CM/HL idea, pt. 3
So, at this point, the BAU is looking into Adam Pierson. Immediately, red flag: the guy watched his employer, to whom he was apparently close, get tortured to death. Trigger-city. The problem is, they don’t know if he’s MacLeod’s submissive partner in killing, or if he was just vulnerable to the man. He was never the most steady guy, a British national studying at the Sorbonne, yet going off for months on a time on international business trips for a historical society. Then, yet another potentially triggering event: he meets a woman, Alexa Bond, and apparently grows wildly attached to her. He takes her around the world on a jet-setting trip mere weeks after their first meeting, and they travel together for several months, until her hospitalization and death-- Pierson by her side as she died. (I’m assuming that Methos didn’t travel under his Adam Pierson identity whilst saving Duncan from the dark quickening or trying to, ah, appropriate the Methuselah Stone.) Over the next few years, he quit the historical society and found no steady employment, mainly seen in MacLeod's orbit when in Seacouver. He continued to go off on long trips, now just disappearing for months at a time.
While the profilers interview Adam Pierson, catching him between classes at the university, Garcia is attempting to compile a list of people gone missing from areas that MacLeod was known to be in at the time and/or bodies found. A very ambitious project, but those do seem to be her specialty. Yet again, the plot thickens. A number of distinctively beheaded bodies follow MacLeod’s movements-- killed in EXACTLY THE SAME MANNER a man known to have been killed by MacLeod in apparent self-defense was killed. (see the s1 episode “Mountain Men”) Beheaded, neck-stump cauterized peri-mortem. This is huge! That beheading was a concrete, physical indicator of serial killing, as beheading is deliberate and even ritualistic, taking a great deal of effort and not a convenient way of killing someone. Plus, it takes a certain amount of skill as well as raw strength to cut through a neck cleanly, as one must avoid getting one’s blade stuck in bone. Not just something one gets right on the first try, especially in the less-than-optimal conditions of one’s victim struggling and attempting to fight back. They know that MacLeod wasn’t responsible for the victims of his latest Immortal victim, but rather a second serial killer who managed to cross paths with their investigation into the first, the odds against which are astronomical. So they need to find out why.
After more investigation into the headless corpses Mac trails, they find that a significant portion of them were unknown, identity-less in the digital world. They lived off the grid, but by the quality of their clothes they didn’t seem to be homeless, and the clothes were also diverse enough that the BAU doesn’t think MacLeod played dress-up after killing them. Others, upon vigorous examination of their background, showed cracks in their ostensible identity, throwing suspicion on even the rock-solid looking victims’ identities. And rather a few of these victims were known to be unsavory or persons of interest in murder. Despite the identity-less victims, MacLeod seems to not have minded taking victims from all walks of life, some quite well-known. MacLeod seems to have killed a bunch of people who got away with crimes, or people running from something... Is he a vigilante killer? That would explain the intersection of his kills and the investigation. The BAU is curious as to how he determines guilt, seeing as many of his victims were not known to have been guilty of any crime.
But this is even bigger than two(!) serial killers. This ties into a weird phenomena that’s been occurring apparently since law enforcement agencies have kept records. MacLeod’s weird cauterized beheadings match the MO of what the BAU thinks may be a long-standing cult, because this odd type of murder has been committed since who knows when. And, creepily,in the past decade there has been an uptick in these ritual beheadings around MacLeod.
While the profilers interview Adam Pierson, catching him between classes at the university, Garcia is attempting to compile a list of people gone missing from areas that MacLeod was known to be in at the time and/or bodies found. A very ambitious project, but those do seem to be her specialty. Yet again, the plot thickens. A number of distinctively beheaded bodies follow MacLeod’s movements-- killed in EXACTLY THE SAME MANNER a man known to have been killed by MacLeod in apparent self-defense was killed. (see the s1 episode “Mountain Men”) Beheaded, neck-stump cauterized peri-mortem. This is huge! That beheading was a concrete, physical indicator of serial killing, as beheading is deliberate and even ritualistic, taking a great deal of effort and not a convenient way of killing someone. Plus, it takes a certain amount of skill as well as raw strength to cut through a neck cleanly, as one must avoid getting one’s blade stuck in bone. Not just something one gets right on the first try, especially in the less-than-optimal conditions of one’s victim struggling and attempting to fight back. They know that MacLeod wasn’t responsible for the victims of his latest Immortal victim, but rather a second serial killer who managed to cross paths with their investigation into the first, the odds against which are astronomical. So they need to find out why.
After more investigation into the headless corpses Mac trails, they find that a significant portion of them were unknown, identity-less in the digital world. They lived off the grid, but by the quality of their clothes they didn’t seem to be homeless, and the clothes were also diverse enough that the BAU doesn’t think MacLeod played dress-up after killing them. Others, upon vigorous examination of their background, showed cracks in their ostensible identity, throwing suspicion on even the rock-solid looking victims’ identities. And rather a few of these victims were known to be unsavory or persons of interest in murder. Despite the identity-less victims, MacLeod seems to not have minded taking victims from all walks of life, some quite well-known. MacLeod seems to have killed a bunch of people who got away with crimes, or people running from something... Is he a vigilante killer? That would explain the intersection of his kills and the investigation. The BAU is curious as to how he determines guilt, seeing as many of his victims were not known to have been guilty of any crime.
But this is even bigger than two(!) serial killers. This ties into a weird phenomena that’s been occurring apparently since law enforcement agencies have kept records. MacLeod’s weird cauterized beheadings match the MO of what the BAU thinks may be a long-standing cult, because this odd type of murder has been committed since who knows when. And, creepily,in the past decade there has been an uptick in these ritual beheadings around MacLeod.