Characters / Mindhunter Cases

Cases & Investigations

Criminals (or suspected criminals) investigated by Bill and Holden at the request of local law enforcement and other people.

One-time killers

The Broomstick Killer

Unknown

Portrayed By: N/A

An unidentified killer in Fairfield, Iowa who raped a single mother and her son with a broomstick before killing them.

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• Ass Shove: The victims were raped with the broom the mother used to swipe the churchyard.
• Bound and Gagged: The mother was tied and handcuffed to her bed.
• Canon Foreigner: No similar case appears in the book.
• Crazy-Prepared: The killer made an effort to leave no prints, hair and most evidence at the crime scene. Only some of his semen was found on a pillow, but it's almost useless in 1977.
• Forced to Watch: The kid was forced to watch his mother being raped and murdered before the same happened to him.
• The Ghost: Only his 'work' is shown after the fact.
• I Have Your Wife: The detectives speculate that he threatened the boy to silence the woman, and viceversa.
• It's Personal: For Frank McGraw.
• Karma Houdini: By the end of Season 1, he still hasn't been found by either the FBI or the Fairfield Police.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: The killer is believed to be impotent.
• Riddle for the Ages: Common fan speculation is that the murderer is BTK, but neither the location nor the details of the murder match his real crimes.
• Slashed Throat: How he killed the boy.
• Stalker with a Crush: It is believed that the killer visited the church regularly or the area around it, and stalked the victims before killing them.
• That One Case: For McGraw, and to a lesser extent, Bill.
• There Is No Kill Like Over Kill: He stabbed the mother repeatedly on the face and thorax.
• The Woobie: The mother was a nice lady that was kicked out of home for becoming pregnant and the boy was a good kid. This is why McGraw finds the case so disturbing. He can't understand why anyone would want to hurt them, let alone like this.
• Would Hurt a Child: In the worst way possible. The agents aren't sure if the kid or his mother was the main objective of the crime.

The Altoona Three

Benjamin "Benji" Barnwright, Frank Janderman, and Rose Barnwright-Janderman

Portrayed By: Joseph Cross, Jesse C. Boyd and Jackie Renee Robinson

The fiancé (Benjamin), his brother-in-law (Frank), and the fiancé's sister (Rose) of Beverly Jean Shaw, a babysitter murdered and sexually mutilated in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

