| “ | That night, I had a cold - almost didn't go out. Glad I did, though. She was a particularly rancid piece of meat, 20 bucks a pop. 'Course, those were 1979 dollars. And this little junkie whore, weighed about 80 pounds. I remember pulling the bag so tight it lifted her clear off the ground. | „ |
| ~ Ridley bragging about the women he murdered. |
Peter Ridley is the secondary antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Hysteria". He is a police officer in the NYPD's Vice Squad; he is also a serial killer who preys on the very prostitutes he investigates.
He was portrayed by Garrett M. Brown, who also portrayed J.B. Allen in Criminal Minds.
Biography[]
Background[]
Ridley was raised by his mother, a prostitute who would lock him out of their apartment while she serviced her clients, leaving him only Saltine crackers for dinner. He grew up to hate women, and as a young man assaulted two prostitutes and his ex-wife.
Nevertheless, he managed to be accepted into the NYPD, despite multiple red flags in his psychiatric evaluation. He did not distinguish himself as a police officer, remaining a low-level member of the Vice Squad for 31 years.
During his years as a police officer, he raped and murdered 18 prostitutes. His signature as a killer was to asphyxiate them to death by shoving plastic bags over their heads; he then ritualistically posed their bodies so that, if placed next to each other, they would look like they were holding hands.
"Hysteria"[]
When 19-year-old college student Tracy Henderson is found raped and strangled in a known prostitution area, Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit question Ridley and his partner, Officer Sal D'Angelo. Ridley tries to misdirect them by mentioning that he had heard of similar murders committed in a different neighborhood. However, they come to suspect that the killer is a police officer after questioning one of his surviving victims, who says that her attacker shined a police-issue flashlight in her eyes and wore gloves with fingerprint powder.
The detectives suspect D'Angelo at first, so SVU Captain Donald Cragen asks his old friend Detective Lennie Briscoe, who used to work in the same precinct as D'Angelo, about him. Briscoe says that, while he dislikes D'Angelo, he considers Ridley the "total wacko" of the pair, telling Cragen about witnessing Ridley's violent mood swings during a precinct golf tournament. Cragen gets Ridley's personnel file, which reveals that he is facing early retirement because of disciplinary problems. Benson cross-references attacks against prostitutes with areas of New York City where Ridley worked and finds evidence linking him to 18 unsolved homicides.
When the SVU detectives bring Ridley in for questioning, he looks at crime scene photos of his victims, reliving the experience of killing them. Knowing that he is caught, Ridley calmly admits to having murdered women for 31 years, all under the NYPD's nose. However, he says that he did not kill Henderson (the murderer turns out to be her lover, Dennis Caufield). When Stabler tells Ridley that he will be sentenced to death regardless, Ridley replies that he knows he is going to die, so he wants all of his murders on the record "for posterity". He is then presumably sentenced to death and executed.
Trivia[]
Ridley is confirmed to be inspired by two real-life serial killers:
- The Storyville Slayer, who murdered prostitutes in New Orleans, Louisiana; Victor Gant was arrested, but never convicted.
- Robert Lee Yates, a.k.a. "The Grocery Bag Killer", a serial killer of prostitutes with two confirmed surviving victims, with a signature of asphyxiating the women he murdered with plastic bags.
External links[]
- Peter Ridley on the Law & Order Wiki
