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“ | You take love and beauty and enchantment and you turn it into something ugly! | „ |
~ Clair Dunbar berating one of her victims. |
Claire Dunbar is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "If the Shoe Fits". She is a psychotic serial killer who murders men who fall short of her fairy tale-like fantasy of "Prince Charming".
She was portrayed by Abbie Cobb.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Claire's mother was institutionalized, and her father was a pedophile who sexually abused her throughout her childhood. Due to his habit of reading her fairy tales before molesting her, Claire became obsessed with them, seeing herself as Cinderella waiting for her prince to come and take her away. Following her father's arrest, Claire was sent to live with relatives in Missoula, Montana, who already had two girls of their own.
As an adult, she got a job as a seamstress at a dry cleaner, and sometimes stole dresses so she could wear them and feel like a princess. She also befriended the owner's son, Chris, who secretly had feelings for her. In her free time, she visited a graveyard and put flowers by an unknown woman's grave, convincing herself it was where her father, who had died in prison and was put to rest in a pauper's grave, was buried.
Desperate to block out the memories of her traumatic childhood, she developed a delusion in which she in fact was Cinderella. When she met affluent college student Douglas Clark, she was impressed by his expensive car and went out with him, convinced that she had finally met her prince. When she discovered that he was a closeted homosexual, however, her fantasy was ruined and she flew into a violent rage, stabbing him to death with the stiletto heel of her shoe and shoving his cell phone, where she had found pictures of him having sex with his boyfriend, in his mouth.
"If the Shoe Fits"[]
Claire kills her second victim, Kevin Brubaker, after she finds out that he posts videos of himself having sex with unsuspecting women on the Internet. Once again, she stabs him to death with the heel of her shoe and puts his cell phone, which contained his sex videos, in his mouth. The Missoula police suspect that the same killer is responsible for the deaths of Clark and Brubaker and call in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) to develop a profile.
Claire meets Colin Baylor while reading a harlequin romance novel in a park, and he charms her into taking him home with her. When he becomes aggressive with her, however, she realizes that he only wants her for sex, and becomes enraged. She ties him to her bed, covers her face in ashes and stabs him to death with the heel of her shoe. After disposing of the body and her bloodstained dress, she goes to work, where her boss docks her pay for being late and threatens to fire her if she is ever late again. Chris apologetically offers to get her money back and then asks her out, but she kindly rebuffs his advances.
That night, she goes to a local bar in a dress she had stolen from her workplace. John Franklin, another bar patron, buys her a drink and slow dances with her in order to seduce her. The seduction works, and she leaves the bar with him. When he demands sex, she pushes him away. He then tries to rape her, and she bashes him over the head with a rock before fatally stabbing him with her stiletto heel. The next day, Chris shows up at her door as she prepares to put flowers on what she believes is her father's grave, and he offers to give her a ride there. She accepts, unaware that Chris' father sent him there to fire her for stealing a dress. At the graveyard, Chris points out that her father is not buried there, which sends Claire into a violent rage, and she attacks him.
Meanwhile, the BAU profiles the killer as a woman in her 20s or 30s who lives and works in the area and who is trying to live out a fantasy of being a Cinderella-type figure who finds her prince, idealizing her victims and killing them after they fall short of her desires, thus ruining the fantasy. They theorize that the killer's fantasy was borne from being physically and/or sexually abused by a male relative, so Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia cross-references young women who live in the area with arrest records for crimes against children in the area within the previous 10 to 20 years, and finds the crimes committed by Claire's father. Realizing that Claire is the killer, they find her address and set out to arrest her.
They find Dunbar in the cemetery, having earlier found out that she goes there every week, as she is about to kill Chris. Thinking quickly, Agent Spencer Reid plays the part of her Prince Charming, claiming to have danced with her days earlier and having searched the entire city to find her; he then presents her with the shoe she had left at one of the murder scenes, and gently places her foot in it while kissing her hand. He says, "Our chariot awaits", which so enchants her that she takes his hand and allows him to put her in the back of a police car. She is then institutionalized.
Trivia[]
- Dunbar is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Aileen Wuornos, a.k.a. "The Florida Highway Killer", an American serial killer of men she lured through sex work, the first sexually assaulting her, and with a history of sex offenders in the family, even targeting her.
- Nannie Doss, a.k.a. "The Giggling Granny", an American serial killer who poisoned her husbands out of motives from slights to outright felonies while wanting her definition of the perfect man. She also killed her other family members, including her children, in-laws, and mother.
- Colin Ireland, a.k.a. "The Gay Slayer", a Scottish serial killer of gay men using gay baiting lures to restrain them to beds before murdering them.
- Ana Trujillo, a woman from Texas who stabbed her partner to death with a stiletto heel in a hotel room.
External Links[]
- Claire Dunbar on the Criminal Minds Wiki