| “ | My father was like you. | ” |
— Seaver in "What Happens at Home"
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Ashley Seaver (originally Beauchamp) is an FBI agent who, after finishing her remedial training with the BAU while a cadet, was added to the team as a "probationary agent" by Erin Strauss after her graduation from the Academy. She later transferred out to Andi Swann's Domestic Trafficking Task Force.
Background
Seaver is the daughter of Charles Beauchamp, a North Dakota serial killer known as the Redmond Ripper, who was caught by Aaron Hotchner and David Rossi when she was eighteen. He is currently incarcerated and sends his daughter letters sometimes. Though Seaver never reads them and has never gone to see him, she keeps them.
Season Six
Recurring Character
Seaver is first introduced in What Happens at Home, doing FBI training when she is approached by Rossi, who asks her for assistance in the Drew Jacobs case. She accepts Rossi's request and eventually meets the BAU team. She is unashamed of admitting her father is Charles Beauchamp aka "The Redmond Ripper" a serial killer that Rossi and Hotch arrested some time ago. Arriving at Las Cruces, Seaver is helpful in finding clues about the serial killer, including deducing that the killer's family doesn't own a pet. She then visits Drew, unaware that he is the killer as his own wife was his third victim, getting along well with his daughter. When she tells him that the family of his wife's killer will feel incredibly sorry for what has happened, Drew becomes suspicious and then threatens her with a knife. Seaver attempted to reason with Drew, telling similarities between him and her father and stated that her father's best day in his life was going to prison. However, when Hotch arrived, the BAU having discerned Drew as the killer, he committed suicide by cop. Seaver is then given a warning by Hotch for going out on her own, and Rossi comforts her in the fact that she feels that loving her father meant being vulnerable to him.
In the next episode, 25 to Life, Seaver has become a temporary BAU member as part of her training program. She also appears in Corazón, but does not appear in the next two episodes. She is seen again in Today I Do after being made a series regular.
Series Regular
In Lauren, while the BAU are searching for a rogue Prentiss, Seaver and Rossi is on a rooftop interviewing a suspect, when suddenly he is shot and killed in front of them. Rossi, knowing they have lost their only source of information to help find Prentiss, realizes that the team aren't looking at the case properly as they all want to save Prentiss so badly. Rossi then asks for Seaver's help, as they have to depend on the team member "with the freshest eyes" since she is unbiased, having worked with Prentiss for only a few months, while the others have worked with her for five years. Seaver initially refuses, terrified, but eventually Rossi pushes her to admit that she doesn't understand why Doyle (Prentiss' nemesis) killed a child in D.C., something which later helps them in finding Prentiss. After telling this to Rossi, he tells her "That's the Agent Seaver I'm looking for."
Shortly before With Friends Like These..., Ashley graduated from the FBI Academy (with all of the team members of the BAU presumably attending her graduation) and has officially become a member of the BAU team as a probationary agent. In The Stranger, she and Hotch attempt to negotiate with a serial killer when he holds his stepmother at gunpoint inside her house, but this tactic fails when Rossi gains entry of the house and is forced to shoot the unsub dead. Seaver later comforts the stepmother, saying the unsub didn't murder his victims because of her.
Departure
At some point before the events of It Takes a Village, she had transferred to Andi Swann's team, which JJ mentions to Prentiss.
Notes
- She uses her mother's maiden name (Seaver) as her surname after her father was arrested for the murders.
- Seaver appears to be based on Melissa G. Moore, the daughter of serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson, a.k.a. "The Happy Face Killer". Starting in 2008, Moore went public about the experiences she had with her father, who she lived with until her parents' 1990 divorce, and wrote a book titled Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer's Daughter in 2009. In one account, she described watching her father hanging stray kittens from a clothesline and laughing as he watched them claw each other in attempts to escape. When she left to get her mother, he killed the kittens.
- Her father would usually get her toys such as dolls and a buckle if she asked for it, but never got what she really wanted - a pet. She once found a stray dog and brought it home when she was young, but her father killed it, unable to control his urges.
- She has appeared in a total of ten episodes as a main character, Supply and Demand being her last.