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| “ | I killed all of them. They were my girls. They were mine, you understand me? You had no right to go in there and disturb 10 years - 10 years! - of my work! | „ |
| ~ Trace Lambert cursing Olivia Benson for ruining his "work". |
Trace Lambert is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "They'd Already Disappeared". He is a serial killer who murders and mummifies women.
He was portrayed by Blake DeLong.
Biography
Early life
Lambert was raised by his mother Maggie, a cruel, angry woman who repeatedly mocked him and called him a failure. Just as she predicted, he grew up to be a chronic underachiever, flunking out of high school and getting stuck in a menial job with a traveling carnival. Beneath his ne'er-do-well exterior, however, Lambert was in fact highly intelligent and resourceful, and put his intellectual gifts to work at his only passion: torturing and murdering women.
He committed his first known murder when he poisoned a landlord who was showing a rental garage, giving him a space to "work" as he honed his violent fantasies and prepared to make them a reality. He then killed Meredith Hart, a woman with whom he was obsessed and who he told a skeptical Maggie was his girlfriend, after raping and torturing her for days. He kept her body in the garage, treating it with household chemicals until it was effectively mummified.
He then began kidnapping, raping, and murdering women as he traveled around the country with the carnival, preying on prostitutes and runaways because he thought they would not be missed. The women he murdered in his native New York City he kept mummified in the garage, experimenting on their organs with household chemicals.
By the time of the episode, he had been active as a serial killer for 10 years, having murdered dozens of women.
In "They'd Already Disappeared"
Special Victims Unit detectives Amanda Rollins and Joe Velasco discover Lambert's murders while investigating the sexual assault and kidnapping of two prostitutes, Tanya and Beauty. A young boy in the neighborhood tells them that a "vampire" had taken the women into the garage, and frequently went into and out of the garage at night. Rollins and Velasco go into the garage and notice a foul smell. Upon investigating further, they discover several mummified bodies and jars filled with human organs. The grisly crime scene horrifies even veteran police officers like Captain Olivia Benson, who admits that she has never seen anything like it in more than 20 years of investigating sex crimes.
The detectives find Lambert after questioning Meredith's young son, who says that he had last seen her getting into a pickup truck with a strange man. The boy, an autistic savant, provides them with the exact license plate number. They arrest Lambert at Maggie's apartment, where he lives with her. At first, Lambert denies having anything to do with the murders, while Maggie tells Benson that he is not smart enough to have gotten away with so many murders.
While interrogating Lambert, Benson says that the killer must be highly intelligent, and even expresses admiration for his skill with forensics. She then tells him that his mother thinks he is too stupid to have done it. As intended, this tactic pumps up Lambert's ego and wounds it at the same time, and gets him to start talking. He begins talking about the murders in the abstract, detailing the years of study the killer put into sciences such as taxidermy, anatomy, and chemistry, and the intelligence and sophistication it would require to commit so many murders undetected. When Benson dismisses the possibility that someone like him could be that smart, it pushes Lambert over the edge; determined to prove his superiority, he admits to all of the murders, bragging about what he did to the victims and demanding that Benson tell his mother what he did.
At the end of the episode, SVU Sergeant Fin Tutuola tells Benson that the FBI has taken over the investigation of Lambert's murders, and suspect that he has committed even more than he admitted to. He also says that federal authorities will seek the death penalty against him.
External Links
- Trace Lambert on the Law & Order Wiki
