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| “ | You bitch, you ruined everything! I could have had her! I could have been happy! I hate you! I showed you what it's like to lose someone you love! I showed you! How does that feel? | „ |
| ~ Lasky's enraged rant at Joyce Fuller, which also reveals his guilt |
Ned Lasky is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Pledge". He is a stalker who is obsessed with a sorority girl he met at a college mixer 30 years earlier, and who murders the son of the sorority president to get even with her for throwing him out of the party and, in his mind, ruining his one chance at happiness.
He was portrayed by Matt Malloy, who also portrayed Max Long in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Early life[]
Lasky was born into a working-class family in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied chemistry.
He met a young Dartmouth University student named Susan at one of Amherst's football games and was instantly smitten with her, so he was overjoyed when she invited him to a party for her sorority, Kappa Delta Alpha (KDA). He did not have enough money to rent a car or take a cab, however, so he hitch-hiked to the Dartmouth campus. When he got to the party, Susan, who had only invited him to be polite and did not think he would actually show up, asked the sorority's president, Joyce Foley, to "squash a bug", the sorority's slang term for ridding their social events of people who did not "belong". Lasky was crushed when Foley asked him to leave and ran out of the party; soon afterward, he dropped out of college and went back to his hometown.
Lasky became obsessed with finding Susan again and called multiple colleges with KDA chapters in a fruitless search for her. He also wanted to go to an Ivy League school so he could be worthy of her, but his family could not afford it. He eventually gave up and went to a state school, where he earned a degree in journalism, and went on to get a job as a fact-checker for a small science magazine in New York City.
He married a woman named Nora, with whom he had a daughter, Molly, but he continued to believe that Susan was his soulmate. He made Molly participate in community service and upper-class hobbies like horse-riding so she could someday pledge the sorority and he could find Susan. When Molly did not get into an Ivy League school with a KDA chapter, however, he began treating her with cruelty, calling her a "third-rate daughter from a second-rate wife" with "a face like a homemade pie" and refusing to pay for tuition for the state school she did get into, forcing her to work two jobs and take on massive debt to pursue her degree. He also began vandalizing KDA's website and Wikipedia page with insults and false information, to the point that he was banned from both sites.
By 2007, his obsession with Susan and KDA reached the point that he began traveling around the country to visit every college with a chapter in the hopes of finding her, to no avail. While looking for Susan, he found out that Foley was a wealthy, happily married scientist with an academically gifted son, intensifying his hatred of her; he believed she was leading the life he deserved.
He convinced his boss to let him write an article on Foley and repeatedly called her office to set up an interview, which he planned to use an excuse to confront her about the party. She did not return his calls, however, so he complained to her boss, who agreed to send her to his office at the magazine for an interview. On the day she was to show up, however, an intern arrived in her place, saying that Foley cancelled at the last minute. This was the last straw for Lasky, who went to Foley's house to kill her; when she was not there, he instead shot her son, Eric, and her housekeeper, Grazinya, dead. Then, to rub salt in the wound, he cut off a lock of Eric's hair and anonymously mailed it to Foley from Amherst, Massachusetts with a cruelly taunting note: "His pain is over. Yours is just beginning."
In "Pledge"[]
While investigating the murders, NYPD Homicide Detectives Cyrus Lupo and Kevin Bernard question Lasky about his aborted interview with Foley. Lasky tells them about a study the magazine conducted concerning Foley's research three years earlier that was never published, and implies that Foley embezzled from her employer, Hudson University, and then paid to have the study buried because it contained evidence of her crime. When the detectives ask officials at Hudson about the allegations, however, they say that no such study was ever conducted, and there was no evidence that Foley had stolen from them.
Lasky later attends Eric's funeral and "consoles" Foley in a menacing tone until he is thrown out. Lupo and Bernard, who are staking out the funeral in case the murderer shows up, confront Lasky, who claims that he merely wanted to express his condolences. When Lupo asks him where he was at the time of the murder, Lasky replies that he was working, but that he cannot recall where. They let him go after warning him to stay away from Foley and her husband, but they decide to keep investigating him.
Lupo and Bernard talk with Nora and Molly, who both freeze up when the detectives mention the anonymous letter from Amherst. They throw Lupo and Bernard out, but the detectives read the odometer on Lasky's car as they leave, which confirms that he recently took a 400-mile trip. They then talk with Molly at her work, who at first defends her father, but eventually reveals his emotional abuse and the fact that he sees a therapist for depression. They talk with Lasky's therapist, who says that she cannot break doctor-patient confidentiality, but remarks that if, "hypothetically", she were to find out he had killed someone, she would not be surprised. They once more question Molly, who admits seeing a briefcase in her father's car that resembles the one the killer had been carrying at the time of the murders. Lupo and Bernard then arrest Lasky as he is about to board a train to a college town in Vermont with a KDA chapter.
At his arraignment, Lasky pleads not guilty, and claims that the Foley family, Hudson University, and the "medical establishment" are persecuting him because he was writing a negative story about Foley. He then files motions demanding to know where Assistant District Attorney Connie Rubirosa and the trial judge, Rachel Cates, went to college. Rubirosa and Executive Assistant District Attorney Mike Cutter then uncover another spiteful condolence letter that Lasky wrote to the parents of a female student at Duke University - another school with a KDA chapter - who had died in a traffic accident. Cutter remarks that Lasky seems to have a problem with female Ivy League college students who pledge KDA, and tasks Rubirosa with finding out why.
Rubirosa talks to Lasky's parents and college roommate, who tell her about the ill-fated Dartmouth party and Lasky's subsequent obsession with KDA. She and Cutter show Joyce a picture of Lasky in his college days, and she finally recognizes him as the boy she threw out of the party. Nevertheless, Cutter and Rubirosa still do not have evidence to prove motive, so Rubirosa asks Molly to testify, saying that she is their only chance to stop him from hurting someone else.
During the trial, Molly testifies against her father, although his lawyer insinuates that she is making it up to get the $100,000 reward that Hudson University offered for information that led to the killer's arrest and conviction. Joyce testifies that Susan had asked her to eject Lasky from the party, provoking an angry outburst from Lasky that Cates immediately silences by threatening to charge him with contempt of court. Realizing that he is out of evidence, Cutter asks for a one-day adjournment, which Cates grants. That evening, Rubirosa says she has found Susan, and grimly hands Cutter a file. After reading it, Cutter says he will have to call Susan as a witness.
The following day, Cutter calls to the witness stand a woman named Susan Grayson who went to Dartmouth and pledged KDA, even though Lasky's lawyer objects; Lasky is so excited by the mention of her name, however, that he instructs his lawyer to drop the objection. Grayson testifies that, while she does not recognize Lasky, she would have found it charming if a "blue-collar boy" like him asked her out, and that she went on to marry a man from a working-class background with whom she has a happy marriage and a wonderful family. Lasky shouts that he knew Susan would have loved him if not for Foley, and then gloats that, thanks to him, Foley now knows the pain of losing a loved one. As a horrified Grayson leaves the courtroom, Lasky says that he still loves her.
Having unintentionally revealed his guilt, Lasky is taken into police custody - but not before Cutter tells him that Grayson is not the woman he is obsessed with; his "dream girl", Susan Walden, had been murdered eight years earlier by her wealthy husband during a drug-fueled argument on their yacht. Broken by this revelation, Lasky offers no resistance as he is led out of the courtroom, and later pleads guilty to murder, for which he is sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.
External links[]
- Ned Lasky on the Law & Order Wiki
