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| “ | Lies. Lies, lies, LIES! | „ |
| ~ Patrick Sorenson screaming at Ellie Zumwalt. |
Patrick Sorenson is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "The Sandman". He is a serial killer who kidnaps and murders children and then grinds their bones and teeth into sand for his homemade hourglasses.
He was portrayed by Reston Williams.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Sorenson was raised in Oswego, New York, by his mother Betty, an alcoholic who often left him alone to go on drunken binges. When he was nine, he was kidnapped from his house by a pedophile while Betty was passed out drunk in her car. His captor raped him for 11 hours, forcing him to stare at an hourglass during each assault; he told the boy that he would kill him if he cried before the sand ran out. Eventually, the rapist tired of Sorenson and let him go, confident that he was too traumatized to remember where he was. While Sorenson recovered from his injuries, his mother abandoned him, leaving behind only a terse goodbye note. He spent the rest of his childhood in the foster care system.
Sorenson's trauma left him with a raging hatred of his mother for failing to protect him and an obsession with hourglasses like the one his abuser made him watch. He began building hourglasses of painstaking mathematical precision, using sand from the Seneca River, which was near his house. He also lived like a hermit, shunning human contact and barely getting by on the money he earns selling glass online.
Six weeks prior to the episode, Betty died of kidney disease in Wichita, Kansas, and the coroner called Sorenson in to identify the body as the next of kin. Sorenson, who had always wanted to hear his mother apologize to him for her neglect, was driven over the edge by her death, as he stole her corpse and ground her bones and teeth into sand to use in one of his hourglasses.
He then became a serial killer, targeting parents of boys to inflict his pain on people who had the familial love he was denied. He targeted mothers as surrogates for Betty, blinding them with glue and sand. He would kill the husbands to get them out of the way, and kidnap the couple's children, telling the mothers that they had 11 hours to comply with his demands or the children would die. He would then kill the children anyway, believing them to be better off dead.
"The Sandman"[]
Sorenson breaks into the home of the Brewer family, killing father Jim, blinding mother Lyla, and kidnapping their son, Ronnie. While blindly running after them, Lyla falls down the stairs and suffers a fatal skull fracture. Sorenson strangles Ronnie to death, and leaves the body out in the open for the police to find.
Soon afterward, he began stalking eight-year-old Josie Zumwalt, intent on making her his next victim. One night, he breaks into the Zumwalts' house, blinds Josie's mother, Ellie, kills her father, Luke, and finally kidnaps the girl. While holding Josie captive, he compulsively turns his hourglasses upside down.
Meanwhile, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) investigates the murders, profiling the killer as a family annihilator whose true target is the mother, wanting to inflict as much physical and psychological distress upon her as possible. They theorize that the killer is using the mother as a surrogate for his own to punish her for failing to protect him from abuse, while the child is a surrogate for himself; he feels they are both better off dead. He works with sand and chemicals, and uses sand from the Seneca River in his assaults because he lives or works near there. Technical analyst Penelope Garcia records of child abuse cases with those of glass workers in the area, and finds Sorenson.
BAU Supervisory Agent Aaron Hotchner instructs Ellie, who is still recovering from her injuries, to give a televised press conference promising to contact Josie in one hour. As intended, this riles Sorenson up, and he hands Josie a phone, demanding that she call her mother. When Ellie responds to the call, Rossi and Hotchner tell her not to address her by her name, and to apologize for allowing harm to come to her; they think that Sorenson will hear in her apology that which he had always wanted from his mother, and so lose focus and become easier to apprehend. When Josie tells Ellie she did nothing wrong, however, Sorenson flies into a rage and attacks her with a ball peen hammer. Fortunately, BAU Agents David Rossi and Derek Morgan infiltrate the house just in time to save Josie. Rossi orders Sorenson to drop the hammer, but Sorenson charges at him, provoking Rossi to shoot him twice in the chest, killing him. His body falls backward into his hourglasses, shattering every one of them and leaving sand poured all over him.
Trivia[]
- Sorenson is inspired by multiple real-life family murderers:
- Matthew Hoffman, a killer of the family and family friend of the girl he kidnapped so he’d hold her captive and repeatedly rape her, until she was rescued. Similar to Sorenson being obsessed with and collecting hourglasses, Hoffman hoarded leaves in his run-down home.
- Daniel LaPlante, a murderer with a history of horrific sexual violence trauma responsible for living in the basement of a family’s home to stalk them as a voyeur, eventually raped and fatally shot the mother, and fatally drowned her children.
External Links[]
- Patrick Sorenson on the Criminal Minds Wiki
