Charm and Harm (Season 1, Episode 20)
Premise: The BAU races to catch an identified serial killer, a master of disguise, as he flees Florida and kills his way across the South.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 20
- Unsub
- Mark Gregory (Andy Comeau)
- Location
- Tampa, Florida; Copperhill, Tennessee
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Elle Greenaway (Lola Glaudini), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.” (Voltaire, read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” (François de La Rochefoucauld, read by Gideon)
- Guest stars
- Robert Pine as Doug Gregory, Mark Totty as Raymond McCarthy, Michael Catlin as Hank Bloomberg, Joey Honsa as Kelly Dalton, Alicia Ziegler as Allyson
- Director
- Félix Enríquez Alcalá
- Writers
- Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer
Summary
The Case
“Charm and Harm” begins with the killer already known. DNA ties Mark Gregory, a 38-year-old Sarasota real estate man, to four women abducted around Tampa, tortured and drowned alive in hotel bathtubs, but he slipped away 36 hours ago, and Nicole Wegener is missing too. Working with Special Agent Raymond McCarthy of FBI Tampa, the team splits up. Hotch and Elle hear from Gregory’s business partner and best friend, Hank Bloomberg, that he is a ladies’ man who swore off marriage. At his sparsely furnished house, Gideon and Reid find about 20 suits, piles of driver’s licenses and catalogs of uniforms: a chameleon who reinvents himself for every deal. Garcia turns up a boyhood peeping incident, a statutory rape charge at 18 and a marriage that lasted 23 days.
Gregory has emptied his accounts and kenneled his dogs, so the team calls him a spree killer moving from a guided phase to a random one. Nicole’s body turns up in a Georgia hotel where he checked in under his own name, and the team suspects he lured her with a photography ruse. His ex-wife, found by Garcia in Bradenton, describes a jealous, controlling husband who stalked her for years. Gregory dumps his car at the Atlanta airport, where footage shows him in a uniform getting a ride from a woman later found dead in a South Carolina motel; her injuries suggest he revived her between shocks only to drown her. He is now switching plates and spending half as long with each victim.
Garcia learns that Gregory was in the car when his mother, Elizabeth, died. Pressed hard by Gideon, his father, Doug, admits that she took the boy along to motels where she met other men, and that he had suspicions about her death. In Tennessee, Allyson nearly drowns in a motel pool but survives: Gregory claims she is his wife, and slips away while a stranger revives her. The team works out that Elizabeth drowned in the wrecked car and concludes that ten-year-old Mark held her under. When Kelly Dalton, a mother of two, is abducted from a mall parking lot, the team predicts he will take her to Rock Creek in Copperhill, near the old crash site.
The Team
Before the case comes in, Morgan teases Elle that her two phone calls in an hour mean she has a secret boyfriend, and she refuses to say.
The ending
Spoiler: Agents find the abandoned car and follow screams to the water, where they confront Gregory as he holds Kelly under. Morgan then calls in that Kelly will be fine and that Gregory is dead.
Why it stands out
- A photograph seen in the episode shows a younger Robert Pine, who plays Doug Gregory, in a red convertible with his real-life son, actor Chris Pine.
- In a “wet drowning,” the term used for the victims here, water is breathed into the lungs; in a dry drowning the throat closes to keep it out, so strictly it is asphyxiation.