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| “ | I cut her, and she screamed. I burned her, and she screamed louder. I pushed my fist into her, and she passed out. I made her say she admired me. I had total control. Total. | „ |
| ~ Bergstrom bragging about killing one of his victims |
Matt Bergstrom is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Agony". He is a serial killer who rapes, tortures, and murders several women, only to be arrested for a murder that someone else committed.
He was portrayed by Christopher Patrick Mullen.
Overview[]
Bergstrom is a misogynistic psychopath who takes sadistic pleasure in raping and torturing women for days before finally stabbing them to death. He works as an editor for the video game company Sandstone, which allows him to travel all over the U.S. and prey on a wide pool of victims, including a woman named Anna Lasky in Houston, Texas.
He prefers to hunt in New York City, where he has murdered at the least six women and assaulted a prostitute. One year before the events of the episode, he talked Erica Davies into his bedroom with promises of consensual S&M roleplaying, but when he began strangling her and ignoring her safe words, she realized he was trying to kill her and managed to get away. She reported him to the police, but she ultimately refused to press charges for fear that her sexual habits being exposed would ruin her career. He was also questioned about Lasky's disappearance, but the Houston police did not have enough evidence to charge him.
"Agony"[]
NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis encounter Bergstrom while investigating the murder of a mail carrier and the brutal torture and attempted murder of a woman named Catherine Lansing.
After forensic psychiatrist Emil Skoda profiles the assailant as a burgeoning serial killer who trolls for victims in bars, they look for women in the area who reported unexpectedly violent encounters with men they met in bars and clubs and talk to Davies. She shows them the apartment where she was assaulted, which turns out to be a vacation rental, and they find sadistic pornography left there by the previous guest - Bergstrom.
Briscoe and Curtis ask for Bergstrom at Sandstone, and a secretary directs them to a restaurant where he has taken a female coworker out to dinner. He agrees to come with them to their station house to answer their questions about Lansing, but he denies ever having met her. When they bring up Davies, he claims that she had asked him to choke her, and then he demands that they let him go. Lieutenant Anita Van Buren persuades Davies to press charges by showing her crime scene photos of Lansing's attack, and Briscoe and Curtis arrest Bergstrom.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael confront Bergstrom in jail with his connections to three sexual assault complaints, so he tries to plead to a misdemeanor charge for which he would pay a fine in lieu of prison. Briscoe and Curtis investigate further and discover that Bergstrom has been a suspect in previous cases involving missing women, including Anna Lasky.
During a meeting with Bergstrom and his lawyer, Frank Lazar, Carmichael threatens to have him extradited to Texas, where he would be executed much sooner than in New York. Bergstrom agrees to plead guilty to second-degree murder and aggravated assault in return for not being extradited to a death penalty state. He also offers to lead them to where he buried six of his victims in return for serving 25 years to life in prison for the postal worker's murder and Lansing's assault and receiving legal immunity for the women he murdered.
When a note is slipped under Lansing's door threatening to harm her worse than before, Briscoe and Curtis investigate and find out that Lansing was in fact assaulted by Michael Ashford at the instigation of his sister, Michelle, who is dating Lansing's ex-husband and wanted to "take care of the competition". McCoy and Carmichael realize that Bergstrom manipulated them to avoid prison time altogether; they cannot try him for a crime he didn't commit, and they cannot go back on the immunity deal.
Bergstrom recants his confession to the six murders, believing he has won, only for Carmichael to reply that the Houston authorities have found Anna Lasky's remains and want to prosecute and execute him for her murder. (Unbeknownst to him, Carmichael is bluffing; she fabricated an extradition order on letterhead from the Houston District Attorney's office, where she worked before moving to New York.) Terrified of being executed and enraged at the idea of a woman having power over him, Bergstrom offers to plead guilty to one of the murders he confessed to in return for life without parole. He then tries to assert a sense of power over Carmichael by gloating to her, in gruesome detail, about what he did to Lasky.
He is then imprisoned for life.
External links[]
- Matt Bergstrom on the Law & Order Wiki
