Officer Thomas Crane was a fugitive task force officer and a rapist and accessory to murder having gotten away with the crime for years, until Chester Lake started reinvestigating.
Background[]
Crane was the partner of rising detective Edward Kralik, Kralik always resented Crane for showing more promising skills at the academy. When the two were patrol officers in 1998, they broke up a fight between two Hispanic girls, Alisa Hernandez and Cecilia Cruz. The two offered the girls a ride home, but the cops suddenly turned on the girls and raped them both. With Hernandez fighting back and getting DNA under her fingernails, Kralik snapped and strangled her to death. When the two cops argued with each other, Cruz took the chance to escape and report the crime. Crane and Kralik cleaned Hernandez' corpse and left her in a vacant lot, Kralik being first on the scene to cover their tracks. Detective Chester Lake took the case in his own early days as his first homicide, but it went nowhere, especially since Cruz lied out of fear of deportation since she immigrated illegally. When cold case investigator Penelope Fielding of the VDOQ society realized in 2008 a cop would know to wipe DNA during its early phases of usage in the justice system, she suspected Kralik since his usual patrol wasn't at the scene of the crime. Notifying Lake, he started to investigate and tried to snag a cigarette butt for testing, but Kralik got into fisticuffs with him in public once finding out. When Crane found out, the two conspired to murder Lake after taking Hernandez' rape kit from evidence storage.
Cold[]
Crane placed a fraud call as friend and witness Bill Jensen to lure Lake out to the lot where the crime happened. When Lake arrived, the two ambushed him and started firing their service weapons, with Crane hitting Lake in his shoulder. Lake took cover and fired back, killing Kralik and resulting in Crane fleeing so Lake could take the fall. When Lake realized he shot Kralik, he went on the run to find Cruz and protect her, knowing another dirty cop was still out there. Crane conveniently got himself assigned to the task force set on apprehending Lake. When Lake and Cruz were tracked to an abandoned site, Cruz revealed that she was raped, and Lake agreed to surrender. Crane was outside waiting for Lake and secretly planned to shoot him dead to prevent his testimony and leave evidence against him circumstantial. But with the SVU finding out Crane and Kralik were partners, they stopped Crane from the shot just in time and arrested him for his crimes.
Unfortunately, with little physical evidence and Lake having gone rogue, Crane's council Donna Emmett fought hard to play reasonable doubt in the defense's favor. This particularly succeeded when Casey Novak set up a false evidence presentation and testimonies from Lake and Melinda Warner to match the lies and Emmett exposed it. As a result, Crane was swiftly acquitted at trial, with Novak facing suspension. When Lake, shocked and livid with Crane being pardoned and back on the streets after all the damage he caused, he decided beat him at his own game. Luring him back out into the lot where the shootout took place, Lake put his gun to Crane's temple and shot him point-blank. Lake then calmly surrendered to his arrest for murder.
Known Victims[]
- Unknown date in 1998:
- Alisa Hernandez (raped; later helped Kralik clean and dispose of her body)
- Cecelia Cruz (raped)
- March 17-18, 2008: Detective Chester Lake (assaulted; lured by a phone call and shot in the shoulder; later attempted to murder)