UnSubs #2 and #3: Floyd Feylinn Ferell and James Colby Baylor/Jason Clark Battle
These two UnSubs are paired together because circumstances made their individual cases concurrent.
Ferell (Jamie Kennedy) is released from the Hazelwood Institute for the Criminally Insane when he turns 18, despite the protests from Dr. Lorenz (John Lafayette) and his assertions that Ferell will commit crimes more heinous than previously seen. In 2007, a victim is found dead in “Alligator Alley” in Florida, partially eaten, and with 10 human fingers in her stomach. The fingers belong to ten different people.
The trail leads the team back to Hazelwood and Lorenz, who repeats his beliefs to them about Ferell. David Rossi (Joe Montegna) has previously debunked satanic cults in his first term as a profiler; that Ferell blaming the Devil for his own cannibalism isn’t enough to lessen his guilt, so he tricks others into participating by feeding search teams chili made with his latest victim. In Derek Morgan’s (Shemar Moore) view, Ferell has been extraordinarily lucky: “Gets released from the hospital. His records get destroyed. Gets pulled over with a victim in the trunk of his car, and they let him go” …leading him to wonder if he hasn’t gotten “outside” help. Rossi says to leave that job to someone else, because their own is hard enough. (Morgan previously gave up on religion of any kind because he felt it gave up on him first; yet when the team returns home, he finds himself in a church for the first time in years.) Ferell is once again committed to Hazelwood.
Also during this episode, Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), the BAU’s technical analyst, encounters a handsome man at her coffee shop having computer problems. He introduces himself as James “Colby” Baylor (Bailey Chase) and asks her out on a date after she helps him. She’s disconcerted by the unexpected attention, but accepts the invitation. The episode ends with him turning around and shooting her!
Despite the fact that he shot her at such close range, she survives and tells her team everything “Baylor” had told her during their date. She’s not trained like they are to look for behavior, so she describes everything she remembers about that night, including the fact that he buckles his seat belt behind him in the car. He is actually Jason Battle Clark, a D.C. Metro cop who also stages crimes so he can “ride to the rescue”. Garcia has put unsolved cases into her system, so the families of these victims can know the cases are being taken seriously. Some of those cases are Clark’s; when he realizes Garcia is still alive, he tries to finish the job and get his cases removed from her computer systems.
Thankfully, another analyst, Kevin Lynch (Nicholas Brendon), knows what Clark is and alerts the BAU that he has entered the office. Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (AJ Cook) takes him out through the plate-glass of the office door before Clark can do any more damage.
Ten years later, when Ferell is on supervised weekend visits with his sister, killings exactly like before pop up, including human fingers in the stomach of the victim (five instead of ten this time). The team discovers that Ferell has enlisted a fellow patient to create copycat murders to clear him of wrongdoing and bolster his lawyer’s theory that he was set up by the “real” killer ten years before. After he is declared “cured” and mentally competent, Rossi and others serve him with a warrant to X-ray his stomach. Now they can properly charge him for all the deaths on his head, including those from ten years ago.
Meanwhile, working on Ferell’s case has brought on a serious case of PTSD for Garcia. She retreats from the case briefing, she snaps at Rossi, and prompts JJ to stay behind in Quantico to look after her. It takes a visit from Morgan (who retired two years before to look after his new wife and baby son Hank) and a video file of Hank saying “hi” for Garcia to declare herself “healed.”
Between the initial attack and the stress of the trauma, Garcia believes that the attack on her made her stronger. She doesn’t put the attack behind her, but makes it part of herself, adding to her well of empathy and her fierceness in protecting those she sees as family. She herself, who hated guns before she was shot, uses Reid’s service weapon to defend her hospital-bed-bound colleague from another dirty cop.