| “ | I decide when you die. | ” |
— Will
| ||
Wilson "Will" Summers is a killer (and serial killer by proxy) who appeared in Risky Business.
Background
Not much about Will's past is disclosed, other than he came to suffer from Münchausen Syndrome by proxy. He repeatedly poisoned his wife Cynthia, who would always recover after a few days of being violently ill in the ICU. She eventually died and Will went on to become an EMT for the local fire department. With Cynthia dead, he focused on his son Chris, choking him to unconsciousness and reviving him repeatedly. It is also possible Chris might have non-fatally choked himself on a few occasions and that Will walked in on him. Chris soon helped him set up a website called "The Choking Game", a website daring teenagers to choke themselves to attain pleasure from it. Will, operating under the username DarkSoul634, began posting dares along with a reluctant Chris, who used the same username. Things went too far when two pairs of teenagers subsequently died after accepting the dares.
Risky Business
After Chris is declared a suspect for his proxy murders and arrested by the BAU, Will arrives and claims he is innocent. Chris' computer is confiscated and searched through by Garcia, who has difficulties breaking through its defenses. In the meantime, Will uploads another video to the game site. As Reid and Morgan are unable to extract any information from Chris, Hotch sends in Garcia as Chris would relate better to her. During the interview, Will invokes and manages to leave with Chris. Eventually, the BAU learn about the mother's poisonings and that Chris had bruises on his chest identical to those that occur during CPR. Realizing that Will, being a Fire Department EMT, is trained at CPR, they determine that he manipulated Chris into creating the website. They hurry after him as he is about to take copies of the recordings of the victims' deaths. Using clues left by Chris during his conversation with Garcia, they track him and Will down to the graveyard where Cynthia is buried. When Will's attempts to download the videos are blocked by Garcia, he begins choking Chris. The BAU then storm in and arrest him, saving Chris.
Modus Operandi
The game site would encourage teenagers to engage in auto-erotic asphyxiation, the practice of choking oneself to achieve stimulation. The site's rules said that the webcam had to point to the teenagers in question, recording them while they were choking themselves, while the door to the room the participants were in had to be closed. They also had to do the act on their own, ensuring that nobody would be around to revive or help them if things went wrong. When they were found choked, Will would arrive on the scene as part of the EMT squad. He kept recordings of their deaths on DVDs and his son's computer as trophies, keeping the DVDs in protective cases and labeling them with the names of the victims and when they died.
Personally, he repeatedly poisoned his wife Cynthia with an unspecified toxin and would take her to a hospital to be treated by doctors, but she would later die from a fatal dosage. He would later strangle his son, Chris, either with his bare hands or with an unspecified ligature, then performed CPR on him. When he tried to kill Chris, he attempted to hang him with rope and strangle him.
Profile
No official profile of Will was made by the BAU since they were focused on Chris as a suspect.
Real-Life Comparison
Will seems to have been partially based on Japanese serial killer Hiroshi Maeue. Both were serial killers (though Maeue wasn't a proxy killer) who lured potential victims in through lethal websites that involved two participants and had a deep fascination with strangulation and asphyxiation. Also, both committed crimes involving strangulation prior to their serial killings; Maeue had been arrested three times for non-fatally strangling four people.
Will is also similar to Russian serial killer Anatoly Slivko, a married father who would trick teenage boys into hanging themselves, and who also revived his unconscious victims (Will only revived his own son due to logistic impossibilities, but he was among the first to see the other victims because of his job as a paramedic). Like Will, Slivko recorded his crimes and kept the films of victims who did not survive the ordeal. Though Slivko was active before the invention of the Internet, he created a boy club for the purpose of drawing in new victims, which is analogous to Will's website.
Known Victims
Personal Victims
- Unspecified date in 2007: Cynthia Summers (his wife; fatally poisoned)
- Unspecified dates in 2007 to 2010(?): Chris Summers (his son; repeatedly strangled manually or with a ligature to the point of unconsciousness, then resuscitated)
- January 22, 2010: Chris Summers (attempted to hang)
Victims by Proxy
The following all died after being encouraged to choke themselves while playing Will's online game
- 2010:
- January 8:
- Sean Eubanks
- An unnamed teenage boy
- January 15:
- Trish Leake (survived, but died upon arriving at a hospital)
- Ryan Krouse (survived, but died a few days later while hospitalized)
- January 22: At least eight unnamed teenagers playing online (intended)
- January 8:
Appearances
- Season Five
- Season Eleven
- "A Badge and a Gun" (referenced)