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| “ | My grandma knew. You can't trust women. They paint their lips, and do what they want! | „ |
| ~ Lynch cursing his latest victim, Helen. |
William Lynch is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "To a Better Place". He is a serial killer who murders young women at the behest of of his alternate personality, that takes the form of his deceased grandmother.
He is portrayed by Alberto Frezza.
Early life[]
Lynch's mother, Ruth, raised him by herself after her husband walked out on the family. She was a drug addict who used narcotics to numb the pain of the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her alcoholic mother, Edith, who blamed her for her husband, Ruth's father, divorcing her. Determined to give her son the love and stability she never had, Ruth conquered her addiction with rehab, kept him safe and healthy, and spent what little extra money she had to send him to summer camps.
When Lynch was six, Ruth tried to leave Edith's house and take him with her to live with her best friend, Susan Aldrete. Ruth told Edith they were leaving as she packed her suitcase, and Edith flew into a rage and bludgeoned Ruth to death with a bottle of vodka, right in front of her grandson. Edith buried Ruth in her backyard and told Lynch, who repressed the memory of Ruth's death, that his mother had abandoned him. Edith took over raising him and taught him that all women (except herself) were liars and whores.
Soon after his mother's death, Lynch began exhibiting mental illness, including undiagnosed schizophrenia. He attempted suicide at age nine by cutting his wrist. Edith also frequently beat him so severely that he had to go to the emergency room, each time telling skeptical hospital staff that he had hurt himself accidentally. He also began self-harming around this same time.
Edith was diagnosed with emphysema when Lynch was 18, which sent him into a deep depression for which he received treatment. Edith finally died of her illness, which sent Lynch over the edge; he began hallucinating that she was still alive and telling him to kill every woman he has feelings for.
His signature as a murderer was to strangle the victims to death, smear their faces with Midnight Surprise lipstick - inspired by Edith's tirades about "painted women" - and then put their bodies in suitcases, unconsciously acting on his repressed memory of his mother packing her suitcase just before her death. His first victims were Patty Dunlop, the caterer for Edith's memorial service, and Ann Baker, the nurse who cared for Edith in the hospital.
In "To a Better Place"[]
Lynch disposes of Baker's corpse near a beach, where it is found by two cyclists. He then murders Laura Westin, a grief counselor he had a brief sexual relationship with, and leaves the suitcase with her body next to a bus stop. In the process of killing her, he accidentally cuts his hand.
He goes to the coffee shop where he works on his day off to see his coworker, Helen, who he has a crush on. He tells her that he recently lost a loved one, and Helen, who also has feelings for him, says he understands, her father having died when she was nine. Lynch tries to ask her out, but he loses his nerve and leaves the coffee shop. Once he gets home, he hallucinates about Edith telling him that Helen is just like all the other "harlots", and that she will leave him just like his mother. Angered, Lynch imagines that he tears off her oxygen tank and throws it on the floor. He has a brief moment of lucidity in which he sees that she is not there, but she "returns" when he tearfully apologizes to her and says that she is right about Helen.
He begins stalking Helen in his car, while hallucinating that Edith is sitting in the back seat, telling him to kill her. He cannot bring himself to kill her, however, and turns the car around without Helen ever seeing him. He then goes trolling for victims on the beach where he left Baker's body, but he leaves after seeing a mother with her son because it brings back unhappy memories of his own mother. Agitated, he sets his sights on a real estate agent named Holly Lefferts, whom he rapes and murders inside one of the very houses she is trying to sell. He puts her head on a pillow and poses her in the exact position that his mother's body was found in, although he is not consciously aware of it, before bursting into tears. He then returns home, where he has another argument with his hallucination of Edith about Helen, whom "Edith" says will abandon him just like his mother. He briefly recovers the memory of seeing his mother die, but quickly represses it, clenching his fist so hard that the wound on his hand reopens.
Meanwhile, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) investigates the murders, profiling the killer as a man in his early to mid-20s who is targeting women in the grieving industry because he sees them as surrogates for a maternal figure who died when he was a child, which he would have seen as abandonment. He is physically strong enough to carry his victims' bodies in suitcases and handsome and charming enough to get his victims to come to him. They theorize that he has until recently been able to suppress his homicidal rage, but a recent stressor, probably involving the loss of another maternal figure, has eroded his self-control. They also deduce that his first few victims were probably connected in some way to his recent loss. Using this profile, BAU technical analyst Penelope Garcia searches for records of recent deaths of elderly women in the area that the victims had some professional connection to and cross-references them with family traumas involving children and finds records of Ruth's death and Lynch's frequent hospitalizations. The BAU team questions Susan, who tells them what Edith did to her daughter and her grandson, and they realize that he is the killer.
Lynch goes to the coffee shop and tells Helen he has quit his job. He then asks her out, and she happily accepts. He picks her up after work and takes her to his house, saying that he wants to introduce her to his grandmother. When she sees that no one is there, however, she gets nervous and asks him to take her home. He refuses, however, and takes her hostage with a box cutter when she tries to leave. Lynch hallucinates that Edith is telling him to kill Helen, and he agrees, saying that Edith was right about her. Lynch tells Helen about his mother leaving him as he takes out a suitcase to put her body in, even as Helen tries to pacify him by saying that it was not his fault that his mother abandoned him.
At that moment, BAU Agents Emily Prentiss, Spencer Reid, and Luke Alvez charge into the house and hold Lynch at gunpoint. Reid tells Lynch what really happened to his mother, but Lynch refuses to believe him. Reid then asks him if he remembers the toy truck he played with as a child, which Susan kept after Ruth's death. This triggers Lynch's memory of seeing Edith kill his mother, and he looks at his hallucination of Edith in anger and disbelief before he finally bursts into tears and lets Helen go. He then hurls the box cutter at his hallucination of Edith, which disappears. As Alvez takes Lynch into custody, Prentiss searches the backyard and finds where Ruth's remains are buried. Lynch is then presumably institutionalized.
Trivia[]
- Lynch is inspired by multiple real-life criminals and crimes:
- The Brighton trunk murders; two women were found dead in wooden chests, one at a train station and one at a hotel. A suspect was arrested and tried for murdering the second woman, but he was acquitted.
- Ricardo Caputo, a.k.a. “The Lady Killer”, an Argentinian-American dangerous serial killer of his girlfriends, from New York State to Mexico, who also suffered psychotic mental health afflictions.
- Ed Gein, a.k.a. “The Plainfield Ghoul”, a killer of women who was conditioned by his fanatically religious mother to believe that all women (except for her) were sinful.
- Philip Joseph Hughes Jr., a.k.a. “The East Bay Strangler”, a serial killer/rapist of women with the reluctant complicity of his abused wife, the last woman Hughes killed being murdered in an almost uncanny fashion to Holly Lefferts. Hughes’ wife was granted immunity to testify against him, and Hughes was imprisoned.
- Norman Bates, the main antagonist of Psycho, a serial killer of women with an alternate personality taking the form of his Puritanical, insanely jealous mother.
- John Harrington, the protagonistic villain of the giallo film Hatcher for the Honeymoon, a serial killer of brides-to-be to recover repressed memories of his first murders.
External links[]
- William Lynch on the Criminal Minds Wiki
