Everett Lynch, a.k.a. "The Chameleon", was a prolific, psychopathic, misogynistic, and narcissistic serial killer, serial arsonist, con artist, former criminal accomplice and later cop killer, mass murderer, and proxy killer who first appears in the Criminal Minds Season Fourteen episode "Chameleon" via flashbacks. He was then the subject of a manhunt by the BAU in Season Fifteen as the show's final unsub.
Background
Everett was born to Roberta Lynch and Delvin Weaver. When he was a child, he aided his mother in conning men whom she would get to marry her to get their money by having him pretend to be a "blubbering seven-year-old" living on the street with his mother. Every time he and his mother were successful in their cons, they would laugh together. His mother's cons not only caused him to develop a narcissistic personality but made him unable to form an identity of his own. At some point in his adulthood, he had a daughter that he named Grace with a woman named Liz Coster when she was 22, but she overdosed on OXY 5 years ago. One day, while the family was living in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Grace was taking a bath and being watched over by Roberta. Grace had drowned in the tub just as Roberta was looking away for a few minutes. Grace survived the incident, but it caused Everett to never forgive his mother, and he decided to end his relationship with his mother and take Grace with him. Later on in his life, Everett decided not only to be a con artist, using aspects of his mother's M.O. but to kill the women he targeted. He killed numerous women, taking their money and each of their faces as trophies. After his murder of Monica Feinstein was discovered, the BAU was called in.
After murdering Monica, Everett is shown in a bathroom, where he changes his appearance, including his facial hair, eye color, and glasses. He then goes to the home of Mary Cullen, a woman who he and Grace are conning. He arrives late at night, explaining that he had stayed late at a meeting in Nashville. After Mary suggests that they go out, Everett excuses himself to the bathroom, where he preens himself before noting Monica's removed face in his open suitcase. After restraining himself, he closes it. He and Grace are later seen washing dishes together. After Mary leaves, Grace asks Everett to explain what his plans are with Mary. When he says he doesn't know, Grace asks him to simply not hurt her.
Mary prepares a fancy dinner for Everett and Grace. When Everett asks what the occasion is, Mary presents him with a ring made of Hawaiian koa wood. She explains that it reminds her of when Everett had said he wanted to go to Kauai and that she wants to take an extended honeymoon with him. When Everett doesn't react, she continues and proposes him, proclaiming that she knew he was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with the moment they met. As Grace watches, Everett accepts and takes a rose from the flower vase on the table and puts it behind her ear. He says that Hawaii sounds beautiful before knocking her out with the vase, horrifying Grace.
Afterwards, Everett sets a trap for the BAU after receiving a call from Roberta's lawyer warning him that the FBI has tracked him down. He restrains Grace in a chair in the house before tying Mary up in a barn on the property. When the BAU breaks in, they find numerous faces belonging to his previously unknown victims placed around the house. After Tara, Rossi, and Simmons find Mary in the barn, Everett opens fire on them while Grace stabs Luke Alvez on his orders. He flees into the woods behind the house with Rossi in pursuit and is able to ambush Rossi and knock the gun from his hand before asphyxiating him into unconsciousness. However, instead of killing him, Everett cuts his forehead as a reminder that he could have taken his face as a trophy and sticks the knife in the ground next to him.
Season Fourteen
Chameleon
In flashbacks, Rossi told his fiancee, Krystall, the story of what happened during the case, culminating in Everett's escape. The case traumatized everyone in the team to the point where they thought they could have done it better and felt guilty about allowing an unsub like him escape. For SSA Luke Alvez, his arm was injured to the point it would take one or two weeks for it to heal. For SSA Rossi, his head needed stitches and under SSA Prentiss' instruction to go home and talk about what happened to Krystall when he was suffering from PTSD. For Reid, he was spending a week looking over the case to work hard to catch the man no matter what happened.
Season Fifteen
Under the Skin
Lynch contacted Dr. Sebastian Hurst (a friend from the past who has a deadly skin fetish) and asked him for help finding a lawyer whose identity he could use to help his daughter escape from federal prison. Through unknown means, Lynch sent Hurst over the edge and gave him the necessary knowledge and skills to become a killer in exchange for the identity of private attorney Arthur Terrell.
As Terrell, Lynch entered the prison Grace was being held at and stabbed U.S. Marshal Alison Faust to death. He then took Faust's gun and escaped with Grace to the parking lot, killing three Marshals on the way and giving Grace one of their guns. Before they could enter their van, they were confronted by JJ, who forced Lynch to drop the gun. While JJ bent over to take the gun from the ground, Grace pulled out her gun and shot her in the abdomen, allowing her and her father to escape the prison grounds via their van.
