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Lawrence "Larry" Moore, also known as The Woodsman, is the overarching antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Signature". He is a serial killer who kidnaps, rapes, tortures, and murders young women to satisfy his sadistic impulses. While his crimes occur offscreen, they drive the plot of the episode.
His actor is unknown as he wasn’t credited.
Biography[]
Larry Moore was born in New York City, approximately 35 years before "Signature". From an early age, he displayed psychopathic tendencies, taking sadistic sexual pleasure in assaulting and harassing young girls his age. He also spent a lot of time with his aunt Helen, visiting her during summers to help with her gardens and often volunteering to clean up Central Park of litter. They would also spend time at the docks to see the ships leave, with Moore having enjoyed the sounds the ships made, which to him sounded like women screaming.
A photo of a young Moore with his aunt Helen, while visiting her for the summer.
During one summer visit to his aunt, while cleaning trash in Central Park, Moore sexually assaulted a few of the girls he was working with. He was sent to a juvenile facility for a few years, but his record was expunged after he was released. After his release, his parents and aunt believed him when he said that the girls were lying about assaulting them. Sometime after his parents’ passing, however, Helen became aware of her nephew’s true nature and what he was capable of, with it being implied that he sexually assaulted her. Following this, Helen cut ties with her nephew, though she never revealed to anyone what he had done to her out of shame and fear of his retribution.
In his twenties, Moore became employed as a maintenance Park Ranger for Central Park. During this time, he would stalk and kidnap young women and bring them to a warehouse he purchased at a New Jersey port, where he would rape and torture them for days until finally waterboarding them to death. He would then dump their bodies in remote areas of Central Park, with no one suspecting him due to his status as a Park Ranger. After killing his third victim, Moore managed to insert himself into the authorities’ investigation by claiming to have found her body in the woods. This allowed him to find out what the police knew about his crimes, and then alter his M.O. accordingly to further elude arrest.
By the time of "Signature", Moore had killed at least 22 women. During his killing spree, the FBI became aware of a serial killer operating in the Central Park area, dubbing him "The Woodsman".
The Woodsman's death after being shot through the head by FBI Special Agent Lauren Cooper.
The FBI assigned Dr. Karl Tilman to the Woodsman case to profile and capture him, and over the next few years Tilman became obsessed with the case. The killer continued to elude him, however, and as the body count grew Tilman became increasingly depressed, blaming himself for the murder of each new victim. His guilt and depression eventually became unbearable, and he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. This resulted in FBI Special Agent Lauren Cooper, Tillman’s protegé and surrogate daughter, becoming obsessed with avenging her mentor, secretly intending to kill instead of arrest the man after finding him.
After picking up from where Tilman left off, Cooper continued to investigate the Woodsman’s activities, with each new victim bringing her more clues to figuring out his identity. Utilizing the information she had gathered, Cooper was able to deduce that the Woodsman was a park employee based on how the victims were found in multiple different jurisdictions. Eventually, she discovered that Moore was the killer and began stalking him, hoping to find and rescue his latest victim.
By this point, however, Moore had already managed to kidnap his 24th victim, a young woman named Amy, whom he imprisoned and tortured inside his Jersey warehouse, before locking her up in extreme cold to the point that she contracts hypothermia. His bloodlust not yet satisfied, Moore left his prisoner to die, as he sought to dispose of the body of his 23rd victim, Kate Barrow, in an area of Central Park close to Manhattan. While dumping the body, Moore was approached by Cooper, who held him at gunpoint with the very firearm that Tillman used to commit suicide. Cooper demanded to know where the serial killer was holding Amy, but Moore, even with Tillman’s gun pressed against his head, refused to tell her. Consumed by her hatred of Moore and recognizing he would never tell her Amy’s location, an enraged Cooper shot him in the head, killing him instantly.
Personality[]
A sadistic psychopath, Moore had no sense of empathy, remorse or fear, was skilled at lying and manipulation, possessed a narcissistic sense of superiority, and took extreme pleasure in hurting and killing others. Even from a young age, Moore was an extremely violent misogynist, viewing the women he tortured and murdered as nothing more than living garbage, and took exceptional pleasure inflicting as much physical and psychological pain upon them as he could in order to satisfy his sadistic impulses. Even his own relatives were not exempt from his cruelty, as it’s implied that at some point Moore viciously assaulted and threatened his aunt after she became aware of his vile nature, an event that left her traumatized and in fear of him for the rest of her life. It is also implied that Moore had planned on becoming a serial killer ever since he was a teenager, as he alluded that the reason he liked to watch ships leave the docks was because of the noise they made, which would be loud enough to cover the screams of his future victims.
As the Woodsman, he subjected his victims to unspeakable acts of physical and sexual torture. Even when he was not in the warehouse where he kept his victims, he would keep a television playing recorded footage and audio of the previous women he had killed as a way of inflicting further psychological agony to his other confined captive. Moore's crimes were so horrendous that even professional sex crimes investigators like Detectives Olivia Benson and Chester Lake of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit, who had dealt with serial killers before, were left horrified upon finding his torture chamber and discovering the sheer scale of the horrors he inflicted upon his victims.
Trivia[]
- While many real-life serial killers were victims of abuse and neglect as children, Moore had no such tragic background to explain his psychopathy and hatred of women.
- Despite only being the antagonist for one episode and not appearing in person, only as a corpse, The Woodsman is arguably one of the most vile, depraved criminals to have appeared throughout the Law and Order franchise, rivaling better-known antagonists William Lewis and Nicole Wallace in terms of psychopathy, sadism, and body count.
- The actor who portrayed the Woodsman was not credited in the episode he appeared in.
External links[]
- Larry Moore on the Law & Order Wiki
- Larry Moore on the Pure Evil Wiki
