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“ | Ok, look. Um, what Roslyn and I had, it was...it was different. Alright? I mean, we...really loved each other. | „ |
~ Howard trying to downplay his crimes. |
Ethan Howard is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "The Tall Man" and an overarching antagonist throughout the series. Howard is an ephebophilic teacher responsible for sexually assaulting girls he instructs, including Jennifer Jareau's deceased sister Roslyn.
He was portrayed by Dan Gauthier.
Early life[]
Howard was a high school guidance counselor and A.P. English teacher in East Allegheny, Pennsylvania, with a long history of sexually exploiting female students. Howard would groom them for abuse by listening to their problems and pretending to care, building "relationships" with them and making them believe he was the only person who loved them. After sleeping with them, he gave them necklaces in the shape of golden hearts as presents. One such victim was 17-year-old Rosalyn Jareau, a bright but depressed high school senior.
When Roslyn's parents found her in possession of such a necklace, she had a fight with them, and she gave the necklace to her 11-year-old sister Jennifer. Shortly afterward, Roslyn killed herself by cutting her wrists with a razor blade, and Jennifer found her body. Howard attended Roslyn's funeral, the last time that he and the Jareau family saw each other.
Howard abused several other girls over the years, including Bethany Wilson, whom he began molesting shortly before the events of the episode. When she lost the necklace he gave her, he feared he would get caught, so he made Bethany assist him in interrogating two other students, Chelsea Davis and Ally McCready, who were the last people to see it. Howard drugged them both with fentanyl, kidnapped them, and held them captive in a train. He repeatedly cut the three girls with a razor to torture answers out of them, but Ally, who suffered from schizophrenia, hallucinated that she and her friends were being tortured by "The Tall Man", a supernatural creature from a local urban legend. Howard left her to stumble blindly in the surrounding woods.
"The Tall Man"[]
When Ally is found and hospitalized, the local police call in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) - where a now-adult Jennifer Jareau works as an agent. They speak to Ally, who relates being tortured by "The Tall Man", but Jareau questions her to work through her psychotic episode, which helps the BAU lead the police to the train. Howard, meanwhile, inserts himself into the case by renewing his acquaintance with Jareau and promising to help in any way he can.
Meanwhile, Bethany stabs Chelsea in the stomach to protect Howard and eliminate her as a rival for his affections, and then flees. The BAU finds Chelsea in time to save her, and Jareau, having deduced that Bethany set the whole thing up over a secret boyfriend, asks her where she can find the boyfriend. Chelsea points to Jareau's necklace, Rosalyn's last gift to her, and Jareau realizes that the boyfriend is an adult sexual predator who also abused Rosalyn.
With help from Supervisory Agent David Rossi, Jareau remembers Rosalyn arguing with their father shortly before her death about someone she was involved with whom he did not approve of. She also remembers Rosalyn giving her the necklace to "protect" her, wearing it at her funeral, and Howard staring at her intently; she then realizes that Howard is the abuser.
When a panicked Bethany calls Howard and tells him what she did, he tells her to meet him in the school gym, where she hid the locket she gave him. After she retrieves it, he renders her unconscious with a fentanyl patch, takes the necklace and locks her up in the school's wiring system, intending for her to die of an overdose.
When he returns home, however, he finds that the BAU are there waiting to arrest him for kidnapping. During his interrogation, Jareau lies to him that they have a search warrant for his house and computer, tricking him into admitting that he abused Rosalyn. She shows him the necklace that Rosalyn gave her and says her sister gave it to her to tell her how special their relationship was and offers to help him if he reveals where he has Bethany. He replies that she is where he keeps "all the kids who are special to me", and she realizes that he is referring to the school. Jareau and her fellow agents Matt Simmons and Luke Alvez find Bethany in time to save her life.
Jareau goes back to the interrogation room, where she condemns him for abusing her sister and so many other y9oung girls. She leads him away in handcuffs and coincidentally passes by Bethany, who is also being taken into custody. Bethany, finally seeing Howard for who he is, slaps him in the face. Howard is then imprisoned for kidnapping, attempted murder, and multiple counts of statutory rape, child sexual abuse, and possession of child pornography.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Howard is inspired by multiple real-life criminal cases:
- Sean Shaynak, a disgraced Brooklyn Technical High School teacher arrested and imprisoned for sexually abusing seven female students.
- Thomas Hose, a rapist who was responsible for the kidnapping of Tanya Nicole Kach, a student he seduced when he was a security guard at her school and whom he imprisoned for 10 years.
- Ariel Castro, a.k.a. "The Monster of Cleveland", a Puerto Rican kidnapper and rapist of three girls whom he also imprisoned and tortured for years.
- Rachel Wade, the killer of a love rival, and the inspiration for Bethany Wilson.
- The "Slender Man stabbing" case, in which two girls lured a third girl into the woods and stabbed her in an attempt to kill her as a "sacrifice" to the Slender Man urban legend.
External links[]
- Ethan Howard on the Criminal Minds Wiki