Awakenings
While JJ barely survived the shooting, Lynch and Grace abandoned their van and took another vehicle to some abandon woodland area. Lynch wanted to part ways with Grace, but she wanted him to stay as she wanted to spend more time with and impress him. That night, Grace killed the Fosters at their cabin and encouraged her father to remove the wife's face post-mortem. The next day, Grace brought her ex-girlfriend, Charlotte Burke, to Lynch, who then sliced off her fingerprint and had Grace use it to rob her. When the BAU arrived to their apartment, they found Charlotte tied up and Grace dead with her face removed. Lynch is later shown driving away with the money and his own daughter's face.
Family Tree
Seven months after killing Grace, Lynch is shown to be in a romantic relationship with Alexandria Duggan at his new home in Nevada. He later killed Alexandria off-screen.
Face Off
After removing Alexandria's face postmortem and burning her body, Lynch looked at Grace's face and flashed back on how he strangled his own daughter to death. By then, Lynch was involved with Marilyn Irwin and befriended her diabetic daughter, Olivia. Once he killed Marilyn without Olivia knowing, Lynch wanted to meet his father, Delvin Weaver, who inspired him to abuse women and even tried to drown him in a bathtub when he was a child. However, his mother Roberta brutally killed Delvin after her release from prison, and Lynch thus decided to meet with Rossi in person.
In their meeting, Rossi asked Lynch where Olivia was and why he even thought of killing Grace. Lynch soon realized that JJ was aiming at him with her sniper rifle and thus took off. He returned to his house and ruined Olivia's medications, but before he could have her take them, Roberta walked in with a gun. Lynch took Olivia hostage and was forced by Roberta to take her to the basement, where he showed Olivia the cremated body of Marilyn. After the BAU and SWAT arrive outside, Reid started speaking to Roberta on the phone. Through his guidance, Roberta had Everett let Olivia go, but fired a warning shot at him.
Alone together in the basement, Roberta teared up while holding her son at gunpoint, as she wanted to die in an impending explosion with him and was hesitating to hold the gun. Lynch quickly knocked out his emotional mother and took her gun, which he used to set off an explosion before escaping through secret tunnels. The SWAT team and Reid started to move in once Rossi told them about Roberta's intentions. However, the entire house exploded, killing Roberta and 6 SWAT agents. Reid is briefly knocked out, and Lynch is presumed dead by all of law enforcement.
After entering his apartment, Reid was confused on why Lynch would "commit suicide" and eventually figured out that Lynch escaped after disarming Roberta. Moments later, he suffered a seizure due to the effects of the explosion.
And in the End...
Once the BAU discovered that Lynch survived the explosion, they dispatched FBI agents to guard their homes and loved ones across Washington, D.C. Lynch heads to Rossi's house and kills the FBI agent who was sent to guard the place. He then meets Rossi's wife Krystal inside and eventually takes her hostage, demanding a private jet so he could make his escape. At the airport, the BAU arrived and Rossi convinced him to take him hostage instead, so Lynch handcuffed him and used him as a shield while he boarded the BAU's jet. Rossi, however, had sneaked a lock pick in his watch, and was able to undo his cuffs, and grab a hidden gun. However, as Rossi opened the jet door, Lynch engaged him in a shootout. Rossi wounded Lynch in the arm, but ended up getting shot in return and falling off of the jet. Lynch began to taxi and the BAU shot the jet's fuel tank, damaging it beyond repair. JJ then shot the fuel tank with a flare gun, and the jet exploded, killing Lynch inside.
Modus Operandi
Everett targeted women who were aged in their early fifties and had kids who had gone to college, having them act as surrogates for his own mother. He would operate in the same cities his mother committed her cons that he helped her within the exact same order, in the hopes of relieving the childhood experiences of helping his mother trick her victims. He found his victims on dating websites and incorporated what kinds of things they liked doing and what they liked in a man into his own fake dating profile in the hopes they would see it and be interested in him. With each victim, he used a different alias, called them on burner phones, and altered his appearance using a disguise kit consisting of fake beards, wigs, glasses, and colored contacts. He would also change his body language, mannerisms, even his accent when interacting with his victims and anyone they were with. To steal his victim's money as he was dating them, he set up fake bank accounts, using them as fences to untraceable offshore accounts which is where the money from his victims' bank accounts would go to.
