OMG, girl from Ozark
I removed a Criminal Minds IH, but I have this and two more candidates to propose, so it'll even out.
What is the work?
Criminal Minds Evolution is a paramount revival and the third spinoff of the CBS show, Criminal Minds, instead focusing on conspiracies involving multiple killers instead of loners
Who is Tessa Merrick? What has she done?
Background
Constance Merrick was the daughter of an active military father; thus, they were forced to keep moving to different American military bases. She left her family as an adult and traveled to Japan, her favorite place. She saw the Yase-Otoko mask, a symbol of eternal punishment in hell, while in Japan, and became obsessed with its appearance and meaning. After traveling back to America, she studied mechanical engineering, but her life soon took a dark turn. Her professor, Adrian Gammon, was a serial rapist of his students, bringing them to a secluded place for "studies" so he could commit these acts. She became one of his victims, but instead of being raped, Constance opted to fight back and steal her attempted rapist's vehicle. Traumatized, Constance abandoned her family and became a runaway, frequently going to bars to drink away her problems. One day in 2002, a man named Cyrus Lebrun saw her at the bar, having previously stalked her. They talked with each other about their life, but Constance didn't want to talk anymore, so Cyrus left the bar. Not long after, she decided to leave, but Cyrus attacked her from behind and held a rag over her mouth, and abducted her.
His motive was that after his nephew Lee Duval left him after years of abuse and assisting him in his killings, there was an empty void in his heart, so he wanted to abduct Constance to subjugate her to the same violence, but worse. It started simple: she was held captive inside his basement and given disgusting food, which she threw on the floor. However, Cyrus was even worse than she would have thought; in truth, he had a history of torturing and killing captive women. The drunk Cyrus entered the basement while Constance was sleeping and pulled off the cover. She woke up, and Cyrus then raped her, but nobody heard anything, as they were inside a cabin, deep inside the woods. A few months later, Cyrus had been forcing her to act as a maid, but this was not enough. Her parents were worried about her well-being, so Cyrus tied up loose ends by killing them in a house fire that was deemed accidental. She wondered why, and he told her that he did so to force her to stay with him forever. Previously, Cyrus raped and murdered a woman named Maria Jones and framed a man she knew as the killer. The police came to ask questions in 2004, but Constance, brainwashed, told the police that her father wasn't home and her name was Tessa. For the next 18 years, he continued to abuse her.
The way he brainwashed her was by lying to her that Lee Duval, his nephew, was actually his son. He apparently killed his aunt and uncle in a fire to turn Lee into a killer, but this was not the truth; Lee accidentally killed his parents. After many years of abuse, a miracle came. Lee, now named Elias Voit, became a killer due to Cyrus’s actions, and Voit took revenge by poisoning his uncle’s IV. Despite his death, she was afraid to leave the house, but got the courage to leave after a few weeks. Tessa pulled out a cigarette and immediately lit it, setting off to become a serial killer. She seduced men who matched Cyrus’s description before killing and robbing them, burying at least one of the corpses. Only a few months later, she learned that Elias Voit was an infamous killer who was caught and sent to prison. While in prison, Voit was attacked by two prisoners and stabbed, subsequently being sent into a coma. To help Voit, Tessa posed as a British psychologist, working under Julia Ochoa, the primary psychologist on Voit's case, to understand his urges. Using her intelligence, she brought back the network and sent various killers on sprees to gain attention from the BAU. When done, she would have the accomplices who survived kill themselves to save their loved ones, then eventually use the ensuing chaos to break Voit out of the hospital he was in and revive his urges of sadism.
Evolution Season Three
Setting her plan into motion, she activates the first network killer. After killing another victim, the BAU is called in, noticing the M.O. matches 5 other killings. All the victims were stabbed in the rib cage and forced to swim until they drowned. They later found his identity: Franklin Fowler, who murdered his family. Before this realization, he abducted a family of 3 and shot the father before making the wife and daughter go into the pool. Despite their pleas, Fowler committed suicide, and they believe the technology that Fowler used links to the network they supposedly ended.
