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| “ | I didn't make him the way that he is! There's always been something wrong with him. I did everything I could to fix it! | „ |
| ~ Mrs. Krug justifying her abuse of her son, Jerry Dupree |
Mrs. Krug is the secondary antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Tortured". She is the abusive mother of murderer Jerry Dupree, whose frequent beatings inflicted brain damage upon her son that caused him to act out violently and kill a woman.
She was portrayed by Margaret Colin, who also portrayed Natalie Gale in Elementary.
Early life[]
Mrs. Krug is a baker who had a son, Jerry, with her first husband, whose last name was Dupree. When Jerry was five years old, she caught him wearing a pair of women's high-heel boots, and she flew into a violent rage and hit the boy over the head as hard as she could. His shoe fetish persisted, however, which so angered her that she inflicted increasingly brutal beatings upon him, including hitting him in the head with any blunt object that was handy. Jerry was too afraid of her to tell anyone about the abuse, so she was able to preserve a reputation as a pillar of their community.
Eventually, she hit him so hard in the head that he was hospitalized. The attending physician suspected abuse, but could not prove it, so he told her that if Jerry had any further head injuries, he would suffer permanent brain damage.
Her beatings only grew more violent, however, especially after her husband died. A few years later, she remarried a man named Krug, with whom she had a son named Brendan. She also beat Brendan, but she reserved her greatest violence for Jerry, who continued living with her and wearing women's shoes well into adulthood. She started hitting him even harder when her husband left her, blaming Jerry's shoe fetish for driving him away.
At one point, she hit him in the head with a frying pan so hard that he had to be hospitalized, although she covered up her crime by claiming that Jerry had sustained his injuries when he walked in on a burglar who had broken into her house.
As the emergency room doctor predicted, Mrs. Krug's abuse left Jerry suffering from irreversible brain damage in the frontal lobe, which houses impulse control and emotional regulation. As a result, he started engaging in antisocial behavior such as burglarizing shoe stores, stalking a woman from Mrs. Krug's bakery, and stealing a date's shoes.
"Tortured"[]
One day, a young woman named Kunsong Bennett showed up at Jerry's door, having gotten the wrong address for someone who was selling their couch online. Jerry is immediately aroused by her feet and asks her to try on a pair of high heeled shoes that he had stolen. Repulsed, she calls him sick and tries to leave; Jerry flies into a fit of rage and strangles her to death with the wiring from the TV he was fixing. He severed her foot and put it in one of the shoes, and then disposed of her body in his mother's bakery truck.
Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit investigate Bennett's murder and briefly question Jerry after the owner of the shoes accuses him of stealing them. They then question Mrs. Krug, whose bakery is right below the apartment that Bennett was directed to. She tells them that Jerry lives there with her, so they get a search warrant for her bakery and find Bennett's blood in her delivery van and on one of her knives. They interrogate Jerry, who eventually confesses to murdering Bennett.
Mrs. Krug hires defense attorney Gina Bernardo to represent Jerry, and she enters an insanity plea on his behalf, arguing that he cannot control his impulses or distinguish right from wrong because of brain damage resulting from a subdermal hematoma on his frontal lobe. Mrs. Krug testifies in his defense that he began acting out violently immediately after a burglar who had broken into their home struck him on the head.
Forensic psychiatrist George Huang examines Jerry's PET scans and notices several healed lesions covering his entire brain, not just the frontal lobe. Detectives John Munch and Fin Tutuola question the EMT who had treated Jerry, who says that Jerry's injuries were the result of an accident, not an assault. Benson and Stabler question Brendan, who admits that Jerry was hospitalized after their mother hit him in the head with a frying pan.
Benson and Stabler meet with Jerry in his jail cell and tell him that Brendan will never be safe living alone with their mother. To protect him, Jerry admits that his mother has abused him all his life, and that he begged her to remember what the doctor said about brain damage while she was hitting him. After Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot persuades her superiors in the District Attorney's office that Jerry's mother knowingly created the conditions that led to Bennett's death, the detectives then arrest Mrs. Krug for second-degree murder at her bakery, in front of her customers. As they take her into custody, Mrs. Krug shouts that she had hit Jerry to "fix" him, and that she is a good mother.
She is then presumably imprisoned for life.
Trivia[]
- Mrs. Krug is loosely based upon the late Marie Brudos, the mother of the late serial killer Jerry Brudos; like Mrs. Krug, Brudos beat her son because he exhibited a shoe fetish and inflicted severe brain damage by hitting him in the head.
External links[]
- Mrs. Krug on the Law & Order Wiki
