Leroy Fry, Randolph Ballinger and Julius Stoddard are the main antagonists of the 2022 period murder mystery The Pale Blue Eye. They were a trio of military cadets who ganged up and raped a girl.
Leroy Fry was portrayed by Steven Maier who also portrayed Tony Kelly in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Randolph Ballinger by Fred Hechinger who also portrayed Ethan Russell in The Woman in the Window and Julius Stoddard by Joey Brooks.
Biography[]
Past[]
One tragic day, West Point Military Academy cadets Leroy Fry, Randolph Ballinger and Julius Stoddard cornered Mathilde "Mattie" Landor in a tunnel and violently gang-raped her. Mattie was unable to recognise her rapists, but Landor discovered that Fry was one of them through finding his dog tags. Mattie committed suicide days later.
Landor forged a lover's note to Fry, persuading him to meet for a tryst at night. When Fry arrived, Landor struck him with his cane, wrapped a rope around his neck and ordered him to name his fellow rapists. Fry refused and Landor used a nearby tree branch to hang Fry to death before fleeing. Fry's body is discovered by a patrolman, Cadet Huntoon. Huntoon fled to alert the others; meanwhile, Artemus Marquis came across Fry's corpse and carved out his heart to use in his family's occult rituals to heal his sister Lea.
The Pale Blue Eye[]
Landor is called to investigate Fry's murder and decides to use his position to find his daughter's two other rapists and kill them, as well as find a scapegoat to pin his crimes on. He befriended another cadet, Edgar Allan Poe, and discreetly recruited him to spy on his fellow cadets. This leads to Poe having an altercation with Ballinger over their shared infatuation with Lea Marquis, which Landor breaks up.
Landor later isolated Ballinger (possibly under the pretence of interrogating him), attacked him and forced him to reveal Stoddard's involvement in Mattie's rape before beating him to death with his cane, clumsily removing his heart and hanging his corpse. Realising that the killer is targeting the men who raped Mattie, Stoddard deserted the academy and fled, frustrating Landor as he was unable to kill all his daughter's rapists, although he conceded that Stoddard will spend the rest of his life worried about being killed.
After being killed in a fire after kidnapping and attempting to kill Poe, Artemus and Lea are posthumously framed for Fry and Ballinger's murders, but Poe realises that Landor was behind the murders through speaking with his lover Patsy and recognising that his note to him and his note to Fry had similar handwriting. Poe confronts Landor, but burns the notes.
Trivia[]
- In the book, Stoddard was mentioned to be murdered in Baltimore after fleeing the academy, possibly by Landor or Poe.
- Whether Stoddard ever deduced that Landor was the murderer or not is unknown.