Dr. Greg Yates

Dr. Gregory "Greg" Williams Yates was the main villain in the episodes of "Chicago P.D.", "Chicago Fire" and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."

He was portrayed by actor Dallas Roberts.

Background
Yates was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Michael and Susan Williams. At a young age, he already exhibited disturbing behavior such as killing numerous animals and setting the basement of his home on fire.

When his mother became pregnant with his sister Nellie, his parents decided to give Yates away for adoption to protect the baby. His father personally drove him to North Carolina, where he was adopted by another family and raised under the surname of Yates. Yates believed that his mother had abandoned him and grew up to hate her and all other women.

He attended medical school at Duke University where he met Susie Frain when she was a freshman and they started dating. The couple also got acquainted with fellow med student Carl Rudnick and his then-girlfriend Lena Grunwald. They all eventually graduated together and Yates became a surgeon. Yates and Susie later made plans to move to New York after Yates accepted a job as a professor at Columbia University.

Before Yates left, he kidnapped, raped and murdered a pregnant woman named Gillian Hale. He then took advantage of the move to discreetly transport her body and bury her in a forest near a beach in New York City. While in New York, he also acquired a residency at Presbyterian Hospital and Rudnick became an attending surgeon.

Yates also continued to rape and murder women while disposing them in his burial ground. He eventually raped and murdered two nurses (crimes that were investigated by Detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson at the time).

What connected both of them was that Yates painted their nails green during the crimes and, after killing them, burned their bodies instead of burying them, to eliminate any forensic evidence left behind.

Yates later kidnapped, raped and murdered another nurse named Debra McCulloch, but unlike the other two, he buried her along with his other victims on the beach. Afterwards, he moved around, raping and killing women wherever he went, bringing the bodies to New York to bury them.

Crimes in Chicago
Yates eventually got a job in Chicago with MedCare and restarted his rape/murder spree by targeting a nurse named Victoria Lewyn.

In the Chicago Fire episode "We Called Her Jellybean," he rapes & beats Victoria, paints her nails green and sets her house on fire to kill her.

In the Chicago P.D. episode "The Number of Rats," Officers Kim Burgess and Sean Roman later catch Yates driving a car fleeing the scene of the fire and take him into custody, saying that the car he is driving struck someone.

Yates is cooperative with Detectives Lindsay and Amaro, giving them all of his information as they talk about his work records. All the while, he has his eye on Lindsay. When the detectives start showing photos of the victims to Yates, he becomes suspicious and denies that he knows them.

Yates then leaves after he asks if he is under arrest and they say no. He greets Nadia Decotis on the way out. Yates then calls Lindsay and asks to meet her at a park, which she agrees to do. Before the meeting, he rapes and kills another woman.

Afterwards, Yates sets up a remote incendiary device to be triggered while they are talking, in order to set up an alibi for himself and goes to meet Lindsay. He approaches her & insists that they walk and talk, which Lindsay reluctantly agrees to do. Yates begins talking about the revolution in Egypt and brings up the law of unintended consequences. He then leaves Lindsay as they get the call about the newest victim.

After leading them on a wild goose chase, Yates approaches Nadia as she is getting a cake for Lindsay's birthday. He greets her again & then knocks her unconscious with a tire iron and forces her into the back of Lindsay's car (which Nadia had been borrowing).

First Spree and Trial
In the Law & Order: SVU episode "Daydream Believer," Yates drives Nadia to New York City, wrapping her in green plastic and swapping the car's license plates at a rest stop in Elkhart, Indiana. As he drives, he taunts Nadia by singing along to music on the road at full volume.

Then, Yates stops at a gas station in Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania, and buys supplies and more green nail polish. While paying for them, he spots a mother & her baby and helps her with her items. He then watches both of them as they leave.

Upon leaving the store, he is approached by a trucker who tells him about something moving around in the backseat, unaware that it is Nadia. Yates jokes that he kidnapped a girl who is resisting violently, then claims that it is his dog. Once the man walks away, he gets into the car, unwraps Nadia, and threatens to knock her out again if she continues resisting.

When Nadia begs Yates to let her go and promises not to tell anyone that he was responsible, Yates replies that she missed her chance at doing that and tells her about the trucker, claiming he is still nearby. Nadia promptly screams, but Yates cranks the radio volume up again and tauntingly tells her that she should tell him something about herself as they have a long drive ahead of them.

Later on, as Yates makes another stop in Plainfield, New Jersey, he tells Nadia that they will arrive at New York soon. Nadia tells him that she will not cave in to him and that Sergeant Hank Voight will make him regret killing her in the first place before spitting in his face, but Yates is not deterred. When they arrive at New York, he forces Nadia to change cars while she leaves her scarf in the old car. He then rapes, tortures and murders her. He buries her in his burial ground.

