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“ | Trust me, this is gonna hurt. | „ |
~ David taunting one of his victims before beating him to death |
David Smith is a recurring character in Criminal Minds, appearing first as a supporting character in the Season 3 episode “In Name and Blood", and later as the main antagonist of the Season 14 episode “Flesh and Blood”. David is the unwilling accomplice of his father, serial killer Joe Smith, and later becomes a serial killer in his own right after being brainwashed by his therapist, Dr. Elizabeth Rhodes.
He was portrayed by Chandler Canterbury in his first appearance and Judah Simard in his second.
Biography[]
Background[]
David’s father Joe developed a terminal brain tumor that resulted in his wife, David’s mother, leaving the family in Wisconsin, particularly when Joe became aggressive and violent as a result of the tumor damaging the empathy and impulse control centers of his brain. Joe took out his anger on David, emotionally and physically abusing the boy for the slightest failure or misbehavior, real or imagined.
Joe began kidnapping women at random and holding each one captive in the house, ordering them to spend time around the house, supervising and nurturing David as a substitute “mother”. After two days, Joe would restrain each woman in his workshop and kill them by cutting their hearts out with his own tools. After taking the hearts as trophies, he left his victims' bodies near a dumpster and/or in an abandoned alley.
"In Name and Blood"[]
Joe begins stalking his latest intended victim, Claire Thompson, in a shopping mall, and tells David to get her attention by pretending to be lost. She tries to help David, only for Joe to pull out a box cutter and threaten to kill his son unless she goes along with them.
He ties Claire up in his workshop and orders her to be affectionate with David like a “mother”, and she speaks kindly to the boy, partly out of fear and partly because she is genuinely fond of him. After Joe and David leave, however, she breaks a window and screams for help.
When Joe picks David up from school, David tells his father that he likes Claire and doesn’t want her to die. Joe tells David to understand the women he kills “leave”, and David says it is Joe’s fault; Joe then hits David in the face. Joe says he wants to “teach” David “an important lesson” before he dies. David then decides on his own to bring the school nurse, Lisa Phillips, to his house.
By now, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) have identified David as the child whom the killer is using as bait to lure his victims. Agent Emily Prentiss' guard is down when she sees David and he lets her in. Joe knocks Prentiss down with a wooden plank and orders David to shoot her with her own gun. David’s near firing the gun in a panic when the agents and police storm the house, as David is too overwhelmed to know what to do. Joe surrenders and tells David to give the agents the gun. Joe is arrested, and David is placed in a squad car, absolved of charges because of his age and being abused into the murders. During the arrest, Joe brags David brought Lisa to the house without Joe’s direction.
Between episodes[]
Eventually, Joe died of brain cancer in prison. David's mother did not want custody of him, so he was adopted by the Addison family in Maryland, who renamed him Edward.
As a teenager, David underwent therapy with Dr. Elizabeth Rhodes, who secretly planned to use him to avenge her daughter Robin's murder. She brainwashed David into believing he can never escape the murderous predispositions he "inherited" from Joe, and then hypnotized him to target the men she held responsible for Robin’s death, making David believe that he was avenging Joe's death.
David paid female prostitutes to bring various men Rhodes targeted to a closed medical center under Rhodes' name, where he would beat and drug them unconscious and suspend them in straitjackets and with bags over their heads. When they woke up, David would beat them with a baseball bat, and cut their hearts out with a chisel, just like his father had done to his victims. He also emulated his father by leaving his victims' corpses in alleys and by dumpsters.
"Flesh and Blood"[]
David murders attorneys Shaun Tate and Anthony Nakamura, financier Dennis Kirkwood, and risk manager James Baxter. The BAU team, now led by Prentiss, is brought in to investigate the murders, and she and fellow agent Jennifer Jareau recognize similarities between these crimes and those of Joe Smith's. After Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia discovers that Rhodes treated David after Joe's death and that the victims were suspected of murdering her daughter, the rest of the team realizes that Rhodes brainwashed David into killing them.
The BAU team sets a trap for him by sending a female FBI agent out to meet him, pretending to be a prostitute. He sees through the ruse, however, and demands to talk to Prentiss, who tells him that the men he killed were innocent and that Rhodes is just using him. David then takes off in his car.
David breaks into Rhodes' house and kidnaps her, intending to kill her as revenge for her turning him into a murderer like his father. The BAU gets there just in time, however, and Prentiss, the same agent he was ordered to kill as a child, tells him that he can kill her if he believes that is who he really is. Rhodes, stricken with guilt, admits that she brainwashed David and told him to kill. David, having finally understood what he did and why, drops his weapon, bursts into tears, and hugs Prentiss, begging her forgiveness as he is taken into custody.
Trivia[]
- David is inspired by Ivette, the main antagonist of the giallo film Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, a serial killer hypnotized by her therapist, Dr. Phillipe Labour, into butchering women Dr. Labour’s daughter killed in a botched eye surgery resembled, so he could put their eyes into his daughter. Ivette killed the women also out of the vulnerability that they also resembled the woman who stole her fiancé from her.
David Smith is also the name of a British murderer, rapist, and auspected serial killer of women in prostitution.
External links[]
- David Smith on the Criminal Minds Wiki