Tyler Green, who lost her sister to Voit’s wrath, has become an FBI agent and is assigned to the case. He suggests looking through Vincent Orlov, Voit’s corrupt lawyer’s, hard drive. There, the BAU is terrified by what they are seeing; there is a brutal network killer who has been raping, torturing, and killing women; he has still not been caught. For years now, The Zookeeper has been torturing and killing women after they are officially “tame,” and soon targets another prostitute, whom he holds captive after killing his old one. Nearly a year ago, a man was interested in hiring the other captive, but she soon went missing. Through phone calls and federal raids, they found out his name was Clyde Smets. Knowing he is in trouble, Smets runs downstairs and attempts to kill his hostage, who turns the tables. Fortunately, she relents, and the BAU hold him at gunpoint, but he grabs a knife and slashes his throat, destroying any lead on the new leader of the network.
After finding a BAU-gate video of a man peeling styrofoam off his face to reveal a mask, JJ wants the FBI to help find the killer. In the following episode, we get flashbacks to the case at hand as JJ recalls it to Ochoa. While investigating, the BAU soon raided a house, finding people dead on the floor and a woman. The girl was the mother; the killer forced her to choose who to die, and after stabbing her family, he left her alive to send a message. When JJ notices that the car sticker on another family's vehicle is gone, Penelope Garcia is called in. Having targeted another family, the father comes home to see his loved ones bound to chairs in a circle before being knocked out. Thankfully, law enforcement came in time, and the killer, Ronald Graber, took off his mask.
Unlike the other victims, Graber did not kill himself as he had a message to send. Voit, in his presence, revealed to the man that he murdered his family when he was young, and when he said he just simply enjoys killing, “it was a fucking lie”. After sending his message, Graber aggressively bashes his head on the table, becoming brain-dead. With Graber down, the next killer, a man who buries women alive, shows up. Realizing he has problems with divorce, Garcia looks through Voit’s network and sees ten men who complained about their ex-wives. However, Kyle Mackey fits the profile the most. At this point, Mackey abducted his daughter and wife and is about to force his wife to watch a livestream where their daughter will die. After allowing himself to be incarcerated, Mackey tells the BAU that this is only the start. Soon, the facility is on lockdown, and they open a container to find the mask Graber used, implying that more than one killer will activate at the same time.
An investigation in the network is underway when a man is found dead. There were sicarius spiders shoved into condoms and put into the man's throat, which burst and killed him from the inside. When JJ finds chemicals on the victim's fingers, Penelope looks for men working in fertilizer who went missing in the past few days. While this is happening, a man has a black man named Tate Andrews tied to a chair and uses a mouth device so he can put balloons down the man’s throat. They track down the truck the suspect is using and enter, and Luke Alvez gets his name and realizes that there might be a bomb connected to him if they try to release him. However, if Voit grabs the iPad and contacts The Disciple, the guy working for him will not activate the miniature explosive devices in Tate’s throat. Using a deepfake filter, The Disciple acts just like Cyrus, and Voit is surprised when the unsub knows almost everything about Cyrus, despite Cyrus being a loner. After the bombs are revealed to be a decoy, Alvez unties the man, and Garcia goes to deactivate the devices. While walking to safety, Tate grabs his stomach in pain and falls to the ground as he bleeds from the mouth and spiders pour out of his mouth; Alvez and other officers fail to save him. As he dies, he mentions that he was being held captive alongside seven men, so Garcia snaps out of her state and tracks down the other truck. The two unsubs are about to drive off, but the FBI comes in time, arresting the one in the street and the one in the vehicle, as well as saving the other captives. They also find a man on the wall, and when they remove the mask from his face, it is revealed to be Orlov, who helped The Disciple, but was then betrayed and killed. Tara, her girlfriend, and Evan Delray are talking about Voit’s new lawyer. When Rebecca sees the unsub with the infamous mask, she pushes them out of the way. Even though she survives, Evan is hit in the shoulder, and Tara is bleeding profusely from the chest, having been shot twice.