Afterwards, Yates charms his way into an apartment where he rapes a pair of roommates and bludgeons both of them, killing one and putting the other in a coma. Yates is then tracked down to Susie's house, sometime after he proposed to her. As he is arrested, Voight demands to know where Nadia is, but Yates denies knowing what he is talking about.

During the interrogation, he claims that he visited the Chicago precinct but found only Nadia, who offered to give him a ride to New York. He then frustrates Detective Jay Halstead by claiming Nadia looked up to him and wanted to escape. He then briefly hints at what he did to Nadia, wording his statements as rhetorical guesses and subtly taunting Voight.

With Susie's unknowing help, they eventually find his burial ground, find Nadia's body and charge Yates for the rape, sodomy, and murder in the first degree.

With the judge's approval, Yates represents himself with his attorney, Sofia Crane, as his co-counsel during the trial. He puts on a defense to create reasonable doubt through Nadia's past as a drug-addicted prostitute as well as previous suspicion on another suspect, Halstead's brother Will, and his claims that the Chicago Police Department was abusing her. However, during his testimony, he begins to visibly revel in his manipulation of the court and go off-topic in his responses to questions.

Realizing that he is getting off on it, A.D.A. Rafael Barba decides to trick Yates into revealing his true nature to the jury by showing him the autopsy photos of Nadia during the trial which prompts Yates to have Medical Examiner Melinda Warner explain the full extent of the injuries that Nadia suffered while relishing the descriptions of her pain and suffering rather than making an attempt to create reasonable doubt.

Yates is subsequently convicted of all charges and sentenced to life in prison without parole at the Green Haven Correctional Facility. Before sentencing, while Yates is washing up, he is confronted by Voight, who chokes him for a moment & then lets him go, telling him that if he lowers his guard in prison, someone will do to him what he did to Nadia.

Incarceration
In the SVU episode "Devil's Dissections," SVU detective Amanda Rollins questions Yates in prison after a body washes up where Yates had buried his victims. Rollins accuses Yates of killing this new victim; Yates implies someone else is responsible but won't elaborate. He asks Rollins to wait for a while and come back when he is ready to share, and she leaves.

Yates then calls Rollins twice to set up a meeting and she agrees, but is forced to bring Fin with her, which Yates isn't happy about. Yates then reveals an incident from 2002 in which he was called to a townhouse by another doctor to treat his wounds and he suspected that he killed someone. He gives them the address while withholding the doctor's name.

When the SVU detectives discovers a body buried in the townhouse, Yates claims to know who she is and who killed her, but will only talk if they grant him conjugal visits with Susie.

Barba reluctantly agrees, and after one such visit, Yates reveals that the woman is Lena and the killer is Dr. Carl Rudnick, his friend from school. Benson and Rollins don't believe him and leave in disgust, thinking Yates was lying to them. When Yates hears that Rudnick is an M.E., he asks if Rudnick autopsied any of his victims.

When they confirm it, Yates theorizes that such an act would be a trigger and would cause him to kill again. He then tells them to check the body that washed ashore again, as he is positive the killer cut the victim up while she was still alive.

When SVU starts to seriously consider Dr. Rudnick as a suspect, they ask Susie to find a photo of Rudnick posing as Lena to prove their theory. Susie eventually finds the photo, but Yates tells her to use the photo to blackmail Dr. Rudnick into setting him free. This backfires when Rudnick kills Susie. When he doesn't get a call from Susie as he expected, Yates starts to get concerned.

When Rollins calls Yates to inform him about Susie's disappearance, he shares his concerns and asks if Rudnick is still imprisoned. When she informs him he made bail, Yates realizes what happened. The police eventually finds Susie's dismembered body washed ashore and Rollins notifies him of her death. He then asks them to see her body and to test to see if she is pregnant.

In the SVU episode "Criminal Pathology," Dr. Rudnick is arrested for the three murders he committed. A.D.A. Barba sends Rollins to talk to Yates for more information they can use at the trial. He tells Rollins that Susie went to Rudnick to blackmail him for his freedom in exchange for hiding the photo. Yates speculates that Susie wanted him out so they could raise their baby together, stating that he knew she was pregnant even though she didn't tell him about it. He also implies that Rollins might be pregnant herself.

After Dr. Rudnick is convicted of his crimes, Yates expresses his disappointment. He subtly confesses that after Rudnick killed Lena and called him over to have wounds inflicted on him treated, he gave Rudnick advice on how to better control his future victims and helped hide the body. At the end of the episode, Yates catches up with Rudnick in the prison cafeteria.

