Send in the Clowns on Law & Order: SVU

What a big twist there was at the end of “Send in the Clowns” on the March 21, 2018 episode of “Law & Order: SVU.” On a trip to New York City with their music teachers, teenagers Haley Sadler and Jenni Hanson sneak out to a club for the kind of partying they don’t get to do in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. (They did not neglect to mention that Beaver Falls is NFL Hall of Famer Joe Namath’s hometown.)

Fin’s Birthday Party: meet Fin’s grandson, Jaden

At the Majesty, a circus themed party is going on. Haley and Jenni are dancing when Haley is approached by a guy wearing a clown mask. Although she initially protests with “Stop, you’re scaring me,” she accepts his invitation to have a non-alcoholic drink after telling him that she is “sweet 16.” Then she goes off to dance with him and that was the last that Jenni saw of her. Jenni tried calling her cell phone because they had a 10 pm curfew. Then Jenni stayed out all night, looking for her friend at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center because that’s where a music prodigy like Haley might go.

The next morning, Jenni and the music teachers (James Turner and Charlotte Cooke) show up at the precinct and report Haley’s disappearance. The parents arrive. After determining that Haley has no reason to run away, knows no one in New York City and is just a naive future concert pianist, Turner suddenly finds an email in his spam folder showing Haley in a car with the clown. He takes off his mask! There’s even something from Balzarini Brothers Butcher Shop in Brooklyn on the video. Rollins and Carisi hotfoot it over there and find their “prime” suspect. (Get it?) His name is Vinny Drago and he admits that Haley was at his apartment. He knew she was underage and didn’t do anything to her. They fell asleep and when he woke up, she was gone.

The detectives take Vinny to his place where they find items belonging to Haley in Vinny’s bathroom and they have blood on them. He gets hauled in. He has a rap sheet for threatening his ex with a meat cleaver. The soup he’s in gets thicker when they find out he lied about being home all night and video shows him dragging a really heavy bag by a garbage dump near the water. Vinny tells an incredulous Fin that it wasn’t Haley’s chopped up body in the bag, it was meat, past its “sell by” date. He was selling it to a guy in the restaurant supply business. That certainly made our stomachs churn.

They have no way to confirm Vinny’s story so they go off to search the garbage dump while the parents go on TV to make a public plea and offer a $50,000 reward. Haley’s father promises he will never stop looking for her.

The detectives get bad news that there’s been an early pickup at the dump and a lot of bags have already been incinerated. Olivia Benson starts working on ADA Peter Stone to charge Vinny Drago with murder while Stone is watching a news report on Haley’s life and astonishing musical gifts. We think the news report moved him more than Benson’s machinations. He agrees to charge Vinny with 2nd degree murder and Vinny goes on trial.

Jenni testifies that even though she didn’t see Vinny’s face, she knows him because he had “creepy eyes.” Chris Sadler tearfully testifies to what a perfect angel his daughter was. Vinny’s attorney isn’t asking any questions. He’s not worried because “there’s no body.” James Turner is supposed to testify the next day but, upon hearing Vinny’s attorney say that, he suggests they get the trial postponed till they find Haley’s body. He’s afraid Vinny will be acquitted and when the body does turn up, her death will go unpunished as double jeopardy will apply. Stone says no way.

The next day, James Turner is nowhere to be found. Rollins and Carisi hightail it out to his Pennsylvania home. Turner’s wife tells them, as she did over the phone, that her husband isn’t there and she can’t get a hold of him on his cell phone either. She also tells them how she was sick of her husband doting on Haley. Wow! It was like she was going to say she was glad Haley’s dead but she caught herself and said “it’s a tragedy.” She showed them Turner’s in-home music studio where they found evidence that he was much more than a mentor to Haley. Besides suggestive photos of Haley, they find a song he wrote professing his love to his student.

That got sent over to Benson who showed it to the parents. They remembered meeting a now-rich friend of Turner’s named Alan Hubert, who prefers the pronunciation “Hu-bear.” He tries to blow the detectives off because he is “late for a meeting with Lin Manuel,” but admits he gave Turner a key to his home in Oyster Bay. That’s where they find Turner and Haley together, in bed.

Haley fills in Rollins on the way back to the city on the grand plan to move to Vienna and tour the world playing the sonatas Turner would write her. She never meant for Vinny to go to jail. She was just trying to make him look suspicious because he looked like a criminal. Turner, for his part, tells Fin and Carisi that it’s not child rape at all, it’s “a fugue for two voices, a tenor and a soprano fitting together perfectly.”

Back at the station, Mrs. Sadler (who up till now has been somewhat emotionally flat) wants to kill Turner. She confronts him and knows all about the fugue line because Turner seduced her 17 years earlier. “Do the math,” she screams at Turner. “That’s right, Jimmy. She’s yours. You’ve been sleeping with your own daughter!” Turner almost throws up. Chris Sadler tries to give him a beatdown. Haley is temporarily stunned but, mostly, she’s happy to learn that her real father is not a garbage man. Watch it again. Benson’s reaction is great, like she’s thinking “you have also inherited your real father’s mental illness, kid.”

We knew there was something screwy about Haley from the beginning because what 16-year-old dances with a guy with a mask on? Nah, first she would have to determine that he wasn’t butt ugly underneath that clown mask. But we were not expecting that confession from Mom, that’s for sure. Good heavens, woman! Right in front of everybody! We also didn’t get how they could charge Turner with incest when, as a result of Mom’s very public 16 years too late confession, they all knew he had no idea Haley was his biological daughter.

Also in this episode: Peter Stone confided to Olivia that he made a promise that he would visit his schizophrenic sister, Pamela, who is at the Bayview Mental Health Facility upstate New York. His dad used to go once a week and now that’s on him. We see him go to visit his sister and she thinks he’s “Daddy” when he gives her some little treat that we could not read the label of if you paid us.

Selected Cast of Send in the Clowns:
Mariska Hargitay – Olivia Benson
Kelli Giddish – Amanda Rollins
Ice-T – Odafin Tutuola
Peter Scanavino – Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr.
Philip Winchester – Peter Stone
Mallory Bechtel – Haley Sadler
Amy Korb – Pamela Stone
Will Sasso – Chris Sadler
Wendy Hoopes – Anna Sadler
Molly Brown – Jenni Hanson
Eric Tabach – Vinny Drago
Erik Jensen – James Turner
Jillian Louis – Charlotte Cooke
Don Stephenson – Alan Hubert
Ernest Waddell – Ken Randall
Migs Govea – Alejandro