The Romani Family

"In history, warriors invaded towns, killed the men, women, and boys, but kept the girls for themselves. You exist because your ancestors did what was needed for you to survive." -The Romani father

The Romani Family was a family of killer "gypsies" who appeared in Bloodline.

Background
Originating from Romania and eventually spreading to the U.S. and presumably other countries, the Romani had been around for years and years, killing families and abducting the young girls as wives for their sons, and possibly the inverse as well, since at least 1909. One of these abducted girls was Kathy Gray, who was inducted into the family under the name of "Sylvia" after her parents were murdered by a branch of the family in 1971.

Bloodline
The Romani group was discovered in 2009 when the group operating in Alabama was discovered after killing Nancy Hale (formerly Scheuren) and her second husband, Geoff Hale and abducting Nancy's ten-year-old daughter, Cate. At first, they treated her normally, like she was family, the boy even deciding that she was to be named "Elena", but after she had an epileptic seizure, the father decided to dispose the "sick" child, abandoning her near a secluded highway. Cate tried to get herself noticed and almost got hit by a car. She was taken to a hospital, where, after interrogated by Prentiss, she revealed some important details about the family, including a Romanian word they used. Due to the fact that the boy had to have a bride by the age of ten, the family quickly started looking for another victim. They eventually abducted ten-year-old Lynn Robillard and killed her parents. In order to start anew, they burned their RV and most of their possessions. The father took his son and Lynn to hide them from the authorities, while the father forced Kathy to surrender after the team spread out flyers with her age procession and he recognized her.

The BAU interrogated Kathy with a good cop-bad cop routine. Having developed a bad case of Stockholm syndrome, she refused to remember her name and only when she was shown some pictures of her dead parents, she started showing some emotions. The BAU eventually got her to reveal the location of her son and Lynn. The BAU found the children, then proceeded to arrest the father. When the son was returned to Kathy, she told him not to say a word of his "brothers", which the BAU has yet to track down. Another segment of the Romani group was seen at the end of the episode, about to kill another family. It is currently unknown if the BAU or the police managed to catch every single member of the family. Although, if there are still active members of the family who have not been caught, what they did after Gray and her husband and son were caught (as they presumably would have found out) is unknown.

Members

 * The Alabama family:
 * The unnamed father . Portrayed by Andrew Divoff.
 * Sylvia . Portrayed by Cynthia Gibb.
 * The unnamed son . Portrayed by Slade Pearce.
 * The second family :
 * The unnamed father. Portrayed by Kirk Bovill.
 * The unnamed mother . Portrayed Tonja Kahlens.
 * The unnamed son. Portrayed by Caleb Guss.
 * The unnamed parents of the Alabama father
 * Presumably more family members and even similar families all over the U.S. and other countries

Profile
The unsubs are a family consisting of a mother, a father, and a son close to ten years of age, all of Romanian descent. The family travels in an RV, but also has another vehicle to go back and forth between camp sites and cities. The discarding of broken glass and the abandonment of Cate Hale (because of her epilepsy) reveals that they are highly superstitious and that they were following a very specific ritual. The focus of it is the young girls, whom the family did not come across by accident, and whom are studied and hunted. They would probably be scouting at parks, shopping malls, and places at a short distance from the RV park. Because they discarded Cate, it means that they are looking for their next victims.

Modus Operandi
Once their sons were close to the age of nine or ten, the families would find prospective wives for them at large, public places, such as malls, and follow them to their homes. Once at the property, the father and son would break in during the nighttime, respectively kill the father and mother by slashing their throats with knives while they slept, and take the chosen girl, stuffing her in the trunk of the car, which the mother would drive up in. The abducted girls would be held, renamed by the son, and slowly brainwashed into servitude. The family's signature was sprinkling multicolored glass outside the homes that they abducted the girls from, and wherever they happened to be staying, due to their beliefs that such acts would bring them good luck.

Real-Life Comparisons
The Romani family has some similarities to Brian David Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee. In both cases, the perpetrators were husband-wife teams said to have "perverted" elements of their mother culture in order to justify their crimes, and their M.O. had the wife waiting outside while the husband broke into a previously selected family home, armed with a knife, and abducted one underage daughter to "marry" her in a sham ceremony. Also, in both cases, the key to solve the crime was the eyewitness testimony of another young girl.

Further inspiration might have been taken from the Tene-Bimbo, a Romani clan sometimes considered a crime family. In the 1990s, the Tene-Bimbo came under investigation for the murders of seven non-Romani people in different states, but only one (coincidentally a woman named Sylvia Mitchell, who was a member of the clan through her marriage under the Romani rite to a Tene-Bimbo and was legally single) could be convicted of manslaughter. Like her fictional counterpart, Sylvia's husband and likely co-conspirator Ephrem Bimbo abandoned her as soon as he knew that the authorities had identified her.

Known Victims

 * At least 30 unnamed families attacked all over the U.S. prior to Bloodline, the dates going as far back as 1909:
 * 60 unnamed parents
 * 30 unnamed daughters
 * Unspecified date and location: An unnamed family
 * The unnamed parents
 * The unnamed daughter
 * Unspecified date in 1971, Vienna, Virginia: The Gray family
 * The unnamed parents
 * Kathy Gray
 * 2009:
 * January 19, Harvest, Alabama: The Hale family
 * Geoff Hale
 * Nancy Hale
 * Cate Hale
 * January 20, Madison, Alabama: The Robillard family
 * The unnamed parents
 * Lynn Robillard
 * January 20-21, unspecified location: An unnamed family
 * The unnamed parents
 * The unnamed daughter
 * Note: Considering that not every single member of the Romani family was caught, the murders are presumed to have continued.

Appearances

 * Season Four
 * "Bloodline"