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| “ | Last chance. Something you'd never say aloud. Not even to your partner here. Your deepest, darkest secret. Impress me or I kill him. | „ |
| ~ Pinkner menacing Jennifer Jareau and Spencer Reid |
Casey Allen Pinkner is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Truth or Dare". He is a serial killer who forces his victims to commit murder themselves to avenge his own incarceration for vehicular manslaughter.
He was portrayed by James Harvey Ward.
Early life[]
Pinkner has been in and out of prison for his entire life, mostly for assault, theft, and burglary. He has a severe drinking problem, and frequently gets into drunken brawls. It is implied that he suffers from symphorophilia, a paraphilia in which one derives sexual gratification from staging and watching accidents in which people are injured or killed.
One night, while drinking at a bar with his friend Mark Zabel, he engaged him in a drunken game of "truth or dare"; Zabel dared him to play a game of chicken with another barfly, with the two driving toward each other at high speed. The "game" resulted in the other man's death, which is what Pinkner wanted all along. He was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and spent five years in prison, all the while nurturing a fantasy about forcing people to cause fatal accidents while he watched.
"Truth or Dare"[]
After being released from prison, Pinkner sets his plan into motion. He kidnaps Zabel's wife Lynn and tells Zabel to kill people he has singled out as targets, threatening to kill Lynn if he does not do as he is told. Zabel reluctantly obeys Pinkner's command to crash his car into another driven by Andrea Hinojosa, one of the jurors who found him guilty, and shoot her twice in the chest.
Zabel then takes Hinojosa's damaged car and, once again at Pinkner's command, crashes it into a truck driven by Paul Burke, another juror in Pinkner's trial, and shoots him dead. Police arrive at the scene and shoot Zabel dead when he opens fire on them. Pinkner then kills Lynn, whom he decides has outlived her usefulness.
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) investigates the case and soon discover Hinojosa and Burke's relationship to each other and to Pinkner, as well as Lynn's murder. Using this information, they theorize that Pinkner is taking revenge against people he blames for his imprisonment using the same weapon - a car - that put him in prison in the first place.
Meanwhile, Pinkner sets his sights on killing Melissa Hamilton, the judge who sentenced him. He calls her and threatens to kill her daughter unless she kills several other members of his jury. The BAU intercepts her before she can do it, however, and Pinker takes off running, with Agents Spencer Reid and Jennifer Jareau in pursuit. They chase him into a jewelry store and clear out the customers, leaving them alone with a cornered and agitated Pinkner and his remaining hostages, Hamilton and the store's owner.
Pinkner forces Hamilton to tie up Reid and Jareau's hands while berating her for sending him to prison. He then orders to shoot the store owner, but Jareau interrupts by saying that the owner had nothing to do with his imprisonment. This only makes Pinkner angrier, and he personally shoots the owner, seriously wounding her. He then orders Hamilton to kill Reid and Jareau, once again threatening to kill her daughter is she does not. When she hesitates, Pinkner shoots her in the leg.
To buy time, Reid, who had been framed for murder years earlier, tells Pinkner that he knows what it is like to be imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Jareau distracts him further by agreeing to play "Truth or dare" with him. She offers "truths" that she has killed people in the line of duty and that she miscarried a baby. He asks her if she enjoyed killing; when she replies that she did not, he flies into a rage and threatens to kill Reid unless she tells a "truth" that he does not know about her. Jareau replies that she has always loved Reid, who is her best friend as well as her colleague; it is left ambiguous whether Jareau, who is married with two children, means that she loves him as a friend or if she has romantic feelings for him.
Pinkner taunts Jareau that, while her "truths" are entertaining, they are not enough to keep her alive. As he prepares to shoot her, however, Reid - who had used a piece of glass to saw through his binding while Jareau and Pinkner were talking - pulls a weapon from his leg holster and shoots him in the chest, killing him.
Trivia[]
- Pinkner is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Willie Bosket, an American spree killer with a lengthy juvie record and a propensity for fighting due to severe abuse. He killed two subway passengers with an accomplice to rob them, and he's now serving life in prison as a consequence of new laws his crimes inspired.
- Brian Nichols, a spree killer guilty of multiple murders in a courtroom, including a bailiff and rhe presiding judge, before going on the run.
- Marie Dean Arrington, an American murderer and FBI fugitive convicted of kidnapping and murdering a public defender’s secretary as revenge for the lawyer not successfully defending her children in criminal court.
- Dennis McAninch, a convicted robber and hostage-taker who barricated himself in an Indiana convenience store with Tammy Smith when being chased by police. Tammy talked McAninch down to buy time until police breached the store and shot McAninch dead.
- Gene Evin Atkins, an American murderer and hostage-taker who held up a Trader Joe's in Los Angeles when being chased by police.
- Omar Mateen, a mass murderer and the perpetrator of the Pulse nightclub shooting, with a history of school fights and rebellion against authority; Mateen was shot dead during a standoff with police after the massacre.
- Francis Gibson, the main antagonist of the miniseries Crisis, a disgraced CIA agent who orchestrates a mass kidnapping of children of powerful D.C. figures, forcing their families into increasingly extreme, life-threatening actions to test how desperate they are to save their families.
- Holly Jones, the main antagonist of the film Prisoners, one of two married serial killers who kidnapped and killed children to provoke their families into criminal acts out of grief and rage.
- Zabel is inspired by Adam Emery, a road rage murderer having disappeared when evading justice, as well as having killed his wife in a supposed murder-suicide.
External links[]
- Casey Allen Pinkner on the Criminal Minds Wiki
