LAW & ORDER: SVU

Wednesday June 10 8.30pm

When a man is found badly beaten with no memory of what happened in a strip club parking lot Detectives Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni) are at a loss for evidence as a rainstorm washed away any clues. A fake fingernail embedded in the victim’s back leads the detectives to believe that the attacker is female. Detective Benson and Stabler turn to the female dancers at the club for questioning, but a homeless man, Sid Gabbert (guest star Paul Lazar), points the detectives to the victim’s truck. Using evidence found in the truck the detectives learn that the victim, Mark Van Kuren (guest star Frank Grillo), was sent to repossess the car of strip club dancer, Molly “Misty” Lambert (guest star Heidi Marnhout).

After questioning “Misty,” Van Kuren awakes in the hospital with no memory, but brings the attention to his ex-wife Ellen (guest star Wendy Makkena) and their 13-year-old transgender son Henry (guest star Bridger Zadina).

A Seriously Green Tip!
Leave the car at home – public transport may not be perfect, but there are alternatives: why not walk (if you live close enough), hitch a lift with a colleague or try going by bicycle?

Wednesday June 3 8.30pm – Mel, Ade, & Per Markets Only

GUEST STARS: JAMES BROLIN AND BETTY BUCKLEY

A young couple walking in Battery Park spots the body of a young woman floating in the water. Scott (Tim Rouhana), a young film maker, on a nearby rooftop filmed the medallion number of a taxi cab that’s been hanging around. Edward De Pablo (Bruce-Robert Serafin), owner of the taxi, has been sick all weekend with the flu, and it turns out someone’s been using his medallion number as a “ghost cab.” It looks like they’re dealing with a serial rapist, who uses an unregistered cab to travel from borough to borough.

The suspect’s last living victim, Leslie Schuster (Annika Boras), says she got into the cab and then realized there were no handles on the inside doors. He drove into an alley and raped her in the back seat, with his hands around her neck.

Fin (Ice-T) and Munch (Richard Belzer) find DNA evidence in the park that leads to former taxi driver Orlando McTeer (Danny Mastrogiorgio), a convicted rapist. Since they don’t have his DNA on the victim, they can’t arrest him, so Benson (Mariska Hargitay) acts as bait. McTeer confesses to raping many girls, but swears he never killed anyone. To prove it, he tells them that he was in Pennsylvania the night of the murder, where he raped another woman outside a mall.

With the rapist safely behind bars, the cops are still looking for the murderer. Warner does a retinal scan on the victim’s body and finds that she is 35 year old Marga Janssen (Kristina Klebe), a famous astronaut who just returned home from the International Space Station. Marga was in New York giving a speech at the Hayden Planetarium. Stabler runs into former Marine Corps buddy and mentor, Colonel Richard Finley (James Brolin), who is also a NASA astronaut. He tells them to talk to Janssen’s girlfriend, Andy (Therese Plummer), who argued with her the night she died.

Andy says Marga was upset about another astronaut’s behavior in space, and took a walk that night to be alone. Finley admits that specialist Lance Corliss (Edwin Sean Patterson) got space sickness, and his erratic behaviour caused NASA to pull him off the mission. Corliss confronted Marga the night she died, but only to apologise for his behaviour, and a local bartender backs up his alibi.

Wednesday May 27 8.30pm

The clues to a kidnapped girl’s location are locked inside an Alzheimer’s victim’s brain, and Dr. Huang will needto utilise all of his skill to give the detectives any hope of finding her before it’s too late.

Thursday March 26 at 8.30pm on Ten

Benson (Mariska Hargitay) attends a support group for rape victims, but still refuses to talk about her sexual assault. The therapist, Margo Wells (Brooke Adams) asks her to look into the case of a victim who has gone missing, Corporal Jessica Crews. Jessica went AWOL from her post a month prior as she was about to give birth to her rapist’s child.

But the case puts the unit at odds with the Pentagon when they fight to keep the case, and Benson’s flashbacks of her own assault may further impede the investigation.

Thursday March 19 at 8.30pm on Ten

All of Benson (Mariska Hargiaty) and Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) work exposing the truth surrounding a false rape report may be lost when the victim recants her testimony. And Olivia’s attempt to keep her safe, exposes a deeper and deadlier secret.

Guest Star: Brenda Blethyn

Brendan Blethyn OBE began her career on stage as part of the Royal National Theatre, and made her late
television debut in 1980. Following her big screen debut with smaller supporting roles in films such as “The Witches” and “A River Runs Through It”, she made her break-through role in the 1996 dramedy “Secrets & Lies” for which she was awarded a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination.

Thursday March 12 at 8.30pm on Ten

When Stabler (Chris Meloni) gets shot twice, Benson (Mariska Hargitay) rushes to the hospital. Two weeks prior Stabler arrives on the scene of a murder in the meatpacking district, where a young wannabe model, Natalie Bleers (Caitlin Fitzgerald), was brutally slashed before being shot to death. They find a rare species of bird dead in her purse.

After Stabler and Benson find a VIp stamp from an afterhours club on the victim’s arm, they meet with the club Owner Michael Solano (John Bianco). he doesn’t remember seeing Natalie in the club, but claims his ‘wrangler,’ Oscar Assadorian (Carlos Leon) will. Stabler and fin (Ice-T) meet with Oscar and find out he is Natalie’s talent manager. Oscar leads them to her apartment where they find contact information for Natalie’s twin sister, Anna.

