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“ | You know, I should've figured it out sooner. Now I'm gonna give you a chance to come clean. Who is helping you? Hm? Who's helping you? | „ |
~ Dale Shavers threatening Patrick Butler. |
Dale Shavers is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Lockdown". He is a corrupt prison guard who forces inmates to fight to the death while he and his fellow guards place bets on who will win.
He was portrayed by William Ragsdale.
Biography[]
Shavers is the head of security at Reagan Federal Penitentiary. He and a group of fellow prison guards run an illegal "fight club" in which they force inmates to fight each other to the death while he takes bets on who will win. During one such fight between inmates Patrick Butler and Devon White, Shavers forced Butler to beat White to death with his baton. Another guard, Tom Polinsky, who was not involved with the fight club, inadvertently witnessed White's death, and Shavers threatened to kill Polinsky's daughter if he told anyone.
Driven over the edge by the brutality Shevers put him through, Butler began killing guards involved in the fight clubs, stabbing them to death with homemade shivs and stuffing socks into their mouths.
"Lockdown"[]
After Butler's first two victims are found, Reagan Penitentiary's warden calls in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) to help them profile and arrest the killer. When agent Jennifer Jareau points out the relative lack of security cameras in the prison, Shavers blames budget cuts by the prison's corporate office, leaving out that he himself made sure there were few security cameras so as to operate his fight club in secrecy.
Suspicious of Butler, Shavers sends one his informants, serial rapist Randall Jefferson Jones, to threaten Butler's friend and fellow inmate Sam Pritchard, provoking Butler to rape and murder Jones. Shavers suspects Butler is the killer and searches his cell under the pretext of a random search. After finding Butler's shivs, Shavers has him thrown into solitary confinement, where he demands to know who else is involved in the murders. When Butler defiantly says that Shavers will get caught eventually, Shavers bludgeons him to death with his baton. He claims that he killed Butler in self-defense after the inmate attacked him. Later on, he stops by Polinsky's locker before Polinsky is scheduled to be interviewed by the BAU, and implicitly threatens to hurt his daughter if he talks.
Shavers watches on one of the prison's security room as BAU agents Derek Morgan and Kate Callahan question Polinsky, and becomes alarmed when Polinsky breaks down and offers to tell them everything about the fight club. He approaches an inmate named Weeks and offers to reward him for killing Morgan, Callahan, and Polinsky. He then releases all the inmates on Weeks' cell block in order to start a riot, giving Weeks and his partner in crime Don Black cover to take the agents and Polinsky hostage.
Shavers' plan fails, however, when Morgan convinces the rioting inmates to stand down so they can arrest Shavers, while his fellow BAU agents Aaron Hotchner and David Rossi go to the security room to arrest him. Knowing that it is all over, Shavers commits suicide by shooting himself in the head.
Trivia[]
- Shavers' ring of dirty prison guards is inspired by the Corcoran State prison "gladiator fights" conspiracy, where in one of the country's worst state prisons, guards forced inmates against each other in bare-knuckled fights even if to the death, shooting them if they didn't comply. There were trials against keep perpetrators in the ring, but they were all acquitted.
External Links[]
- Dale Shavers on the Criminal Minds Wiki