Forensic Evidence 36 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Cases that hinge on DNA and lab work, and the limits of what forensic science can prove.
- Season 1 · Episode 14
Limitations
DNA links three five-year-old rapes to one unidentified man days before the statute of limitations expires, and the only victim who knows his name refuses to give it up.
- Season 3 · Episode 4
Rooftop
A string of rapes and murders of Black teenage girls in Harlem points first to an HIV-positive sex offender and then to a smooth-talking would-be rap promoter.
- Season 3 · Episode 5
Tangled
A doctor is beaten to death and his wife raped in their home, and the investigation runs through his estranged son and his affairs to a mistress and her downstairs neighbor.
- Season 3 · Episode 13
Prodigy
The mutilated body of an animal-cruelty agent points detectives to a teenager who tortures animals, but the evidence keeps leading elsewhere.
- Season 4 · Episode 4
Lust
The murder of a public health doctor in Central Park points first to the HIV patients she tracked and then, after a second killing, to a serial killer, until her husband’s secret life surfaces.
- Season 5 · Episode 11
Escape
Two inmates escape from a Virginia prison, and a convicted child rapist heads to New York to confront the boy whose testimony put him away.
- Season 6 · Episode 1
Birthright
An attempt to snatch a little girl from a playground leads to a woman convinced the child is hers, and to a fertility doctor who gave away embryos without consent.
- Season 8 · Episode 3
Recall
A prominent lawyer charged with rape is cleared in one case by DNA, and Stabler’s new partner finds the woman he attacked as a teenager.
- Season 8 · Episode 4
Uncle
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.
- Season 8 · Episode 15
Haystack
A baby taken from his crib, a mother driven to suicide by a TV reporter, and a family DNA search that leads detectives to the boy’s real father.
- Season 9 · Episode 18
Trade
A pregnant woman’s murder entangles a wealthy coffee trader, his son and the son’s lawyer in a web of money, jealousy and a bribed juror.
- Season 10 · Episode 18
Baggage
A Major Crimes detective who has chased a serial killer alone for months is forced to share the hunt with SVU, and his reasons for working solo come out.
- Season 10 · Episode 22
Zebras
A paranoid killer walks free after a CSU technician’s paperwork error, and new murders seem to target everyone who crossed him, until SVU learns who is really behind them.
- Season 11 · Episode 9
Perverted
A biker’s mutilation murder is pinned on Benson through her car and her DNA, and the squad races to prove the evidence against her was manufactured.
- 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 11 · Episode 21
Torch
A father is charged with setting the fire that killed his two young daughters, until the new SVU prosecutor, his accuser, comes to doubt the fire marshal’s science.
- Season 12 · Episode 3
Behave
A recluse who says one man has raped her across the country for 15 years helps Benson pursue him, but his crimes are buried in untested evidence.
- Season 13 · Episode 4
Double Strands
Rollins links a New York rape to a serial rapist she chased in the South, but the suspect’s DNA cannot tell him apart from someone he never knew existed.
- Season 14 · Episode 23
Brief Interlude
A Canadian mother on her first trip alone is found beaten and raped in Central Park, and the search for her attacker uncovers the nightlife she kept from her family.
- Season 14 · Episode 24
Her Negotiation
A man Rollins arrests for flashing in Central Park refuses an easy plea, then attacks the witness against him, and his record shows a long history of escaping conviction.
- 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 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 2
Criminal Pathology
After Greg Yates’s fiancée is found dismembered, the squad tracks the fugitive medical examiner Carl Rudnick and tries to convict him despite his claim of self-defense.
- Season 17 · Episode 8
Melancholy Pursuit
When a 15-year-old girl vanishes after swim practice and is found dead, a partial DNA match leads SVU through the secret children of a dead man.
- Season 18 · Episode 13
Genes
A rapist who claims a “rape gene” leads SVU to a therapy group where a serial attacker has confessed, and the law may protect what was said there.
- 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 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 18
Eighteen Wheels a Predator
A Central Park rape that seems solved is linked by DNA to a trucker who has assaulted women along the interstates for 20 years.
- 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 10
Jumped In
After surviving a gang attack, Benson takes her squad to the Bronx and reopens a closed serial rape case against deaf schoolgirls.
- Season 25 · Episode 2
Truth Embargo
A teenager in a looting crowd rapes a woman in a boutique dressing room, and she hesitates to identify him in court because of how the justice system treated her brother.
- Season 25 · Episode 6
Carousel
Three college friends compete to seduce foreign women at New York hostels, and SVU must learn which of them raped a tourist from Singapore before she flies home.
- Season 25 · Episode 11
Prima Nocta
A bride is raped the night before her wedding, and Rollins, between jobs, helps Benson track a man who targets brides-to-be.
- Season 26 · Episode 13
Extinguished
When a teenage girl is raped in a Washington Heights park near Velasco’s home, he has to win over neighbors who distrust the police, starting with the vigilante upstairs.
- Season 27 · Episode 3
A Vicious Circle
A bomb at a fertility clinic destroys a rape suspect’s DNA sample, and the murder of the clinic’s owner leads the squad from antinatalist protesters to her own divorce lawyer.