Serial Killers 31 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Detectives link a string of attacks or killings to one offender before the next victim is found.
- Season 1 · Episode 4
Hysteria
The murder of a college student dressed for a night out is folded into a string of attacks on prostitutes, until the detectives catch a serial killer who insists she was not his victim.
- Season 2 · Episode 15
Countdown
When an eight-year-old escapes a predator who holds girls for three days before killing them, the squad races the clock to find him before his newest captive’s time runs out.
- Season 2 · Episode 18
Manhunt
A diner waitress’s abduction revives Munch’s unsolved serial-killer case and sends him and Fin upstate and on to the Canadian border after the killer and his accomplice.
- Season 2 · Episode 21
Scourge
A man who believes he is doing God’s work kills four people in a day, and the push to execute him stalls when doctors find a disease his insurer knew about.
- 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 6
Redemption
A rapist-killer’s signature matches a strangler jailed in the 1980s, and the detective who caught him is sent to help, until it emerges that the old confession was false.
- 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 5 · Episode 23
Bound
The strangling of a wealthy, terminally ill widow links two older murders to a home-nursing company run by a doctor and his sister.
- Season 6 · Episode 4
Scavenger
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.
- Season 8 · Episode 7
Underbelly
A paw-print tattoo on three murdered teenage girls leads Stabler and his new partner, Beck, into an underage prostitution ring and to the pimp who claims to love his girls.
- Season 9 · Episode 6
Svengali
A copycat murder modeled on an imprisoned serial killer’s crimes exposes how far his admirers will go for him, and one of them targets Benson.
- Season 9 · Episode 12
Signature
Benson and Lake team with an FBI profiler to hunt a serial sexual sadist, only to find he has already been executed, and that the shooter may be on their side.
- Season 10 · Episode 16
Ballerina
When a landlord linked to a double murder falls from his Park Avenue window, suspicion turns to his wife, a retired dancer, and the younger man she calls her nephew.
- 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 11 · Episode 10
Anchor
Fin tracks a man strangling the American-born children of undocumented immigrants, and a crusading lawyer puts an anti-immigrant TV host on trial in all but name.
- 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 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 13 · Episode 15
Hunting Ground
The disappearance of a 16-year-old escort leads SVU to a beach full of bodies and a game keeper who hunts women for sport, while Benson and Haden begin dating.
- 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 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 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 14
Nationwide Manhunt
When Greg Yates and Carl Rudnick escape from prison, SVU and Chicago detectives join a manhunt across upstate New York.
- Season 18 · Episode 15
Know It All
A data-mining executive suspected of disguising his girlfriend’s murder as a serial killer’s work uses hacked secrets to blackmail a forensic expert and Barba.
- Season 23 · Episode 7
They'd Already Disappeared
When a young sex worker vanishes after calling her sister for help, SVU uncovers a decade of killings that police ignored because the victims lived on the street.
- Season 25 · Episode 7
Probability of Doom
Two dismembered child predators lead SVU to a pair of sisters, and to a young woman who has spent years shielding her little sister from their father.
- 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 26 · Episode 19
Play with Fire Part 2
In the second half of a crossover with Law & Order, Benson comes to suspect that the decorated lieutenant who supervised a murdered undercover officer raped and killed her and two women from the shelter where she worked.
- Season 26 · Episode 22
Post-Rage
After a psychiatrist is raped and nearly blinded in her office, the squad works through her patient list while a killer who targets therapists strikes again.
- Season 27 · Episode 11
Career Psychopath
After a gunman ambushes Rollins and Carisi at home, SVU finds a string of attacks on people who helped convict Henry Mesner.
- Season 27 · Episode 21
Monster
A suppressed search frees a man caught with a kidnapped boy in his trunk, and SVU must rebuild the case before he takes another child.
More themes: Crimes
- Blackmail & Extortion
- Child Abuse & Neglect
- Child Murders
- Child Sexual Abuse
- Con Artists
- Cults
- Date Rape & Consent
- Domestic Violence
- Gang Rape
- Grooming
- Gun Violence
- Hate Crimes
- Hostage Standoffs
- Human Trafficking
- Incest
- Kidnapping & Abduction
- Male Victims
- Murder for Hire
- Online Predators
- Prison Rape
- Prostitution & Sex Work
- Serial Rapists
- Stalking & Voyeurism
- Statutory Rape
- Vigilantes & Revenge
- War Crimes