Gary and Ervin Robles are a pair of serial killers and family annihilators that appeared in Season Three of Criminal Minds.
History
See Gary and Ervin Robles's pages.
Modus Operandi
Gary and Ervin targeted families with parents they perceived as being abusive towards their children. They would use devices to block out their victims' cellphones during the evening, sabotage the lights, and cut off their phones and alarms. After that, Gary would knock on the house's front door, carrying a dead animal euthanized by Ervin and claiming to have found it outside. When he is gained entry to the house, Gary would let Ervin in before they let the children watch Gary tie up and brutally attack the parents with an incidental object. When the parents were killed, Ervin, in a warped sense of mercy, would take the children to a different room and euthanize them with pentobarbital he obtained from his workplace at the pound. They would also kill any potentially dangerous family pets whenever possible. They would then take some small valuable items from the house, such as cash and jewelry. In the case of the Serranos, they killed them during the middle of the day and forcibly broke into their homes due to the media mentioning their usual M.O.
Profile
The unsubs are two men in their mid-to-late twenties, most likely white, intelligent, and organized. At least one of them has served time in jail for home invasions, but they do not look like convicts and will be clean-shaven and well-dressed in order to not arouse suspicion and appear to be neighborly. They most likely enter the house using some kind of ruse (door-to-door sales, persons in distress, or car trouble) and share a compulsion to kill, but their signatures have very different personalities. One brutalizes the parents, the other prefers poison injections, a type of offender known as an Angel of Death. The dominant partner in the relationship is sadistic, remorseless, and extremely volatile, while the submissive partner would have a more withdrawn, sensitive personality and also a warped sense of mercy.
Later in the investigation, it is revealed that the Laybourne daughter was being abused by her own parents. Based on how the dominant unsub brutalizes the parents, it is likely that he may have been abused by his own parents. The Laybourne parents were his trigger, and now, he sees all parents as abusive towards their children; by killing his victims, he is getting revenge for his own childhood abuse, while the submissive unsub kills the children mercifully so they do not have to deal with life without their parents (later revealed to instead so they would not be abused by their foster parents like the unsubs were).
Real-Life Comparison
Gary and Ervin are extremely similar to Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. Both were serial killing teams, family annihilators, and robbers, whose teams consisted of a Caucasian male and another male that was of a different race and had at least one member who was abused by parental figures (Ng was abused by his father; Gary and Ervin were abused by their foster parents). In addition, one of the members of both teams assumed the identities of one of their victims before being arrested.
Mutual Victims
- At least four victimless home invasions committed prior to Children of the Dark:
- Villanosa
- Williams
- Marcus
- Knights
- 2007:
- September 17: The Laybourne family
- The unnamed parents
- The unnamed daughter
- October 7: An unnamed family
- The unnamed parents
- An unspecified amount of children
- October 16: The Halbert family
- Tom Halbert (father)
- Dina Halbert (mother)
- Hayden and Neil Halbert (sons)
- October 17: The Ortiz family
- The unnamed parents
- Carrie Ortiz (daughter; attempted, but survived; was non-fatally poisoned by Ervin)
- Danny Ortiz (son)
- October 18-19: The Serrano family
- Robert Serrano (father)
- The unnamed mother
- An unspecified amount of children
- September 17: The Laybourne family
Notes
- Gary and Ervin's M.O. is extremely similar to details of the 1997 psychological thriller film Funny Games, which also involves two young men talking their way into homes to kill the families inside. Like the killers of the film, Gary and Ervin psychologically tortured their victims, used a golf club in one of their attacks, and killed any possible pets present in the house.