Stuart Barker

"You're a bad mother! Or should I say grandmother?"

Stuart Barker is a serial killer and abductor who appeared in Taboo.

Background
Before Stuart was born, his mother Lynelle and her father Edward got into a car accident. Edward was killed and Lynelle suffered damage to her frontal lobe, which caused her to develop Klüver-Bucy syndrome. As a result, she became hypersexual, having sex with random men whenever she can. This got her pregnant with Stuart while she was still a teenager. After he was born, Stuart was adopted by his grandmother Gloria, since Lynelle could never be a proper mother to him. To explain the age difference between Stuart and Lynelle, Gloria told him that he was adopted and that Lynelle was his adoptive sister. She never remarried and had to deal with raising two children on her own. Stuart grew up believing Gloria's claim, and became aware of Lynelle's hypersexuality at some point. Eventually, he became infatuated with her, believing his feelings weren't morally wrong since they weren't biologically related. As an adult, he found a job at a construction company that built swimming pools.

In September 2016, Lynelle sought treatment for her condition and was prescribed medication, which helped keep her sexual urges under control. She took Stuart to a lovers' lane she used to frequent, causing him to believe she was going to have sex with him. When he tried to kiss her, she became disgusted, blurted out that she was his biological mother, and explained everything to him. Outraged by this, and horrified to realize that he had been in love with his own mother, Stuart snapped, killed Lynette, and then buried her body in concrete. Because she often went missing intermittently to have sexual escapades, Gloria believed Lynette was gone for the same reason and didn't report her missing. Meanwhile, Stuart, now with a damaged and confused love map, developed a delusion in which he believed all single mothers were hypersexual like Lynette, and that he needed to literally turn their hypersexuality off. This caused him to abduct Sharon Landon, who he came across during his line of work, lobotomize her to damage her frontal lobe, and drown her in concrete when his experiment failed.

Modus Operandi
Stuart targeted single mothers with sons who reminded him of himself. He would abduct them, take them to his workplace, restrain them to a chair, and stuff a drill up their nostril, pouring chlorine in it to damage their frontal lobes and therefore turn their perceived hypersexuality off. For the first two victims, they both survived these lobotomies, forcing him to stuff them into heavy drums and pour concrete into them, effectively drowning them. The third victim, however, was killed by the lobotomy and encased in concrete post-mortem. The drums would then be disposed at lovers' lanes, where he could revisit them over and over again.

When he attempted to kill Gloria, Stuart knocked her out with a lamp, then tied her to a chair, took her to the same lovers' lane where he killed Lynette, and dug out a hole. He then threw her into the hole, locked her in it with an iron gate, and began pouring concrete into it. He likely killed Lynette the same way.

Real-Life Comparison
Stuart is partially similar to Jeffrey Dahmer, a.k.a. "The Milwaukee Cannibal", and may have been somewhat inspired by him. Like Dahmer, he performed lobotomies on his victims to affect their frontal lobes and alter their sexuality (though Dahmer wanted to turn it on while Stuart wanted to turn it off), and when those lobotomies were unsuccessful, he disposed of the bodies in containers.

Known Victims

 * 2016:
 * September:
 * Lynelle Barker
 * Sharon Landon
 * October: Lisa Barclay
 * October 10-11: Kim Conti
 * October 12: Gloria Barker

Appearances

 * Season Twelve
 * Taboo