Antonio Riaz takes a shot at playing with rockets.
Trent Reager: A few months ago, I saw this guy out on Third, tripping on acid. He was, like, out of his mind, and it was just so so weird. And that is when I came up with that rig for the bathroom. You have to admit it is pretty clever.
Captain Jim Brass: Five people are dead, one is in the hospital.
Reager: Hey, I just put the gas in the car okay? They're the ones that crashed it. Come on you've got my tapes; you've seen 'em. That first dude, hacking his legs off. Or that teacher oh, and the homeless guy. I mean, the dude is already a total mess, and then the lady has all those dolls! I mean, that was a gift. Or the poor Mexican guy killing his wife. Honestly, I didn't see that coming. I mean, that that that was awesome.
Captain Jim Brass: Five people are dead, one is in the hospital.
Reager: Hey, I just put the gas in the car okay? They're the ones that crashed it. Come on you've got my tapes; you've seen 'em. That first dude, hacking his legs off. Or that teacher oh, and the homeless guy. I mean, the dude is already a total mess, and then the lady has all those dolls! I mean, that was a gift. Or the poor Mexican guy killing his wife. Honestly, I didn't see that coming. I mean, that that that was awesome.
As gritty crime dramas, it's not surprising the series that make up the CSI-verse have quite a few monstrous villains.
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Examples
- "Cross Jurisdictions": Gordon Daimler, aka Adam van der Welk, is a limo driver who targets wealthy couples. He kills the husbands first and then, after 48 hours of "fun and games", kills the wives. Having already done this with 3 previous couples, his latest target was the former Las Vegas Chief of Detectives; he then took the wife and the Chief's young daughter to Miami, where he kills the wife; the daughter manages to escape, despite Daimler trying to shoot her. He rapes and kills a fifth woman, and unsuccessfully attempts to kill her husband.
- "Assume Nothing": Mandy and Cameron Klinefeld put the "unholy" back in Unholy Matrimony. A married couple united by a shared sexual fetish for rape and murder, the pair operate by abducting other husbands and wives, sexually torturing the women while making the men watch, with the ultimate goal of forcing them to Mercy Kill the women they love. They promise the husbands they can go free if they do this, but they're lying.
- "Pirates of the Third Reich": Leon Sneller rejected his Jewish upbringing in favor of Nazism, and set out to continue the work of Josef Mengele. Taking his own twin brother captive, Sneller experiments on and eventually kills him, afterward stealing his identity so that he can use his job at a sleep clinic to find subjects for his experiments, which he conducts in a secret laboratory modeled after Auschwitz. Sneller mutilates or murders 21 people, and treats the victims like death camp prisoners, keeping them shackled while he shaves, brands, and starves them; Sneller's atrocities include crudely sewing two brothers together to create artificial conjoined twins; injecting people with flesh-eating bacteria; and lobotomizing a man and taking one of his eyes, which he tries to transplant into Lady Heather's heterochromatic daughter, Zoe, who gnaws her own hand off in a failed bid to escape from Sneller's Torture Cellar.
- "Bittersweet": Gina Sinclair is a pedophilic master manipulator who had her weak-willed husband, Todd, help her rape, torture, and murder five little girls, with the only survivor of the killing spree being Colleen Hughes, who was held prisoner for three years by the Sinclairs. The couple would film themselves abusing their victims, who Gina enjoyed violating with beer bottles while being watched by Todd. When they were caught, Gina got a lenient sentence by convincing the jury that she was abused and enslaved by Todd. After being paroled, an unrepentant Gina coerces a man named Ryan Thomas and the brainwashed Colleen into assisting her with the rape, torture, and murder of thirteen-year-old Samantha Chase.
- "Zippered", "Ms. Willows Regrets", & "Willows in the Wind": Laura Gabriel is a ruthless arms smuggler and supposed friend to Catherine Willows. Playing a meek and submissive wife to her sleazy private military firm head husband Mark, she uses this false personality to deflect blame off her and onto him as she funnels his company's weapons to the Mafia and the cartels. When the investigation starts getting too close to the truth, she hires employees of the company to murder her own lawyer and all of his staff; following this, she kills the assassins and burns their bodies beyond recognition in order to fake her own death and that of her right-hand man. She intended for an enraged Catherine to summarily execute her husband, and placed a contract on Catherine herself to clean up the last remaining loose end, not caring for her old friend in the slightest.