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• All Love Is Unrequited: Turns out Beverly Jean wasn't so sure she would marry Benji as he was.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: How Rose and Frank see Benji, despite Benji being actually older than Rose.
• Basement-Dweller: Benji continued to live with his mother as an adult, moving away only three months before the murder.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The investigators' conclusion is that sensitive, outwardly-Nice Guy Benji beat and tied up Beverly Jean out of jealousy, then brought Frank to rape her as a way to humiliate her, with her murder being committed by both.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Tench suspects that Benji is being overly nice and crying in order to not be considered a suspect. He is partly right, but Benji really is that emotional and submissive.
• Bittersweet Ending: While the three are caught, the agents feel disappointed that Benji will likely get the chair while Frank will just go to a psychiatric facility for 5 to 20 years.
• The Corrupter: Frank has a long rapsheet and it is very unlikely that the others would have turned to murder without his intervention.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Frank was recluded in a psychiatric facility as a teenager for breaking a girl's nose with a wrench.
• Devil in Plain Sight: Frank, who is instantly seen as dangerous before his expunged juvenile record is known.
• Disappeared Dad: The Barnwrights' unnamed father left them when Benji was 12-13 and Rose was 11.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Benji thinks Beverly Jean is flirting with Frank, so he beats and ties up her, has Frank rape her, stabs her (posthumously, he claims), allows Frank to dump her in a landfill like trash, and comes back two days later to mutilate her breasts and bury them in his garden.
• Domestic Abuse: Frank has apparently beaten all his partners at least once, including Rose.
• Everybody Did It: all three are held criminally responsible, even Rose who was roped in to clean the crime scene by his abusive husband.
• The Family That Slays Together: Frank raped her, Benji mutilated her, and Rose helped clean the evidence. Benji, Frank, or most likely both murdered her.
• Generation Xerox: Benji apparently inherited his blubbering from his mother.
• Groin Attack: Benji stabbed Beverly Jean between her vagina and anus after Frank raped her.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Benji cries his eyes out in the interrogation room. It actually helps him at first, since the agents interrogating him become uncomfortable with such a blatant display of emotion and want to get out of there as soon as they can.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Wendy realizes that Rose was at the scene when Beverly Jean was still alive because she says that her blood was "splashing," which a corpse's blood obviously wouldn't do.
• Karma Houdini: The DA decides to prosecute Benji only for the murder because he did the mutilation and it would be easier to convince the jury that he did it alone than that all three did it.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: Benji is either impotent or thinks he is. He only had sex for the first time as an adult with Beverly Jean, and he seems to think he did not perform like he should.
• A Love to Dismember: Benji cut out Beverly Jean's breasts sometime after disposing of the body.
• Momma's Boy: Benji was babied as a child and lived with his mother until he bought a house for himself and Beverly Jean.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The murder of Beverly Jean included rape (both literally by Frank, and then symbolically by Benji stabbing her in the groin) as a way to hurt and humiliate her before her murder.
• Teens Are Monsters: Frank was apparently one in high school and has not changed since.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The murder would have turned into this if the FBI hadn't get involved, given the local cops' reluctance to accept that one of their neighbors could have done it.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Beverly Jean was considered above average in Altoona and very much above Benji's level.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story:
  • In the real 1979 case, the victim was murdered during a camping trip (not in a bathtub) and "Frank" was a brother to both "Benji" and "Rose".
  • The bits that don't match the 1979 case may have been lifted from the 1970 unsolved murder of Texan housewife Beverly Jean Hope, which was reopened in 2016 with her brother-in-law as the main suspect.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Despite being younger than Benji, Rose helped her mother take care of him and the house after their father left them.

Devier

Darrell Gene Devier

Portrayed By: Adam Zastrow

"I kind of thought she was into me."

A hebephilic treecutter who raped and murdered a 12-year-old majorette in a rural road near Atlanta in 1979.

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• Appeal to Flattery: During the interrogation, Bill and Holden tell him how handsome he is and how the victim must have been into him, to make him lower his guard.
• Commonality Connection: Holden also goes on a very long tirade about how sexual teenage girls are and how it should be okay to lust after them if they have reached puberty, which makes one of the detectives present very uncomfortable.
• Death from Above: He spotted his victim from the top of his lift, while cutting branches.
• First Girl Wins: Married his first wife when she was 16, divorced, married another, divorced, and moved back in with the first one. All while fighting with them all the time.
• Harmful to Minors: The first undisputable example besides BTK and the 'Broomstick Killer' (in case they are not the same).
• I Never Said It Was Poison: When Holden reveals the murder weapon (a rock), he cannot get his eyes off it despite it being a rock not having been released to the public, and he immediately goes mute. Both are pointed to him by the FBI.
• Lie Detector: He passed one, which makes him more comfortable entering the room.
• Perp Sweating: The mood changes to this after the rock is revealed.
• Younger Than They Look: He thought she was 14 or up, the age of consent in Georgia (it became 16 in 1995).

Serial and escalating killers

Dwight

Dwight Taylor

Portrayed By: Tobias Segal

"I bump into things, I guess."

A Sacramento budding serial killer with a vendetta against elderly women and dogs.

