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| “ | Why are you just sitting at home when you should be out looking for your boy?! | „ |
| ~ Claire on one of her garbled burner phone calls. |
Claire Bates is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "The Instincts". She is a psychotic murderer and serial child kidnapper driven by the loss of her son and a need to replace him.
She is portrayed by Melinda Page Hamilton.
Biography[]
Early life and crimes[]
Claire worked as a secretary at a law firm in Nevada who suffered from psychosis-spectrum mental illness. On October 28, 2004, Claire had a nervous breakdown and violently assaulted one of her colleagues, beating her and biting off half of her ear. Claire was institutionalized and eventually released sometime before 2008, given strong antipsychotic prescriptions and living in her father Herbert's home in Reno. He died in 2006, two years after the assault.
In January of that year, Claire got pregnant with her son, resulting in her tapering off her medicine for her baby's safety. A week after she gave birth, Social Services removed her son from her custody, sending Claire over the edge, as she was already off her antipsychotics and her mental health problems were combined with and exacerbated by her grief. Under the paranoid delusion her son was dead, Claire decided to recreate the loss of her son with the captivity of a new boy after seven days once the last one was murdered.
A neighbor's child, Ethan Hayes, age 5, was the first boy she snatched a few days after her son was taken from. Claire breastfed Ethan to nourish him, then smothered him to death before leaving him in the Las Vegas desert. The same day, she kidnapped Michael Bridges, age 4. During each abduction, Claire would call the boys' parents every day with disposable phones and garble her voice, guilting them over their inability to save their son.
In "The Instincts"[]
When the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) is called to Nevada, they listen to Claire harassing Michael's parents about being at home while their son was missing. With the agents knowing the killer will be present at Ethan's funeral, they watch for suspects, but they don't see Claire since they don't suspect a woman. When she sees them arrest a pedophile, Walter Davis, attending just to record the funeral for his own gratification, Claire is furious. Her last call is a demand to speak with the FBI, and she tells Agent Aaron Hotchner that she was a better mother and they won't arrest her.
When Michael's mother pleads for his return, Claire hangs up, but the call provides the profile that she's a woman who had a history of mental illness. Going back over the video footage, Michael's mother spots Claire in the crowd, and she's successfully identified. When agents arrive at her house, she runs outside with a blanket to an open fire, the blanket presumed to be holding Michael. Claire mourns her son's loss despite her trying to care for him, vehemently insisting that he is dead. Just when she chucks the blanket into the flames, Michael is safely recovered in a closet, the blanket revealed to just contain stuffed animals. Claire is then arrested and presumably again placed in court-ordered psychiatric commitment,
Trivia[]
- Claire is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Larry Gene Bell, a killer of girls responsible for harassing their families with phone calls while the girls were held captive, shortly before he killed them.
- David Meirhofer, a serial killer of children caught by the FBI's earliest profiling. Meirhofer kidnapped Susan Jaeger, demanded a ransom from the family, then killed and dismembered her without the ransom.
- Albert Fish, a.k.a. "The Gray Man", a serial killer of children, mostly boys, responsible for sending a letter to the family of the last child he murdered, with a twisted contradiction of both apologizing to and harassing her family.
External links[]
- Claire Bates on the Criminal Minds Wiki
