Complete Monster/Law and Order

Although Law and Order features countless killers (and non-killers) who committed heinous crimes without remorse, many of them have a typical motive such as Greed and Envy, or sometimes even a good Freudian Excuse or even sympathize with. Some however, have the (dis)honor to be called a Complete Monster.

Law and Order

 * While the original show certainly wasn't lacking in Complete Monsters, perhaps the most striking one was the character of Mark Bruner from the episode "Bodies"; a cab driver who, over a few years, brutally raped and killed over a dozen teenage girls and kept their bodies in a secure location where he would go to admire them as he left them out to rot. But what makes him more monstrous than that is his amusement at the suffering of the hundreds of mothers of the missing girls who he may have killed, and his utter refusal to disclose the location of his victims so that they may be identified -- he wanted them to suffer not knowing, and he wanted Jack to suffer knowing that he couldn't move him to tell and couldn't give the parents the closure they so needed.
 * Let's not forget Jacob Lowenstein, from the 1st season episode "Indifference". Using his job as a psychotherapist as a cover to sell cocaine, the man would routinely beat his wife on a daily basis, then watched as she got high on his product and turned her anger towards their children. Beating her six-year old daughter and burning their young son's hands was the only the tip of the iceberg for this woman. Their father did nothing, coming home one night and ignoring the fact that his daughter was unconscious on the floor, with her head sitting in a pool of her own blood. And when she finally succumbed to her horrendous injuries, he tried to get off scott-free by pinning all the blame on his wife. Class act. The scariest part of this little story is the fact that it was based on a real-life monster
 * Constantin Volsky, the Russian mob boss in the two-parter "Refuge". He ordered an innocent man murdered and dismembered because he had a relative who wouldn't go along with a money laundering scheme. When he finds out that the key eyewitness for the prosecution is a six-year-old boy, he sends assassins to kill him. They murder his mother and an A.D.A. The boy lives, but only because they didn't cut deep enough into his throat. In the second part, he orders the bombing of the precinct where the police protagonists work, just for giggles. He makes most of The Mafia seen on the show look like pikers.
 * "Deadlock": Leon Vorgitch was given a death sentence for massacring a restaurant and killing five people. But the law changes, so he gets to live. He uses this to kill two guards and escape from prison. The detectives hunting for him results in even more deaths, including a classroom of children. When Detective Green asks Vorgitch why he killed the kids, he laughs and says "Why not?" He also treats the justice system as a joke; his plea at arraignment was "kiss my ass", he said he would only plead guilty if he could get a cool new television, and he bragged to Jack and Connie that he would escape again and kill both of them. All the while laughing, since he knew the worst thing that the justice system could do to him was put him in jail. All this makes it particularly satisfying when the father of one of the dead kids gives him that death sentence anyway.

Law and Order Special Victims Unit

 * Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had Victor Paul Gitano, a notable suspect that completely topped anyone else Benson and Stabler have ever encountered. Gitano was a sadistic pedophile, and, as you find out later, absolutely proud of it. He lures kids in, then rapes, tortures, and kills them. He doesn't discriminate by gender either. On top of that, when trying to hunt Gitano down, things don't quite go as planned. Not only does he kill one of the two kids he had with him in a subway station full of people by slashing his throat, he almost killed Benson the same way. And then, when they corner Gitano in a warehouse, he manages to get behind Stabler and hold him at gunpoint with a shotgun. Gitano, despite knowing he'd get caught or killed at this point, outright boasts that he killed the other child he had (who was a girl) and bragged that she was a "slut" and a "real little whore" before killing her, even though he never got the chance to molest her. Fortunately for Stabler, Gitano gets killed by a police sharpshooter. Compared to any of the other serial killers on TV (even on Dexter and Criminal Minds), Gitano tops them ALL on the creepiness factor. By the end of the episode, you're glad he's dead. Oh yeah, and he's based on a real guy.
 * The first episode featured one as the VICTIM! Ostensibly an innocent cab driver brutally murdered, "Victor Spicer" turns out to be Stefan Tanzic, a particularly Sociopathic Soldier and a perpetrator of the Serbian genocide. We receive anecdotes about him killing a little boy with a hatchet, as well as having all the men in a certain village killed, presumably so he and his cronies could have the women to themselves. He was indicted for raping 67 women. His killers turned out to be two women whose lives were ruined and families slaughtered by him; after one is Driven to Suicide, the ADA decides that pursuing charges against the second would be an absolute joke since nobody would convict her, and they simply elect to send her home.
 * SVU had another one in the episode "Dominance" in the form of one Charlie Baker: by the end, he has murdered And he's played by dear, sweet, clueless Boone, of all people. WHAT.
 * Larry Moore from "Signature" would torture his victims through every conceivable means, meticulously record the sessions, and constantly play the tapes on a loop to torment current and future captives, and occasionally abduct more than one woman at once so he could have a captive audience. His Torture Cellar was pure Nightmare Fuel, and they implicate pretty heavily that he raped his aunt while still a teenager.
 * Henry Messner from "Born Psychopath." He has his parents wrapped around his finger for a while, abuses his sister and ties her to a bed while trying to set the house on fire to see if she could "melt from the inside out," shot a cop dead, slashes his mother's hand open, locks a kid in a closet, threatens to kill another one, blames everyone else for his own transgressions, and kills his neighbor's dog. He has no emotions and no empathy at all. What makes him special? He's only ten years old.
 * Adam Grafton, from season 12's "Pursuit", is a sadistic Serial Killer and Serial Rapist with over forty victims to his name over at least 25 years. Starting as a teenager, Adam would claim his victims—some of whom, including TV host Alicia Harding's younger sister Vanessa, were in their mid-teens at most—in clumps and paralyze them from the chest down by stabbing them in a certain area, rape them repeatedly, and viciously stab them to death to finish them off, but not before stabbing them in their lung, collapsing it and preventing the victim from screaming for help. In the present day, Adam's obsessed with mentally toying with Alicia about his role in her sister's death by stalking her and sending her bloody pieces of old evidence from the case. When Alicia insults him on live TV, Adam flies into a rage and brutally murders, including before trying to hunt down and murder Alicia, which leads to his arrest. At the end of the episode, even on Death Row, he coldly and smugly, if not gleefully, tells Detective Benson about all the women he's killed without so much as a hint of remorse.
 * William Lewis’s soft-spoken manner and good looks hide the fact that he is a Serial Rapist, Serial Killer, and sadistic torturer, as well as the Arch-Enemy of Detective Olivia Benson. Appearing in the season 14 finale and in season 15, his MO is going from state to state, under different aliases, kidnapping, raping and torturing women, regardless of age, for hours and even days on end. When he was young, he watched his babysitter get raped and killed in front of him; he describes it as the best day of his life. Eventually he kidnaps Benson, forces her to watch as he kills the father and rapes the mother of his defense attorney. After killing a cop and taking Benson to a house to rape her, he takes a maid and young girl hostage. When Benson turns the tables on him, he deliberately tries to provoke her to kill him, an experience he makes Olivia relive during his trial. After his escape, he kills another cop, rapes a nurse and kidnaps a young girl. When Benson confronts him, he takes her hostage again, but becomes turned off by his initial molestations, so he decides to force her into a game of Russian Roulette. He ends up fatally shooting himself as one last way of tormenting Olivia, figuring she’ll be accused of his murder.