When they talk Anna (Caitlin Fitzgerald), she says that Natalie was involved with Gots Money (Antwan Andre Patton), an up-and-coming hip-hop artist, who promised her a big payout for some secret mission.

Me Warner (Tamara Tunie) comes back with some startling evidence – saliva found in the cuts on Natalie’s body shows she was mauled by a tiger. They get a search warrant for Gots’ apartment and find a Bengal tiger in the bathroom. He’s working for an animal smuggling ring, and the cops think he killed Natalie because she wanted a cut of the profits.

But it turns out Gots’ tiger isn’t the tiger that killed Natalie – instead, he reveals Natalie was the smuggler. Gots agrees to set up a deal with Stabler and Fin to introduce them to the smugglers, Andre Bushido (Andrew Divoff) and Victor Tybor (Reg E. Cathey). Stabler goes with him undercover – he poses as a JFK customs agent willing to smuggle animals into the country, but the introduction goes badly, so they quickly leave. On the way out, Stabler manages to pocket some hair from a nearby tiger cage for testing.

Meanwhile, Stabler gets a call from Bushido and continues his undercover work. He leaves before he can tell his wife Kathleen IIsabel Gillies), and Benson is left to convince her not to leave Stabler.

Thursday November 27 at 9:30pm

Ben Nicholson (guest star Aidan Quinn) finds his wife Corrine (guest star Judy Kuhn) beaten into a coma, and the only witness is their mentally challenged daughter, Katie (guest star Paulina Gerzon). Because of Katie’s sensitive mental condition – the detectives are reluctant to have her testify.
Detectives Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Dr. Huang
(B.D. Wong) work with Katie, and begin to piece together the night of the beating and some of Corrine’s well-hidden secrets.

Det. Olivia Benson is called upon to help in an investigation regarding her brother Simon Marsden and finds herself caught between Police Captain Julia Millfield and FBI Agent Porter.

Knowing that there was evidence stacked up against her brother in a rape case, Benson continues to help her brother jump bail. Was it intuition or did she truly know he was innocent, or was she just not herself?

Later, when she starts to believe that her brother is guilty, she doubts her mother’s tale that she was raped and became pregnant with Olivia. She doubts this because her father, whose name was Joseph Hollister, kept track of her during her lifetime.

Benson asks Wong: “What kind of rapist keeps track of his victim?” It’s a question that rocks her entire foundation and she goes on a quest to determine whether her mother lied about the rape. She listens to her mother’s interrogation and, even though she finds two other women who were raped at university dining halls, she questions their stories, too. Could her entire life be based on a lie told by her mother? Or is she the result of a rape?

The body of an African American girl is found dumped in the East River, and while she was killed from a blow to the head, she also bears the scars from a female circumcision.

The detectives identify the victim as 15 year old Nikki Kwambe from Nigeria, and manage to track down her “aunt”, Mira Otume at a craft store in Harlem, who they find performing a circumcision ceremony in the basement. Otume gives detectives Benson and Stabler Nikki’s home address, but not before she’s arrested.

At Nikki’s home, the detectives meet her husband, Chukwei Bothame who legally married Nikki eight months ago to bring her to America. While Bothame has an alibi, the detectives become suspicious to the two women at this apartment Almani and Sarah who say they run a daycare facility from the apartment.

When a boy comes inside wearing a t-shirt that says “lie or die”, the detectives are lead to an anti-snitch website where Bothame’s name is listed as a witness in a murder trial of a dangerous drug dealer by the name of Dennis King (played by special guest star Method Man).

When King shows up at Nikki’s funeral, Stabler arrests him for harassing a witness, and the SVU offers protective custody for Bothame and his immediate family. Bothame then reveals that Almani and Sarah are also his wives. Although disgusted by Bothame’s polygamy, the SVU agrees to secure his whole family until the trial.

Then, Bothame receives a threatening note which shakes his confidence at King’s murder trial. When he takes to the stand, he backs down, saying he knows nothing about King murdering anyone.

The judge gives the detectives 24 hours to prove intimidation or King goes free. But when the detectives examine the threatening note, they discover it was printed on Bothame’s home computer…

WITH SPECIAL GUEST STAR RAPPER METHOD MAN

8.30PM THURSDAY / MAY 8 2008 on TEN

During the autopsy for a murdered school counsellor, Kate, M.E Warner is puzzled to discover a lesion on
her arm that has been caused by a foreign parasite.

The parasite is only found in Middle Eastern countries, and the detectives soon discover that Kate had secretly visited Turkey and Iraq to volunteer at the Women’s Refugee Coalition. The detectives discover that since her death, Kate’s computer and potable flash drive have been stolen. Also, the day she died, she received several calls from a cab driver, Haround Abbas, who is also found dead.

Abbas’ body shows signs of “torture lite”, a military torture that doesn’t leave any conspicuous marks. Kate was encouraging Abbas to write a book about his ordeal, but someone obviously found out and decided that death was the only way to silence Abbas and Kate.

8.30PM THURSDAY / MARCH 13 on Ten