- "CSI on Fire": Tom Cooley led the gang-rape on Marla Louie before attempting to kill her by burying her alive. He would later go on to rape eight more women before strangling them and dumping the corpses under his family's ranch. He would also kill his cohort, Max Liston, in a scuba-diving accident, and it's implied he was planning to kill his lawyer Gavin Pearson before Pearson managed to kill Cooley first.
- "Check In and Check Out": Trent Reager is a voyeuristic motel owner who graduates to full-on murderer due to his love of watching people. Spying on the people who check into his motel, Trent decides to spice things up by applying an LSD hallucinogen spray canister and dowsing his customers in room 114, causing them to go wild and violent, leading to a young man stabbing himself to death; a loving husband beating his wife to death; a homeless man stabbing a kindly couple to death though a hundred knife wounds each; and a teacher gutting her student. Completely proud of his crimes that have led to innocent people being jailed, Trent stands as one of the most unique and horrific killers in all of CSI.
Examples
- "Broken" & "Body Count": Stewart Otis is a pedophilic Serial Killer and Serial Rapist who targeted little girls around the ages of five to eight years. While acting as an authority figure, he would kidnap the girls to take to his home for him to rape and strangle to death before burying the bodies in is backyard. He has done this to eight little girls and only laments his latest victim, Ruthie, because she died before he got a chance to "play" with her. In a later appearance, he escapes prison with the help of two fellow inmates, Hank Kerner and Randall Kaye. He then returns the latter's favor by kidnapping his daughter, Emma, taking her to a cabin where he not only raped her, but force her to partake in a film taunting Horatio Caine, the person who arrested him. He then tries to kill her before trying to find her cousin, Robyn, hoping to do the same thing to her.
- "Tinder Box": Danny Maxwell, the bouncer at "Club Descent", resorts to unethical means to make himself into a hero. Having doused curtains with rum so that the pyrotechnics would light them on fire, Danny intends to engineer a rescue of the patrons from the inferno, killing a bartender who witnesses him and attempting to frame him. As a result of Danny's actions, over a dozen people die and several more are injured, notably a woman being trampled and another woman injuring herself in a shower as a result of smoke inhalation. Eventually confronted by CSIs Eric Delko and Tim "Speed" Speedle, Danny tries to justify his actions by saying he wanted to be a hero, much to the disappointment of his former friend Delko.
- "Rampage" through "Rio": Antonio Riaz is the head of the Mala Noche and Horatio Caine's Arch-Enemy. In his first appearance, Riaz helps shoot up a courtroom to free one of his associates to help him with a business deal and later gains an enmity with Horatio, which he acts on by killing Horatio's wife Marisol—who is also Eric Delko's sister. Upon his return, Riaz has a crime scene rigged with a grenade to kill one of Horatio's team to spite him and later attempts to blow up a plane filled with hundreds as a big show before being captured. Using his connections to free himself, when he returns, to continue his feud, he forces Horatio's brother and nephew to be involved in his drug business, before having Horatio's brother killed and forcing Horatio's nephew to smuggle in heroin pellets into the US, along with other teenage boys forcefully recruited by Riaz—some of whom die as a result of the trade—all while keeping the nephew's father's life over the boy's head when in reality the father is already dead.
- "All Fall Down" & "Fallen": Professor Robert "Bob" Starling, when denied tenure on account of his student—and mistress—Melissa Walls's faked thesis, retaliates by killing Miami-Dade University personnel he sees as having interfered with his career. To this end, Starling shoots one victim with a remote-controlled rifle, drowns another under a pool cover, and attempts to burn the third one alive with a compound of potassium and water as a result of the victim using fake cologne. In order to suppress evidence against him, Bob manipulates Melissa into releasing halon gas in an attempt to suffocate dozens of CSI lab workers, successfully having CSI Jesse Cardoza killed.
- "Hunting Ground": Wesley Habeck is the founder of an underground club dedicated to Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. After buying undocumented male immigrants from a smuggler, Habeck holds the men captive for a time, during which he treats them like animals, keeping them chained up and wallowing in their own filth while he brands them and pumps them full of steroids, ensuring that they remain compliant by threatening to kill any loved ones that they took with them from the Caribbean. When the time comes, Habeck and one or two of the people who have bought their way into his organization hunt the men through the Everglades. When he realizes that the authorities are closing in on him, Habeck sends a pair of club members out to hunt his remaining two captives, then drives off and leaves them in the middle of nowhere as he prepares to flee Miami.
