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| “ | He gave a 13-year-old boy his first hit of coke. He thought it was funny, supplying a cop's brother day after day. | „ |
| ~ Edmunds justifying having murdered the drug dealer who turned his brother into an addict. |
Luke Edmunds is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Rotten". He is a police officer and serial killer who murders the drug dealers he blames for his brother's addiction and death.
He was portrayed by William Mapother, who also portrayed Ethan Rom in Lost, Richard Strout in In the Bedroom, Delroy Baker in Justified, and Parasite in Supergirl.
Early life[]
Edmunds' parents died when he was young, leaving him to raise his younger brother, Bobby. As an adult, he became a police officer. Bobby, meanwhile, became a cocaine addict and eventually died of an overdose.
Edmunds found out that a drug dealer named Javier Vasquez sold Bobby the drugs that killed him. Obsessed with avenging Bobby's death, he murdered Vasquez and five other drug dealers who sold to him, with help from his partner, Les Cooper, who convinced him that they were meting out justice for the families of the addicts whose lives they ruined. Unbeknownst to Edmunds, however, Cooper's motive was greed, not justice - he was secretly working as a hitman for drug lord Hector Ramirez, who wanted to get rid of his competition.
The day before the events of the episode, Edmunds and Cooper arrested drug dealer Carlos Torres and tortured him, with Edmunds at one point sodomizing him with a toilet plunger. They then dropped him off at Riker's Island Prison as if nothing happened.
"Rotten"[]
The following day, Torres is found dead in his cell of internal bleeding caused by the rape. Detectives Olivia Benson and Fin Tutuola of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit investigate his death as a rape-murder, and deduce from the available evidence that he was sodomized after he was arrested. They talk to Edmunds and Cooper, who both claim that they arrested Torres by the book. When Tutuola finds blood on the handle of a toilet plunger in the bathroom of Edmunds' station house, he confronts Edmunds, who confesses to sodomizing Torres.
Suspecting that Edmunds and Cooper killed Torres together, Benson and Tutuola investigate the officers' work history and find that several drugs dealers died under suspicious circumstances after the pair arrested them.
Edmunds, meanwhile, makes a deal with Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot to plead guilty to manslaughter in Torres' death in return for a reduced sentence and making the bad publicity for the NYPD go away. When Benson and Tutuola find evidence that Cooper was working as a hitman for Ramirez, however, they ask her to cancel the deal so they can get leverage on Edmunds for information on his partner.
Benson, Tutuola, and Cabot meet with Edmunds, who declares that his victims deserved to die. When they tell him that Cooper used him to commit murder-for-hire, however, a horrified Edmunds tells them that Cooper shot a drug dealer named Willie Angel, but he survived, so they framed him for attempted murder. Angel corroborates Edmunds' story and is set free, which outrages Edmunds. He also refuses to say anything against Cooper, saying that he owes his partner for saving his life a few years earlier when a suspect in a domestic violence case tried to kill him. Benson persuades him that Cooper used him and the memory of his brother to get rich, however, so he testifies against his partner, leading to Cooper being arrested and Ramirez being sentenced to death.
Edmunds, meanwhile, is sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. He is unable to live with having helped Cooper commit murder for hire, however, so he commits suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet.
Trivia[]
- Edmunds is loosely based upon Justin Volpe, a former NYPD Officer who sodomized Abner Liouima with a broomstick in 1997 after arresting him, a crime for which he served 26 years in prison.
External links[]
- Luke Edmunds on the Law & Order Wiki
