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| “ | I promise you she's dead unless you find my brother. | „ |
| ~ Gregory threatening to kill a woman he supposedly kidnapped unless Stabler finds his kidnapped brother |
Gregory Engels is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Spectacle". He is a college student who stages a fake rape and kidnapping in order to attract police attention to his brother, who was kidnapped years earlier.
He was portrayed by Spencer Treat Clarke, who also portrayed Corey Holland in the remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Jordan Halloran in Criminal Minds, Werner von Strucker in Agents of SHIELD, and Mike Ryerson in Salem's Lot.
History[]
Early life[]
When Gregory was 10 years old, his parents died in a plane crash. He and his one-year-old brother Jason were taken into the foster care system, only to be sheltered by two drug addicts who neglected them to the point of abuse.
Two years later, Jason was kidnapped by Miriam Penner, a mentally ill woman who was under the delusion that the boy was a "replacement" for her own son, Danny, who died of leukemia when he was the same age as Jason. Several people saw Jason being kidnapped, but, in a classic "bystander effect", no one did anything to help, and they all gave wildly varying accounts of the kidnapping to police. Jason's kidnapping was initially a big news story that galvanized the NYPD to find him, but as time went on and the investigation went nowhere, the media moved on to the next big story, and the kidnapping case went cold.
As a young man, Gregory went to Westmore College to study IT engineering, and developed an impressive array of technological skills, including the ability to produce and broadcast Internet video feeds. His grief over Jason's kidnapping and his anger at the police and news media for ignoring it never went away, however, and he became obsessed with finding him. He called and emailed every police department in the city asking for follow-ups and offering to help and even hiring a private investigator, but he was ignored.
Gregory gets the idea to fake a rape and broadcast it all over the university's intranet, and then to leave clues involving Jason's kidnapping so that the NYPD's Special Victims Unit, which has a high closure rate for crimes against children, so they will investigate the case. To that end, he paid his classmate Doug and an aspiring actress named Lizzie Harmon to play the rapist and the victim, respectively, having Doug wear a ski mask and a tattoo reading "Try or Die" in Chinese characters, as Gregory filmed the "rape" against the backdrop of the college's basement, spray-painted with "see no evil". An hour later, he broadcast it all over campus.
"Spectacle"[]
Gregory's classmates are horrified when they see the "rape", but no one does anything about it for at least an hour, when Gregory all but forces one of his friends to call the police. SVU Detective Elliot Stabler investigates the supposed assault, at one point questioning Gregory, who volunteers at the school's tech management department.
Gregory then leads Stabler and Detective Fin Tutuola on a wild goose chase across the city by rerouting the IP address of Lizzie's iPhone, directing them to several locations, all bearing graffiti reading "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil". Just as Gregory intended, the crime creates a media frenzy.
Stabler and Fin trace a series of calls Lizzie made to disposable cell phones, and the owner of the store where the cell phones were purchased emails them surveillance photos of the four customers who bought them from him - the last one being Gregory. Just then, Gregory livestreams Lizzie being bound while screaming for help. Stabler and Fin follow the livestream signal to an apartment a few blocks away which is empty except for a laptop computer reading, "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" and displaying an image of Lizzie, bruised and crying.
The SVU team eventually discovers that the empty apartment Gregory sent Stabler and Fin was in fact Gregory and Jason's childhood home, leading them to uncover the death of their parents, their placement in foster care, and Jason's kidnapping. Gregory then texts Stabler that he can find Lizzie if he goes, alone, to an address in Queens that he provides. There, he finds Gregory, who shows him an iPad with a live feed showing Greg, once again masked, supposedly menacing Lizzie. He gives Stabler an extensive file he has kept on Jason's kidnapping and tells him he will kill Lizzie unless the detective finds his brother.
Stabler develops a rapport with Gregory by taking his brother's kidnapping seriously, even though he cannot find an answer in the evidence Gregory has found. He then tells Gregory that Lizzie's mother is going through the same pain he has suffered for eight years and promises to find Jason if he lets her go. Just as Gregory seems about to reveal her location, however, Captain Donald Cragen bursts in and arrests him, having located them by tracing the signal from Gregory's phone. Feeling betrayed, Gregory breaks the iPad and declares that Stabler and Cragen have just killed Lizzie.
Stabler tries one last time to reach Gregory and sees that he does not have it in him to kill anyone, which means that Lizzie is still alive. Stabler, Fin, and Cragen reinvestigate Jason's kidnapping and interview the witnesses, who all give differing accounts. They all mention their neighbor "Mrs. Penner" being present when Jason was kidnapped, but she does not appear in any witness reports, nor was she ever questioned by police. Stabler asks Gregory about her, and he says that he had babysat her son as a child until the boy died. Stabler looks up Penner's records and finds that she spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital after Danny's death and that she drives a green Subaru, the one detail that the witnesses all agree on.
Suspecting that Penner is the kidnapper, Stabler and his partner, Detective Olivia Benson, drive to her house. She tries to drive off, but Benson and Stabler cut her off and arrest her. They search her car and find Jason in the trunk. Keeping his word, Greogry tells Stabler where to find Lizzie, thereby revealing that the rape and kidnapping was a ruse and that no one actually got hurt. Gregory says he knows he is going to prison but that it was worth it to find Jason; seconds later, Benson brings Jason to him, and the long-lost brothers embrace.
External links[]
- Gregory Engels on the Law & Order Wiki