To gain sympathy from his victims, he told them the story of how his daughter drowned in a bathtub while she was being watched by his mother, but lied to them when he told them that she had died as a result of the drowning. Just as his mother proposed to her victims, Everett would do the same. Sometime after his victims said yes to the marriage proposal, he would kill them in their own homes by strangulation. He then cut their faces off with a knife to keep as trophies. As a forensic countermeasure to the murders, he set fire to his victims' homes by leaving a stove on and corroding the gas pipes in the houses with sulfuric acid. In the case of his last victim, Mary Cullen, he used his daughter in his con and assaulted and knocked her unconscious with a flower vase after she proposed to him which ruined any chance of him being able to perform his signature on her.
Profile
Lynch as "Paul Macintyre"
Lynch as "Mike"
Lynch as "Bill"
Everett visiting Grace Lynch in prison, while posing as her lawyer.
Lynch as "Edward Miles"
The unsub is a malignant narcissist and misogynist who fundamentally hates the women he takes advantage of. He cannot reveal who he truly is to them, so at the moment of their greatest happiness, he destroys it and takes their face. A hatred this severe, where rage trumps money, indicates that the unsub has a damaged relationship with the primary female figure in his life, most likely his mother.
Something must have happened during the unsub's formative years to produce this level of violence, suggesting that he has been nursing this anger for a long time. Although he goes to great lengths to hide his face, the unsub probably uses all or part of the same cover story in his con.
The details the unsub recycles might be helpful, as there might be some bread crumbs that may or may not help lead to where he is now or more likely, they will reveal who he was, to begin with.
Real-Life Comparisons
Lych is highly similar to Charles Sobhraj - Both are serial killers and con artists with problematic relationships with their families, killed their victims by strangulation, burned their remain postmortem to cover up their crimes, had female accomplices, had histories of prison escapes (though Lynch assisted in his daughter Grace's prison break), and stole identities for getaways.
Lynch appears to be inspired by Raymond Fernandez - Both are prolific (suspected in Fernandez's case) serial killers of women they swindled in romance cons, had female accomplices who were their family in their cons and murders, killed their victims by strangulation (though Fernandez also used other means), were active in multiple states, continuously evaded the police when they closed in, and died at the ends of their sprees (Lynch was killed in a plane explosion, Fernandez was executed by electric chair).
Lynch appears to also be inspired by H.H. Holmes - Both are serial killers of women through romance scams, had physically abusive fathers, married and abandoned (and killed in Lynch's case) multiple wives, killed their victims by some form of asphyxiation, burned their victims postmortem, arranged with other criminals to find lawyers to assist them in later crimes, arranged building explosions (accidental in Holmes' case) that resulted in several people being injured (and killed in Lynch's case), and died some way at the hands of law and justice (Lynch was killed in a shootout, Holmes was executed by hanging).
Lynch also appears to be inspired by Kenneth Kimes Jr. - Both are con artists, murderers, and accomplices of mothers who were serial killers, turned on them shortly after their mothers were arrested, and specialized in part with romance cons.
Lynch is similar to Evan Spencer Ebel - Both are murderers who shot employees to steal their uniforms, used their disguises as ruses for their targets to answer the front door, and died in shootouts with police.
Known Victims
Personal Victims
- Late 1970's to early 1990's:
- Unspecified dates and locations throughout the southern U.S.: Numerous unnamed men (aided Roberta in conning them)
- Nashville, Tennessee: Unnamed man
- Little Rock, Arkansas: Unnamed man
- Unspecified dates and locations throughout the southern U.S.: Numerous unnamed men (aided Roberta in conning them)
- Early 2000's: Grace Lynch (his daughter; possibly abused[1])
- Unspecified dates and locations: At least six unnamed women (removed their faces postmortem)
- 2018:
- Unspecified date, Birmingham, Alabama: Meagan Holden
- August 15, 2018, Memphis, Tennessee: Clarissa Carney
- 2019:
- January 16, Nashville, Tennessee: Monica Feinstein
- January 22, Little Rock, Arkansas: The standoff at Mary Cullen's house:
- Mary Cullen (intended to con; assaulted, knocked unconscious with a flower vase; later held captive in a barn and shot at repeatedly, but missed; was rescued)
- Tara Lewis (attempted; shot at repeatedly, but missed)
- Matthew Simmons (attempted; shot at repeatedly, but missed)
- David Rossi (attempted; shot at repeatedly, but missed; later assaulted and attempted to kill by asphyxiation, but relented, then slashed his forehead)
- August:
- Arthur Terrell (murdered for his identity)
- The escape from the U.S. attorney's office:
- U.S. Marshal Alison Faust (stabbed six times)
