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| “ | Speaking as a concerned citizen, I wish the police were half as capable as this fellow seems to be. | „ |
| ~ Rowan speaking in the abstract about his own murders |
Harry Rowan, Sr. is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Dead". He is a contract killer who uses his cousin's funeral home to cover up his own murders.
He is portrayed by Jay O. Sanders, who also portrayed Ranch Wilder in the 1994 remake of Angels in the Outfield.
Overview[]
Rowan owns his own business consulting firm, M&H Consulting, and has two children with his wife, Susan. Behind his respectable, family man exterior, however, he is a psychopathic contract killer with dozens of murders to his name, working mostly for organized crime families in New York City. He hides his secret life from his family by telling them he is going on a "business trip" every time he goes to kill someone. At one point in his career as a hit man, he murdered his own brother.
In his capacity as a consultant, Rowan goes over the books of a crematorium owned by his cousin, Russell Matthews, and discovers that Russell is embezzling from his own company by burying the bodies he receives from funeral homes in a mass grave and giving their families urns full of debris. Rowan helps Matthews cover up his fraud while using it to conceal his own crimes; he takes DNA from the bodies and places them on the bodies of the people he kills in order to divert police attention and create reasonable doubt in the event that he is ever caught and tried.
In "Dead"[]
When one of the crematorium's customers, Damon Tyler, complains to one of the funeral homes that Matthews works with that he has not received his mother's ashes, Matthews fears that his fraud scheme will be exposed, and goes to Rowan for help. That night, Rowan strangles the funeral home's director, Douglas Hagman, and makes the murder look like the work of a religious fanatic by manipulating the corpse into a crucifixion pose and injecting it with a hand sanitizing lotion that leaves blemishes resembling plague sores, a reference to the Biblical Sixth Plague.
Rowan then goes on another "business trip" and kills another target. He brings his victim's body home with him and puts it in the freezer in his garage, at one point nonchalantly opening it to get ice cream for his daughter, before finally putting the corpse in the plastic-lined trunk of his car.
Detectives Robert Goren and Alexandra Eames of the NYPD's Major Case Squad investigate Hagman's murder, quickly deducing that the killer is trying to throw them off his trail, as a genuine religious fanatic would consider it a sin to desecrate a corpse. They go through Hagman's business records and discover that Tyler had threatened to sue the crematorium unless he got his mother's ashes on time. They then speak with Tyler, who says that his mother had a pacemaker, which appears to clash with Hagman's paperwork, which has no record of such a device. They then show up unannounced at the crematorium to question Russell, and discover the mass grave. They arrest Russell, but Goren thinks someone else committed the murder. He investigates Russell's business, and finds out that Rowan sometimes does consulting work for him.
Goren and Eames question Rowan at his home, and Goren notes his lack of affect upon hearing the gory details of the mass grave. Goren "accidentally" gets grease on his hands and asks Rowan if he can use the hand sanitizer he saw in Rowan's garage, a request that Rowan obliges. Goren then has the sanitizer analyzed in the NYPD's crime lab, and discovers that it is the same lotion used on Hagman's corpse, revealing Rowan as the killer. Goren also runs the DNA of the bodies found behind the crematorium through a national database, and discovers that it matches the DNA found at the scene of several mob hits. They try to get Russell to tell them about Rowan, but he refuses, terrified that his cousin will kill him if he talks.
Determined to unnerve Rowan into making a mistake, Goren and Eames tell Susan that her husband is a hired killer, and show her pictures of his victims. As intended, Susan tells Rowan about the encounter, angering Rowan so much that he goes to the Major Case Squad's precinct, with Susan in tow, to complain. Goren takes Rowan into his office, and plays to his ego by marveling at "the killer"'s meticulous planning and effortless staging of the crime scene; Rowan smugly replies that he wishes the police were half as capable as "this fellow". Goren then goes out of the office to ask Susan something outside of Rowan's earshot, before telling the Rowans they are free to go.
Suddenly paranoid, Rowan asks Susan what Goren had said to her, and she says that he had asked if she had ever seen a porcelain dental cap anywhere in the garage. Believing that the dental cap had fallen out of his latest victim's mouth, Rowan spends the entire night tearing the garage apart looking for it, to no avail. When Susan asks him what he is doing, he uncharacteristically loses his cool and screams at her to go to bed. Early the next morning, Goren, Eames, Assistant District Attorney Ron Carver, and several uniformed police officers show up at Rowan's house with a search warrant, only to find Rowan with a bizarre smile on his face, declaring proudly that he had not made a mistake. Carver says, "Sounds like an admission of guilt to me," and the officers arrest Rowan as a horrified Susan looks on. When Carver remarks that Rowan had made a costly mistake, Goren and Eames reply that the victim did not have any dental caps, revealing that they had tricked Rowan into exposing his own guilt.
Rowan is then imprisoned for life.
External links[]
- Harry Rowan, Sr. on the Law & Order Wiki
