Hell Hath No Fury Like Marcia Gay Harden
Munch (Richard Belzer) comes back from a sojourn in Cold Cases with a tip: Brian Traymor (Harold Perrineau Jr.), the prime suspect in an unsolved rape-murder from 1987, is about to get out of prison on an unrelated charge, so Amaro (Danny Pino) and Benson (Mariska Hargitay) are sent to go arrest him.
Once Brian is back at SVU in New York, he confesses to the first four murders he's been linked to, but holds out on admitting to the last one -- Kira Stanger's -- until an FBI agent gets him to confess -- a confession he later recants on the ground that she coerced him.
Whoops! The FBI agent had dated Kira's fiancé, Noah Bunning (Jay Karnes), on and off for years; she even got pregnant and, though she wanted to raise a family with him, he asked her to get an abortion because he didn't want to settle down. Then he met Kira, and clearly thought she was marriage material. He told his ex about his engagement, and a week later, Kira was dead, because his ex killed her.
Marcia Gay Harden, who plays the recurring character of FBI agent Dana Lewis (er, probably for the last time).
"All of the women were raped, then tied up, and strangled with athletic tape." We see the grisly crime scene photos, as usual.
Not only did Dana use her position in the FBI to stage the crime scene in such a way that it conformed to Brian's patterns; she also horned in on the case until she was asked to recuse herself.
Benson, who sticks up for Dana much longer than anyone else on the grounds that Dana is as upstanding a careerist as Benson herself is. But if Benson's next guy throws her over for some chippie, will Benson murder said chippie too?!