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| “ | You have to be cleansed before you die. | „ |
| ~ Kevin preparing to kill his latest victim. |
Kevin Decker is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Scarecrow". He is a mentally ill, fanatically religious serial killer who tortures and murders prostitutes at the behest of his hallucinations of his deceased father.
He is portrayed by Chris Owen.
Early life[]
Kevin was born and raised in rural Yakima, Washington. His mother, Susan, died while giving birth to him, and he was raised by his father, John, a fanatically religious farmer who believed that sex was sinful and all women were tools of Satan. John also blamed Kevin for Susan's death, and regularly whipped him with a knotted rope and cut his hands with barbed wire. John and Kevin at one point joined True Believers, a fundamentalist Christian group that practiced fasting, meditation, and ritual self-harm. John ultimately left the group, taking Kevin with him, because he thought they were not devout enough.
When Kevin was a teenager, he fell in love with a classmate named Wendy Baldwin, and they began dating. When John found out, he flew into a rage and accused Wendy of being a "harlot" and trying to corrupt his son. He threw Wendy out of their house and gave Kevin a savage beating with his rope. John then hung Kevin up on a cross in the middle of their cornfield with a sign around his neck that read, "Fornicator", and left him out in the cold for the night. When he let Kevin down off the cross the next morning, an enraged Kevin stabbed him to death with a pair of shears and put his body on the cross like a scarecrow.
Killing his father filled Kevin with remorse, however, and his already fragile mind snapped under the pressure. He began hallucinating that his father was still alive and telling him to punish Wendy for "corrupting" him, so Kevin murdered her, as well. He then kept and preserved John's corpse.
With his hallucinations of his father guiding him, he began torturing and murdering prostitutes, believing that he was cleansing the world of "loose women". His modus operandi was to approach his victims pretending to pay for sex, kidnap them once they had their guard down. He would then don a homemade scarecrow mask and beat and torture the women in his father's barn, all while making them wear burlap hair-shirts like those worn by early Christian monks. Finally, he would stab them to death with the same shears he used to kill his father. Afterwards, he would "atone" by cutting himself with razor wire.
By the time of the episode, he had murdered 11 women.
In "Scarecrow"[]
Kevin's latest victim, Cheryl "Cherry" Rollins, tries to escape after he kidnaps her, but he chases her down and knocks her out before taking her back to the barn.
The next morning, she offers to have sex with him for free if he lets her go, and he is briefly tempted, to the point that he starts taking off her shirt. He eventually recoils from her, however, shouting "No, no, no!" while hitting himself in the face. She tries to make him see her as a person by telling him about her son, but he refuses to listen. Guessing that he was abused as a child, she tells him that her uncle molested her when she was a girl, and asks what his father had made him do. Kevin has a flashback of his father whipping him, and so yells at her to be quiet. He then engages in self-harm by squeezing a piece of barbed wire, cutting his hands just as his father had done to him.
The FBI's Behavioral Response Unit (BAU) investigates the murders, profiling the killer as a religious fanatic who is punishing women he believes to be "unclean". From the shear wounds and the burial sites of the victims, they deduce that he lives or works in Yakima, probably on a farm. They also theorize that he was raised in an abusive household in which a parent figure, likely his father, taught him to view sex as a sin, and so punishes his victims for "making him" have sexual urges he believes are wrong. Finally, they deduce from the killer's use of hair-shirts that he mutilates himself to "atone" for his sins, meaning he belongs or belonged to a religious group that encourages self-harm.
BAU Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia goes through membership records of such organizations in the area, and eventually finds records of the Decker family's brief membership in the True Believers, as well as Wendy's disappearance. This leads the rest of the team to surmise that she was the killer's first victim, and that he knew her personally. Agent Spencer Reid discovers that John Decker had filed a complaint against the store where she worked for employing "a dirty whore"; Garcia then discovers that Decker's son went to school with Wendy, and that Wendy and John had disappeared at roughly the same time. The BAU team realizes that Kevin is the killer, and go out to find and arrest him.
Meanwhile, Cheryl convinces Kevin to let her go by telling him that she wants to get out of street life and lead a normal life with her son. After he unties her, however, she stabs him in the back with the shears and takes off running, at one point tripping over John's corpse. Kevin catches up to her, puts a knife to her throat, and tries to drown her in a trough. Just then, the BAU agents storm into the cornfield to arrest him. He picks up the shears and runs into the barn's grain silo, with Agents Emily Prentiss, Jennifer Jareau, and Luke Alvez in pursuit.
When they have him cornered, Kevin asks Prentiss if she knows what he did. She replies that she knows what his father did to him, and offers to get him help. Finally understanding the harm he has caused, Kevin says that he must atone for his sins. He turns on the grain elevator, pouring grain down on all three of them. Prentiss, Jareau, and Alvez escapes, but Kevin allows himself to be buried alive in the grain, eventually suffocating.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Kevin is inspired by multiple real-life and fictional serial killers:
- The “Gilgo Beach Killer”, an unidentified serial killer of women in prostitution, including a transgender woman, as well as an infant, who were all found dismembered in burlap sacks on the shores of Suffolk County, Long Island, New York when one woman who was later found dead went missing after a 911 call. Two women at the scene also had tattoos on their chests, one of two cherries, which was the nickname she was given without a proper identification.
- The “Eastbound Strangler”, an unidentified serial killer of women in prostitution who were all found in a drainage pipe beneath a hotel in Atlantic City, the killer named because their heads were turned to face east.
- Alex Comstock, the main antagonist of the 2011 slasher film Husk, an undead serial killer possessing the bodies of previous victims he dresses as scarecrows, as revenge for his brother Corey killing him and hanging him like a scarecrow.
- Norman Bates, the main antagonist of the Psycho franchise, a serial killer who murdered his mother, then took on her personality, which would drive him to kill women she would’ve hated.
External links[]
- Kevin Decker on the Criminal Minds Wiki
