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“ | I may have done some things that you would never understand, but I would never hurt Katie. | „ |
~ Richard after his pedophilia is discovered. |
Richard Jacobs is the secondary antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Seven Seconds". He is a pedophile who molests his six-year-old niece, Katie, and unintentionally motivates his wife to kidnap her.
He was portrayed by Emmanuel Xuareb.
Biography
Not much is revealed about Richard's background, but it is established that he has a brother named Paul, and that he and his wife Susan have a thirteen-year-old son named Jeremy. They appear to be a model suburban family, but beneath that veneer lies a dark secret: Richard is a pedophile and 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.
Susan knows about Richard's pedophilia and briefly leaves him, but she eventually moves back in, determined to keep her family together.
"Seven Seconds"
When Katie goes missing during a family outing at a local mall, the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) is called in to help find her. While interviewing the family, agents Emily Prentiss and Aaron Hotchner notice that Richard 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 that he knows practically nothing about his own son; Hotchner notes that pedophiles are sometimes so focused on their victims that they ignore their own children. While questioning Jeremy, meanwhile, Reid intuits that Jeremy is hiding something about his family. When Katie's necklace, an expensive gift from Richard, is found in a mall trash can, having been forcibly torn off of Katie's neck, Prentiss and Morgan realize that Richard bought Katie the necklace to buy her silence about him molesting her, and may have kidnapped and killed her to keep her quiet. Richard denies abusing Katie but when Hotchner asks him if Katie had outgrown his age preference, Richard blurts out, "No! Never!" He then admits that he has done things Prentiss and Hotchner "would never understand".
Dazed and broken from his confession, Richard slumps in a chair. Prentiss notices that Richard, a smoker, does not light a cigarette, 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 quit smoking a month before. Prentiss then questions Susan, and uncovers the truth: Susan knew that Richard was abusing Katie, but irrationally blamed Katie for her husband's actions, and engineered the family outing to a mall where she used to work so she could kidnap and kill her niece, all in a desperate 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 abusing Katie and Susan for kidnapping her.
Trivia
- The BAU team notes that another young girl had been found sexually assaulted and murdered in the area shortly before Katie's disappearance. Susan, meanwhile, tells Prentiss that she pieced together what Richard was doing to Katie after seeing a news story about the murdered girl. While his guilt or innocence is never directly stated, it is suggested that Richard may have raped and murdered the girl.
External Links
- Richard Jacobs on the Criminal Minds Wiki
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