Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Eighteen Wheels a Predator" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 14, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that followed was a relative comedown, though it also was a good story: it was called “Eighteen Wheels a Predator” and it starts with a woman in a bar, Kayla Stuart (Supriya Ganesh), who walks in after her boyfriend, who never liked bars, sent her a text breaking up with her. The bartender, Dustin Tinsley (Ryan Coyle), immediately has a case of the hots for her and invites her back to his place as soon as he finishes – in fact he leaves the bar early and gets his sister and co-worker Demmy (alas, not identified on imdb.com) to close up for him. Then Kayla is approached from behind and grabbed by the hands of an otherwise unseen man, pulled into the bushes and raped. Dustin Tinsley is arrested for Kayla’s rape, and when the police find Kayla’s pink wallet in Dustin’s apartment they’re sure they have the right man, until they get an anonymous call from a blocked number by a guy who claims to be the real rapist. The cops are able to trace the call to Kentucky (ironically they were showing this the day Kentucky became the first U.S. state since Roe v. Wade in 1973 where no legal abortions are available at all, an event Rachel Maddow made a great deal of in her MS-NBC news show), and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) sends detectives Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) and Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) to Kentucky to work with local law enforcement to bust the guy. They’re sure the mystery caller is indeed the rapist because he knew the assailant had neatly folded up Kayla’s blue jeans and placed them beside her body, a detail the New York SVU cops had not released to the media.

They soon realize that the man is a long-haul truck driver who’s been committing rapes for 20 years, always along the interstate routes, but he’s never been arrested because he’s committed all his crimes in different jurisdictions and no one put the pieces together … until now. He turns out to be a seemingly ordinary family man in Pennsylvania, with a wife of 22 years and two kids who were planning to throw him a birthday party on the day he was arrested (in fact, that’s one detail that convinces the cops they have the right man: he’s the only one of five potential suspects whose birthday falls on the right day). One of the things I like about the Dick Wolf Law and Order shows is they sometimes give the bad guys ordinary lives: I remember one show on the original Law and Order in which the killer was a professional hit man who also had a normal family life, saying goodbye to his wife as he heads off for work that day – it’s just the nature of his work is to kill people – and when the cops finally arrested him his main concern was what was going to happen to the dog he was walking when they busted him. The rapist on this show, Aaron Wesley Parker (Trevor Long), is cruised by Captain Benson wearing a hot black patterned pantsuit; she pretends to come on to him in a bar and then busts him, and his first concern is to express the hope that Dateline NBC and Netflix will do shows about him. But the show is not over with Parker’s arrest: the cops also realize that Dustin Tinsley has been regularly raping his sister Demmy since Dustin was 12, and the reason she stole the pink wallet (ya remember the pink wallet?) from the scene of the original crime was to take it home so she can frame him for the rape of Kayla Stuart since she hasn’t been able to get him busted for raping her. It was a neat “twist” ending even though the show as a whole, while a good SVU, is not one of their truly great ones.