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| “ | It's bad enough to be raped, Detective, but when the rapist has HIV, he leaves you with a daily reminder that lasts you the rest of your life! | „ |
| ~ Durning telling Detective Olivia Benson why she murdered two HIV-positive rapists |
Louise Durning is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Victims". She is a vigilante who murders two HIV-positive rapists as revenge for contracting the disease after she was raped.
She was portrayed by Ann Dowd, who also portrayed Aunt Lydia in the TV series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, Joan in Hereditary, Patti Levin in The Leftovers, and Ramona Norville in Big Driver.
Early life[]
Durning was a social worker in New York City who specialized in counseling people with HIV/AIDS - a mission that became personal when she was raped by an HIV-positive man and contracted the disease. Eventually, the retroviral drugs she was prescribed stopped working, and she was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.
Shortly before the events of the episode, she started counseling Thomas Marchek and Craig Moss, two convicted rapists who had contracted HIV in prison. Both men told her that they were not having sex with anyone, but Marchek eventually let it slip that he had a girlfriend, Gloria Palmera.
Fearing that he had infected his new girlfriend, Durning befriended Palmera without telling her that she had counselled her boyfriend, and Palmera told her that she had just tested HIV-positive. She also looked deeper into Moss' criminal history and discovered that he had deliberately infected his victims with HIV as a sick form of revenge for having contracted the disease himself.
Enraged and disgusted at what the two men were doing, Durning decided to kill them both, and started spending time with Marchak and Palmera socially so she could get close enough to him to get a chance to murder him.
"Victims"[]
After Durning sees Sam Winfield, an anti-crime activist and ex-cop, gets into an altercation with Marchak in a restaurant, she decides that the time is right to kill Marchak; she believes that Winfield, who was forced into early retirement after killing an unarmed sex offender, will be suspected of the crime. She then stalks Marchak to the front of his apartment building, shoots him dead, and takes off running. Winfield briefly glimpses her as she flees the scene, but he decides not to pursue her after he discovers who she killed, believing that Marchak got what he deserved.
Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit investigate Marchak's murder and question Durning and Palmera, who both say that Winfield had been harassing Marchak. Benson and Stabler arrest Winfield after finding out that he had shot at another sex offender's window, which gives Durning cover to kill Moss, shooting him to death just as she had Marchak. Since Marchak was killed while Winfield was in custody, Benson and Stabler rule him out as a suspect and let him go.
Gloria, meanwhile, attempts suicide, but Benson and Stabler manage to save her life. As she recovers in the hospital, she says that she killed Marchak, but she appears confused when the detectives ask her about Moss. Skeptical that Palmera committed the murders, Benson and Stabler look for people in her life who knew Marchak and Moss who knew what they had done, and they discover that Durning had counselled both men, owned the same kind of handgun used to kill them, and resembled Winfield's description of the killer.
Benson and Stabler bring Durning into the SVU station house under the pretense of needing to ask her a few more questions about Whitfield harassing Marchak. When they mention that Palmera attempted suicide and confessed to the murders, Durning's conscience gets the better of her and she confesses that she killed both men. When Benson and Stabler ask her why she did it, Durning tearfully reveals that she knew that Marchak gave Palmera HIV, and that she herself has AIDS because she was raped by an HIV-positive man; she then declares that she could not allow Marchak and Moss to infect any more innocent women.
Durning is imprisoned for life for murder, and she presumably dies of AIDS while serving her sentence.
External links[]
- Louise Durning on the Law & Order Wiki
