Emma Kerrigan

"The soil will heal you."

Emma Kerrigan is a delusional serial killer, abductor, and (at one point) a cannibal who appeared in The Good Earth.

Background
A health store worker, Emma was married to John Kerrigan, who owned a large farm, and the two of them had a daughter together named Lexy. She was a firm believer in natural, holistic medicine, with her beliefs bordering the point of fanaticism. At some point, she developed scleroderma, a severe skin disease. This turned her into a hypochondriac (although it is possible she was one for her whole life) who wouldn't eat anything unless she grew it herself. On August 18, 2010, while she was still suffering from the scleroderma, John died in a car accident, and his body was cremated and his ashes spread in Emma's tomato garden. Emma healed soon after, which made her believe that her husband's ashes were what healed her. However, she would often hallucinate of having scabs on her arms and face, causing her to visit the hospital thirty times in six months. Becoming frantic and delusional, she started abducting fit young males to use as fertilizer due to her belief that her husband's ashes were what cured her disease, and possibly because she had used up all of her husband's ashes.

The Good Earth
In the episode, Emma is first seen abducting Terry Rodgers after he drives off the road due to a melatonin overdose. She takes him to her farm and tends to him and three other men she abducted (Gary Ellard, Barry Deaver, and Paul Hicks), feeding them a cocktail of soil additives and animal feed. After some time, she realizes Terry had cancer and dumps his body in the river. She is later seen chopping firewood, likely testing her ax's sharpness when Lexy surprises her. After hurriedly shutting the door and telling Lexy to go back inside, she starts up the wood chipper and kills Gary Ellard. Afterwards, she washes the ax and the wood chipper clean. She and Lexy begin digging in the tomato garden and Emma hallucinates scabs and itches on her arms. When she visits her doctor, he insists she is fine. She quickly leaves when he suggests that this is a mental problem and asks her if she contacted a therapist. Later that day, she still scratches the imaginary scabs when she looks in the mirror and sees the disease on her face. Emma then began waiting outside a baby shower for Cheryl Winslow, who is due in three weeks. She abducts her and does a C-section, taking the placenta and dropping her and the surviving newborn baby off at the hospital.

After consuming the placenta, Emma looks in the mirror and sees her face has healed, much to her relief. Later, Lexy tries to investigate the barn, but Emma stops her. She then tries to feed her daughter the placenta, but the bowl is accidentally spilled, angering Emma. She then hallucinates severe scabs and pustules on Lexy's face. Panicking, Emma feeds Barry Deaver the sawdust cocktail and kills him for fertilizer. That night, she drugs Lexy with the melatonin and buries her up to her neck in the soil. Believing that her daughter would be healed by the soil and Paul Hicks's blood, she drags him to her and starts cutting his wrist. The BAU arrive and attempt to convince Emma to drop the knife. She refuses, claiming that it is all she had left. Blake tries to convince her that the blood would not help her, then gives Emma a bag of ashes she found at a fireplace, which she claims are her husband's. Convinced that the ashes would heal Lexy, Emma drops the knife and spreads them over Lexy. She is then taken into custody, while Lexy and Paul are saved, although judging by Paul's condition when he was last seen and the fact that the BAU did not comment on whether or not he survived, it is possible he later died of the injuries he sustained from the torture.

Modus Operandi
Emma targeted healthy Caucasian men, all of whom she found at farmers' markets. After abducting them by drugging them with melatonin, she would take them to the barn on her farm, strip them nude, and hold them captive, force-feeding them a cocktail of soil additives such as gypsum, animal feed such as cotton and flax, and natural sedatives such as hops, catnip, and kavakava through a tube inserted into their throats by injecting the blend with a liquid syringe. After killing them with an ax, she would dismember the bodies and grind the parts with a wood chipper. Afterwards, she would use the chopped flesh as fertilizer. Her first fatal victim, Terry Rodgers, was drowned instead when she found him undesirable due to him being terminally sick. When she attempted to cure Lexy from her alleged scleroderma, she drugged her with the melatonin and buried her up to the neck in soil, then cut Paul Hicks's wrist and parts of his neck in an attempt to pour his blood all over the aforementioned soil. She later briefly targeted Cheryl Winslow, a pregnant woman, abducting her, performing a C-section on her, and removing her entire placenta for consumption before releasing her.

Profile
The unsub is a woman who is highly organized, thorough, and patient. Based on the amount of complexity and sophistication demonstrated in the abductions, she is most likely between the ages of 30 and 40 and is familiar with the rural area surrounding La Grande, being either a native or someone who had lived there for a while. She is keeping her victims in isolation in the countryside, which means she has access to land or a structure that is remote, hidden, and private. Her targets are exceptionally health-conscious men, who represent ideal specimens for fertilizer (although it was originally believed that these victims were selected for their ability to father children, since they are all age-appropriate and all of them are fathers). The unsub killed her first victim because she saw him as flawed, being the least physically fit of the four and making him undesirable. It was initially thought the victims could be surrogates for a man that she wanted but could not have. Because she killed the last two victims, it is possible the unsub is engaged in some sort of elimination process: pre-selecting a handful of prime candidates and then whittling them down one by one until she has her ideal human fertilizer.

Known Victims
The dates denote when the victims were abducted.


 * 2012:
 * Abducted four men, held them captive, tortured by force-feeding, and killed at least three of them. They are, in order of abduction:
 * September 17: Gary Ellard
 * October 6: Barry Deaver
 * October 18: Paul Hicks
 * October 25: Terry Rodgers
 * October 26: Cheryl Winslow
 * October 27: Lexy Kerrigan

Appearances

 * Season Eight
 * "The Good Earth"