Sara McLean is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Unforgettable". She is a psychopathic nurse who poisons several people with radioactive materials as part of a scheme to kill her husband and collect his life insurance.
She is portrayed by Sara Vincenti.
Early life[]
Sara worked as a nurse in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area in the radiology department of a hospital. She was also a psychopath who developed a plan to poison her husband, Alex, to collect on his $5 million life insurance policy. She spent nine years stealing radioactive materials from several different hospitals, changing jobs frequently so no one would catch on. She also hacked into the hospitals' databases to alter their records of how much radioactive material they had.
She then covered it up by poisoning federal employees with the same material in order to make it look like a series of assassinations committed by the Russian government, having researched assassination methods used by assassins working for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. By time time of the episode, she has murdered four people, including Sam Bower, an old friend of Agent Stephen Walker of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU).
In "Unforgettable"[]
After killing Bower, Sara puts radioactive material into Alex's lunch, intending for him to die at work. While Alex eats the tainted food and collapses, he survives long enough to be examined at the hospital, where doctors discover the true nature of his illness. They are too late to save him, however; he dies a slow, painful death, just like the other victims. Sara realizes that suspicion will fall on her if Alex is the last to die, however, and so goes out looking for another person to poison.
Meanwhile, the BAU starts investigating the case, profiling the killer as someone with access to medical-grade radioactive material who holds a grudge against a specific person, probably a family member, and so is killing people at random and copying the modus operandi of Russian government assassins in order to disguise the real goal of the murders: to kill that person. Supervisory Agent David Rossi has Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia cross-reference employees of hospitals in the area who have access to radioactive material with immediate family members who have died of radiation poisoning, and she finds Sara. Rossi deduces that she would next attack the nearest federal building to her work.
Sure enough, Sara goes to a federal building near her work and sneaks up behind a random woman, preparing to inject her with radioactive material. Before she can claim another victim, however, the BAU appears with guns drawn to arrest her. Sara panics and takes the woman hostage, threatening to kill her. Agents Emily Prentiss, Jennifer Jareau, and Tara Lewis all back off bercause they do not have a clean shot at Sara, but Rossi manages to sneak up behind her and shoot her dead, thus saving the hostage.
Trivia[]
- Sara is primarily inspired by Stella Nickell, a murderer and poisoner responsible for killing her husband for life insurance payouts, as well as tampering pills of Excedrin with the same poisons she used to kill and harm more people as a diversion.
- Sara's poisonings being suspected of being by Russian mercenaries are inspired by multiple infamous Russian and other poisoning cases:
- Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and political critic who was stabbed with a Bulgarian umbrella and poisoned with an irradiated ricin tablet.
- Viktor Yushchenko, a Ukrainian politician who alleged he injected dioxin, which poisoned him badly enough to leave him with chloracne and he blamed on Russian political rivals.
- Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian-British former law officer and spy who publicized biographies on Russian corruption, before his meeting with a Russian businessman led to his poisoning by radiation.
- "Amerithrax", a series of terrorist attacks against government officials and employees in D.C. using poison pen letters laced with live anthrax spores. The writing in the letters suggesting Islamic extremism, but federal investigations eventually followed other leads, in spite of the case going cold.
External links[]
- Sara McLean on the Criminal Minds Wiki