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• The Alcoholic: Why he bumps into things.
• Back-Alley Doctor: When he was twenty, his girlfriend got pregnant and his mother (implicitly) made her visit one.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: He hates his mother's dog even more than his mother. He slashes pet dog throats from ear to ear as his signature.
• Basement-Dweller: Thirty years old, lives on a couch at his mother's house.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Their stop in Sacramento marks the first local case Holden and Tench get fully involved with, and once they do, they make short work of identifying Dwight and coaxing a confession out of him.
• Momma's Boy: She commands every aspect of his life, which is the reason of his resentment. His crimes are a way to symbolically respond to her without actually hurting her.

Rader

Dennis Rader

Portrayed By: Sonny Valicenti

"House looks good. Can't think you need much beyond door and window sensors."

An unidentified, highly-organized serial killer active mostly in Wichita, Kansas starting in 1974. Although present in the first season, the main characters only become aware of him in the second.

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• Attention Whore: He gave himself an acronym (BTK) and writes to the media regularly to vindicate his crimes.
• Beneath Suspicion: Being a family man with a steady career puts him completely outside the profile for serial killers the team has created by the time they find out about him.
• Bound and Gagged: He likes rope bondage and tying up his victims.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: His wife catches him masturbating while crossdressing and engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation at the beginning of Season 2.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Appears constantly throughout the show's teasers before his importance becomes clear.
• Control Freak: Rader's Establishing Character Moment in his first appearance is refusing to give a technician at his workplace a new roll of electric tape before the employee brings back the empty roll.
• Crazy-Prepared: He stalks his victims before killing them, has a "murder kit", and wears gloves whenever he kills or sends taunting letters.
• Creepy Crossdresser: He likes to relive his crimes by roleplaying as his female victims. This includes putting on their underwear and wearing a mask with their makeup on.
• Creepy Souvenir: In addition to the clothes, he collects his victims IDs and other objects as trophies.
• Death by Irony: He is a home invader serial rapist/killer that installs home alarms for a living.
• The Dreaded: The nature of his crime and taunting letters spooked the entire police department and caused a lot of people to move away. He has, "the whole town twitching like prey".
• Evil Is Petty: Bordering on Lawful Evil, he forces his coworkers and random citizens (like the boy at the copy machine) to stick to the Exact Words of regulations just to feel powerful. As detailed below, this aspect of Rader is taken from real life where he would often be an abusive authority figure for no other reason than that he could.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Season 2 focuses on the search for him, while we know Rader was never even considered as a suspect during the initial investigation.
• For Want Of A Nail: In Season 2, his identity is almost revealed when a copy machine fails and cuts the "BTK" signature out of one of his poems.
• Happily Married: And with a baby daughter.
• I Just Want to Be Special: He writes letters to the media because he wants to be feared, positioning himself next to other famous serial killers.
• Jerkass: The first time he appears, he is being a dick to a coworker for the sake of being a dick. In Real Life, people who met Rader before his arrest said he would abuse every possible way that would make him feel powerful over others.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: He's never seen facing justice in the show but audiences know he will decades from now.
• Leitmotif: A short, enigmatic one with bells plays at the end of his segments.
• Monster Fangirl: He claims several serial killers as inspiration, including Berkowitz, Glatman, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, and Jack the Ripper.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It is implied that the news of the unit's success make him burn the evidence and go dormant to avoid his arrest.
• Red Baron: BTK, a self-given acronym standing for "Bind, Torture, Kill".
• Refuge in Audacity: He traces bondage porn in a public library and copies his poems at the university's copy machine.
• Stalker without a Crush: He chooses his victims more or less at random.
• Teaser-Only Character: An unusual recurring, villainous example. We only see tiny snippets of him, and none of the four deadly attacks (one of them with four victims) that he committed before 1980.
• That One Case: For the Wichita PD, obviously, later becoming one for Bill.
• The Un-Smile: After startling a woman while checking her home... for an alarm installation. Maybe.
• The Un-Twist: Credited as the "ADT serviceman", blatantly obvious that he is BTK. Even IMDb had Valicenti credited as "Dennis Rader" before the series came out (probably because Valicenti himself or his agent included it).
• Wham Shot: The scene where he burns his drawings of the murders in his backyard.
• Would Hurt a Child: During his first attack on the Otero house, he sat and watched as a 9-year-old boy suffocated with a bag on his head, then hanged a 11-year-old girl from a pipe and masturbated over her body.