- "Crowned": Edwin Chambers is a pageant director who arranges beauty pageants to lure young girls before abducting them and taking them to an abandoned movie theater where he then proceeds to rape them, already raping countless girls, including Jan Gramercy when she was young. He later kidnaps Tori Haverford, and tries to rape her before attempting to kill her when he gets cornered by Horatio and Natalia.
Examples
- "Down the Rabbit Hole" & "DOA for a Day": "Suspect X" is an enigmatic assassin who takes pleasure in profiting off of murder, using a "recursive spider" to find keywords that lead her to potential clients. Having tortured and murdered a woman to obtain her virtual avatar "Venus", X intends on using Venus as a means of reaching her target, a New York Congressman. Under the threat of exposure from Venus's online paramour "Don Juan 2-3", X kills him to silence him. Confronted online by NYPD Detective Mac Taylor, X lures Mac's avatar into a virtual gallery containing dozens of her past targets, then has the Crime Lab's computers infected with a virus. Upon resurfacing, X captures a similar looking woman—subjecting her captive to torture and inhumane conditions while having a disgraced plastic surgeon client-turned-accomplice perform plastic surgery on her—subsequently murdering her to fake her own death. After antagonizing the NYPD once she realizes they are on her trail, and murdering the surgeon once he is exposed, X is discovered to have posed as an audio technician in order to set up a city official's assassination.
- "She's Not There": Carolyn Williams is a leader in a Human Trafficking ring. Carolyn lures in girls from around the world who are aged 14-21 and promises them jobs as models. Carolyn befriends them and brings them to a party where she and her partner drug and then kidnap them. They then take them to a warehouse where the girls are beaten and drugged into submission using heroin. They are then forced into prostitution for money, with this operation having run for years and with an estimated victim count in the dozens.
- "Party Down": Neal Cooper is a seemingly unimposing young man who blames others for his feelings of isolation. To this end, Neal sets up a party for at least 20 people on a truck where he plans on killing the attendees—including four people he specifically invited from his past—having hot-wired the truck, padlocked the rear entry, and welded the emergency exit shut. While the party is going on, Neal commandeers the truck into the Hudson River so it can sink. Rescued by an intended victim when he is himself trapped, Neal kills his rescuer when he realizes the latter can finger him as the perpetrator. Subsequently, Neal hides among the survivors to throw suspicion off of himself. Even when confronted by NYPD Detectives Mac Taylor and Jo Danville with the evidence against him, Neal refuses to take responsibility for his actions.
- "Python" & "Python's Revenge": Python, real name Dante Wilkerson, is one of the world's most wanted hackers. A figure born with reptilian skin, he would run a website where he sells faulty guns and drugs in the hope of creating anarchy. When cornered by the authorities, he would brutally torture and kill any agents sent against him. He would also hack various government agencies and release the information to criminals. Becoming obsessed with Agent Avery Ryan, he would kidnap, torture and even, just to mess with her, would give drugs to Avery's friend. About to be captured, he threatened to use his tech skills to overdose the friend if they don’t solve his riddles, but later attempts to kill her anyway. After failing, he tracks Avery down and kills the agents guarding her in the sick hope that if she kills him, she would become just like him. Python mixes cold sociopathy and vindictiveness and stands out as one of the most wicked of the franchise has ever produced.
Examples
- CSI: Miami's "Felony Flight" & CSI: NY's "Manhattan Manhunt": Henry Darius is a Serial Killer-turned-Spree Killer known for shooting his victims in the head. As a child born from a mistress of a wealthy family, he always felt jealous that his half-sisters got more attention than he did, and as a result, became a murderer, with his first three victims looking like his sisters. In his first appearance, he causes a plane crash that kills two pilots and one U.S. Marshal. He then steals the marshal's gun and uses it to kill four college students and steal their car. He then travels to Miami University where he would kill two more college students after they told him about his half-sister, Alexa, and her whereabouts. He then goes to her location and kidnap her before shooting a man for his car and heading to New York City. When he arrives in New York, he murders Alexa along with six college students, before heading off to kill his second half-sister Sarah. A narcissistic sociopath, with a violently-low impulse control, an excuse that doesn't come close to justifying his actions, and 20 body count to boot, Henry Darius was among the worst that both CSI teams from Miami and New York had ever had to face.
