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| “ | I may have done some things that... you couldn't possibly understand, but I would never hurt Katie. | „ |
| ~ Richard to Aaron Hotchner after his pedophilia is discovered. |
Richard Jacobs is the secondary antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Seven Seconds". He is a pedophile who molested his six-year-old niece, Katie, and unintentionally motivates his wife to kidnap her.
He was portrayed by Emmanuel Xuereb.
Biography[]
Not much is revealed about Richard's background, but it is established that he has a twin brother named Paul, and that he and his wife Susan have a 13-year-old son named Jeremy. They appear to be a model suburban family, but beneath that veneer lies a dark secret: Richard is a child molester who preys on prepubescent girls, and has recently begun abusing his niece, Paul and his wife Beth's six-year-old daughter Katie. He is obsessed with Katie and spends as much time as he can with her but ignores and neglects Jeremy. At some point, he bought Katie an expensive gold necklace, likely for her silence.
Susan knows about Richard's pedophilia, which caused their marriage to fall apart, with Richard moving out.
"Seven Seconds"[]
When Katie goes missing during a family outing at a local mall, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) is called in to help find her. While interviewing the family, BAU Agents Emily Prentiss and Aaron Hotchner notice that Richard especially appears to blame Jeremy for Katie's disappearance. Agents Derek Morgan and Spencer Reid investigate Paul and Beth's home and discover that Katie had been wetting her bed and disfiguring her dolls, both classic signs of child sexual abuse. They theorize that Katie's abuser is a family member, and, upon learning that she spent a great deal of time with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, decide to interview Richard and Jeremy separately.
While questioning Richard, Hotchner and Prentiss find that he knows the smallest details of Katie's life, but practically nothing about his own son; Hotchner notes that pedophiles are sometimes so fixated on their victims that they ignore their own children. While questioning Jeremy, meanwhile, Reid intuits that the boy is hiding something about his family. When Katie's necklace is found in a mall trash can, having been forcibly torn off of her neck, Prentiss and Morgan realize that Richard bought Katie the necklace to buy her silence about the abuse, and that he may have kidnapped and killed her to keep her quiet. Richard denies abusing Katie, but when Hotchner asks him if Katie had "gotten too old", Richard blurts out, "No! Never!" He still denies abducting Katie, but he admits that he has done things that Prentiss and Hotchner "couldn't possibly understand".
Dazed and broken from his confession, Richard slumps in a chair. Prentiss notices that Richard has the yellowed fingernails of a smoker, but he has not lit one cigarette during the most stressful day of his life, which makes her wonder why Susan had said that she was buying an engraved lighter for him. When Prentiss asks him about it, Richard says that he had quit smoking a month earlier.
Prentiss then questions Susan and uncovers the truth: Susan knew that Richard was abusing Katie, but she irrationally blamed Katie for her husband's actions. She engineered the family outing to a mall where she used to work so she could kidnap and kill her niece, all in a desperate misguided attempt to make Richard stop molesting children and to keep their family together.
Fortunately, the BAU team is able to find Katie, alive. Richard and Susan, meanwhile, are both arrested, Richard for molesting Katie and Susan for the kidnapping and attempted murder.
External links[]
- Richard Jacobs on the Criminal Minds Wiki
