Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Career Psychopath" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown on January 22 after the “Enemy of All Women” episode of Law and Order, “Career Psychopath,” trod over more familiar ground but had some interesting things to say about the bizarre cults that form around serial killers. During his long stretch in prison Charles Manson got a number of marriage proposals (one of which he actually accepted and went through a wedding ceremony via remote control) and innumerable requests for autographed photos. My husband Charles once read a report that Manson had actually farmed out the task of autographing some of these photos to fellow inmates. He seemed really put out by that until I reminded him that the reason Manson was in prison in the first place was not for killing people personally, but for getting other people to do it for him. Anyway, the “Career Psychopath” in this story is Henry Mesner (Ethan Cutkosky), who committed rape as a juvenile, served his sentence, then not only raped and murdered someone else but killed his parents too. His sister Ruby (Maxine Wanderer) survived and was taken in by foster parents, only they eventually cut her off because she was demanding too much money from them and using most of it to buy drugs. The show opened with assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and his wife, SVU detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), coming home from a dinner date. Rollins sees that their home has been broken into, and shortly thereafter the culprit, whom we don’t see enough of to get a recognizable image, is holding a knife to Carisi’s neck and ordering Rollins to toss him her gun. There’s a scuffle in which Carisi regains control of the situation, though his wrist is slashed and the assailant escapes despite Rollins’s attempt to track him down.

It turns out that the assailant is Phillip Wingate (Kimball Farley), who formed a sick attachment to Henry Mesner even though the real Mesner is safely in Sing Sing prison. Wingate goes as far as to date Ruby Mesner and enlist her as an accomplice in his assaults, including killing a Black woman court reporter who’d taken the transcript of the case and later retired. There are two confrontations between SVU detectives and Henry Mesner in prison; in the first of which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is the interviewing officer. Henry makes it clear he only wants to talk to Detective Rollins, even though Benson has taken her off the case because she’s too close to it and she came on too strong in the interview room when the SVU cops busted Ruby Mesner and get her to reveal Wingate’s current location. Nonetheless, Rollins goes to Sing Sing without formal authorization from Benson, her boss, and gets Henry to give her the fan letters he got from Wingate, which he was so contemptuous of he never even opened any of them. From these the SVU detectives are able to figure out where Wingate is living and arrest him. Once again, this show had a particularly interesting villain; Ethan Cutkosky’s chilling matter-of-fact performance as the titular career psychopath Henry Mesner is scary precisely because he doesn’t underline. He seems like jes’ plain folks and we have to keep reminding ourselves of what the character is supposed to have done. And unlike Manson and some other real-life psychopaths who served long prison terms, Henry if anything seems rather embarrassed at the cult that’s formed around him and certainly wishes that his admirers “outside” would get over it and get a life.