Wally Stevens

Wally Stevens is a minor character in the American police series Law and Order: Criminal Intent

Biography
His difficulty in social interaction ended with his wife leaving him for a rich lawyer. After the divorce, he'd still show up at her house every week with flowers. In order to win her back, he thinks he needs to be rich and thus devises an elaborate insurance fraud scheme in order to quickly get millions of dollars. He takes out large insurance claims on homeless people, who he sets up as important people in sham companies that he also set up - making the policies worth more money. He then murders the homeless people and insurance pays out to his sham companies, earning him around a million dollars per person.

Everything is perfectly covered up, and it only goes wrong when his partner in crime Jack Bernard goes off-script, which alerts the police that something is up. Initially he is not connected to the crimes and is even brought on board as an insurance expert for the police, but he is eventually connected to the murders through the patterns that he subconsciously left behind.

Autism
He is not officially diagnosed with autism, but detective Robert Goren suggests that he has Asperger's syndrome and went undiagnosed because he was already an adult at the time when Asperger's became a diagnostic category.

Although Wally has a formal understanding of the minutiae of social cues such as eye contact, he struggles to put them into practice.

His most remarkable trait is pattern-recognition. He subconsciously creates the same pattern in almost everything he does - from the way he arranges pictures on his desk and thumbtacks on a pinboard, to the locations where he dumps the bodies. The central part of this pattern is the number 5 - everything is arranged by fives. He also taps a piano melody to help calm himself down, this melody consists of 5 bars of 5 notes.

Episode list

 * season 2, episode 14 - "Probability" (main character)
 * season 6, episode 21 - "Endgame"