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| “ | I said I'd decide, and I have... I'm gonna send you to Hell myself. | „ |
| ~ The Woodsman Killer preparing to kill Cissy Howard. |
The Woodsman Killer, also known as the The Mountain Man, is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "Blood Relations". He is an inbred, feral serial killer who hunts and kills people to force his mother to acknowledge him.
He was portrayed by Bill Oberst, Jr., who also portrayed The Facebook Stalker in Take This Lollipop.
Biography[]
Early life[]
The Woodsman Killer is the product of an incestuous relationship between teenage siblings Malachi and Magdalena Lee, who abandoned him in the West Virginia woods after he was born with sever deformities, not even being given a name. He was unofficially adopted by a mysterious Appalachian woman who had helped Magdalena give birth, who raised him in isolation in the very cabin where he was conceived, and taught him how to hunt and trap. Over the years, he caught several of the nearby townspeople's livestock animals and pets, and became an urban legend.
Eventually, the woman developed terminal cancer, and the Woodsman tried his best to take care of her. On her deathbed, she told him the truth about his parents. He found his birth mother, who had changed her name to Cissy Howard, and devised a plan to make her acknowledge him by hunting and killing members of the Lee family, with whom Cissy's husband and his relations had been feuding for years, unaware of her true identity.
"Blood Relations"[]
The Woodsman kills Malachi's son (and his half-brother) Matthias with a barbed-wire laced bear trap, beheading him. The following day, he kills Cissy's son (and his half-brother), Clark, by hanging him with barbed wire. The murders are so grisly that the local police contact the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) for help in profiling and apprehending the killer.
The next night, the Woodsman attacks the home of Malachi's other son Lee, killing his wife Maddie by putting a barbed wire noose around her neck, attacking it to a car and driving away at top speed, which beheads her. Following that murder, he bleeds his adoptive mother's corpse by stabbing her in the stomach, and then puts salt on her face in a kind of funeral rite.
He then initiates the final phase of his plan when he kidnaps Cissy and brings her to the cabin. He reveals his identity to her, and demands to know whether she had showed him any affection after giving birth to him. Cissy replies that, while she did not name him or kiss him goodbye, she did hold him once. Enraged, he prepares to hang her with a barbed wire noose, but she buys time by saying that she can help him escape the police as a way to atone for her sins. He agrees and spares her, and she shows him an escape route. He flees the cabin, leaving behind a booby trap that kills one of the SWAT officers backing up the BAU as they try to arrest him.
The Woodsman attacks BAU agent Alex Blake, sending them both into a creek. Blake shoots at him, grazing his temple, before they both plunge into the water. Blake emerges seconds later and tells her fellow agents to open fire into the water, which they do. The Woodsman is nevertheless nowhere to be found, but they reason that he could not have survived. Regardless, his actions caused Malachi and Magdalena to feel heavy shame and guilt for abandoning him, but this also caused their respective families to put aside their differences to question the siblings on what is going on. The two then prepared to tell them the disgusting truth about the Woodsman Killer.
The following day, however, he turns up, very much alive, in Kentucky, where he ambushes a young couple and steals their car.
Trivia[]
- The "Mountain Man" is inspired by multiple real-life criminals:
- Frank Davis, a serial killer/rapist of boys with a signature of restraining with wire nooses before sexually assaulting and murdering them.
- The murderers of Davis Timmerman, a family guilty of murdering a farmer in retrobution for him killing someone in their family in self-defense. Similarly, a shootout with police ensured when they were to be arrested, which killed two cops and a pedestrian.
- Mark Hopkinson, a mastermind of a series of murders over land dispute in Wyoming.
- William Diller Hollenbaugh, an identically nicknamed kidnapper and killer. Hollenbaugh was a repeat offender who kidnapped Peggy Ann Bradnick and shot dead FBI agent Terry Ray Anderson. Hollenbaugh himself was killed in a shootout, and Peggy Ann was rescued.
- The Odet Family, the main antagonists of the Wrong Turn franchise, a serial killer/cannibal inbred family in the West Virginia mountains, with a variety of M.O.s involving hunting weapons and booby traps involving barbed wire.
- Jason Voorhees, the main antagonist of the Friday the 13th franchise, a semi-immortal serial killer born with deformities, of local horror legend in the area where he typically kills, and is motivated by trauma involving his mother Pamela Voorhees, keeping her corpse at his hideout to cope.
- He is one of the only five criminals in Criminal Minds that remained at large in their final appearances, alongside Skull Tattoo Man, Darlene Beckett, Shane Wyland and Taras Yudin.
External Links[]
- The Woodsman Killer on the Criminal Minds Wiki