Williams

Wayne Bertram Williams

Portrayed By: Christopher Livingston

"There's a difference in being where you're supposed to be and being where you aren't."

A murderer targeting African-American boys in Atlanta, Georgia between 1979 and 1981. Maybe.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Just as in real life, with Wayne protesting his innocence to this day and only two murder charges brought against him, it remains unclear just how many of the murders if any he was responsible for. And Holden, Bill, and Barney all certainly have strong doubts about whether he was the only perpetrator, noticing that there are just too many loose ends in the case and make preparations to look into other possible leads, but they reluctantly stop because the FBI ends up shutting down the investigation after Williams is formally charged.
  • In real life, the fact remains that the murders stopped when he was arrested and a later DNA test did strengthen the case against him. But, notably, the former FBI profiler John E. Douglas, who wrote the book the series is inspired by, pointed out that while all evidence points towards Wayne definitely having committed at least some of the murders, he doubts that he did all, or even just most of them.
• Arc Villain: Of Season 2.
• Armored Closet Gay: He has no girlfriend or known relationships with women, lives with his parents, and spends most of his time bringing boys to his studio. His last attributed victim is a male prostitute. Insists he isn't gay. Bill theorizes that his conservative parents and self-hatred for his homosexuality are part of the reason behind the crimes.
• Attention Whore: Once he is caught, he thrives off the attention he receives from the press. He has around a dozen cars trailing his, and makes even more of a spectacle of himself by causing a scene at the mayor's house under the guise of protesting the media circus he's relishing.
• Bad Liar: He contradicts himself right after being caught, claiming to be a music producer and then a photographer. Not to mention his chosen alibi is both ridiculous and very easy to prove false.
• Basement-Dweller: Lives with his parents at the time of the murders.
• Beneath Suspicion: He is free to stalk and lure his victims, helped because most people assume the killer to be a white racist.
• Black and Nerdy: Is black, wears glasses and is not very in shape, fancies himself more intelligent than everyone else, and has nerdy hobbies like radio and reading "how to pass a polygraph".
• Blatant Lies:
  • His first alibi is absurd. He claims to be a singer promoter going to take a girl's audition... at 3 AM. In her home. Which he has no address to, just a phone number. Which either doesn't exist or is a business where they have never heard of such girl. And he cannot explain why he turned back and crossed the same bridge twice after a cop heard a loud splash in the water.
  • He claimed he fell in a bush when the studio owner found him with cuts in his arms and face. The other man is certain that he got in a fight.
• Control Freak: Wayne's murders, and his desire to dictate both the BSU investigation and media coverage, are borne out of a desire for control that he lacks in his personal and professional life.
• Crazy-Prepared: He prints flyers and rents a music studio to lure his victims, drives a police-looking car, has jammed the police's radio frequency, wears tools to kill and dispose of the bodies in the back of the car, follows the case in media and changes modus to destroy evidence when he becomes aware of it (for example, throwing the bodies from a bridge into the river after hearing about hairs and carpet fibers in the bodies), has a press pass to return to the crime scenes, even owns a book on how to pass polygraphs. This all makes the more puzzling that he can fail so much as not making himself look like a suspect when he talks to police.
• Deadpan Snarker: Almost nothing comes out of his mouth that is not a witty remark.
• Disco Dan: He wears an afro, bell-bottom pants, and works in the music business. Or claims to.
• The Dreaded: The series of murders grips the city, with children going out only in groups, and eventually goes nationwide.
• Early-Bird Cameo: He is among the journalists in Episode 2x06 but is not given any introduction until Episode 2x08, doubling as Rewatch Bonus.
• Everything Is Racist: He pulls the card when Holden asks him if he knew any of the victims, saying if he is also going to ask if he knows Jim.
• Faux Affably Evil: He acts superficially polite, but he's clearly filled with contempt for others and delights in the attention he's getting. At one point, he catches on that he's being followed and buys Bill and Holden some fast food, just to rub their faces in their own failure.
  • His first speaking appearance has him walk away by saying “You boys have a good night.” It’s not genuine, but a way, like the fast food, to taunt Holden and Tench about how he knows they’re on to him; in this case, mocking them for how he basically walks away from circumstantial but damning evidence: being the only one on the bridge after a splash, with rope, dog hairs, and a blatantly false alibi.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He wears thick glasses and is a depraved child killer.
