Cold Cases 28 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Old, unsolved crimes reopened by new evidence, new witnesses or a suspect's return.
- Season 1 · Episode 15
Entitled
The shooting of a salesman in his parked car leads SVU to the youngest daughter of a revered political family, until a second killing links the case to unsolved shootings from years earlier.
- Season 3 · Episode 3
Stolen
A baby snatched from a grocery store leads detectives to a shady adoption lawyer and to a boy kidnapped in 1989, now being raised by a family that never knew.
- Season 3 · Episode 15
Execution
With a serial killer days from execution, Stabler races to prove he also murdered a schoolgirl whose case went cold a decade earlier.
- Season 4 · Episode 10
Resilience
A 15-year-old girl’s suicide attempt after a rape leads detectives into her family’s home, where her father’s obsession with having more children hides a murder.
- Season 6 · Episode 13
Quarry
The remains of a boy missing since 1980 point to a death-row child molester, but the truth lies with a boy he abused.
- Season 7 · Episode 7
Name
A child’s remains found under a new playground reopen the 1978 disappearance of four boys and lead a CSU technician back to the unsolved case that consumed her father.
- Season 8 · Episode 10
Scheherazade
A priest sends Stabler to a dying man who has waited decades to confess, and his slowly told stories uncover old bank robberies, a buried partner and the truth about his daughter’s birth.
- Season 9 · Episode 19
Cold
In the season finale, Lake’s fatal shootout with a fellow officer exposes a decade-old rape and murder by police, and the case costs Novak and Lake dearly.
- Season 11 · Episode 18
Bedtime
A journalist’s murder brings back a 1970s serial killer’s signature, and one of his supposed victims turns out to have been killed by someone else.
- Season 12 · Episode 1
Locum
A ten-year-old who stages her own disappearance reveals that her adoptive parents are remaking her in the image of the daughter they lost to a kidnapper years earlier.
- Season 12 · Episode 16
Spectacle
A student broadcasts a staged rape and holds a classmate hostage to force SVU to reopen the cold case of his little brother’s abduction.
- Season 12 · Episode 17
Pursuit
A TV host who exposes predators is stalked by a man the squad comes to believe killed her sister 25 years earlier, and the hunt costs Executive ADA Sonya Paxton her life.
- Season 14 · Episode 5
Manhattan Vigil
The kidnapping of a real estate heir’s young son leads Benson back to a boy who vanished from the same neighborhood 13 years earlier.
- Season 14 · Episode 14
Secrets Exhumed
A cold-case DNA hit on a paralyzed serial killer seems to close five 1980s murders, until he refuses to confess to one and the evidence points to the FBI agent who profiled him.
- Season 16 · Episode 9
Pattern Seventeen
A serial rapist who hums hymns and chokes his victims strikes in New York, and Rollins links him to Atlanta cases whose rape kits were never tested.
- Season 16 · Episode 20
Daydream Believer
SVU and Chicago’s Intelligence Unit hunt a doctor suspected of a decade of rape-murders after he abducts a young woman from Voight’s office and drives her to New York.
- Season 17 · Episode 1
Devil's Dissections
A dismembered woman found near Greg Yates’s old burial ground leads the squad, through Yates himself, to a second body hidden in a wall and to the city’s deputy chief medical examiner.
- Season 17 · Episode 9
Depravity Standard
When Lewis Hodda recants his confession, Barba tries him for a 1999 child murder and Benson’s interrogation tactics go on trial with him.
- Season 19 · Episode 5
Complicated
A young woman found in Central Park is taken for a girl kidnapped ten years earlier, and the detectives come to doubt both her story and the missing girl’s family.
- Season 20 · Episode 12
Dear Ben
A copycat revives the case of a 1980s serial rapist who taunted Stone’s father, and the search for the real attacker leads to a genealogy website.
- Season 20 · Episode 17
Missing
A six-year-old found in the trunk of a stolen car leads SVU to her kidnapper and to a boy who vanished from a Queens park in 2002.
- Season 21 · Episode 6
Murdered at a Bad Address
DNA from the rape of a teenage girl in a housing project matches a 16-year-old double murder, suggesting the man imprisoned for killing his mother and sister is innocent.
- Season 22 · Episode 8
The Only Way Out Is Through
Twenty years after their attack, two sisters seek answers from the man who assaulted them, while Fin tries to keep a manipulative rapist from winning parole.
- Season 23 · Episode 6
The Five Hundredth Episode
Former detective Nick Amaro uses new DNA techniques to reopen a 1996 prom-night murder, and the writer behind the case turns out to be Benson’s first love.
- Season 23 · Episode 19
Tangled Strands of Justice
A girl’s remains surface in Central Park 20 years after the search for her was abandoned on 9/11, as a rape victim is arrested through her own rape-kit DNA.
- Season 24 · Episode 14
Dutch Tears
A man Fin arrested as a teenager 23 years ago confronts him at gunpoint and demands justice for his rape in a city holding cell.
- Season 25 · Episode 12
Marauder
Benson quietly reopens the decades-old disappearance of Agent Sykes’s sister and connects it to other missing girls across the Northeast.
- Season 27 · Episode 10
Fidelis ad mortem
A thrift-store cassette leads SVU to a 1999 rape and murder, and to the detectives who were secretly recording the victim.