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| “ | They like it when they get to share me. | „ |
| ~ Wilkinson about his victims |
Robert Wilkinson is the overarching antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Birthright". He is a serial killer of teenage girls and the father of Charlie Wilkinson, who is inspired by his memory to become a serial killer as well.
He is portrayed by Matt Hoffman.
Biography[]
Robert appears in flashback, having died in 1980, 26 years before the episode takes place.
A farmer in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Robert was a violent, alcoholic misogynist who would beat his wife, Mary, and their infant son, Charlie, during his frequent drunken rages. When Mary finally left him and took Charlie with her, Robert took his anger out on a teenage runaway named Karen Foley; he kidnapped her and held her captive in his barn as his sex slave, beating and raping her whenever he got drunk.
Karen finally escaped one night after Robert forgot to chain her up prior to passing out. Unbeknownst to him, she was pregnant with his child, whom she named Stephen after giving birth to him. Her family did not believe her story about being kidnapped, as she had run away several times before.
Robert, meanwhile, began kidnapping teenage girls, having become addicted to the power he held over Karen. As with Karen, he held them prisoner in his barn, raping and torturing them for weeks. This time, however, he killed them with an axe to make sure they would not escape. He would then dismember the bodies and dump the remains at Civil War re-enactment site near his farm.
He murdered a total of five girls before Mary returned to the farm, and discovered what he had done. Knowing Robert would eventually kill her and Charlie, Mary killed him by pushing him into his own combine harvester, and made it look like an accident.
Decades later, Mary would discover that her efforts to protect Charlie from his father were in vain; he had become a serial killer in his own right, having inherited his father's psychopathy and grown up to hate her and all other women because she lied to him about who his father was.
Trivia[]
- Robert is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Larry Hall, an imprisoned American murderer and suspected serial killer infamous for leaving victims dead at Civil War historic sites across the country. Jailhouse informants tried get his confessions on dozens of suspected murders nationwide, and all of Hall's confessions have since been recanted.
- David Meirhofer, a serial killer of children at the center of one of the FBI's ewrliest offender profiling cases. Meirhofer reduced victims to bone fragments and committed suicide in police custody.
- Gordon Stewart Northcott, a.k.a. “The Wineville Chicken Cook Murderer”, a serial killer/rapist of boys he held hostage, several of them at a time, using his equally brutalized nephew as a lure, before he murdered them and butchered their remains.
- Richard Speck, a serial rapist later escalating to mass murder of numerous nurses in a college dorm, caught once one of them escaped when he wasn't looking and gave identifying information of him.
- Joel Rifkin, a serial killer of women in prostitution who were reduced to dismembered remains, coinciding with the murders of Robert Shulman, one of the inspirations for Charlie.
- John Allen Muhammad, one of the "D.C. Snipers", a serial killer of random strangers who had an accomplice in a teenager, Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the inspirations for Charlie.
External links[]
- Robert Wilkinson on the Criminal Minds Wiki