• Freakier Than Fiction:
  • The BSU's profile of the killer was more detailed than in the series and matched Williams even better.
  • In addition to driving to the Mayor's home to cry injustice, he also drove to the Police Commissioner's and repeated the same stunt.
• Harmful to Minors: The flyers he uses to lure victims ask for boys and girls aged between 11 and 21. However, he starts targeting adults as children become unavailable due to the general panic.
• Hypocrite: He disparages the victims for being out at night, doing nothing good... just like he does.
• Jerkass: He is very snotty and entitled, thinking himself smarter than he is.
• Just One Little Mistake: In an inversion of Retirony, he decides to get rid of a body on a bridge in the very last night before the APD calls off the stakeouts. But considering how much of an Attention Whore he is, this might have been deliberate.
• Lie Detector: He has a book about how to pass them. Yet he fails.^note In reality, he failed three polygraphs, then called the press to tell them that he had failed them even though he had no reason to.
• Metaphorically True: Some of his lies qualify. For example, claiming that he doesn't own dog, yet lives with one but that doesn't count because it belongs to his father, according to him.
• Momma's Boy: Gender-Inverted — his father babies him despite being an adult, paying his studio's rent despite getting nothing back from it, and he even tries to buy him a plane ticket to South America while Wayne keeps the press and police's attention on himself.
• Not Me This Time: At the end of the series, Holden finds hints to the existence of other pedophiles in the area, whose crimes will be swept together with Williams's rather than properly investigated.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: He's a supposed music promoter who takes a possible new talent to his rented studio every month or so, yet they never record a demo, and his number of attended gigs and represented clients is zero.
  Bill Tench: Know what I call a child talent scout who makes no music and no money, Wayne? A fucking pedophile.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He is at the very least egotistical, narcissistic, and classist.
• Red Baron: Called "The Atlanta Monster" by the press, a name he (possibly) gave himself.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Approaches his potential victims in broad daylight, even after being arrested and watched over by police.
  • Takes a hostile and arrogant stance when dealing with them, openly mocking them and the victims.
  • Tries to book a flight to South America while bringing the press, police, and mayor's attention to himself.
• Returning to the Scene: The killer is expected to return to the places where he disposes of the bodies to relive his crimes. Williams does it by using his press pass and driving twice over a bridge after dumping one.
• Run for the Border: His father tries to buy a flight ticket to South America while the press is on Wayne.
• Saying Too Much: When pulled over, he says it must be "because of those boys". When asked if he was throwing something out of the bridge that night, he asks if they mean "something like a child". When asked if he panicked while strangling his last victim, he says "no"… then adds because he "didn't kill nobody".
• Scary Black Man: He may not look very imposing in person, but don't let that fool you; he's a remorseless killer.
• '70s Hair: He sports an afro.
• Stupid Evil: Okay, consider he's actually innocent of everything like he claims. How else can one describe his monumental arrogance, gratuitously making fun and insulting the victims and law enforcement, producing a nonsensical and easily disproven alibi, making stunts to bring the press's attention to himself in a time when all the city wants is for someone to be caught and get over with it (down to coming up with the "Monster of Atlanta" moniker for himself, at least impliedly)?
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: There's nothing about Wayne's appearance to indicate what a monster he is, a fact he exploits to commit his crimes.
• Would Hurt a Child: He has a preference for young teenagers and his youngest victim is nine.
• You Are What You Hate:
  • Also speculated by Bill as a reason for the crimes. He was raised in a somewhat privileged family, but he failed college due to being seen as just another black boy from the streets (or thinks so), and has resorted to taking his anger out on the black boys who 'set a bad example' rather than the white racists who actually treated him unfairly.
  • He blames the victims for their own murder due to them being out on the streets at night, doing nothing good. I.e., what he does when he goes looking for them. He calls them "drop shots", meaning they are useless (like misfired bullets you have to take out and drop in place), but he himself has failed at any career he's tried and is parasitizing his parents, while his victims were actually bringing money home by doing odd jobs.

