This week’s episode of Law & Order: SVU was a crossover episode with Chicago Fire and Chicago PD. The episode started with Chicago Fire characters discussing a perpetrator named Yates. The police chief said they would need to open a hotline to help them track Yates down and one of the detectives on the case said that they were tracking his phone, iPad and credit cards.
In the next scene Greg Yates was driving down the highway with Nadia trapped in his car with him. Nadia had disappeared from the Chicago Fire police headquarters. Yates then shopped at a convenience store and offered to help a young mom carry her items to the register. Outside the store someone in the parking lot told him there was a person moving around in his car. He first joked about having kidnapped someone but then said that the one moving around was actually his dog. Yates then got back into his car and hit Lindsay for moving around in his backseat. He told her to lay still or he would knock her out. She begged him to let her go, but he refused.
The Chicago Fire characters went searching for Nadia and they found her car abandoned on the side of the road with a smashed birthday cake in the car, which is what she had gone to pick up. One of the cops on the Chicago Fire team said a car had been spotted with a man driving and a woman being held prisoner. They fled to where the car was and pulled their guns on the driver. When the driver got out of his car with his hands raised, they realized they had the wrong person. That’s when the police realized that Yates had switched license plates between his car and the car of the person they pulled over. They asked the man when the last time he had gotten out of his car was and he said he had been at a rest stop hundreds of miles away.
To help solve the case, the Chicago police called in the services of the SVU. Olivia was told Nadia was still missing and that they suspected Yates was heading to NYC because he lives there.
Yates pulled over to change the license plate on his car to a New Jersey license plate. He then checked on Nadia, who he had tied up and hidden in his trunk. Nadia threatened to kill the man and he told her not to do that.
At the SVU station Rollins got a hit on one of the stolen credit cards possessed by Yates. She said they also had a hit on Nadia’s car and Olivia went to go investigate. Rollins and Olivia went to an abandoned shipyard because a car had been found there with a New Jersey license plate. However, the car was empty and though they smashed the window to get into the car they didn’t find any clues pertaining to the kidnapping at first. Olivia then found a bloody scarf hidden behind the car’s back seat cushions that one of the Chicago police officers defined as the scarf she had given to Nadia.
Yates was walking down the street in Manhattan when he spotted a young woman getting out of a cab while on the phone. He went to the woman, took her bags for her and opened the door of her building. Once in her apartment Yates killed her. The woman’s roommate came home and caught Yates and he knocked her unconscious.
The SVU detectives tracked Yates down at home and demanded to know where Nadia was. They arrested him and took him to the station. They questioned him about where his many victims could be found. He told the cops he left town with Nadia because the Chicago PD was looking for him. The detectives told Yate’s fiancé, Susie that he had been kidnapping, hurting and killing women. Susie told them many things about Yates, including that he used to take her to a beach in Queens. The detectives then went to the beach to investigate. They found thigh bones and pelvic bones in a forest behind the beach, which led them to Nadia’s body.
Olivia when to the D.A. and told him that Yates had killed seven women and hid their bodies. She said every single body was burned or buried and that there was never any evidence left behind to prove Yates killed them.
Yates went on trial for killing Nadia and, acting as his own lawyer, tried to tell the judge he never would have killed the woman. Warner, the medical examiner, testified that Nadia was beat up and then strangled to death. She testified that Nadia had been sexually violated in a violent way. Lindsay, one of the Chicago police officers, testified that she had to arrest Nadia for working as an escort and that was how Yates met her. Lindsay said Nadia had been addicted to heroin but had beat her addiction.
Olivia testified to the court that Yates and Nadia had driven from Chicago to NYC together. Yates asked Olivia about a similar case in which she had flown out to Chicago. Olivia then said that Yates was a suspect in that case as well as Nadia’s case. Yates did everything he could to convince the judge and jury that another suspect in the previous Chicago case was guilty and that Yates himself was innocent.
Yates was then put on the stand and questioned by the defense attorney. He testified that Nadia wanted to use heroin to relieve the stress of having been abused when she was younger. Yates also testified that he thought Nadia was going into withdrawal from her lack of heroin use.
Warner testified that Nadia didn’t have the DNA of multiple men in her body and that she suffered a slow, painful death. Yates was ultimately found guilty of sodomy and first degree rape and murder.