Escape From Prison
During his imprisonment, Yates began paying a corrupt guard to slip him burner phones so he could do research on his family. When he discovered the location of his family and learned of an escape plan devised by Rudnick and prison employee, Bronwyn Freed-Wilkins, Yates implicitly confesses that several remains found at his primary disposal site in New York belonged to runaways from Chicago.

In the SVU episode "Nationwide Manhunt," Detectives Lindsay and Antonio Dawson are sent from Chicago to New York to interrogate Yates, but Yates refuses to cooperate unless he can speak with Detective Rollins. When Yates is able to speak with Rollins, he offers to share more details under the condition that he is transferred to the prison's honor block which is reluctantly accepted.

When Sergeant Benson, ADA Barba and Sergeant Mike Dodds arrive at Green Haven to visit Yates, drones suddenly appear at the prison, causing a small riot among the prisoners. At the same time, Rudnick finishes creating a hole in the wall of his cell with the tools he got from Bronwyn and takes Yates with him.

They both crawl through a pipe leading out of the prison where they kill two electrical workers who assisted Rudnick, then Yates leaves behind a taunting note written in green nail polish for the SVU to find.

The two then rendezvous with Bronwyn, who drives them over to her house and provides them with weapons. Afterwards, Yates gags her, stuffs her in the trunk of her car and tells Rudnick to kill her, but Rudnick

Unbeknownst to him, Rudnick doesn't do it and merely fakes her death.

Yates and Rudnick make their way to Gloversville, New York where they hide out in a house that abandoned for the winter. They are found by a state trooper, but Yates manages to rape and murder her. He then attacks Rudnick and leaves him to die, but Rudnick is rescued by the SVU squad.

Meanwhile, Yates murders another state trooper and uses his body to lure in Lindsay and Dodds, both of whom he shoots at with the trooper's stolen gun. He then flees to a cabin, where he carjacks a man, kills him and leaves a taunting note for Lindsay, telling her he will be seeing her back home.

Final Showdown & Death
In the Chicago P.D. episode "The Song of Gregory Williams Yates," Yates returns to Chicago to find his sister, Nellie Carr. During this time, he started using the spyware on Lindsay's phone to keep tabs on the investigation. Yates arrives at an apartment complex, finds the apartment his sister owns and knocks on the door. He charms his way into the apartment and brutally murders all four of Nellie's roommates (who were nurses) trying searching for her.

When he didn't find Nellie, Yates goes to her workplace and asks a couple of students where she was. They inform him she was covering class and was headed to the parking lot. While he waits, he calls Lindsay by spoofing her mother's phone number, but she ignores it.

When Yates finally finds Nellie, he kidnaps her, leaving another note taunting Lindsay and revealing that he knew she was at the station. He starts interrogating Nellie about her past and keeps mentioning how everyone needs a home. He starts handing the stuff he stole from his victims off to homeless vagrants to throw the police off his trail and pays another homeless woman to deliver a box to the station, containing one of his victims' hands holding another note.

Yates then breaks into Lindsay's apartment, bringing Nellie with him. He checks on Lindsay through the spyware and monitors her when she opens the box. As soon Lindsay reads the note, he calls her again spoofing her mother's number and FaceTimes her.

Yates shows Lindsay that Nellie is still alive and continues taunting her. Lindsay tries to elicit a confession from Yates on the four nurses he killed, but he refuses, starts ranting about Cain and Abel, and hangs up on her. Yates then locks Nellie in a closet and warns her that if she tries to escape, he will kill her.

Later on, Yates locates his biological father Michael, attacks and kidnaps him. Using Nellie's phone, he calls his mother's cell phone. When Lindsay and Nellie answer the phone, Lindsay tells Sergeant Platt to take Nellie somewhere safe and listens to Yates talk about Cain and Abel again.

Lindsay turns the tables on Yates and starts taunting him with the fact that she reminds him of his mother. He informs her that her team is on their way to the wrong location, which he pointed them to. As one of Lindsay's colleagues triangulates his location, Yates invites Lindsay to come over and promises to talk to her when she gets there, but threatens to kill Michael unless she comes on her own.

When Lindsay arrives, Yates has his father in a chair, perched over an edge with a noose tied around his neck. When Lindsay tries to call for help, Yates forces her to hang up her phone and her gun. He then instructs her to sit down, gives her a full confession of all his crimes and begins taunting her over Nadia's murder and their similarities.

After Yates is done, he pushes Michael over the edge and ends up hanging him. He then grabs an ice pick and starts moving toward Lindsay, taunting her that she will be the one to kill him.

Lindsay warns him to stay back, but Yates keeps edging closer and closer, declaring that she will be the one to tell his story and repeatedly daring her to kill him. Finally, Lindsay is forced to shoot him in self-defense, killing him once and for all.