- U.S. Marshals Hines and McCullagh (both shot using Faust's weapon)
- U.S. Marshal Tevin Hart (shot twice in the chest)
- T. Seymour (carjacked only)
- Charlotte Burke (cut off her fingerprint; was left alive)
- Grace Lynch (his daughter; strangled and smothered; removed her face postmortem)
- 2020
- January-February:
- Alexandria Duggan
- Marilyn Irwin
- The standoff at Alexandria Duggan's house:
- Olivia Irwin (held hostage, was released by Roberta Lynch)
- Eight killed and numerous others injured in the house explosion. They are:
- Roberta Lynch (his mother; knocked out beforehand)
- Orlando Gaines (his private investigator)
- Carl F. (name indiscernible)
- Steve F. (name indiscernible)
- Ernest (name indiscernible)
- Paul M. (name indiscernible)
- Mark McTiernan
- Alex Kirman
- Spencer Reid (attempted; injured in explosion and suffered intracranial hemorrhage as a result; survived)
- Numerous unnamed law enforcement officers (attempted; injured only)
- Unnamed FBI agent (shot twice)
- Krystall Richards (held hostage)
- David Rossi (attempted; traded Krystall for him and shot him several times in shootout; survived)
- January-February:
Victims by Proxy
- January 22, 2019, Little Rock, Arkansas: Spencer Reid and Luke Alvez (Grace attempted to kill both under his instructions)
- Spencer Reid
- Luke Alvez (slashed in the arm; survived)
- August 2019:
- Terrence Folger (drugged and strangled by Hurst)
- Daniel Kane (drugged and strangled by Hurst)
- Gregory Broder (drugged and strangled by Hurst)
- Dr. Lloyd Jewell (attempted to skin alive by Hurst)
- David Rossi (attempted to stab with a knife by Hurst)
- Jennifer Jareau (attempted, but barely survived; shot in the abdomen by Grace)
- Roger and Helen Foster (Both shot by Grace; Everett removed Helen Foster's face post-mortem)
- Charotte Burke (Grace’s ex-girlfriend; held captive and robbed)
Notes
- Everett bears stark similarities to serial killer Newton Joyce, the main hidden antagonist of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novel Point of Origin. Joyce murdered beautiful young people and cut their faces off as trophies out of jealousy due to his childhood acne that scarred his own face. He disguised his murders in violent fires, with the assistance of an accomplice and formidable nemesis of the series' protagonists, and in a final confrontation, the duo led the police to the victims' faces and showed there were far more people Joyce killed than assumed. Lynch's death in a plane explosion is reminiscent of the final fight between Scarpetta and her colleagues and Joyce and his accomplice in two separate helicopters, the criminal team dying when their chopper blew up and debris fell into the sea. It's also important to note Joyce's earliest murders involving dismemberment and leaving behind headless torsos of victims is partly inspired by The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
- Everett seems to be based on at least three unsubs from the show's past:
- Season Three
- Max Poole ("About Face") - Both were psychopathic serial killers (budding at least) who targeted women, cut their victims faces off (although Lynch did it post-mortem, while Poole did it as a kill method), and attempted to kill a BAU agent and had a final encounter with Rossi (though Lynch survived and escaped, while Poole died).
- Season Five
- Bill Hodges ("Parasite") - Both were murderous con artists who formed relationships with their female victims in order to scam them, operated in multiple cities, and killed their female victims by strangling them.
- Season Eight
- Johnny Ray Covey ("Nanny Dearest") - Both were psychopathic serial killers who targeted women who acted as surrogates for the true targets of their rage, operated in multiple cities, and had female relatives who drowned in bathtubs while being watched over by maternal figures (although Lynch's daughter survived her drowning, Covey's sister did not).
- Season Three
- In addition to these inspirations, Lynch may have been inspired by Jerry Tyson (aka 3XK or the Triple Killer), Michael Mosely's character in the mystery comedy-drama series Castle - both were serial killers who primarily targeted women, killed their female victims by strangling them, had postmortem interactions with their victims, killed in cycles, used disguises and aliases to evade capture for long periods of time, had stressors involving maternal figures (though this was only implied in Tyson's case), received nicknames for their crimes, had extensive interactions with law enforcement, and died before they could be captured for their crimes.
- Lynch is the second unsub to recite bookend quotes in an episode, the first being Ian Doyle, who recited the closing quote in the Season Six episode "Coda".
- Lynch is the second of only three unsubs in the show's history to have been inside the BAU's jet, the first being Antonia Slade ("Devil's Backbone" and "The Storm").
Appearances
Criminal Minds
Season Fourteen
- "Chameleon" (via flashbacks)
- "Sick and Evil" (via flashbacks)
Season Fifteen
- "Under the Skin"
- "Awakenings"
- "Spectator Slowing" (indirectly referenced)
- "Family Tree"
- "Face Off"
- "And in the End..."
Criminal Minds: Evolution
Season One
- "Dead End" (indirectly referenced)