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| “ | I decide when you die. | „ |
| ~ Summers trying to kill his own son. |
Wilson "Will" Summers is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Risky Business". He is a serial killer who manipulates people into killing themselves.
He was portrayed by John Pyper-Ferguson, who also played Top Dollar in The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, William McBride in Smallville, and Tucker Shockley in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Summers suffers from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, and is thus compelled to harm people in order to get attention. He repeatedly poisons his own wife, Cynthia, who would always recover after a few days in the hospital, only for Summers to poison her again when his compulsion resurfaced.
Eventually, however, he gives her too much poison, killing her. Finally killing someone fully unleashes Summers' sadistic need for power and control, so he begins choking his teenage son, Chris, and makes it look like the boy practices autoerotic asphyxiation.
Finally, choking Chris was not enough to satisfy Summers' urges, and he decides to exercise the ultimate power and control by making people kill themselves. With Chris' reluctant help, he creates a website called "The Choking Game", on which he uploads anonymous videos daring the site's teenage users, mostly Chris' classmates, to choke themselves for sexual pleasure. Just as Summers hoped, several of the site's users died after choking themselves too hard at his instigation.
"Risky Business"[]
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) was called in to investigate what appears to be a mass suicide, but they quickly find out that the teenagers' deaths were provoked. They come to suspect Chris, so they detain him at the local jail for questioning. However, the only BAU member who can get through to him is technical analyst Penelope Garcia, who bonds with him over their mutual love for and skill with computers and social media.
Meanwhile, Summers uploads another video, and goes to the station to rescue Chris. He demands a lawyer for his son, and invokes his right as a parent and guardian to take him home. Unknown to the BAU, he also steals the recordings of the victims' deaths.
Believing that Chris is innocent, Garcia digs into his past and finds out about his mother's death, and that he had been admitted to the hospital several times with bruises on his chest similar to those inflicted by CPR compressions. The rest of the team then realize that Summers, who worked as an EMT, would have access to poisonous chemicals and would know how to revive someone repeatedly; they theorize that he is the killer.
Summers took Chris to the graveyard where Cynthia was buried, where he tried to upload the stolen videos. When he was unsuccessful, he took his rage out on Chris, choking him violently. Fortunately, the BAU - acting on verbal clues Chris had communicated to Garcia, arrest him before he can kill Chris. He is presumably imprisoned for life, while Chris is exonerated.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The “choking game” is a reported fad in real-life where victims, particularly children, asphyxiate themselves for the rush or high of experience either a loss of air or a resuscitation after they regain it. As in the episode, it’s dangerous and reported to have killed young people participating in it.
- Summers is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Hiroshi Maeue, a.k.a. "The Suicide Website Murderer", a Japanese serial killer of random people Maeue lured through the Internet for "suicide pacts" just so he could strangle them to death for his own pleasure.
- Charles William Davis, Jr., a serial killer/rapist of women working in ambulance dispatch and taking pleasure of placing anonymous calls to the scenes of his crimes and even visiting them with his colleagues under the guise of his job.
- Richard Angelo, a.k.a. “The Angel of Death”, an American serial killer also responsible for deliberately harming patients at the hospital he worked at as a nurse explicitly for the purpose of being the one to save them, killing many patients and still continuing until he was caught.
- Anatoly Slivko, a Russian serial killer who would maliciously trick the boys he lured into hanging themselves under the pretense of filming a home movie reenacting a partisan soldier being executed by Nazi soldiers. Then Slivko assaulted, murdered, dismembered and burned the boys to fuel his own gratification.
- The episode is reported to have been inspired in its plot by the Japanese horror film Suicide Circle.
External Links[]
- Will Summers on the Criminal Minds Wiki
