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“ | Scream for me. | „ |
~ Peter to Jennifer Jareau; also his last words. |
Peter Folkmore is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds Season 10 episode "Scream". He is a man obsessed with recreating a tape that contained the sounds of his parents' deaths. To these means, he kidnaps, tortures and murders women.
As an adult, he is portrayed by Brian Poth. As a child, he is portrayed by Ty Hale.
Biography[]
Peter was born in 1980, under the surname Holden. As a child, he had to constantly hear his father beating his mother, Karen. Despite having multiple chances to report her husband to the police, Karen never did. Wanting to get both Peter and Karen out of that situation, an officer named John Folkmore gave Peter a tape recorder and told him to record the abuse, so they'd finally have evidence. One night, Peter heard his parents arguing again, but when he went to record it, his father had murdered his mother by slashing her throat. Peter witnessed and recorded this. After realizing that Peter had seen the murder, his father shot himself in the head.
Despite being put into foster care, this incident would go on to traumatize Peter, so much so that he carried his tape recorder around everywhere he went and listened to the tape of his parents' deaths repeatedly. Likely because it was the last he'd ever hear of his mother. As an adult, Peter changed his surname to Folkmore (after John Folkmore), and got a job as a Domestic Abuse counselor.
One fateful day, a fire in his basement burned up the tape recorder and the tape of his parents' deaths. Desperately wanting the tape back, Peter came under the delusion that he could recreate the tape. This leads to him abducting a woman from his work, taking her back to the house, and beating her, while recording it to recreate the sounds and lines from the tape. However, he unintentionally beat the woman to death. After disposing of the woman's body, he would go on to try again one month later, this time using a baseball bat instead of his fists. He makes them drink hot tea to soothe their throats so they can continue screaming for as long as possible.
In "Scream"[]
Folkmore kidnaps Lauren White, ties her up, and records her while forcing her to reenact with him the abuse that his father put his mother through. Unsatisfied with her "performance", he beats her to death with a baseball bat, all the while recording her screams of pain. Afterward, he listens to the recording while banging his head against the wall until it bleeds.
The following day, he goes to work and meets battered wife Greta Thomas and her young son, Conner, acting as their case agent. Conner is the same age Folkmore was when his father murdered his mother, so he decides to kill Greta, whom he sees as an unfit mother. He breaks into their house and distracts Conner by giving him candy, allowing him to kidnap Greta. He berates her for "allowing" her husband to beat her in front of Conner. He tortures her while recording her cries of pain, but is again dissatisfied and yells at her for "not doing it right". He then trashes the room and starts banging his head against a shelf.
Meanwhile, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), who is investigating the murders, profiles the killer as a man in his mid-to-late 30s who, as a child, witnessed his mother being abused, and is re-enacting that abuse with his victims. He chooses women from abusive backgrounds, wanting simultaneously to help them and punish them for "allowing" the abuse they suffered. The fact that he makes them drink hot tea to soothe their throats suggests that he wants them to keep screaming above all else. Finally, BAU technical analyst Penelope Garcia researches domestic violence cases in the area 30 years before, and finds an article about the murder-suicide. After speaking with Officer Folkmore, agents Spencer Reid and Kate Callahan intuit that Peter changed his last name to Folkmore in honor of the only positive male role he ever had. With this information, Garcia finds his address.
While washing his dishes, Folkmore drops one and breaks it, triggering the memory of his parents' deaths. Greta, meanwhile, breaks free of her restraints and hides, but Folkmore finds her. She hits him in the face with his own baseball bat, so angering him that he begins choking her with it. Just then, the BAU, flanked by local police, burst into Folkmore's house. Folkmore attacks agent Jennifer Jareau, ordering her scream for him. Just as he is about to strike her, however, Callahan shoots him in the back, killing him and saving Jareau. His recorder is revealed to have been running, as he wanted to rush preserving Jareau’s murder on tape in a desperate futile attempt to achieve his motive.
Trivia[]
- Folkmore appears to be partly inspired by Eddie Leonski, a.k.a. “The Brownout Strangler”, a serial killer and navy sailor in Australia responsible for choking three women to death with his bare hands to, in his own words, attack their voices.
- The song that played when Folkmore's father murdered his mother is Brenton Wood's "Great Big Bundle of Love". Folkmore plays this song on a record player whenever he tortures someone.
External Links[]
- Peter Folkmore on the Criminal Minds Wiki