Marcus Talbot is an incidental character who was briefly framed by Robert Bremmer in the Season Six episode of Criminal Minds "Out of the Light".
Background[]
Born on January 28, 1959, Talbot was an unmarried loner. In 1996, he was convicted of sneaking looks at girls in the bathroom of a Hyde County art institute he worked at. Despite this history, he was able to easily get a job as an art teacher at Walter Randolph High School in Lake Worth sometime after his release from prison. He resorted to taking photos of girls no older than 16 and putting them in his personal darkroom. Simultaneously, a series of murders occurring in the area began, and the perpetrator, Robert Bremmer, somehow discovered Talbot's criminal history and decided to frame him if his killings were discovered. Coincidentally, Marcy Owens, a would-be victim of Bremmer, took Talbot's summer camp in 2006 and attended it for the following four summers.
Out of the Light[]
In 2011, when the BAU is called in to investigate, Garcia looks into a list of suspects who committed any sexual crimes outside of Lake Worth prior to the murders. She narrows it down to Talbot and expresses shock and outrage that he is a schoolteacher. Morgan and Reid head to his residence and finds a shirt with blood on it, while Hotch and Rossi go to Walter Randolph High and arrest him as he is giving out a lecture about reading the emotions displayed in photographs (which include some of women being terrified). At the police station, he is yelled at by the sheriff, who demands to know the whereabouts of Marcy, Bremmer's latest captive, forcing Hotch to intervene. Meanwhile, Morgan and Reid discover Talbot's darkroom and inform Rossi, who had since taken over the interrogation at Hotch's request.
Later, Rossi heads into the interrogation room to talk to Talbot, who constantly denies abducting Marcy and her friend Angela Proctor, only for Rossi to tell him about how much Talbot wanted Marcy in order to extract a confession. However, Talbot is exonerated when authorities discover a skull buried in his property, to which Reid realizes that the skull was recently buried from the fresh dirt and that Talbot is being framed, since he was in the police station by the time the skull was buried. At the end of the episode, when Bremmer is killed after being shot by Hotch and Marcy is rescued, Talbot is last seen hanging a photo of a captured Marcy in his darkroom, all the while whistling a merry tune. A file with Bremmer's name is seen on his desk, implying that he may have been receiving photographs from Bremmer for his personal viewing and also for his lectures.
Notes[]
- Time Winters, the actor who portrayed Talbot, previously appeared on Criminal Minds, starring as Kirk Lomax in the Season One episode "What Fresh Hell?".