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| “ | You made choices. The wrong choices. | „ |
| ~ Arthur Rykov menacing the Acklin family. |
Arthur Rykov is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Through the Looking Glass". He is a serial killer who kidnaps, tortures, and murders whole families he sees as dysfunctional.
He was portrayed by John Fleck.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Rykov's mother died when he was a child, and he was raised by his fanatically religious father, who abused him severely for deviating in any way from his puritanical world view. Rykov idealized the family across the street as perfect, and wished he lived with them. When he discovered that the father of that family was having an affair, however, his idealized view of the family was ruined, and he attacked the man's lover. He was arrested, but the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence.
As an adult, Rykov started a successful construction company in Kansas, A.R. Electrical, which he used as a ploy to surveil the families who moved in to the houses he built. If he felt that a family was unhappy or dysfunctional, he would imprison them in the building and put them through a series of psychological tortures before finally forcing them to kill each other.
"Through the Looking Glass"[]
Rykov murders his first victims, the Yamada family, after learning that Mr. and Mrs. Yamada were going to send their daughter Karen to boarding school. He dumps the bodies, except that of their son Scott, on the side of a highway, and made it look like the father, John, murdered his family and killed himself. The bodies are discovered by schizophrenic drifter Nathan Eades. Soon afterward, he kidnaps the Acklin family after he sees the father, Mike, having an affair with Vanessa Hall, his autistic son Braden's tutor.
Rykov imprisons Acklin, his wife Debra, and his daughter Mackenzie in the basement of their house, and speaks to them over an intercom. He also keeps Braden in a separate room so his parents and sister cannot find him, and kidnaps Hall and Mackenzie's boyfriend Darren Wilson. He forces Mike to admit sleeping with Hall before killing her, and demands that Debra choose between taking the money and sparing Wilson's life. Debra who hates Wilson for giving Makenzie drugs, chooses the former, and Rykov leads them to believe that he has killed him. Rykov becomes so consumed with tormenting the family that he lets his guard down, allowing Braden to escape.
Local police call in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) to investigate the Yamadas' murder, and they quickly rule out Eades as a suspect. During the investigation, they are also called in to help find the Acklins. They come to the conclusion that the murders and the kidnappings were committed by the same person, and profile the killer as a man who has lost his family and wants to punish families he views as dysfunctional. They deduce that he would have put cameras and intercoms in the houses in which the murders occurred, which would mean they either worked in it or sold it to the family. After researching the history of the Yamada house, technical analyst Penelope Garcia finds out that A.R. Electrical constructed both houses. After Scott Yamada's body is found near the company's headquarters, the BAU theorizes that he is the killer.
Meanwhile, Rykov recaptures Braden, and gives Mike a loaded handgun and a choice, that if he kills himself, his wife, and his daughter, Braden will live, but if he doesn't, Braden dies. When Mike refuses, Rykov warns him that he killed the Yamadas after they made a similar choice. Desperate, Debra takes the gun and shoots herself in the chest. At that moment, the BAU charges in and arrests him, having deduced his location from the company's work records. They also find that the gun is loaded with blanks, meaning that Debra was not wounded after all. Rykov is then presumably imprisoned.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Rykov is inspired by multiple real-life serial killers:
- Nathaniel Code, a.k.a. "The Cedar Grove Killer", a similar serial family annihilator with a record of assault and a need for control.
- Futoshi Matsunaga, a Japanese serial killer/rapist responsible for holding his wife and accomplice Junko Ogata's family captive and forcing the family, along with other victims, to torture and murder each other.
- Robert Spangler, a serial killer of his wives and children over marital problems, the Murders of his entire first family being blamed on his dead wife.
- Sy Parrish, the main antagonist of OneHourPhoto, a stalker of a family with internalized problems who terrroizes them out of hating them not meeting his previous idealistic view of their relationships.
External Links[]
- Arthur Rykov on the Criminal Minds Wiki
