Part One of the “Chicago PD/Law & Order: SVU” crossover, a rape/attempted murder case has somehow managed to draw New York’s attention.
According to Sgt. Olivia Benson, this latest case involving a Chicago nurse sounded eerily familiar to a string of cases that she herself had dealt with back in the day. See, there were three victims and all had the same MO. A man in medical scrubs would get a hold of these women and they were all assaulted and strangely had their nails painted.
But, sadly, that’s where the case came to the close. There were not one that saw this man’s face, there wasn’t DNA, and since 2004 their prep has been dormant. And yet now it looks like something has changed.
The perp is back and Victoria’s nails weren’t painted. And while Victoria was lucky enough to survive the initial assault, she ultimately succumbed to her injuries and died in the hospital.
According to Halstead’s brother, prior to the incident, Victoria was actually really nice. That was one of the things you just immediately knew about her. So she never had a problem with anyone at the hospital and seeing as she was a maternity nurse most people didn’t have a reason to hold a grudge against her. Yet she was still attacked and the perp had tried to kill her by lighting her apartment on fire.
So in a few hours she had left, both Voight and Benson had to ride roughshod over common decency and grill their victim in her final moments.
And she didn’t have much to say. Before she died, Victoria told the police that she didn’t see the man’s face. She saw that he was wearing medical scrubs and she knew he was white. Other than that though she mostly guessed at his height. Thus they know he could be or close to six feet.
Unfortunately, what little description Victoria gave wasn’t much but it could be used to hold against a doctor. Practically any doctor but in particular Jay Halstead’s brother Will. After all Will admitted to knowing Victoria and some digging showed that he once questioned by Detective Stabler in New York in connection to another victim. So Benson asked Voight for the go-ahead and he gave her permission to question Will.
The actual conversation began just fine but once Halstead realized what the detectives were doing with his brother, he quickly pulled Will out of there.
Another suspect was eventually mentioned thanks to more evidence coming up but Jay still felt a certain way about how his brother had been brought in. So it wasn’t until Will was cleared that Halstead allowed him to come back and give testimony. Because, apparently, Will knows the new suspect.
Dr. Greg Yates was once a profressor at Columbia University. In fact he was once Will’s teacher. And Will can recall seeing him at a party, that one of the original victims had attended.
So Will can make a connection and he also said that Yates was simply one of those guys that always gave off a certain vibe.
He had students call him by his first name and later, when he got sloppy, he would rate the women around him. Including some of his students and one woman that died in 2004 three days after he saw her at a party. Thus the detectives felt they had the right guy. However they had to take him in by the book and so at first they let him go.
They needed more evidence to arrest him at the time and so Voight and his task were essentially stuck sitting on their hands. But then Yates reached out to Lindsey. He said he wanted to talk and later that’s exactly what they did.
They just talked.
And when the conversation was over (and Lindsey was safe), Yates drove away and the task force received a call about a young woman that had been set on fire in her own home. She was a brunette, young, and pretty. And now she’s dead.
So Lindsey was used as an alibi and while the team was searching for Yates, Yates snatched Nadia.
On Part Two of tonight’s crossover, it wasn’t long before Nadia’s absence was noticed and though the police were quickly put on alert, it was far too late for them to rescue a friend. Yates had dragged Nadia out of state kicking and screaming by time her people started looking for. And to make it difficult for them, Yates kept switching his license plates along the way. So, initially, the only way they could find him was to track each License Plate he had stolen.
And that showed that Yates was heading back to familiar territory, he was driving back to New York.
Thus, at this point in the investigation, New York detectives were back in charge and that meant Voight couldn’t just fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. And that goes for when he especially wanted to. Like when they found Lindsey’s car not long after Fin and Amaro returned with some of Chicago’s finest.
Luckily, Nadia’s body wasn’t found in the car. Nor was there any large amounts of blood at the scene but she did leave her scarf behind intentionally. It was way for Nadia to assure her friends that she was alive in the car. However there was no way they could know if she was still alive after leaving the car.
Yates is smart. He attacked a woman that had come close to identifying him back in Chicago and when the cops finally caught up to him in New York, he pretended to be as innocent as a newborn baby. As in he claimed Nadia came with him because she wanted to see the city and then he implied she ditched him to go to some random party.
And his fiancée, that no one knew about, backed him up.
The poor woman had no idea who she was involved with. And when the detectives tried to shake her out of her illusion, she still refused to believe them. How could her fiancée have kidnapped a woman when he said he spent the past few days at the beach?
Apparently, Yates had sand on him when he came home so he told his fiancée “everything”.
And that tip with the sand led the detectives to finding Nadia’s body. Unfortunately she had been killed hours earlier but up until the point they found her, Detective Lindsey had tried to be hopeful.
Nadia’s body had been found and two more women had been assaulted but at the end of the day there was no evidence against Yates. What they had was circumstantial at best. So when the ADA decided to go ahead with an arrest warrant, he knew he didn’t have the best of chances. Though he didn’t let that stop him.
Barba knew this was their only chance to put away Yates but what he wasn’t prepared for is Yates representing himself in court.
Yates is actually pretty brilliant. He’s disturbed all right but still brilliant. Hence he was able to defend himself very well. So well in fact that Barbra was losing the case.
Yates had made Lindsey appear to be a misguided friend and he also accused Voight of sexually assaulting Nadia months before her death. Meaning he knew how to work the jury. And they were eating up every lie he told.
But then Yates destroyed himself because once he began cross-examining the medical examiner, he got too worked up as she started to describe the torture Nadia had gone through prior to her death. It was like he was experiencing it all over again and everyone in the courtroom got to see how much torture excites him.
So Yates was convicted for the rape and murder of Nadia. Though if he thinks it’s going to be smooth sailing from here on out then that visit he received in his cell now means he knows differently.
See, Voight had promised him something. He said everything that happened to Nadia was going to happen to him.
