| “ | I keep telling you, Mr. Anders had nothing to do with this! | „ |
| ~ Mellors defending Stefan Anders to the end. |
Kyle Mellors is the secondary antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Evil Breeds". He is a neo-Nazi record producer who murders a Holocaust survivor to prevent her from testifying against his idol, Nazi war criminal Stefan Anders.
He was portrayed by David Marshall-Green, who also portrayed Mitch Wilkens in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Jackson Brice in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Early life[]
Mellors was born into a comfortably middle-class family, but his parents taught him to hate Jews and non-whites; as a result, he developed an obsession with Nazi Germany and idolized Adolf Hitler and the other perpetrators of the Holocaust. As an adult, he became a record producer with Heritage Records, a label that specialized in racist and antisemitic heavy metal.
While he genuinely believed in the neo-Nazi cause, however, he felt insecure next to the rough, street-brawling skinheads who made up Heritage's roster of musicians; due to his privileged, suburban upbringing, he had never actually been in a fight, let alone committed a hate crime. He dealt with this insecurity by taking annual pilgrimages to Germany to go to "white power" rallies.
Shortly before the events of the episode, he met and befriended one of his heroes, Nazi war criminal Stefan Anders, a former concentration camp guard who murdered five female camp prisoners. Anders told him that he was facing deportation back to Germany to be tried before a war crimes tribunal, and that the chief witness against him, former camp prisoner Leah Glaser, was going to testify that he murdered the five women, including her sister, Rebecca. Eager to impress his idol, Mellors volunteered to kill Glaser, unaware that Anders had been manipulating him to do so since the moment they met.
"Evil Breeds"[]
Mellors stalks Glaser to her apartment, where he breaks down the door, shoves her into the wall so hard that it fractures her skull, and then asphyxiates her with his bare hands. He takes her locket as a trophy and later gives it to Anders to celebrate her death.
NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Ed Green investigate Glaser's murder and find out about her testimony against Anders, whom they arrest after finding Glaser's locket in his apartment. Mellors gets him an expensive lawyer, Dan Jensen, who tries, unsuccessfully, to use Holocaust denial as a trial strategy. This argument, though thrown out of court, makes Anders and Mellors even more popular with Heritage Records' fanbase, all avid Holocaust deniers.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn find it suspicious that Mellors would pay Anders' legal bills, so they send Briscoe and Green to Heritage Records' offices to talk to him. Mellors is polite but disdainful of Briscoe, who is Jewish, and Green, who is Black, as he denies knowing Anders and dismisses Anders' legal defense fund as one of many charitable causes he contributes to. Green tricks him into giving them his DNA by asking for an autograph. When the DNA is found to match that left on Glaser's body, they arrest him.
McCoy and Southerlyn offer Mellors a prison sentence of 20 years to life in return for his testimony against Anders. Mellors refuses, however, claiming that he killed Glaser on accident while trying to persuade her not to testify against Anders; he also insists that Anders had nothing to do with Glaser's death. Fed up, McCoy decides to charge both Mellors and Anders together with first-degree murder.
During the trial, Mellors' business partner, David Levinson, testifies on his behalf, claiming that the racist and antisemitic lyrics sung by the bands signed to Heritage Records are merely a shock value gimmick designed to sell records, and that neither he nor Mellors would engage in actual hate crimes or associate with people who did. When McCoy plays the jury a recording of Glaser tearfully recounting what Anders did to her sister, however, they are so horrified and outraged that they find both Mellors and Anders guilty.
External links[]
- Kyle Mellors on the Law & Order Wiki