Other cases

Cody

Cody Miller

Portrayed By: David H. Holmes

"How can you shoot what you can't see?!"

A mentally ill hostage taker whose actions give Holden the idea of the unit.

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• Ax-Crazy: He thinks he's invisible.
• Boom, Headshot!: He commits suicide with his own shotgun. This is the only instance of graphic onscreen violence in the first season.
• Fan Disservice: We wish we could actually not see you, Cody.
• Happily Married: Until he went cuckoo, that's it. His wife is visibly worried about him.
• Hostage Situation: He takes a group of people prisoner in an industrial area and demands to speak to his wife.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Holden's inspiration was there as a sniper, not as the negotiator.
• Wild Hair: He definitely didn't visit the hairdresser before taking a bunch of hostages.

Wade

Roger Wade

Portrayed By: Mark Kudisch

"My covenant is with your son, not with you."

An elementary school principal in the D.C. area with a compulsion to tickle children's feet.

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• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: If he had simply stopped the tickling when he was told, he would've kept his job. Notably, this is somewhat consistent with the behaviors of pedophiles in real life, who largely cannot control or restrict their behavior around children or desire to have access to them.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Nowadays, the school board and law enforcement would have looked into his hobby a lot earlier. In the series' late 1970s setting, most people who know of his activites think they are at least somewhat strange, but also doesn't see them as being actively harmful to children.
• Friendly Tickle Torture: Every time kids get sent to his office for discipline, he has them take off their shoes and socks, tickles their feet, and gives them spare change. Most people who knows about this behavior find it at least somewhat weird, but relatively harmless, while some find it outright disturbing.
• Happily Married: With two teenage daughters. His wife goes to shame Holden in his home after he is fired.
• Monster Fangirl: His wife and the younger schoolteachers basically worship him.
• Pædo Hunt: One of the most debated Season One aspects among the fandom is if he is really a pedophile and how much of a pass he should have been given.
• Self-Inflicted Hell: He was told to stop his strange behavior both by parents and a freaking FBI agent. He refused and got all mad instead, which caused him to get publicly shamed, fired, and incapable of getting a job around children when he should be thinking of securing his retirement. And all for not stopping tickling children's feet and giving them money for it when the parents told him to. Long story short, Wade is either a pedophile with a compulsion that overrides all rationality in the interest of letting him continue to touch children's feet, or just Too Dumb to Live.
• Seriously Scruffy: Holden finds him in a store some time after he is fired, exhibiting signs of this.
• Too Smart for Strangers: He is introduced censoring a speech that Holden is going to give to a school class about the MacDonald Triad, rendering it vague to the point of nonsensical.
• The Unreveal: It is never established for certain if he is a pedophile or just has a fuzzy concept of social boundaries around children.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The principal that inspired him lived in Texas, was younger and unmarried (though he had a girlfriend), and was already fired before the school board asked Holden's Real Life counterpart for his opinion.
• Villain with Good Publicity: If he is indeed a pedophile. The police and at least half of his teachers consider him beneath suspicion.