Mitchell "Mitch" Wilkens (alias Max Van Horn, born Eric Wayne Proctor) was a teenage sociopathic kidnapper, rapist, murderer, and repeat offender.
Background
Born as Eric Wayne Proctor, Mitch, at the age of ten, molested, tortured, and murdered his three-year-old neighbor, Tommy Leggatt in Bedford, New Hampshire. He was always regarded as a nuisance in the town from committing a series of burglaries, but Tommy's murder was the worst yet in the city. He was detained at a juvenile facility and released when he turned eighteen, despite being arranged for release at twenty-one. His mother kept advocating for him, even after her husband divorced her out of trauma. Upon his release, he changed his name and got a job as a parking attendant, his expunged juvenile records never being available. Mitch convinced a group of wealthy young men that he was Max Van Horn, the son of a CIA official, and joined their social circle. One night, while out clubbing with his new friends, Mitch drugged fifteen-year-old Chloe Dutton, and he and the other boys gang-raped her. Later realizing that she could identify him and send him to prison for good, Mitch kidnapped Chloe from a hospital and murdered her.
Soulless
Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler encountered Mitch while investigating Chloe's murder, at the parking garage where he worked where he stole a suspect's car to show it off to the other boys. When the boys led the detectives to Mitch as the one boy in the group they were still looking for, Mitch claimed that his friends gang-raped Dutton and bullied him into joining in. He pinned Chloe's murder on one of the other boys, whose toilet Chloe was drowned in after Mitch broke in with a copy of the boy's apartment key he stole. ADA Alexandra Cabot believed his story and offered him a lenient sentence in return for his testimony against the other boys. However, when Tommy Leggatt's mother came forward and told the detectives who Mitch really was, they tried to persuade Cabot to renege on the deal, but her hands were tied.
Benson and Stabler interviewed Mitch's mother, Sally Wilkens, who was convinced that her son had changed for the better. When the detectives discovered that Mitch had given her Chloe's bracelet, however, she finally faced the truth and testified against him. Mitch was convicted of Chloe's murder, and sentenced to death. Prior to his execution, he was also a suspect in the disappearance of Emily Owens, the elderly ex-owner of the brownstone he lived in before his arrest, but he alleged to detectives had no knowledge of her whereabouts. Owens' status remains unknown. (SVU: "Soulless")
Known Victims
- 1991: Tommy Leggatt (tortured, molested, and burned to death)
- 2003:
- Chloe Dutton (knocked out, raped, and set up her gang-rape; later kidnapped after the rape and drowned in a toilet; threw her body into the Hudson River)
- Nancy (assaulted; punched)