- CSI: Trilogy note : These three represent the worst that the Zetas have to offer:
- Part 1 (CSI: Miami's "Bone Voyage"): Jimmy Burris is a pimp who tricks numerous women throughout Miami into working for him by posing as a recruiter for a model agency, where he would then have them forced into prostitution, even having sex with them himself. When one of his prisoners, Ashley Tanner, tries to escape, Burris tracked her down, planning to dismember her while she's still alive, before dumping her remains in the swamps.
- Part 2 (CSI: NY's "Hammer Down"): Casey Steele transports the abducted women throughout the U.S., where he would harvest the women's organs by extracting them from their bodies while they are still alive and conscious, his victims dying in excruciating pain; Debbie Menzel is one such example, with Steele cutting her open to extract her liver before she dies. When he retrieves Madeleine Briggs from Jimmy Burris's liaison, Tyler Goodman, Steele murders Tyler after he served his purpose. After causing a car accident that killed a man, Steele forces an innocent bystander to drive him and his captive away from the car crash and into New York City before shooting him and leaving him to die; he would shoot at several New York cops when he makes his attempts to leave the city.
- Part 3 (CSI's "The Lost Girls"): Dimitri Sadesky is a leader of the Zetas and is responsible for arranging for countless women to be kidnapped throughout the U.S., their organs harvested, and them forced into prostitution. In his role as a college professor, Dimitri exploits his position to lure students into sex work. He's also had them killed whenever they try to escape from their imprisonment, even killing four women himself after he is done torturing them, and he also murdered Samantha Matthews before having a butcher from Miami dismember and dispose of her corpse.
Examples
- "Fly Away": Josh Freely is a brutal pedophile who uses his position, as a social worker working with emotionally unstable parents, to find new victims, of which he has eight at the very least. Freely piles emotional abuse onto the parents, making them feel as though they're worthless, so they surrender their kids to him, and if that doesn't work, he's more than happy to fudge his own records so his superiors order the children removed. His abuse eventually reaches the point that one such mother attempts to kill herself and her young daughter—with the latter dying—rather than let Freely take her.
- "Blank Generation": Maurice Warfield is a charismatic cult leader who preaches the erasure of the past; in practice, this means the systematic destruction of any relationship his cultists have to anyone but Maurice. Ingraining his toxic philosophies deep into impressionable victims, Maurice's ultimate goal in 1978 was a plan he called "Zero Hour", a mass patricide which entailed each and every cultist—thirty in all—poisoning their fathers as the "ultimate act of loyalty" to Maurice. When one teenager, Matthew Adams started to break out of Maurice's brainwashing, Maurice coldly gives one of his Co-Dragons, Alison Ray, the go-ahead to poison Matthew, so he wouldn't "taint the plan". Remorseless about his atrocities even years later in prison, Maurice has one of the highest attempted body counts of any Cold Case killer.
- "Saving Patrick Bubley": The despicable Miguel Maldonado is one of the few killers in the show whose evil is clear from the get-go. A gang leader and a swaggering thug who happily uses his own devoted girlfriend as a Human Shield, nobody testifies against Miguel for fear of lethal reprisal. In 1999, Miguel stole a scooter from a kid named Patrick Bubley, and murdered his older brother just for trying to get the scooter back. This kicked off a long-standing feud between him and the Bubleys that would lead to most of the family dying: Miguel killed Patrick's second eldest brother for standing up to him, his third for dealing on the wrong street, and his fourth who gives up his life in a futile attempt at retribution. In his cruelest move, Miguel torments the Bubleys' mother, Maeve, by forcing her to have sex with him in exchange for the location of one of her sons' bodies, then gets her hooked on cocaine to keep her as his Sex Slave. Even the team is notably put off by Miguel's atrocities: "Four boys dead. All over a scooter".
