Ronald Boyd

"Now how can someone be missing if they ain't supposed to be here in the first damn place?"

Deputy Ronald "Ronny" Boyd, a.k.a. "Santa Muerte", was a prolific serial killer (later spree killer) who appeared in Season Five of Criminal Minds.

Background
Not much is know about Boyd's life prior to "A Rite of Passage". His father, Fred Boyd, was a foreman for Golden Harvest, a grain and feed company, and died in one of their barns due to an unspecified accident when he was younger. When Boyd was eighteen, he had an accident while riding an ATV, which left a lasting injury to his leg. He somehow got a job as a Sheriff's Deputy in Terlingua, Texas, as well as a hold of a trailer that he moved into, keeping to himself both personally and professionally. At some point, he became a serial killer. It is unknown why or how he came to be so, but he seems to have chosen illegal immigrants as his victims since they are hard to identify and travel at vast deserts, where there wouldn't be any witnesses. It is also possible a secondary motivation of his is racism. Immediately prior to "A Rite of Passage", Boyd received a new sheriff, Eva Ruiz, hailing from the New York Police Department, whom he felt threatened by.

A Rite of Passage
"You just came from New York and took over. Sticking your nose in things that were going just fine."

Boyd is first seen riding his ATV with a helmet on and a mask covering his mouth, pursuing an illegal immigrant. He catches up with the immigrant and kills him, later decapitating him and putting his head into a cooler with the heads of two previous victims. The heads are later discovered when a group of biking youths accidentally knock the cooler over, spilling out its contents. When the BAU is called in, he assists them in the investigation, in which the main suspect is Omar Morales, a member of the Lugo Cartel, a Mexican drug cartel. Boyd watches as Morales states that decapitation isn't his style and describes how he disassembles his victims, which is more gruesome than his decapitation method. The following night, he watches a group of illegal immigrants enter the country and kills one when the man remains behind in order to rest. He then leaves the latest victim's head at Ruiz's house. The BAU tracks down the group of illegal immigrants the latest victim was escaping with before getting killed. When one of the immigrants, a child, mentions seeing "The Sun" during his travel, something that intrigues Ruiz, Boyd decides to lure her into a trap as she is beginning to catch on to him.

He takes Ruiz to a barn owned by Golden Harvest, which is abandoned, alone, kills her, and disassembles her in a fashion similar to Morales's aforementioned vivisection method in hopes of framing Morales and the Lugo Cartel, dumping the pieces far away from the barn. However, when he and a fellow deputy, Gentry, go to arrest Morales at the Lugo Cartel headquarters, he devolves, opening fire with a pump-action shotgun, shooting and killing any members that come across him before killing Morales. He then repeatedly shoots and kills Gentry, who witnessed the entire shooting, with the same revolver used to kill Ruiz, and then places the gun in Morales' hands in an attempt to pin the shooting on the two of them. Just then, he receives a call on Gentry's cell. Pretending to be Gentry, Boyd is notified that the BAU are onto him. Fleeing back to the Golden Harvest barn, Boyd arms himself on his ATV with an M4 assault rifle and gets ready for the BAU to arrive. When Hotch and Rossi arrive, he fires at them before attempting to escape. An SUV containing Morgan and Prentiss arrives and Morgan shoots his MP5 repeatedly through the windshield, hitting Boyd several times in the chest, forcing him off the ATV, and killing him.

Profile
The unsub is a "human predator", basically a hunter, whose killings are about power and control. All of the victims that were conclusively tied to him have been old or handicapped in some way. He waits for his victims to get separated from the rest of the "herd" (the other illegal immigrants) and then wears them down for a long period of time by chasing them across the vast desert. He may not be able to take them on in their strongest state, despite their age or infirmity, suggesting that he may be physically weak, small, thin, or possibly suffering from some sort of handicap, and is therefore incapable of taking them on in a fair fight. He creates chaos and then attacks, a pattern that he applies to his entire life. Because of this, he is most likely not in any kind of relationship, or if he is, it will be an abusive one as he gets off on control. Since he is an organized killer, he will be likely following the investigation. He is also well aware that Sheriff Ruiz has started looking into the missing illegal immigrants. He decapitates his victims as a forensic countermeasure.

Modus Operandi
Staking out a remote part of the desert close to a tunnel used by illegal aliens, Ronald, when a group of immigrants passed by, would single out the weakest member of the pack, usually the oldest, sickest, or simply the slowest, and chase them for miles on his ATV. When the victim became completely exhausted, Ronald would slash and/or stab them to death with a machete, take the body to his trailer, and behead it with the same machete. Ronald would bury the remains on his property, though after Eva Ruiz became sheriff, he began leaving the heads around Terlingua (including her own house), to taunt her. Similar to how George Foyet, a.k.a. The Boston Reaper, wore a black mask to intimidate his victims, Ronald wore a motorcycle helmet with a skull-motif (presumably referencing Santa Muerte) to terrorize his prey.

When he devolved into a spree killer, Ronald shot Sheriff Ruiz three times with a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 36 revolver and mutilated her according to how Omar Morales had said he would have people killed in order to cast suspicion on him. Then, in a botched attempt to frame Morales and the Lugo Cartel, he attacked several members with a 12-gauge Remington 870 pump-action shotgun, killed Gentry and presumably one Lugo Cartel member with the same revolver used to kill Ruiz. He would later attack the BAU with an M4A1 assault rifle he had mounted on an ATV.

Known Victims

 * Numerous unnamed illegal immigrants killed prior to Sheriff Ruiz's arrival, ranging in the dozens
 * October 2009-April 2010: Over twenty unnamed illegal immigrants
 * 2010:
 * April 11 : The three heads in the cooler :
 * An unnamed female illegal immigrant
 * An unnamed male illegal immigrant
 * An unnamed male illegal immigrant
 * April 12: An unnamed male illegal immigrant
 * April 13: Sheriff Eva Ruiz
 * April 14:
 * Five killed in the garage massacre. They are:
 * Unnamed mechanic
 * Jose
 * Omar Morales
 * Deputy Clyde Gentry
 * An unnamed Lugo Cartel member
 * Shot at the following BAU members with an assault rifle at the old Golden Harvest barn in an attempt to escape them:
 * David Rossi
 * Aaron Hotchner
 * Derek Morgan
 * Emily Prentiss

Appearances

 * Season Five
 * "A Rite of Passage"