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The Indianapolis Unsub (so named by this wiki, real identity unknown) is a serial killer and abductor who appears in the Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior episode "Jane".

History[]

Nothing about this man is revealed during the episode, not even his real name, other than the fact that he appeared to work as a mechanic. He started out with abducting prostitutes, but when the Indianapolis PD Vice performed a sweep on local prostitution, he switched to middle-class women. The BAU are called in when the unsub attacked Michael, a bystander who overheard an abduction and tried to stop him. He later dies in the hospital, as does the woman who was abducted after she’s slowly dismembered alive. The Red Cell team manages to find him before he could kill another woman and he retaliates violently, macing Simms and attempting to fight back when Cooper apprehended him, but he was immediately subdued by a near-fatal strangulation from him, done in a blind fit of rage over Michael's death. Cooper calms himself to carefully cut the captive woman loose by snipping the wire tourniquets around her limbs. The unsub is interrogated in custody, where he boasts his admission of gout and the infamy he’ll receive. Despite the team’s best efforts, the unsub refuses to divulge the name of the last woman he killed to assert a last remaining power, and the team later packs up vowing to find out her name.

Modus Operandi[]

The unsub targeted women of various ages and races. He started with prostitutes but later went on to target middle-class women. He would abduct them on Thursday or Friday nights in different ways, usually from public or semi-public places, and take them to his workshop, where he would strip them and hold them captive in a secret compartment under the floor. He then tied them up tightly with wires in a way ensuring that blood flow to the limbs was completely cut off. When circulation had stopped, he would spend hours cutting off the arms and legs with an electric saw, amputating them alive, eventually killing them by decapitating them. The torso and limbs were placed in a metal barrel filled with wet concrete and the heads were kept in his refrigerator. The barrels were then dumped in Fall Creek, a nearby lake, and the remains of different women were often mixed and matched in the barrels. For at least one abduction, he used a car that was left at his workshop for repairs. When he killed Michael, he slashed his throat with an unknown bladed instrument.

Profile[]

The unsub is a male in his mid-20s to early 30s, who is most likely a local, since he is able to easily blend in. Because he is able to hold his victims captive over the course of a few days, he likely has access to a storage space where nobody finds them and he most likely does not have any kind of family, as they would notice. He does not like his victims to fight back. That said, he may have had a past rape victim who did fight back, and now, he is punishing them all. If he was incarcerated before the abductions, it is conceivable that his conviction rested on some woman who fought back, and he might have planned his crimes while incarcerated. He might be a sexual offender who was released in the Midwest area in the last three years. He is also strong and might work as a laborer. He may be driving a flatbed with a winch, a tow truck, or a crane to transport the drums containing his victims. He is cutting himself off completely from the rest of humanity, even dehumanizing himself, and is also extremely brutal and an obvious psychopath.

Real-Life Comparisons[]

The unsub appears to have been based on Jeffrey Dahmer - Both were serial killers who targeted both high and low-risk victims of one gender (women in the Butcher's case, men and boys in Dahmer's), dismembered and decapitated them (though Dahmer did so post-mortem, while the unsub's kill method was decapitation), stored their body parts (particularly their heads) in barrels in some sort of liquid compound (cement in the unsub's case, acid in Dahmer's) and disposed of unwanted parts in some body of water (a lake in the unsub's case, the sewers in Dahmer's), in one case they slit an incidental victim's throat, and were both apprehended after a fight with two members of law enforcement.

He also appears to have been based on The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run - Both were serial killers that targeted both high and low-risk victims (most of them female though they both killed men), bound their victims and killed them by decapitation, dismembered their victims in a secondary private location (premortem and antemortem in the unsub's case, postmortem in The Mad Butcher's case), retained the heads of their victims as trophies, disposed of their remains in bodies of water, have had at least one victim left unidentified, and were both profiled as strong psychopaths and locals to the areas where the murders happened.

Known Victims[]

  • 2011:
    • April 1: Maria Sanchez
    • April 15: Alicia Vernon
    • April 23: Amy Hodgkins
    • April 28-29: An unidentified woman
    • April 30:
      • Michael (incidental; throat was slashed)
      • Trish (abducted; was rescued)
      • The raid at the auto shop:
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