- "Cargo": "Nachalnik"—Russian for "Boss"—is a mysterious, powerful crime lord and human trafficker operating on the East Coast of the U.S. "Nachalnik" is secretly a seemingly mild-mannered woman named Linda Boyka who uses her position as the head of a community center to prevent her victims from escaping. Boyka is responsible for the systematic kidnapping of young girls in Eastern Europe and transporting them to the States, where they're forced into prostitution. Boyka is so utterly ruthless that even her own men are terrified of her, as they know death awaits them if they fail her. To keep her victims in line, Boyka burns cigarettes into the soles of her victims' feet to break them into submissive slaves, and her treatment of these girls is so horrific that one has died as a result. In 2005, when Mike Chulaski tries to save one of her teenage victims, Boyka threatens to murder Mike and enslaves the girl as a prostitute.
- "Boy Crazy": Dr. Russell Kearns was a 50s-era Psycho Psychologist who specialised in the torture of children. His gender non-conforming patients were subjected to strict, systematic abuse to "cure" them; when one transgender boy named Alex proved defiant and called him and his institution out for what they were, Kearns had him subjected to ECT. This fried Alex's brain and left him a near-vegetable, with the only lucid part of him unable to do anything but beg for death. Kearns' institute eventually went under for pumping out at least three more of these "zombie" children, each of their minds destroyed by his abuse.
- "Justice": Michael "Mike" Delaney seems to be a charming, handsome young man, but is secretly one of most depraved villains the show has ever produced. Delaney is a sadist who enjoys raping girls and brutalizes others for the sheer fun involved. The most prolific rapist in the show at ten victims, Delaney also taunts his victims for months after his assault, and even rapes victims who would have had sex with him anyway. Eventually, one of Delaney's victims decides to kill herself to escape from the trauma he's inflicted on her. When confronted at gunpoint by his victims, Delaney lies to their faces about being remorseful and later taunts the brother of one of his victims about his sister's rape, resulting in Delaney's death. The vilest Asshole Victim in the series, Delaney disgusts the entire Cold Case team to the point they help his killer get away with causing his death.
- "The Road": "John Smith", real name unknown, is a depraved Serial Killer whose motivations amount to amusing himself. Disturbed since childhood, Smith once witnessed a woman drowning and didn't help her, getting off on the feeling of seeing someone lose all hope and die, and sets about replicating it. Posing as a videographer to attract victims, Smith lures in women with happy lives and something to live for — be it their family, a wedding or their religion — and then kidnaps them before locking them in special cellars. Smith then psychologically torments them until they finally break and give up hope, whereupon he fully seals the cellars and leaves them to starve to death.
Other Media
Examples
- Dominos, written by Kris Oprisko: "Smiley" Tallarico is an infamously vicious and psychopathic Mafia enforcer who is brought to Las Vegas by the Cavellinis. Fearing what Smiley is capable of, the Cavellinis' main rival, Don Vincent Brescia, orders a risky hit on Smiley, but Smiley survives, and proceeds to embark on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Smiley tracks down his two would-be assassins, tortures and dismembers one, and bashes in the head of the other before burying him alive and going after Brescia. After garroting Brescia, Smiley decides to terrorize the entire city and prove to everyone that he is not a man to be trifled with by systemically eliminating absolutely everyone who has had any kind of recent contact—no matter how minor—with Brescia, starting with the innocent staff of a plastic surgery clinic called Desert Hearts. Smiley brutally murders three random employees of the clinic and nearly kills two others before being taken down by the LVMPD.
- Level 26: Dark Origins, by Anthony Zuiker & Duane Swierczynski: Sqweegel, real name unknown, is the most prolific Serial Killer in history within the CSI world. Sqweegel is known for incredible preparation and his seeming randomness. Once he locks in on a victim, Sqweegel proceeds to murder them, often after torturing and raping them, with gender being irrelevant to his tastes. Sqweegel initiates the book's plot by sending in a homemade snuff film to the authorities, and proceeds to kidnap three teenagers who tried to illegally tried to buy beer before raping them with himself, a mop handle and a baseball bat. He burns six priests alive and attempts to torture the widows of 9/11 firefighters to death. His true enemy is the investigator Steven Dark, whose foster family was murdered by Sqweegel once Dark came close to catching him years ago. To “punish” Dark for cheating on his wife Sibby, Sqweegel had raped Sibby, possibly conceiving a child which Sqweegel plans to kill, along with raping and killing Sibby. With a body count numbering in the high hundreds and the belief he is an instrument of divine retribution, Sqweegel remains the most terrifying enemy of Dark's career, and is the only known serial killer to receive the classification Level 26 to designate a monster that was previously beyond human comprehension.
