Dr. Katrina Pynchon is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Scared Crazy".
She was portrayed by Jennifer Van Dyck.
Biography[]
Dr. Katrina Pynchon served in the U.S. Army and worked under the SERE program at Fort Bragg, where she was training soldiers in how to resist torture and interrogation. After this, however, Pynchon was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where she—ironically—trained people to engage in harsh and tortuous interrogation techniques. At first, she justified her actions by saying that she was defending her country against terrorism, but eventually came to feel ashamed of harming so many people, terrorists or not.
Pynchon used her interrogation methods on one of her patients, computer programmer Robbie Boatman. She locked him inside a room for two weeks; a room that was barely lit and had house music playing nonstop. As a result of his experience, Robbie grew to associate house music with fear and pain. Soon afterward, Robbie overheard his co-worker Aidan Grant listening to house music on headphones, causing him to fly into a panicked rage and crush Grant with a vending machine.
When questioned by Detectives Robert Goren and Alexandra Eames of the NYPD's Major Case Squad, Pynchon doesn't cooperate, only spotting holes in Goren's attempt to deceive her.
Goren and Eames placed Robbie in an interrogation room, and turned off the lights and play house music while Pynchon stood by, horrified that they were apparently abusing her patient. Eames confronted Pynchon about the guilt she felt about what she did at Guantanamo Bay. Pynchon broke down and admitted that she used the methods on Robbie in an attempt to convince herself that what she did in Guantanamo Bay wasn't evil, but that she realized that she had been deceiving herself when Robbie told her about the murder he committed. After Pynchon's confession, Goren opened the blinds and reveals that Robbie was not, in fact, being tortured, and told her that they only made her believe they were torturing him to elicit a confession from her. Pynchon is later arrested, but not before she expressed relief that Robbie was unharmed.
