| “ | I should've cried for Katie. I guess there's some things I just can't fake. | ” |
— Sera to JJ
| ||
Sera Morrison is a psychopathic teenage killer who appeared in the Season Eight episode of Criminal Minds, "All That Remains".
Background[]
Born in 1995, Sera was a high-school senior with a 4.0 GPA who had accepted an early admission to Stanford. She especially excelled in writing, most likely taking after her father, Bruce. She appeared to be a normal girl, but in reality was a psychopath who was viciously jealous of her younger sister, Katie and hated her mother, Judy, whom Sera believed loved Katie more than her, starting from when Katie was born in 1999. Sometime in 2012, a year prior to the episode's events, she orchestrated a plan to kill Judy and Katie and pin everything on her father, who was suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Sera eventually murdered Judy during a blackout on February 4 and disposed of the evidence, letting her father take the brunt of suspicion. Over the following year, she orchestrated events for her next murder. She reached out to Jeff Godwin, her soccer coach and her mother's suspected lover, claiming that she needed a father figure. She confided in him about her father's drunken outbursts. She also cut off Bruce's medications, allowing his sadistic alternate personality called "Johnny" to slip through. Along with his drunken rages, this helped her convince Katie to call an abuse hotline several times. All of these would point to Bruce being the killer, at the same time that would give her several strong alibis.
All That Remains[]
On the first anniversary of Judy's disappearance, "Johnny" takes the girls to an abandoned building in the forest, located near a river, and leaves them as a way to scare them. Sera murders Katie there, beating her over the head and throwing her body into the river. She then takes a shotgun that was at the building and vanishes into the surrounding forest. Investigating, the BAU finally come across her, disheveled and apparently in shock, and take her to the hospital, still thinking she is a victim. JJ comforts her, admitting that she is a mother, in order to help her talk about what had happened. Keeping up her appearance, Sera confides how Judy would wrap her up in a homemade quilt. Instead of talking about what her father had done to her and her sister. She asks to talk with her father, so she is brought to the precinct and into the interrogation room where he is held. After allowing her father to ask for her forgiveness, she starts a confrontation with him, presenting her scars, asking about her mother's whereabouts, and angrily demanding that he confess.
After the outburst, JJ takes Sera home. JJ becomes increasingly suspicious of Sera's unusually calm behavior as the conversation shifted to the cold temperature of the house. Sera goes to take a shower while JJ makes some tea for them both, all the while showing no signs of grief for her younger sister. JJ remembers how she was after her sister Roslyn died from committing suicide. In turn, Sera notices that she may have put herself on shaky ground with the profiler when she hears her talking on the phone. She makes her presence known to JJ, who reacts swiftly and mimics a conversation with her own son, when in fact she is relaying her suspicions to Blake, Morgan, and Reid. However, Sera is unconvinced and her discomfort increases. As a result, she returns upstairs and turns on the shower to cover her moves. Sera then goes to retrieve her father's revolver, which she had concealed well enough that the police missed it during their search that same day.
Meanwhile, JJ, thinking she is in the shower, returns to the basement, having remembered something odd about the storage boxes, full of quilts and mementos Judy had collected through the years. Sera, armed with the revolver, follows JJ and watches as the agent discovers something inside one of the boxes. Sera holds JJ at gunpoint from a vantage point on the stairs and admits that she hated Judy and Katie, explaining her view of how Katie had stolen her mother's love from the moment she was born. JJ theorizes that was why she chose the box labeled '1999' because it was the year Katie was born. Bold and secure in her own intelligence, she dismisses JJ's attempts to pull out her own weapon, claiming that she can pretend a form of PTSD had kicked in when she attacked JJ. JJ admits to Sera that she has really thought of everything. In the meantime, Morgan and Reid show up to the house and find them. Confronted with this new threat, Sera pretends to be panicked and tries to win them over to her cause. Morgan plays along to get Sera to lower the gun. When she does so, Reid, who had been keeping his gun trained over Sera's head the whole time, arrests her despite her protests. Soon after, JJ and Reid discover the necklace and earrings taken from Judy after her murder in the planner; February 4th, which was the day Judy went missing. Reid notes the necklace and earrings were Sera's trophies; he figures Sera would have pinned it all on her father if the lead detective had found them.
Profile[]
No official profile of Sera was made since the investigation was focused on her father. However, JJ deduced that she was a psychopath from her unusually calm attitude and her lack of mourning for her sister. Sera is highly intelligent, manipulative, and ruthless. She was motivated by anger and jealousy towards her sister, Katie, who she believed has ruined her life from the moment she was born and how her mother let her; which is why JJ believes that Sera chose the 1999 labeled box to put Judy's necklace and earrings because it was the year Katie was born. Blake concluded that her writing suggested no empathy and no real emotional connection to her family; psychopathic tendencies as Reid added. Morgan also concluded that her wounds were more self-inflicted than superficial. Sera was noted to be meticulous; orchestrating a very detailed plan on pinning the deaths of her mother and sister on her father. She set up character witnesses like Jeff Godwin to back up her fear, getting Katie to make calls to a hotline, even JJ noticed this trait when Sera planned to use PTSD as an excuse to attack and possibly kill JJ when she held her up at gunpoint.
Modus Operandi[]
Sera killed her sister Katie via blunt-force trauma using the grip of her father's revolver, and then disposed of her body in a nearby river. Though it is unknown how Judy died, it can be assumed that Sera applied blunt-force trauma to her as well. Sera took her mother's pearl necklace and earrings as trophies and placed them inside a planner dating the day of her disappearance, February 4th; Sera also chose to put her trophies a storage box in the basement labeled '1999' because it was the year Katie was born.
Known Victims[]
- February 4, 2012: Judy Morrison (her mother; killed, likely by blunt-force trauma; her body was never found)
- 2013:
- February 4: Katie Morrison (her sister; fatally pistol-whipped)
- February 6: Jennifer Jareau (held at gunpoint and threatened to kill; was rescued)
Notes[]
- Sera seems to have been based on at least two unsubs from the show's past:
- Season Four
- Danny Murphy ("A Shade of Gray") - Both are closet psycho-sociopathic killers who were underage and killed their younger siblings. Furthermore, in both cases, suspicion first fell on them when a member of the BAU noticed their odd behavior, which didn't fit the typical reaction of the sibling of a missing child.
- Season Seven
- Bill Rogers ("Hope") - Both killers attacked their first victims a certain period of time prior to the episodes they appeared in (Bill abducted Hope Kingston seven years prior; Sera murdered her mother Judy a year prior). They then attacked a second victim, who was biologically related to the first victim, on the anniversaries of the attacks on the first victims.
- Season Four