| “ | Have you ever wondered what it's like to be with a real man? | ” |
— Hansen
| ||
Floyd Hansen was a serial killer and rapist who appeared in Season Four of Criminal Minds.
Background
Floyd was born in Sherwood, Nevada, in the mid-1970s and lived with his parents in a small roadside motel called the Crest Cottages, which his father Monroe owned. Floyd's mother drank herself to death when he was two years old. Three years later, his father married a prostitute named Maureen McKeffan, who presumably subjected Floyd to psychological and physical abuse, causing him to develop an underwear fetish, and he became a sexual sadist. After being caught breaking into a woman's home, Floyd was charged with burglary and attempted rape and imprisoned in May 2000. Due to good behavior, Floyd was released in August 2007 and inherited Crest Cottages when his father died in February 2008. After firing Wayne Dryden, the motel's only employee, Floyd raped and beat a woman to death in the nearby town of Selbyville; the crime was later mistakenly attributed to another rapist, Clint Barnes. Eventually, Floyd began killing couples who stopped at the motel, holding them captive and torturing them for hours before beating them to death with a baseball bat. After placing the bodies of his victims in their car, Floyd would park it in the middle of secluded roads with blind curves in the middle of the night, thus ensuring that they would be hit by traveling trucks, making the deaths look like accidents.
Paradise
Eventually, Floyd had already claimed the lives of three couples. The BAU are eventually called in to investigate due to the suspicious circumstances of the "car accidents" that involved the couples. Meanwhile, a vacationing couple, consisting of Abby and Ian Corbin, checks into Floyd's motel for the night. He has them stay in Cabin Six, where he spies on them through peepholes. In the morning, Floyd drops off breakfast, which puzzles Abby and Ian, who did not order breakfast in the first place. They then realize that something is off, as the meal consists of their favorite foods, which Floyd learned about while eavesdropping. When they try to leave, Floyd seals them in the cabin. Ian looks into the peephole and Floyd stabs him in the face through the hole with a knife, injuring him. After psychologically tormenting the couple for several hours, Floyd briefly speaks to Hotch when he stops by, asking questions about the murdered couples. Giving his name as Wayne Dryden and feigning obliviousness, Floyd convinces Hotch and another traveling guest to leave.
Returning to the cabin, Floyd enters and beats both Ian and Abby unconscious with a baseball bat. Tying Ian to a chair bolted to the floor and Abby to the bed, Floyd rapes her when she wakes up, and before leaving, he tells her that he will be coming back for her. Sometime later, when Ian finally regains consciousness, Floyd returns, taunting the former's inability to help his wife while he was raping her. Approaching Abby, preparing to rape her again, Floyd is tackled by Ian, who had managed to loosen the bolts that are keeping his chair attached to the floor. Managing to fight Ian off, Floyd starts brutally bludgeoning him with the bat, almost to death. Just then, the BAU, having realized that Floyd was the unsub, break down the door of the motel room. Fleeing through a secret entrance hidden in a vent in the bathroom, Floyd runs into the nearby woods, with Hotch and Morgan in hot pursuit. Seconds after stumbling onto the road, in an act of poetic justice, Floyd is hit and killed by a speeding truck. Afterwards, Ian and Abby were taken into the ambulance and Hotch doubts himself for not knowing that Floyd was the unsub in the first place when he interrogated him. Rossi consoles him, saying that Floyd put up an extremely convincing facade.
Profile
The unsub is a local white male in his early to mid-thirties, due to the fact that holding couples captive is an ambitious task and he had time to perfect his skill. He probably owns or works the night shift in an off-road hotel or motel, due to all of the victims being vacationers. Due to how brutal the murders and rapes were, the unsub is classified as an anger-excitation rapist, someone who gains sexual satisfaction through torturing his victims and watching the effects that it has on them. Part of the victims' torture is psychological, which is why he takes couples: he may be making one spouse watch him enforce his power over the other. As the women were abused much worse than the men, it indicates that the unsub is a malignant misogynist who absolutely loathes women, his hatred of them probably stemming from being physically and psychologically abused by a dominant female in his youth. Given in this upbringing, the unsub likely never had any real relationship or has never been married. He would either change his M.O. or relocate and find his victims somewhere else if he thought the authorities were on to him.
