to a loft where Julie Liebert has been hanged, 45 minutes too late; three fingers there belong to the loft’s owner, photographer Gloria Durham. Initials and a symbol on the body revive RDK, a killer who murdered five women in Manhattan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, taunting police with riddles, before going silent. A clue naming a flower leads through the flower market to Gloria’s body in a community garden shed, stabbed after death as many times as RDK’s second victim. Unlike RDK, this killer has not raped anyone. RDK’s lone survivor, Jeannette Henley, says a reporter visited her a month earlier, and the description fits Humphrey Becker, a researcher at the newspaper; his apartment walls are papered with publishers’ rejections, including one for a book on RDK.
Huang decodes drawings on Gloria’s feet as a rebus for Lincoln Center, setting off a chain of clues across the city. Becker’s notebooks, found in a cigar-club locker, name his next target, a chorus dancer called Red Watts, who is taken to safety. But Becker has seized Jeannette, and he is found asleep in her empty apartment. He says she is buried alive with an oxygen tank, and in the interrogation room he toys with Stabler, who chokes him until he is pulled off. Huang notes that Becker chooses mothers of small boys.
Spoiler, the ending: Becker’s mother, Ida, who has not seen him in 25 years, admits she locked him in a closet as a child so she could go to the movies. When the detectives shut him in a cramped room, he gives up Jeannette’s location: a chained refrigerator at a Staten Island dump. Rescuers reach her as the oxygen runs out, and she survives.
Why it stands out
- Doug Hutchison plays the copycat, with Anne Meara as his mother and Elizabeth Franz as the survivor he hunts.
- The killer names himself after a Humphrey Bogart role, and his mother says she named him after the actor.