Peter Lewis

"You do what I say."

Peter Lewis, a.k.a. "Mr. Scratch", is a serial killer by proxy, hacker, and stalker who first appeared in Season Ten of Criminal Minds. He later escaped with twelve other serial killers in Season Eleven and currently remains at large.

Background
Peter was born with extremely high intelligence and was a math genius. His parents ran a group home that took in several children who were waiting for adoption. During the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and early 1990s, some of the children made claims that Peter's father Neil would dress himself and the other children as the Devil, causing people to believe there was child abuse and Satanic rituals occurring inside the home. At first, the claims were met with skepticism from police, but a core member of the Believe the Children movement, a psychologist named Doctor Susannah Regan, convinced them to believe them. As a result, the group home was shut down and Neil was sent to jail, where other inmates killed him for being a pedophile while the investigation was still pending. Peter eventually moved on with his life and attended Harvard University, taking the top classes for mathematics. Upon graduating, he was immediately hired by the National Security Agency, which would always hire math geniuses because it was too dangerous for them to work anywhere else. In 1992, the FBI's Lanning Report helped the BAU and other federal agencies evaluate Regan's work and debunk it. This left her credibility in ruin and forced her to go into witness protection after she began receiving numerous death threats. Realizing the closure of the group home and his father's death were all for nothing, Peter began seeking revenge against Regan and the children who were responsible for the scandal.

Mr. Scratch
"Do you see Mr. Scratch?"

After forcing Daniel Karras, Christine McNeil, and Larry Merrin to hallucinate Mr. Scratch and kill their loved ones, the BAU notice a pattern in the interrogations and investigate the occurrences. Peter then targets Bill Kinderman and attempts to make him kill his son, but Bill's paternal instinct overrides his hypnosis and he committed suicide instead. Reaching his endgame, Peter hacks into the witness protection database in the BAU headquarters in Quantico to find Regan, causing a widespread blackout in the process. Reid deduces from the code used to hack into the Quantico database that the unsub works for the NSA. Appealing to Tony Axelrod, an NSA employee, Hotch identifies the unsub and who he is targeting next. He goes to Regan's house, but finds that Peter is already there. Peter forces Regan to kill herself in front of Hotch, then drugs him and talks to him in an attempt to make him see Mr. Scratch. As they talk, Hotch deduces that Peter was in Susannah's interviews as well, giving testimony against his father. At first, he is enraged by this, but Peter then takes it as a challenge to get into Hotch's head. He makes him hallucinate Peter killing Reid, Rossi, and Morgan; and then tries to goad him into shooting the real Reid and Rossi as they try to enter the house. However, Hotch overrides the suggestion and tries to shoot Peter. Dodging the bullet, Peter retreats into an attic and waits for Morgan and JJ to arrive. When they do, he surrenders immediately, satisfied that he had gotten into Hotch's head. As he is taken away, he smiles at Hotch and taps his head.

The Storm
Peter briefly reappears in the episode when Hotch is arrested under the suspicion of conspiracy. During Hotch's interrogation, he is shown a video recording of Peter explaining Hotch's experience while being drugged. According to Peter, Hotch started to laugh while hallucinating his entire team getting killed, and he goes on to claim that he became scared of what he could do to his team and even his own son. After the team closes the case and proves Hotch's innocence, they receive word that prison breaks occurred in three different states: thirteen serial killers managed to escape and Peter is one of them; his testimony against Hotch was part of the escape plan.

Modus Operandi
Peter targeted people who lived at his father's group home as children during the scandal, specifically those who testified against his father and were responsible for putting him away. After finding the victims, presumably by using his job to access the country's adoption records, he would drug them with a mixture of two powerful dissociative agents (sevoflurane and scopalamine) he somehow planted into the air-ventilation systems of their homes. These drugs caused them to hallucinate about Mr. Scratch and lash out violently at the person next to them, which would always be a loved one living in the same house.

These people would be stabbed to death by the drugged victims, who would then slip out of their psychotic episodes with barely any memory of what they were actually doing. He would later force his true target, Susannah Regan, to commit suicide, and later held Hotch hostage with a knife and the latter's FBI-issued sidearms. He would later have Hotch use one of these sidearms in an attempt to kill Rossi and Reid. Part of his signature was also mixing the drugs with the scent of burning sage, a reference to the burning sage Regan would have in her office when she interviewed Peter and the other children who testified against Peter's father, telling them that the aroma made it safe to talk about Mr. Scratch.

Profile
No official profile of Lewis was made by the BAU. However, Hotch briefly described the unsub as being too psychologically unstable for the NSA to hire, but it did so anyway due to his expertise with computers. He would have broken into adoption records before in search of a particular person.

Personal Victims

 * 2015:
 * April 14, Derry, Maine: Daniel Karras
 * April 17, Roswell, Georgia: Christine McNeil
 * April 19, Topeka, Kansas: Larry Merrin
 * April 21, unspecified location in Virginia: Bill Kinderman
 * April 22, Columbia, Maryland: The standoff at the Regan home:
 * Doctor Susannah Regan
 * Aaron Hotchner

Victims by Proxy
The following were attacked by his drugged victims


 * 2015:
 * April 14, Derry, Maine: Daniel Karras' unnamed adoptive mother
 * April 17, Roswell, Georgia: Christine McNeil's unnamed boyfriend
 * April 19, Topeka, Kansas: Tabitha Merrin
 * April 21, unspecified location in Virginia: Jimmy Kinderman
 * April 22, Columbia, Maryland: David Rossi and Spencer Reid

Appearances

 * Season Ten
 * Mr. Scratch
 * Season Eleven
 * Internal Affairs
 * The Storm