Chase Whitaker

"Did you see it? The darkness? The light? Did you see?"

Chase Whitaker was a terminally ill serial killer who appeared in Epilogue.

Background
Whitaker was born in 1980 in Ridge Canyon, California. His father, Daniel Whitaker, was an abusive alcoholic whose wife, Chase's mother, left the family. They lived together in a cabin by Ridge Canyon Lake. At the age of the 10, he was diagnosed with lymphoma (a kind of cancer), but went into remission when he was 12. One night in 1996, when he was 16, he and his father were fishing in the lake from a jetty. When Chase started talking back at his father, he forced Chase to take his shirt off and whipped him his belt. When he was done, Chase argued with him again and was punched in the face so hard that he fell into the lake and nearly drowned. His father dragged him up and tried to revive him, but couldn't. Thinking Chase was dead, he dragged him into the woods and buried him. Shortly afterwards, Chase woke up inside the grave and dug himself up. Upon coming back to the cabin, he struck his father with a shovel, dragged him to the lake and drowned him. He was institutionalized, but was released at the age of 18. In 2011 (Epilogue), he was diagnosed with fourth stage lymphoma and learned that he only had three months to live. He became interested in a news story about Jake Shepherd, a hoodlum who had turned his life around and become religious after suffering an ATV accident; while in an ER, he died for four minutes before being resuscitated. When he was at Ridge Canyon Lake to be baptized by his congregation, Whitaker approached him, hoping to learn from him what dying was like. Somehow, he wound up killing Shepherd by strangling and drowning him, unsuccessfully trying to revive him. After that murder, he became a serial killer, drowning people in the lake and bringing them back to life to ask them what it felt like.

Modus Operandi
Whitaker initially targeted heavy-built males with dark hair, but later started killing more random victims. After approaching them with some kind of ruse, he would lure them away from whoever they were with, bring them to an isolated part of Ridge Canyon Lake and drown them. When they passed out, he would revive them with CPR and ask them what it was like. Inevitably, they would be killed, after which he tied rocks to them and dumped them in the lake (he later stopped weighing them down). As his killings progressed, he would take more time drowning them, hoping they would experience more of the "other side", and revive them more frequently. He also started killing them in colder parts of the lake in order to keep them alive longer.

Known Victims

 * 1996: Daniel Whitaker
 * 2011:
 * Jake Shepherd
 * Kirk Huggin
 * Unnamed victim
 * Nick Scirvin
 * Gracie
 * Samantha and Evan Braun