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Two of you will leave this room alive. One of you will die. You choose.
Younger's ultimatum

Marcus Younger is an abductor and proxy killer who appears in the Season Two episode of Criminal Minds, "North Mammon".

Background[]

Younger was born sometime in 1966 and raised in North Mammon, Pennsylvania. While in high school, he became the star of the town's football team. However, during the first quarter of the state championship game in 1984, he suffered a knee injury, which cost him a full-ride Notre Dame scholarship and presumably made it impossible for him to play again. After that, he lost a lot of friends and fell out of the social circle. As an adult, he became a garbage man; still carrying a lot of resentment towards his former teammates and friends within him.

North Mammon[]

"I never touched her. I never hurt them. I never even came into the room, Jeff. They did this. Brooke. Polly. All I did was... show them who they really are. What they were truly capable of. They were pretending to be decent. But when it came down to it... they reacted just the way I knew they would. They turned on each other. Just like when I got hurt. You all couldn't wait to run over me, to take my position, to take my life! And to forget all about me... You don't know what it's like, Jeff, you all had lives. I just cleaned up after you. Now you have to clean up after me."

In 2006, when the present-day North Mammon football team made it to the state championship again, Younger devised a plan to make a point to everyone in the town and take his revenge on his now-mature former teammates. He abducts Brooke Chambers, Polly Homefeldt, and Kelly Seymour (three young soccer players and best friends) when they are alone in the house of Chambers's father Peter and takes them to a small basement in his house without any food, water, or chance of escape. He then instructs them to choose one of them to die in exchange for the surviving two to be released. Homefeldt's mother, a friend of JJ's aunt, feels that there is something wrong, even though the girls had left phone messages, scripted by Younger, and asks the BAU to help the local police.

Marcus Younger Masked

Younger threatening and kidnapping the girls in a disguise

As the investigation proceeds, Younger has turned the parents of the girls against each other by planting evidence implicating Peter and the girls' soccer coach, revealing their secrets in the process. When Seymour tells Younger that they have made their choice, he simply drops in two hammers for her and Homefeldt to kill Chambers with. However, Chambers manages to grab a hammer and uses it to kill Seymour. Satisfied by what had happened, Younger releases the two outside of the police station and waits at his home for the police to arrive. When they do, he shows no remorse for his actions and remarks that he didn't touch them while they were in the basement. He said that all he did was "show them what they really [were]" and explains the motivations for his actions before Morgan promptly arrests him. Gideon is later shown to be disgusted and angered by Younger' actions.

Modus Operandi[]

When Younger abducted the three girls, he first grabbed Chambers outside the house, choking her with a garrote until she was unconscious. He then went inside and, holding Seymour at knifepoint, took Homefeldt as well. He then had the two leave messages on their parents' phones, saying they had gone on a trip together (he didn't make Chambers do this since her father was out of town). He then took them to a basement in his house and tortured them psychologically and by starving them for several days. After a while, he gave them two hammers, one for each girl to use to kill the third.

Profile[]

Like all other predatory abductors, the unsub is intelligent, patient, and cautious, and this type of unsub likes to watch not only their victims but everything related to them, such as their families and the authorities. He would thus keep an eye on the police and attempt to inject himself into the investigation. They also prepare a "nest" before setting their plans into work and abducting their victims, which could be a remote cabin or an underground bunker designed to confine and hide his victims once his abductions are done. The unsub also has a job that gave him access to Brooke, Kelly, Polly, and people related to them. He may also be a family member, a teacher, or a next-door neighbor.

Real-Life Comparisons[]

Although his crimes didn't come to light until after the episode aired, Younger still has a remarkable resemblance to Ariel Castro - Both were abductors and indirect killers who abducted three young women (most of whom were teenaged, though one of Castro's was a woman he mistook for one), they had some personal connection to them (Younger's were his former soccer teammates, while two of Castro's were acquainted with his children and the other was the daughter of a former classmate), they left messages for at least one of their victims's parents to divert suspicion, held their victims in their modified basements, starved and psychologically tortured them, they were profiled by specialists, and they expressed no remorse and deflected blame from their actions after their arrests.

Known Victims[]

  • October 28, 2006: Abducted three girls and released two of them when the third was killed by one of them. They are:

Notes[]

Appearances[]

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