Rhett Walden

"Every great movie star has a walk...Something you'll never have."

Rhett Walden is a schizophrenic abductor and budding serial killer who appeared in Season Six of Criminal Minds.

Background
Rhett was the only son of actress May Walden. She became pregnant with Rhett during the shooting of her first and only movie called Reflection of Desire. The father was her co-star, also named Rhett. Once she got pregnant, her career was ruined. As Rhett was growing up, he would get verbal and emotional abuse from his mother who raised him alone, blaming him for her ruin. He would then develop a love-hate relationship towards his mother that seemed to border on incest. Before the events of Reflection of Desire, his mother died, possibly by his hand. He kept her corpse hidden inside the house, but, in his mind, she was still alive. She interacted with him daily in his hallucinations.

Reflection of Desire
Rhett is first seen showing a clip of Reflection of Desire to Kelly Landis, a woman he managed to abduct. He then tries to get her to act the scene along with him, all the while hallucinating about May. When Kelly fails to pull off the act, May shows her how it's done (though Rhett was either talking to himself or was using the corpse). The following night, Rhett kills Kelly, takes out his razor blade, and it closes in onto Kelly's lips. Kelly's body is later found by a vagrant in an alleyway and the BAU is called in. They find out that another vagrant lives in the alleyway and he tells that no other vagrants were present in the alleyway when Kelly's body was found. The BAU realizes that Rhett was posing as a vagrant.

Meanwhile, two days after Kelly's murder, Rhett and May sit at a train station, looking for potential victims. May excuses herself, and Rhett spots a little girl and tells her that she has the confidence and grace of an actress. He kindly has her enact a walking-down of a red carpet before he spots Penny Hadley. He absent-mindedly tells the girl she is stupid and leaves, later abducting Penny. Taking her to his residence, he attempts to get her into his mother's shoes, but Penny's large toes prevent the shoes from being worn. Playing along, she says she can do the scene barefoot. When she is untied, she tries to escape, but Rhett knocks her out and greets her when she awakes, telling her that she was right about her big toes. Penny looks at her feet and realizes that they are now fitting perfectly in the shoes. Rhett's razor blade is still bloodstained.

When Rhett leaves, Penny attempts to escape, but finds a room full of Reflection of Desire posters. Rhett appears behind her and takes her to a secluded alleyway in his car. He then attempts to kill her, but he is spotted by Hotch and Rossi. Rossi rescues Penny while Hotch shoots at Rhett to incapacitate him; he manages to hit Rhett, but he keeps running, merely yelping out when he is shot. Garcia manages to track down Rhett's address with his car's license plate and authorities surround his house. Inside, Rhett straightens out his suit and, still hallucinating, asks May if she's ready. Rhett calmly walks out with his mother's corpse and surrenders to the police, laughing hysterically as he hallucinates walking down a red carpet with his mother. With no doubt, Rhett was institutionalized for his mental illness.

Modus Operandi
Rhett would abduct women ranging from age 19 to 24 with blonde hair. He would then imprison them in a special room in his house, dressing them up to resemble his mother in her prime. During their imprisonment, the victims would be forced to re-enact a scene from his mother's last movie. If they were not convincing, he would knock them out with chloroform and drive them to a secluded spot. When the victim wakes up, they would be fooled into thinking that they are free. When they attempt to escape, Rhett will come out with a plastic bag and wrap it around her head, suffocating her, and dump her body. Post-mortem, he used a razor blade to remove his first victim's lips and place them on the face of his mother's body. When he kidnapped Penny, he used the same blade to remove her toes to make a pair of shoes fit her feet. He had several "calling cards" during his murders, such as leaving a page from a Reflection of Desire script stuffed into Kelly Landis's throat and writing quotes from the script in blood on a wall near where her body was dumped. Doing so, he gave them the fame that eluded his mother.

Profile
The unsub is a white male in his mid- to late-40s, who is approximately six feet tall, has a slim build, and may ben unemployed local who is antisocial. He is moving his victims around the city unseen, so he has a vehicle, probably an older model, but well-maintained. By leaving a piece of a script in the victims throat, it is believed that in the unsub's mind, Kelly Landis failed to live up to his expectations. Although there was no sexual interaction ante- or post-mortem, the removal of the lips is a sexual act in itself, and a behavior that says they are dealing with a borderline personality (later clarified to be schizophrenia). Based on the obvious theatricality of the case, he may have worked in or around the arts.

Real-Life Comparison
Rhett may have been directly or indirectly inspired by Ed Gein, a.k.a. The Plainfield Ghoul, as both had domineering and emotionally abusive mothers and were schizophrenics. His habit of keeping his mother's body in the house may have have also been mainly inspired by Norman Bates, a ficional murderer prominently featured in Psycho, who did the same and was, in turn, inspired by Gein. This scenario may have also been inspired by necrophiliac Carl Tanzler, who kept, for seven years, the body of a young Cuban-American woman who died of tuberculosis, of whom he was morbidly obsessed with even after her death.

Known Victims

 * Unspecified date: May Walden
 * 2010:
 * November 10: Kelly Landis
 * November 12: Penny Hanley

Appearances

 * Season Six
 * "Reflection of Desire"