Blake Wells

"How do you know I don't have more bodies out there? It's a big sea."

Blake Wells is a prolific serial killer and abductor who appeared in Season Six of Criminal Minds.

Background
Blake's father, Chuck Wells, was an abusive alcoholic who worked as a fisherman. On October 1998, his mother, Crystal Wells, was diagnosed with breast cancer, leading to Chuck abandoning her and Blake, who was then a teenager, and moving over to Norfolk, Virginia. Crystal later died three months later, on January 19, 1999, with Blake by her side. He was then reunited with his father at the age of sixteen and was forced to get a job at a fish cannery, with Chuck keeping the paychecks he earned for himself and spending them on alcohol. One day, Chuck hit Blake so hard his arm broke. At the cannery, he was forced to work anyway and kept doing so until he passed out. Not long afterwards, Blake tortured and killed his father and dumped his body in the ocean. Over the following eleven years, he killed eleven more people on the boat, the Osprey. In 2011, the bodies, which were disposed of in the same spot, were found when the area underwent cleaning, leading to the BAU being called in to lead the investigation.

Big Sea
Blake is first seen on the Osprey in the middle of the ocean, cutting up a fish as Gary Rhymer calls for help from inside the boat. Blake then goes inside and proceeds to blow trilomide in Gary's face as the latter's son James watches fearfully. Since the drug allows the user to be more willing, Blake is able to control Gary and he has him gag his son, despite the boy's soft efforts to get his father to snap out of it. Afterwards, Blake gives Gary a set of knives and tells him to choose one, and after Gary chooses a knife, he orders him to tell James of how he abandoned him and how he stopped loving him. Whenever Gary refused to follow the demands, he would stab his own body. When Blake goes back outside, Gary recovers from the trilomide's effects and reconciles with James before Blake returns with a fish that he immediately starts cutting. Gary forces himself to vomit in order to get Blake to unlock his chains to clean it up, allowing him to assault Blake. The fight moves to the upper deck, where the both of them tumble into the ocean. James acquires the keys, which his father tossed to him during the fight, unlocks his chains, and goes up to investigate. He watches with shock and fear as Blake emerges from the ocean, alone. Gary's body is found the following day.

Blake later decides to make James experience the same abuse he received from his father, forcing him to carry large fish to the Osprey and cut them up. When Blake gives James his first fish, ordering him to gut it, James refuses, angering Blake. Later, Blake takes James to a dock where he used to work. As James carries the fish, Blake rambles on about how he worked with his father. When James accidentally drops the fish, Blake hits him and orders James to get up and pick up the fish. He then demands that James gut the fish, but once again James refuses and even counters the older man's threats. Meanwhile, Garcia manages to track down Blake's boat and Morgan and several local policemen, as well as a SWAT sniper, arrive, forcing Blake to hold James at knifepoint. Morgan warns Blake of the sniper before convincing him to release James. Morgan later shows photos of missing persons to Blake to confirm who he killed. When Morgan shows Blake a photo of his cousin Cindi, who vanished mysteriously, Blake taunts Morgan. He tells the agent he killed her, but Morgan refuses to cave in, tells him that he didn't do so, and leaves the room, causing Blake to yell out angrily at him. Rossi, who was watching the interrogation, asks Morgan how he knew that Blake didn't kill Cindy and is given the response that Blake never knew her name like how he did with his other victims and was therefore lying.

A year later, it would turn out that Cindi was alive and well, having been abducted by her murderous stalker and held captive for seven years. Blake's case was briefly mentioned by Morgan during a phone conversation with Hotch.

Modus Operandi
"This is gonna be the knife you kill yourself with."

Blake targeted both male and female tourists of different ages, sexes, races, and socio-economic lifestyles; what they had in common was that they had all somehow abandoned a responsibility at home. He would abduct them on routes from at least two different cities (Charleston, South Carolina and Miami, Florida), take them on his boat, finding them through his job as a train conductor and apparently using some ruse, and drove out to sea, where he would restrain them to a chair and use a drug on them called "trilomide", which made them controllable to the point that Blake could instruct them to cut and stab themselves. The torture, which presumably went on for a long time, ended when Blake finished them off. Prior to doing so, he would have the victims write a postcard to their friends and loved ones at home, saying they had decided to stay in the area to ensure they would never report them as missing. Once the victims were dead, he would dispose of the bodies in the sea outside off Jacksonville, Florida. Prior to dumping the bodies in the water, Blake would disarticulate their joints to make them sink better, with the exception of his father, who had his bones broken in multiple places due to the torture. When he killed Gary Rhymer, he was forced to do so by drowning him in the ocean when he fought back.

Profile
The unsub is a 30- to 40-year-old fisherman who is currently chartering his boat to tourists, trying to find victims of medium risk; for example, when a man's car breaks down in a bad neighborhood. Once the man gets out of his normal routine, the victim is at a greater chance for victimization. The disarticulation of the victims bones immediately tells that the unsub is either a butcher or fisherman. Nine victims in nine years (later revealed to be thirteen victims in thirteen years) means that he can control his murderous urges. Each of the victims were trying to start over; they were out of a relationship, or starting a new job, but to the unsub, they were abandoning their responsibilities.

This anger stems from his first victim: his father, who was most likely a fisherman as well, and definitely an alcoholic due to the low calcium in the bones. Based on the unsub's level of sadism, the father was violently abusive. He was the first person to abandon the unsub, possibly by walking out on his family and writing a postcard like the unsub would write. The unsub picked a site of significance to the both of them: a spot that is known to local fisherman, which he turned into his own prison. Despite the fact that his original dumping site was found and claimed by the police, he will not have any other inclination to leave Jacksonville, since that prison was his responsibility and without it, he will cling on to what he knows. He would change his M.O., and that would make him erratic. He will escalate his sadism and kill uncontrollably until he finds another spot in the ocean to replace the original site.

Real-Life Comparison
Blake shares some similarities to serial killer Carl Panzram in the sense that both had fathers who abandoned them as children and killed their victims aboard a boat they owned and then disposed the corpses by dumping them into the ocean.

Known Victims

 * Post-January 1999: Chuck Wells
 * Eleven victims killed in an eleven-year span prior to Big Sea. Known ones are:
 * 2000: Carol Reed
 * 2004: An unidentified African-American woman in her twenties
 * 2009: Doctor Samantha Cormack
 * 2010: An unidentified Caucasian woman
 * Unspecified years:
 * Alton McKee
 * Unnamed prostitute
 * 2011:
 * Early April: An unidentified victim
 * May 11: Gary Rhymer and his son James :
 * Gary Rhymer
 * James Rhymer

Appearances

 * Season Six
 * "Big Sea"
 * Season Seven
 * "The Company"