Children of the Dark (Season 3, Episode 4)
Premise: When Denver-area families are wiped out in their homes, the parents beaten and the children given lethal injections, the BAU hunts two foster brothers acting out their own abuse.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 4
- Unsub
- Ervin Robles (Francis Capra), Gary (William Lee Scott)
- Location
- Denver, Colorado
- Starring
- Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological, resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.” (Barbara Ehrenreich, read by Prentiss)
- Guest stars
- Jhoanna Flores as Carrie Ortiz, Christine Healy as Mrs. Manwaring, Tom Kiesche as Lt. Nellis, Masam Holden as Tyler, Stephanie Erb as Dina
- Director
- Guy Norman Bee
- Writers
- Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie
Summary
The Case
“Children of the Dark” opens at the Halbert family’s dinner table in Cherry Creek, outside Denver, where a polite stranger at the door with a dead cat asks for help and is soon joined by a second man. The Halberts are the third family killed in a month. In each home the phone line was cut, the parents bound and beaten with household objects and the children quietly killed with pentobarbital; at the Halberts’, cell signals seem to have been jammed and chairs were set to face the parents. Lieutenant Nellis wants the BAU despite old friction over the JonBenét Ramsey case. The profile describes two clean-cut career criminals with a ruse: a sadistic leader who attacks the parents and a withdrawn partner who sees the injections as mercy.
Then teenager Carrie Ortiz survives a fourth attack when the needle misses her vein, though her parents and little brother, Danny, die. She says the quiet one, a Hispanic man who spoke no Spanish, avoided her eyes, took her photograph and called her Lucy, and the pair called each other brothers. Reid traces the start to the Laybourne killings, where the daughter had been abused, and the team concludes that two foster brothers are punishing parents and sparing children a life like theirs. News of Carrie’s survival draws flowers matching the Ortiz arrangement, bought with a stolen card. Garcia cross-checks felons from foster care with access to animals and the drug, and Carrie picks out Ervin Robles, who puts down animals at the city pound. His foster mother, Mrs. Manwaring, names his protector, Gary, and recalls that Ervin lost a sister named Lucy.
After Ervin’s arrest, Carrie faces him. He says the flowers were meant as an apology, says he puts strays to sleep so they will not suffer, and describes how his foster mother held him under bathwater until everything went dark. Gary, he says, suffered worse and is headed for the Manwaring house.
The ending
Spoiler: Gary instead collects the Manwaring foster children from school and holes up with young Tyler in a doughnut shop. Hotch phones him there and argues that the boy can still turn out differently, and Gary lets Tyler walk out and surrenders. Social services will not remove the children until it investigates, so the agents return them home, but Tyler has taken Gary’s gun in his backpack and confronts his foster mother with it. Morgan talks him into handing it over with a promise that he will never have to go back. Prentiss offers to take Carrie in, but JJ has heard from Carrie’s family, who are coming from Los Angeles.
Why it stands out
- Francis Capra and William Lee Scott guest-star as the foster brothers, and Christine Healy plays their abusive foster mother, Mrs. Manwaring.
- Reid buys a chocolate frosted doughnut with sprinkles; in the much later episode “Taboo” (2016), Prentiss remembers it is his favorite.