The character Jerry Dupree is loosely based on the serial killer Jerry Brudos. Brudos killed four women in or around Salem, Oregon, through 1968-69. He had a foot fetish and was infatuated with women's shoes. At the time of his death on 3/28/2006, he was the longest-incarcerated inmate in the Oregon Department of Corrections.
The victim in this episode is loosely based on the first victim of Oregon serial killer Jerry Brudos. Her name was Linda Slawson, who at the time of her death was 19 years old and worked as a door-to-door encyclopedia saleswoman. In January of 1968 she knocked on Brudos's door in an attempt to sell him an encyclopedia; Brudos, whose wife and two children were also home, lured her into the garage. When Slawson entered the garage Brudos hit her over the head with a wooden plank and choked her to death; he then dressed her body in different sets of underwear and shoes he had stolen from other women and arranged her body in provocative poses while taking pictures of her. Afterwards he cut her left foot off before dumping her body in the Willamette River; he kept her foot in his freezer and would use it to model his collection of stolen shoes.
Paul Fitzgerald has played multiple characters on SVU:
- Ryan Chambers in Tortured (2003)
- Charles Murphy in Criminal Hatred (2013)
- Jason Karr in Contrapasso (2017)