Ben Bradstone

Ben "Cy" Bradstone was a serial killer who appeared in Proof.

Background
Ben was born with a lack of oxygen in his brain and a damaged frontal lobe, rendering him mentally retarded when he grew up. Throughout his life, he had a very poor sense of hygiene and was often bullied. He displayed some sociopathic traits when he was young, hitting a dog he owned just for fun. One night when he was a teenager, he attended a homecoming party together with a girl named Lyla Smith, who later married his brother, Matt, and had a daughter, Tammy, with him. At the party, the kids played spin the bottle. When it was Lyla's turn, it landed on Ben. They went into a closet together, where Ben felt her up. Having fallen in love with her, he started following her around at school, but stopped doing so when he overheard her telling a friend how gross she thought he was. At some point, he spent time in a halfway house for some unspecified crime. After that, he began travelling around the area in an RV, occasionally working part-time jobs to get by and crashing at his brother's home now and again. In 2011, he learned that Matt and Lyla were having some marital problems and became a serial killer, targeting women who resembled Lyla when she was young.

Modus Operandi
Ben targeted blonde girls in their late teens who resembled Lyla when she was their age. He would approach them using a simple ruse (his mental state made him appear more trustworthy), force them to an old shed where he and Matt had hung out when they were younger, dress them in 1980s style clothes, rape them and torture them by stabbing them in the genitalia, chest and neck. While they were still alive, Ben would drip a sulphuric acid solution onto their face in such a way that it would destroy one of their five senses, starting with the eyes to blind them, then the nostrils to take away their sense of smell and into the mouth to take away their sense of taste.

Profile
The UnSub is a white male in his 40s who is reacting to a rejection of him done by a woman when he was a teenager in the 1980s and is getting his revenge by torturing his victims by taking away their five senses. He may have worked part-time as a janitor or a mechanic, where he could have gotten hold of the sulphuric acid he uses to torture his victims. Because he dumps his victims on the streets, he is probably homeless. He is fixated on the woman who rejected him all those years ago and believes she holds the key to his happiness. The fact that she still rejects him furthers his rage and he will eventually spiral to such a degree that he will stop killing surrogates and attack the real source of his anger.

Known Victims

 * An unnamed prostitute
 * An unnamed runaway
 * Abby Alcott
 * Beth Westerly
 * Unnamed girl
 * Tammy Bradstone