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| “ | One thing was young, ripe, begging for it. It had the most beautiful brown eyes, almost sleepy... until I went to work. Then they went big and round. First it pleaded. Then it bargained... The thing screamed in pain, yelled in fear. It was alive through every moment of it, even when I gutted it and blood sprayed over me like a warm shower. I can almost taste it! | „ |
| ~ Brodus describing one of his murders. |
Matthew Brodus is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Execution". He is a serial killer on death row whom Detective Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit and forensic psychiatrist George Huang interview in hopes of getting him to confess to the murder of a young girl.
He is portrayed by Nick Chinlund, who also portrayed Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus in Ultraviolet, Agent Calderon in Eraser, Jacob McGivens in The Legend of Zorro, and McNeely in Walker: Texas Ranger.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Brodus' mother abandoned him when he was a child, leaving him in the care of his grandparents. When they died, she sent him to foster care, and years later left him behind when she moved away with his half-sister. When they did interact, she treated him with cruelty, even telling him that she wished she had aborted him. Brodus convinced himself that she loved him, but he nevertheless grew up to hate all other women.
As an adult, he stalked, raped, tortured, and murdered 13 teenage girls - keeping them alive for as long as possible so they would feel the torture he inflicted on them - before he was caught and sentenced to death. However, he was never convicted of killing his 13th victim, Debbie Cooper.
He spent 12 years on death row before his appeals ran out. After his execution date was set, he held a press conference offering to sell tickets to his execution to fund his daughter's education at Our Lady of Light, the school Debbie attended. Since Brodus had no children, Debbie's parents suspected that he was toying with them by flaunting his guilt in a plausibly deniable way.
In "Execution"[]
The Coopers, who always suspected but could never prove that Brodus killed their daughter, contact Detective Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit, who had worked on the case, and ask him to get Brodus to confess to murdering Debbie. Stabler agrees so he, too, can get closure on the case, which drove his former partner to kill himself.
Stabler and forensic psychiatrist George Huang interview Brodus hours before his execution in the guise of wanting him to help them profile another serial killer. Brodus speaks in the abstract about a serial killer's need to degrade and dominate his victims before killing them, but balks when Huang mentions the possibility that the "suspect" had sexually violated his victims' corpses - which Debbie's killer had done. Brodus feigns disgust, but he begins to suspect their real purpose in talking to him.
With time running out, Stabler tries another tactic: confronting Brodus about his mother abandoning him in hopes that he would get angry enough to let something slip. Instead, Brodus waits for his guards to switch shifts, and attacks Stabler and Huang, slamming the latter into the wall. As he tries to strangle Stabler, Brodus says, "Debbie didn't fight back."
Guards rush in and beat him into a coma, and suddenly Stabler realizes that Brodus has been manipulating them all along; he started the fight so the guards would beat him, thus delaying the execution, as it is illegal to put a sick person to death. Brodus is then put on a ventilator, his execution delayed indefinitely.
Personality[]
Brodus is a sadistic sociopath who has violent sexual fantasies of rape, torture, disembowelment, and murder, to the point that he cannot perform sexually unless he is inflicting pain. An extreme misogynist, he sees women as objects rather than people, and refers to his victims as "it" and "the thing". He is also a necrophiliac, the only one of his various paraphilias about which he feels embarrassment and shame.
External links[]
- Matthew Brodus on the Law & Order Wiki
