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Gary Michaels is the overarching antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode “Memoriam”. Michaels was a pedophile responsible for the murder of Riley Jenkins and the reason for the divorce of Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) Agent Spencer Reid's parents, his crimes letter appearing in Reid’s nightmares.
He was portrayed by Andrew Harlander.
Biography[]
Michaels had a long record in Las Vegas of lewd conduct, such as trespassing on nursery school campuses and exposing himself to children. In 1984, he followed young Riley Jenkins home from a teeball game, forcing the boy into his house. Michaels put tape on Riley’s mouth and raped him, before stabbing him to death behind the washing machine in the laundry room with a fish knife. Riley’s father Lou personally found Riley's body and was irreparably traumatized. Michaels later targeted nine-year-old Spencer Reid, watching him play chess in the park, even playing a round to ingratiate himself with the boy. Reid’s mother Diana was horrified when she found out and told Lou, who knew Reid’s father William since William coached the Little League team Riley was on.
Lou knew instantly that Michaels killed Riley, getting confirmation from his criminal history on the sex offender registry. He made Diana take them to Michaels’ house, where Lou barged in with an aluminum baseball bat and beat Michaels to death. In spite of Lou telling Diana to go home, she walked in on the crime scene, even slipping in Michaels’ blood. William saw Diana stained with blood and feared she would be arrested, so he burned her clothes in their backyard. Reid saw William burn the clothes, but he suppressed the memory for decades. Lou buried Michaels in the California desert, which was found by construction workers in 2001. The police at first thought the body was a victim of the Manson family, as Michaels was near the cult’s Barker Ranch compound, so his DNA was uploaded into the national database. William quit the Little League and walked out on his family, but he continued practicing as an attorney in the city.
As an adult, Reid, now an agent with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) began having nightmares about the murder when he returned to Las Vegas to visit Diana, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. He suspected William of raping and murdering Riley, so tracked down his father, whom he had not seen or spoken to in years, and demanded answers. William was uncooperative, and Diana was not lucid enough to handle questioning.
Michaels’ DNA ultimately tied him to the murder, as well as his decaying corpse, confirming all the basic facts of the two crimes. Intuiting that Michaels' killer acted in a fit of rage, Reid questioned Lou, who also refused to talk. Lou was later arrested when the evidence conclusively proved that he was the murderer and he confessed in order to spare the Reid family any further suspicion.
Trivia[]
- Michaels is inspired by multiple real-life and fictional criminals:
- Ronald Lloyd Bailey, a pedophile and serial rapist of Boyd responsible for two impulsive rapes and murders of boys that were investigated by the FBI.
- George Franklin, the suspected rapist and murderer of a classmate of his daughter Eileen’s convicted after she recalled key details of the murder decades later. His conviction was overturned when her testimony was attributed to false memory syndrome and perjury.
- Robert Anderson, a murderer and rapist of a little girl, by means of stabbing and drowning her, who he openly kidnapped from her home community.
- The unidentified killer of JonBenét Ramsey, a child beauty queen who was murdered and found in the basement of her home. Suspicion was placed on her family, until they were absolved and possibilities of a sex offender came into consideration.
- The late Jeff Doucet, the kidnapper and rapist of Jody Plauché, who was later murdered by his victim's father, Gary Plauché.
- The late Jeffrey Dahmer, a.k.a. "The Milwaukee Cannibal", a serial killer/rapist of men and boys who was later bludgeoned to death in prison by Christopher Scarver.
- Barry James, a neighbor who was killed by Jonathan Edington under the false belief James sexually abused Edington's daughter.
- Lester Burnham, the protagonistic villains of American Beauty, a suburban family man later attempting to sexually abuse his daughter's friend, only to get shot for at the end of the film.
External links[]
- Gary Michaels on the Criminal Minds Wiki
