Uncle (Season 8, Episode 4)
Premise: A silent homeless man found with clippings about sex crimes becomes the first suspect in a double murder, until Munch recognizes him as his own uncle.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 8, Episode 4
- Starring
- Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Dani Beck (Connie Nielsen), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Jerry Lewis as Andrew Munch, Timothy Adams as Brent Allen Banks, Tara Bast as Maryellen Seaver, Ryan Brown as Trey Williams, Caitlin Sanchez as Lupe Rojas
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Dawn DeNoon
Summary
“Uncle” opens with the discovery of Gabriella Travino and her ten-year-old daughter, Illaria, raped and suffocated with packing tape in their apartment; the girl is clutching her mother’s crucifix. Beck has to step outside. The killer cleaned the bodies with bleach, and there is no forced entry. Gabriella’s coworker, Sean Darringer, says she was short of money and borrowing from petty cash, and her landlord, Larry, admits offering her free rent for sex. When he mocks Beck, she says her husband’s killer is serving life. A young associate at Gabriella’s law firm, Trey Williams, admits a brief affair and recalls a picnic where an old homeless man hugged Illaria.
Illaria’s friend Lupe Rojas leads Stabler and Beck to the man’s cardboard box in Inwood Park. He does not speak, has blood on his hands and carries clippings about sex crimes, many from Manhattan SVU cases. Fingerprints on a sign Gabriella posted at a market to sell Illaria’s bike lead to Brent Allen Banks, who served seven years of a 14-year sentence for raping and torturing a 15-year-old girl. In the squad room, Munch recognizes the homeless man as his uncle, Andrew Munch, who was supposed to be living in Florida. Huang finds that Andrew does not have Alzheimer’s disease but a depression so severe it looks like dementia, and Munch says that his father, Andrew’s brother, killed himself when Munch was 13. Banks, who stocks vending machines, stays calm under questioning, but he leaves tooth marks in a piece of gum that Warner matches to her reconstruction of the bite marks.
After ten days on antidepressants, Andrew is transformed and asks Beck to dinner in Paris. Banks’s first victim, Maryellen Seaver, asks to testify, and Beck tells her she wants Banks dead, which Andrew overhears. At a suppression hearing, Andrew shouts at the court over the defense’s attack on the enhanced bite-mark images. The judge throws out the bite evidence and the indictment with it, and Banks is free. Now manic, Andrew phones Beck, insisting that she promised to kill Banks.
Spoiler, the ending: Watching Banks on their own time, Stabler and Beck follow him into the subway with a girl who knows him. Andrew, who has torn through Munch’s apartment, turns up outside Banks’s building; they leave him there, but he follows them down and pushes Banks in front of a train. At a psychiatric center, Munch, Stabler and Beck urge Andrew to take his medication and plead insanity. He refuses, says he must pay for what he did, and says good-bye to his nephew.
Why it stands out
- Jerry Lewis guest stars as Andrew Munch, John Munch’s uncle; producer Neal Baer promoted the episode as showing how often depression in older people is misdiagnosed.
- Munch reveals that his father killed himself when Munch was 13.