Because he works in the service industry, the unsub is most likely forced to deal with a lot of people. He can probably hide his aversion to women until he is alone with them. Given the amount of time that he spends with his victims, he requires a great deal of privacy. Taking his victims' underwear and the use of brutal, physical force and extreme violence on his victims means that he likely had prior offenses for peeping, burglary, and maybe even attempted rape. He may have also been angry and hostile while committing one of these crimes. He leaves the victims' bodies behind to be hit by trucks; he may be even utilizing an ATV to get away from the accident sites. He is organized and intelligent since he copied the M.O. of another rapist when he committed his first murder to ensure that the latter would be arrested. The disposal of the victims' bodies was at first thought to be simply of means to cover up the murders, but it was surmised by Prentiss that it was only part of it; the speeding trucks violently slamming into the women, left in their car without underwear, could be seen as one final act of rape by the unsub, something that he has been building up to for a while, not overnight.
Modus Operandi
Every three days, Floyd targeted traveling couples who came to his motel and, after having them pay in cash (to stop them from being traced electronically), would check them into a cabin, where he would spy on them through the night via various peepholes, even occasionally sneaking in through a hidden entrance in the bathroom duct to steal underwear belonging to the wife. In the morning, Floyd would seal the cabin door and windows and psychologically torment the couple for hours by assaulting them with loud noises and also by causing the power to flicker on and off, sometimes even entering the room and leaving underwear belonging to a previous victim in it.
Eventually, Floyd would personally enter the cabin and beat the couple into submission with a baseball bat, tying the husband to a chair bolted to the floor and the wife by her wrists and ankles, while on the bed, with duct tape. Floyd would then rape and torture the wife by beating her, forcing the husband to watch, all the while ridiculing his inability to do anything to stop the abuse. At the end of the day, Floyd would bludgeon them to death with the same bat and put their bodies in their cars, which he parked in the middle of the secluded roads in cities with large, diverse, and transit populations late at night. Due to the cars being in blind curves they, inevitably ended up being hit by truckers, making it seem as if the couple was killed in the crash. Floyd easily fled the dump site using off-road trails and hid the underwear that he took from his female victims in his office.
When he killed his first victim, he raped, tortured her by beating her, and fatally beat her to death, taking her underwear as a souvenir. He made sure to use a condom when raping her to avoid leaving his DNA on her body and then kill her in the same city where Clint Barnes committed his rapes, as a means of framing him for the murder.
Real-Life Comparison
Floyd's progression from burglar to serial rapist and killer is reminiscent of the Original Night Stalker. Like Floyd, the killer targeted lone women before moving on to middle-class couples, who he tied up, forcing the man to watch while he raped the woman, and then bludgeoned to death. Unlike Floyd, the killer always attacked his victims in their own homes and did not need to stage accidents to hide his identity.
Floyd is also very similar to Jerry Brudos, a.k.a. "The Shoe Fetish Slayer". Both were serial killers who primarily targeted women, were abused by maternal figures, had underwear fetishes and a sexual component in their crimes (Floyd raped his female victims; Brudos engaged in sexual acts with his victims after killing them), were arrested for attacking a woman prior to their main serial killings, and bludgeoned their victims.
Known Victims
- March 31, 2000, Sherwood, Nevada: Unnamed woman (attempted to rape and presumably kill her, but was caught and arrested)
- 2008, Nevada:
- May, Selbyville: Unnamed woman (raped, tortured, and beaten to death; framed another rapist for the crime)
- Sherwood:
- September 21-22: Fritz and Johanna Dietrich (disposed of their bodies outside of Carson City)
- September 24-25: Tom and Melissa Taylor (disposed of their bodies outside of Lake Tahoe)
- September 27-28: Jonathan and Rebecca Gallen (disposed of their bodies outside of Reno)
- October 2-3: Ian and Abby Corbin (held them captive; both were rescued):
- Ian Corbin (attempted, but barely survived; tied to a chair, non-fatally stabbed in the face, and beat to near-death with a baseball bat)
- Abby Corbin (tied to a bed, tortured, and raped only; later attempted to rape for a second time)
- Note: Judging from the amount of women's clothing that was under Floyd's possession at the time of "Paradise", plus Prentiss's suggestion that he had been building up his M.O., it is possible he killed other victims
Notes
- Originally, Floyd was going to survive the events of "Paradise" and successfully escape the BAU. He would have returned in a later season, operating in another Crest Cottages-esque motel somewhere else. These plans were scrapped by the CBS staff before production on the episode began.[1]
- Floyd is similar to Jeremy Andrus. Both were psychopathic serial killers and sexual sadists who primarily targeted women, raping and torturing them and keeping articles of their clothing as souvenirs.
- Floyd's killings being triggered by his father's death, from which he inherited the latter's business and used it to torture and kill his victims, is taken from Charles Holcombe's own background.
Appearances
References
- ↑ Criminal Minds Season Four - Working the Scene: Truckin'