Outfoxed (Season 5, Episode 8)
Premise: As a killer wipes out Virginia military families while the fathers are deployed, Hotch and Prentiss question the imprisoned family annihilator who received the killer’s fan mail.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 8
- Unsub
- Miranda Dracar (Kristina Klebe)
- Location
- Hampton, Virginia
- Starring
- David Rossi (Joe Mantegna), 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
- “Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else, unless it’s an enemy.” (Albert Einstein, read by Morgan)
- Guest stars
- Neal Jones as Karl Arnold, Andrea Thompson as Field Agent Anne Hudson, Neill Barry as Captain Joseph Downey, James Fallon as Prof. James Fallon, Sydney Sweeney as Dani Forester
- Director
- John Gallagher
- Writers
- Simon Mirren
Summary
The Case
“Outfoxed” cuts between a lecture by neuroscientist James Fallon on the brains of psychopaths and an attack on a Virginia home. Laura Downey and her sons are shot, her daughter Lucy, 12, is drowned in the family pool, and all four are buried in the yard while Captain Joseph Downey serves in Iraq. A year earlier the Williams family of Newport News died the same way, and the father has since been killed overseas. Garcia relays that Karl Arnold, the imprisoned family annihilator called the Fox, who killed eight families and kept wedding rings, has been mailed clippings of both crimes signed by an admirer. Hotch, who testified at his trial, visits him with Prentiss.
Prints on a Downey photo match the Newport News scene. JJ breaks the news to Captain Downey and persuades a military contact to give Garcia the fathers’ records. Within three days the Forester family is attacked and 14-year-old Dani suffocated, with her father in Afghanistan. The team ties the sudden escalation to the noise and crowds of an air show at Langley and reads the graves as copies of wartime mass graves. Because the girls always die last and are never shot or sexually assaulted, Prentiss suggests the killer is a woman. Interpol links the prints to killings in Zagreb, Modena and London, and the team suspects a woman marked by the Bosnian war and the massacre at Srebrenica.
Garcia finds that every family shared pictures through a photo site that hires outside workers. Its staff list turns up Miranda Dracar, an orphan born in Sarajevo in 1982 and adopted by a family in Srebrenica. At her home the agents learn her next target is the family of Marine Sergeant Young. A struggle there ends with a gunshot, and Morgan reports that he is unhurt.
The Team
In prison, Arnold notes that Hotch no longer wears a wedding ring and turns his attention to Prentiss. She objects to showing him Lucy’s picture, but Hotch insists, and she plays up to Arnold to draw out his story; afterward she tells Hotch she feels sickened at having encouraged him. Pressed to explain why he killed, Arnold hears his crimes traced back to his own father, and he warns that things are not over for Hotch.
The ending
Spoiler: Before Hotch leaves, Arnold says his admirer is far from lost and has already found Hotch. The note proves to come from George Foyet, who knew Hotch would be called in and is using the case to torment him, as Arnold laughs.
Why it stands out
- Neal Jones returns as Karl Arnold, the Fox, a family annihilator whose conviction Hotch helped secure.
- Neuroscientist James Fallon plays himself, and the lecture on psychopaths’ brains that opens the episode is one he has given to real students.
- Fallon has said his own brain shows the neurological markers of psychopathy, which he found while studying brain scans for Alzheimer’s research.