Law & Order: SVU (3/27/2007) The Father, The Son, and The Holy Gay Escort

A man is found dead outside of a church. He is naked and his eyes had been ripped out. As if that weren't enough, he had also been sodomized and gagged with a bag of methamphetamine pills. One can only wonder in what order these things happened, but I am guessing that he was naked and gagging on the pills and whoever was giving him the Heimlich maneuver got a little carried away and accidentally slipped in the back door and then thrust so hard that he popped the poor guy's eyes out. Of course, this is why I am not a detective. Turns out his eyes were eaten posthumously by the black crows hanging out in the graveyard (literally the birds not the hippie stoner-rock band).

The bag of meth pills lead the detectives to think that this may have been some sort of drug deal gone bad, but a run of the victim's DNA through the super-computer doesn't turn up anything. Captain Donald Cragen suggests that they set up a sting and try to lure the killer/rapist back to finish the job. The detectives Photoshop the crime scene photo to make it look like Oedipus himself is still alive and in a coma and they publish the hospital where he is supposedly recovering. Then, Detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson go undercover and wait...

A woman does turn up, but in turns out to be the victim's mother. She identifies the victim as Richard, a medical school dropout-turned-actor. She doesn't mention directly that he was a homosexual, but she did say he was an actor. She gives the detectives his last known address and Detectives Stabler and Benson go to check it out.

A search of Richard's apartment verifies that he really was an actor because there is nothing but collection notices, pasy due bills, and headshots with his stage name, Nick Benchley. The detectives cannot find anything of interest except for a hidden cell phone that Oliva steps on. The geeks at Technical Assistance recover the last text message received. It gives an address and the message “pick up tonight." The cops determine that this address may be a stash house for drugs and so they organize a raid. The cops find something much more disturbing than mere drug dealers or copious amounts of narcotics...they find Christians. Yikes! The warehouse is the rehearsal space for a Christian “Satan House." It is basically a haunted house used to scare kids into thinking that homosexuality, abortion, and rational scientific inquiry will lead them to hell. Before Olivia gets a chance to rape-kit anyone, the detectives get a call from Detective Munch and head back to the station.

Detective Munch claims to have been Googling Richard's stage name, Nick Benchley, and finds that he was the star of a gay escort web page. Detective Fin was also able to run Richard's phone records and find that he was having long conversations with someone from “New Souls Church." New Souls Church caters to a fundamentalist anti-gay congregation. Is this another case of “doth protest too much"? Detectives Benson and Stabler go to the church administration to try and find out who was wasting precious peak-hour cell phone minutes with a gay prostitute. The detectives are halted from talking to the head of the church (no, not Jesus) Reverend Jeb Curtis. Instead they get stuck talking to Trent Levet, a creepy Christ-bot that looks like a ventriloquist's dummy modeled after the Hitler Youth. Trent does reveal that the extension on Richard's phone did go to Reverend Curtis and tells them that the Reverend is presiding over his son's funeral.

The detectives decide to wait until the next day to interrogate Reverend Curtis at his home. The Reverend denies knowing anything about Richard but does take the time to lecture them about homosexuality being a sin against God. A forensic report shows that Richard was killed by being suffocated by one of his own pillows and the DNA on the pillow is almost an exact match of Reverend Curtis. They take him downtown and a mob of newspeople is already gathering in front of his house. Stabler decides to use Curtis' religion against him. No, he doesn't bring up the existence of dinosaurs or talk about the Bible's complete lack of historical evidence, but rather he takes him to his own church. Stabler leads the way and recites a prayer asking for forgiveness of his sins. Unfortunately, he doesn't list them out loud otherwise I am certain we would have heard about his impure thoughts about Danni Beck. Not wanting to be outdone by some almost-divorced, barely-Catholic, Reverend Curtis confesses to the murder of Richard. Actually, he doesn't. He just admits responsibility (whatever that means).

The court is unwilling to admit the confession as evidence because it was taken in an “improper environment". Apparently, a church is no place for a confession in the eyes of the law. Without the confession, and with only a partial match of the Reverend's DNA on the murder pillow, the detectives need to find some real evidence that Jeb Curtis was guilty of killing something other than everyone else's good time. Then it gets handed to them by Mrs. Curtis. Mrs. Curtis stops the detectives at the church and tells them that she had discovered a phone call accidentally recorded on the family answering machine. The call is between Reverend Curtis and Rear-end Richard (sorry, but I have to have at least one awful pun per recap, it's in my contract). Richard is demanding more money from the Reverend and threatening him if he doesn't get it. Wow, talk about irony. This is exactly what preachers do to their congregations every Sunday. I wonder if gay blackmail money is also tax deductible? The detectives take this new evidence to Jeb and his attorney, and Jeb confesses. Again.

The detectives head back to the station and when they arrive they get the news that Reverend Curtis has been shot at the church. They find Richard's blood on a particular verse in the Bible. I am not sure which verse exactly, but I think it is from the Book of Mel Gibson in the New Line Cinema Testament, Act 5, or maybe Scene 3. The detectives are pretty certain that Mrs. Hannah Curtis did it because she seemed like she was wound pretty tight for someone that had ten kids. Mrs. Curtis had already prepared a confession and proudly read it aloud like it was an Oscar speech.

Detectives Benson and Stabler are surprised that she is willing to confess and wonder why the Reverend will only confess to “responsibility" for the crime and not just say that he plugged the gay escort (okay, that's two bad puns). They then realize that it may not have been the father but it may have been one of their gazillion sons and this would explain the partial match of DNA. They go the Curtis house and lean on the daughte,r Lucy. Lucy doesn't take long to tell them that her brother Paul admitted to having gay desires but that he was sent to a special clinic that cured him of his sexual desires. Hmmm...I wonder if this clinic can do anything about curbing my sexual desires? It's getting expensive and if, God forbid, Chris Hansen ever does a Dateline sting to capture guys trying to pay elderly women to have foursomes while singing the Golden Girls theme song, then I am in trouble. Thank YOU for being a friend, Blanche, you oversexed, hot, old raisin.

Stabler and Benson need to ask Paul a few questions so they head over to the Satan House. Paul admits that he met Richard at an audition for the Satan House and that they had a sexual relationship until his father found out. After he left the clinic, Paul continued to see Richard and he admits to sleeping with him on the night he was killed. Paul says that he loved Richard and would have never hurt him and he was clearly into the Christian vanilla variety of gay sex and so it couldn't have been an S & M accident. Paul asks to see his father and so the detectives take him to the hospital where Reverend Curtis is recovering from the gunshot wound. At the hospital, father and son awkwardly reveal that they both thought that the other one had killed Richard. Detectives Stabler and Olivia realize that neither of them are the murderer and ask Jeb who informed him that his son was having an affair with Richard. Trent Levet, the Aryan angel that worked at the church, not only informed the father of the son's sins but also was the only person that could have alerted the media after the father was questioned. He is also the only one that could benefit from the Reverend's downfall.

Trent, in his Christ-induced hypnotic state, proudly admits to killing Richard as part of God's Will. He was willing to let Reverend Curtis take the rap for it because he had a “weak faith".

The episode ends with Hannah Curtis joining her husband and son at the hospital. The three of them all pronounce their forgiveness of each other and the three of them, the hate spewing preacher father, the attempted murdering mother, and the gay escort loving son, sit in a perfect trinity on the hospital bed as a perfect example of Christian Family Values. gAyMEN!