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Michael Vinoda is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior episode “Devotion”. Vinoda is a spree killer of fathers on a quest to get revenge on his own father for abandoning their family.
He’s portrayed by Lukas Behnken.
Biography[]
Background[]
Vinoda was born in Nebraska in 1987, having a father, Grant Nichols, and a sister named Tami. After the siblings’ mother died, Nichols abandoned the family and relocated to Washington D.C., becoming an entrepreneur and entering politics. Vinoda was diagnosed with schizophrenia in a very uneducated manner around the same time Nichols left, but it’s unknown if there’s a correlation. Vinoda and Tami were in foster care for eight years, before they lived in an old, uninhabited farm together. Shortly after Vinoda lost a job due to his untreated schizophrenia, Tami found a campaign poster for Nichols’ run for city council, which showed he remarried to a woman named Kristen and had another daughter named Erica. Tami was so devastated by the grief she hanged herself in the barn. Vinoda found Tami dead and took her down from the noose, leaving it behind in the barn. He set there for days, until his mental illness warped his mind to believe Tami was still alive, mixed with a furious drive for revenge against Nichols for ditching his first family and leaving Tami to die. While Vinoda was driving to D.C. to confront Nichols, Tami’s remains with him and preserved with molten candle wax and perfume while decorated with flowers in her memory, Vinoda would track any fathers he’d see whenever he made pit stops and take his aggression out on them by splitting them from their families and killing them, before he drove away again.
Vinoda started with Armen Agüero in Omaha, who was somehow lured away during the nighttime from an eatery and blitzed in a parking garage. Vinoda struck his head and knocked him out with chloroform, before gagging him, taping his hands together as if folded in prayer and standing him on a stool with a noose around his neck. As Nichols’ campaign slogan was "Because you can't always keep promises, but you can fix them!", Vinoda pointed at Armen while forcing Tami’s remains to “watch” and shouted "Don't make promises you can't keep, 'cause you can't always fix 'em!", as if addressing Armen as Nichols in reaction. Vinoda then kicked the stool, and Armen slowly hanged to death. Vinoda then saw Kevin Laughlin in Joliet, Illinois, with his family, tampering with his camera to split him from his family while he repaired it. Vinoda blitzed Kevin and killed him in the same ritual when night came. While in Ohio, Vinoda then saw Otis Meredith out the window, and made off on the same road before Otis did to trap him. Vinoda laid on the road and pretended he was dead so Otis would stop to see if he was fine. Vinoda blitzed and hoisted Otis in his ritual, and when Otis saw Tami’s decaying corpse against Vinoda’s car, Otis shouted in horror. Otis was killed and left to be found at the scene, the agents narrowly arriving shortly after Vinoda escaped.
By this point, the team finds out Otis’ murder was recorded on a 911 call that never ended. Knowing Otis shouted before he died, pairing that realization with the candle wax, perfume, and flower petals, they realize Vinoda’s driving around with a dead person. They then go back to his signature phrase before he executed each man, and they realized his mental illness made an anagram of Nichols’ speech. They knew Nichols was connected somehow, but he was uncooperative, so the profile and the evidence eventually led to Vinoda’s identification. The agents found the barn where Tami hanged herself, the noose still suspended, and the poster she saw before she died. By this point, Vinoda has taken the Nicholas family hostage. Confronting Nichols, he’s in no way placated by what he hears that’s meant to quell him or perhaps justify Nichols’ actions, and Vinoda makes him get into position for his murder too. A dead Tami is placed at the family table to “watch”, but while Vinoda’s arguing between Nichols and Tami, the agents barge in to stop him. Agent Sam Cooper begins appealing to Vinoda, chastising Nichols as a deadbeat father enough for Nichols to cry, in the hopes Vinoda gets the recognition he wants to surrender. Vinoda still won’t hear it and is about to kill Nichols, when Agent Mick Rawson fires a shot into Tami’s skull. Vinoda, believing that now she’s been killed, turns his shock into hugging her and sobbing in grief. Cooper then says Tami’s already dead in the hopes it’ll break Vinoda of his delusions, but it’s no use. Vinoda is detained and institutionalized given his state of mind.
Trivia[]
- Vinoda is inspired by multiple real-life and fictional murderers:
- Edmund Kemper, a.k.a. “The Co-Ed Killer”, an American serial killer of teenage girls and college women whose rage was taken out on them until he killed his mother, the primary focus of his rage. Kemper was also a necrophile, which Vinoda was originally profiled as.
- Andrew Cunanan, an American spree killer of men across the country, ending with the assassination of fashion tycoon Gianni Versace.
- Ed Gein, a.k.a. “The Plainfield Ghoul”, an American killer of two women after the death of his mother, as he wanted to use their remains and the remains of women whose graves he robbed to make “woman suits” to wear to remember his mother.
- Norman Bates, the main antagonist of the Psycho franchise, a serial killer, primarily of women, keeping his mother’s decaying remains in his house and taking on her personality, having killed her first and progressed to murdering women he believed she’d be jealous of.
