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| “ | I'm already dead. | „ |
| ~ Owen as he prepares to die in a "blaze of glory". |
Owen Savage is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Elephant's Memory". He is an angry teenage outcast who goes on a killing spree to get even with everyone in his small town whom he feels has wronged him.
He is portrayed by Cody Kasich.
Profile[]
Owen was born and raised in the small town of West Bune, Texas. His alcoholic mother died in a drunk driving accident when he was 10, leaving him to be raised by his domineering father, West Bune's deputy sheriff and U.S. marine (whom he reluctantly discharged himself from the service so he could take care of his son after he lost his wife), who constantly demeaned him as "stupid". Owen is in fact very bright, with a gift for math, science, and computer technology; however, he has an undiagnosed learning disorder that makes it very difficult for him to read and understand spatial relations, and so he got bad grades in English, History and Geometry.
He was also severely bullied - at one point, three jocks of the school's wrestling team forced him to masturbate on camera as an "initiation" into the team, and then put the video on the Internet. The school did nothing to discipline the jocks, and Owen's father blamed him for what they did to him. Ironically, he had only wanted to be on the wrestling team in a desperate attempt to appease his father.
The one person in Owen's life he cares for is his girlfriend, Jordan, whom he sees as his soulmate; both have learning disabilities and abusive fathers, both are bullied for being "stupid" and "weird", and both their mothers abandoned them at a young age. The two made a plan to leave West Bune together and never return - and, unbeknownst to Jordan, Owen plots to get even with the entire town before they leave.
In "Elephant's Memory"[]
Owen steals a cache of his father's firearms, and plants homemade explosives in front of the Norris residence, killing Jordan's father, Rod Norris when he walks into his front yard smoking a cigarette. He makes it look like Jordan had died in the explosion by planting her clothes at the scene, stuffed with meat. When his father and his partner arrive at the scene, Owen kills both his father by shooting him in the face at point blank range and his partner with an automatic rifle.
Owen then kills Kyle Borden, a 19-year-old former student who had taken advantage of Jordan when she was a freshman and bragged about it to everyone in school. Owen also abducts, undresses and kills the three jocks who videotaped him years earlier, shooting them execution-style and dumping their bodies in a nearby lake. He records these three murders with Jordan's phone and uploads the footage onto the school's social network.
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) arrives at West Bune after the massacre at the Norris residence, and they theorize that Owen will eventually kill himself while taking as many people with him as he can. Considering Owen a lost cause, Special Supervisory Agents David Rossi and Aaron Hotchner plan to get Jordan to abandon him and thus take away his only reason for living, in the hopes that he will commit suicide alone without hurting anyone else. However, Dr. Spencer Reid, who was also bullied in high school, takes pity on Owen and tries to reason with his colleagues that he can persuade him to give himself up peacefully.
Meanwhile, Owen takes Jordan - who is completely unaware of the murders - to a local rancher's home, believing the rancher to be out of town. When the rancher unexpectedly returns home early, however, Owen panics and reluctantly kills him to avoid being discovered. Meanwhile, Agents Emily Prentiss and Jennifer "J.J." Jareau convince Jordan's best friend Eileen to warn her via text message that Owen will eventually kill her. When Jordan defends Owen, Eileen sends her the video of Owen killing the three jocks. Horrified, Jordan runs outside, only to see Owen burying the rancher's body. Terrified and heartbroken, Jordan gets into Kyle's stolen car and drives away, leaving Owen completely alone.
Now believing he has nothing left to live for, Owen walks into town, intent on giving Jordan his mother's necklace before killing as many people in the Sheriff's Department as he can and take his own life. Reid defiantly intercepts him, however, and tries to talk him down, saying that he understands what Owen has suffered. While talking to Owen, Reid blocks his fellow agents' line of fire, endangering his life and (unintentionally) theirs. Finally, Reid tells Owen that if he commits suicide, he will be abandoning Jordan, just like his mother abandoned him. This touches what remains of Owen's humanity, and he gives himself up. Reid leads Owen into the Sheriff's Department, where he gives Jordan his mother's necklace before being led away in handcuffs. Owen is presumably imprisoned for the murders.
Psychological profile[]
Rossi theorizes that Owen is an "injustice collector", a type of mass killer who has spent years nursing grudges against everyone they feel has wronged them, and who commits a large-scale act of violence to avenge every real or imagined slight or insult they have ever received. What separates him from other school shooters and mass murderers, however, is that he has a reason to live - his love for Jordan.
Rossi and Reid also note that Owen is a huge fan of the late country singer Johnny Cash, identifying with Cash's image as a solitary, misunderstood "Man in Black". Reid is able to predict Owen's plan to kill as many people as he can by remembering the opening lyrics to Cash's song "When the Man Comes Around": "There's a man goin' round, taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody will be treated all the same/There'll be a golden letter reaching down/When the man comes around".
Trivia[]
- Owen is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Charles Starkweather, an American spree killer with many similarities. Starkweather also dressed like a rebellious teen icon, specifically James Dean, and he killed the family of his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who he stayed in hiding with as well. Caril’s complicity in Starkweather’s crimes were questioned, and she also served prison time until her release, while Starkweather was executed.
- Gary Lee Sampson, a spree killer and serial robber who was born with dyslexia and similarly beaten and verbally degraded by his father, as well as denied advanced duration because of his IQ, leading to Sampson accumulating a criminal record.
- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two perpetrators of the Columbine high School massacre, where they committed shootings and bombings of the staff and pupils present, after a long, brutal history of bullying without intevention against the two.
- Kit Caruthers, one of the two protagonistic villains of the film Badlands, along with girlfriend and accomplice Holly Sagris, who’s the inspiration for Jordan. Kit and Holly, in turn, are coincidentally inspired by Starkweather and Fugate as well.
External links[]
- Owen Savage on the Criminal Minds Wiki
