Walter Inman is a double murderer at the instruction of spiteful lawyer Tessa McKellen, incriminating her husband Linus McKellen in the crimes.
Background[]
Inman was one of 50 mercenaries at Silverhammer, a private contracting company, unemployed after losing a major lawsuit that cost the company 100 million dollars. His company was represented by Tessa McKellen, a legal attorney who was temporarily paralyzed from a car accident and developed Munchausen syndrome, a compulsion to get attention from personal harm, from enjoying being cared for by her husband, Linus. When Linus began having an affair with Tessa's employee, Vicky Riggs, she hired Inman to investigate and paid him with money he put into his daughters' college funds. She also employed him to steal viruses and bacteria from labs to weaken her immune system to continue her ruses. Inman was easy to manipulate from a past record of breaking into the home of and assaulting a woman he was having sex with, making his instability and desperation much more useful to Tessa even in spite of getting Inman fired.
With enough investigation, he discovered the affair and Riggs' secret life as a stripper. He assumed Linus was also sleeping with Josie Post, one of Riggs' colleagues at the club, but she simply offered her place for Linus and Riggs to have their trysts. Tessa was horrified and further paid Inman to kill the two women and frame Linus for the crimes out of personal vengeance.
Manipulated[]
With Linus' semen Tessa obtained from seducing him into sex, Inman stalked the two women to pounce on them when they were alone, strangling them to death in their beds and planting Linus' semen in their thighs. With his training in rope climbing, he easily scaled the outside of the buildings to get in and out of the apartments almost undetected. But when he leaves the door to Post's apartment locked, that reveals to SVU how he broke in and escaped. Tessa tries to prevent his being found with the right to legal privacy, but Inman is fingered when he fits the profile.
He tries to rappel down his building out of his apartment window, but John Munch successfully arrests him even when elbowed by Inman in an attempt to wrestle away and escape. Tessa's DNA is on Post's thigh, but she's released from circumstantial evidence without an explanation regarding the murders, so A.D.A. Casey Novak, after finding out the payoffs, confronts Inman and tells him his crimes will null the funds he's saving, as well as stresses Tessa's manipulation even of him and how he's left to take the fall for everything.
Inman confesses in full and is found guilty of two murders, grand larceny, stalking, fraud, conspiracy, and assault of law enforcement, and is sentenced to life without parole.
Known Victims[]
- His unnamed girlfriend (assaulted)
- Vicky Riggs (strangled; left Linus' semen on her thigh postmortem)
- Josie Post (strangled; left Linus' semen on her thigh postmortem)
- Linus McKellen (attempted to frame for murder)
- Detective John Munch (assaulted)