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| “ | The hour is upon us. With this, I send your soul back to Hell! | „ |
| ~ Duncan as he is about to kill one of his victims. |
William Danary, alias Leland Duncan, is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "In the Blood". He is a psychotic serial killer who murders people with the same methods that the perpetrators of the Salem Witch Trials used against their victims.
He was portrayed by James Immekus.
Early life[]
He was born William Danary in in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1982. His biological parents were killed in a car accident when he was three years old, and he was adopted by conservative Mormon couple Orland and Claire Duncan, the descendants of William Stoughton, a magistrate in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts who had proclaimed several women to be witches and had them executed in the most brutal ways possible. Years later, Duncan became a librarian, which he considered his dream job.
After his adoptive parents died, Duncan found out that he was related to Stoughton, and dedicated his life to bringing back his ancestor's former glory. He began hallucinating that he was surrounded by witches, and convinced himself that it was his God-given duty to judge and execute them, just as Stoughton had. He became obsessed with a book in the library about torture and execution methods used by the Salem Inquisitors, and began planning to inflict them on people he saw as sinners. He also began flagellating himself with a cat o' nine tails to rid himself of "impure" thoughts and urges.
Duncan's M.O. was to drug his victims with the anti-psychotic chlorpromazine, and take them to an isolated farmhouse belonging to his late adoptive grandparents. There, he would accuse them of witchcraft and sentence them to death. He then dressed them in Puritan-style robes, tortured them, slashing their arms and branding them with a hot poker with an end styled to resemble Stoughton's seal. Finally, he would kill them in various ways described in detail in the witchcraft book.
"In the Blood"[]
Duncan's first victim is Abby Duncan, a cocaine addict whom he tortures and throws off a cliff, much as accused witches were thrown from high places to their deaths as a "test" to see if they could fly. He then kidnaps Gloria Carlyle, who had declined to join an utopian sect to "live in sin" with her boyfriend. He subjects her to "pressing", a torture method used by Salem Inquisitors in which the victim is buried under heavy rocks, slowly crushing her to death.
One day at work, Yvonne Carpenter and her young daughter Kylie try to check out the witchcraft book; Duncan becomes possessive of it, and lies that is a reference book and cannot be checked out, only copied. Sex offender Parker Mills, who regularly hangs around the library harassing patrons, aggressively offers to scan the book for them, frightening them away. Upon learning of Mills' criminal record, Duncan becomes convinced that he is a witch, and kidnaps and hangs him in a public city square, hallucinating that cloaked figures holding torches are watching him.
Meanwhile, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) begins investigating the murders, profiling the killer as a delusional vigilante who was raised in a repressive religious atmosphere and projects his own failings onto his victims, inflicting brutal torture upon them to punish them and, thus, punish himself. He lives in the area and is most likely socially inept, branding his victims as a way of making them "his" because he cannot form relationships with him in any normal, healthy way. He tortures his victims in ways reminiscent of execution methods used during the Salem Witch Trials, which suggests he has a solitary job that gives him access to historical records - like a librarian. They go to the local library and question head librarian Charlotte Novak, who tells them about Duncan's confrontation with Mills, and they deduce that Duncan is the killer.
After killing Mills, Duncan learns that Carpenter checked out the witchcraft book, which convinces him that she is a witch. He drugs and kidnaps Carpenter and Kylie, accusing them of being witches and condemning them to death. Desperate to save her daughter, Carpenter tells Duncan that Kylie is in fact a witch hunter, which works; Duncan agrees to spare the girl, but tells Carpenter that she is still going to die. He goes to the library to steal another book on witchcraft to guide the execution, but Novak catches him, so he kills her.
He returns to the shed and ties Carpenter to a makeshift stake, preparing to burn her alive while hallucinating that a mob of angry, torch-wielding villagers are demanding her execution. He also declares that he will execute Kylie after all because she is the daughter of a witch. Just then, however, the BAU bursts in, having deduced where Duncan would take Carpenter based on property records found by technical analyst Penelope Garcia. Duncan's hallucinations begin to fade, and he screams that the BAU are agents of Satan conjured up by Carpenter to defeat him. He then charges at Kylie, preparing to kill her, forcing BAU agent Alex Blake to shoot him in the back. As he dies, Duncan sees the phantom villagers advancing on him with their torches, ready to burn him for his crimes.
Trivia[]
- Duncan is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Ralph Tortorici, a student at SUNY who took a lecture hall hostage and maimed a student out of schizophrenia, having a family line dating back to the Roman Empire he prided himself on.
- Ted Bundy, American’s worst serial killer, with a history of murdering women after eventually finding out his mother was who he always thought was his sister because it was hidden from him he was born out of wedlock.
- David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam”, a serial killer with a hatred of women due to his birth mother giving up for adoption, resulting in him being raised by a Catholic family.
External links[]
- Leland Duncan at the Criminal Minds Wiki