David Rossi, who was a victim of Elias Voit (his archenemy), has been theorizing about The Disciple’s motives and suggests luring the unsub out, but it is cut short when they get a call from Rebecca that Tara was shot and is in a temporary coma. Despite her injuries, the BAU continues its investigation, knowing they have work to do. After looking through the footage, they notice that the unsub hesitated before shooting Evan and suspect him of having orchestrated the shooting to be with Rebecca. Voit helps the team and tells them the symbol marked on the bullets connects to an incel whom he kicked out of the network for compromising its privacy. They also link the killer, Robert Kinney, to Evan, as he was the prosecutor in Kinney’s assault case. Eventually, they find that Voit’s new lawyer was shot dead in his office with a mask covering his face, meaning he is innocent of being an accomplice. Prentiss thinks that Evan is innocent, so she talks to his girlfriend. Apparently, days before this incident, Kinney posed as a worker to fix a problem with the pipes and went into the laundry room, signifying that he took DNA to frame Evan as the killer of Voit’s new lawyer. Voit then insists that the connection between The Disciple will be found by investigating Maria Jones’s murder, committed by Cyrus. After finding Kinney dead, they dont know what the motive for the shooting is, and Rebecca is unable to find a connection to Cyrus to The Disciple.
The episode begins with an orderly working for Ochoa, who asks about receiving the job. When her assistant sees him on his phone, he makes an excuse that he will never do it again before using his phone to stage Project Checkmate. The night before, the killer puts on a silencer after shooting a woman in the head, and then drugs her son, who is bound to a chair. After her body is found, they identify her as Trevor Wolner’s wife, the abductor of the nine men, who recently committed suicide in his cell. Steve Morris, who killed one of the abducted victims, also killed himself, presumably after his loved ones were killed as well, while Ronald Graber, one of the only survivors, has permanent brain damage. As Voit never took children hostage, JJ suspects that it is not for collateral, but because some of the criminals in the network are pedophiles. Hoping to get a lead, they look for Kyle Mackey but oddly can't find him in the prison network; his ex-wife and daughter have also gone missing. When a box is sent to the BAU, they spot Andrew in a box, and the boy wants to speak to JJ to send a message. In exchange for Kyle Mackey’s family's safety, the police will deliver Mackey to be killed, and then they will release them. However, before the abductions happened, someone had notified the wife and daughter that someone was coming, so they packed up and went on the run, meaning they aren't actually missing. Eventually, they locate Kyle Mackey through misspelling his name, so they bring him in for questioning. He mentions Project Checkmate, but they realize he will only do it to heal his narcissistic wounds, so they bring in his ex to force him to tell the truth. When Tyler looks through Voit’s bed, he finds a hacked phone and arrests him for accessory to murder. To find the leak, Ochoa scans the SIM cards of orderlies working for her, including John Perry. Instead, her assistant’s phone matches the hacked phone, but JJ knows she isn't guilty. Once again, Rossi thinks of a theory, saying that The Disciple might be female, as she protected Andrew from the pedophiles.
When law enforcement questioned Cyrus, a woman named Tessa showed up at his door, so they believe the woman, who is now in her forties, is the leader, being both brilliant and ruthless enough to run the network and kill with impunity. Convincing Voit to help, Rossi brings in Mackey’s family, and the BAU tells her that they need her to say something to break Mackey’s ego and get him to talk. She successfully convinces Mackey, and he tells them more about Project Checkmate, but they still don't believe him, as the network isn't that dumb. He tells them about The Engineer, The Disciple’s right-hand man, who told him how to use miniature explosives for his killings. Months ago, a man going by John Peters bought an anodizer that he used for his silenced gun, so they sent SWAT to the home. After nobody is home, they realize that the real Peters has been in Miami for five years now. Prentiss soon wonders why they have been orchestrating these killings in the first place and says one word: Voit. Currently, Voit and Ochoa are talking, and she tells him that she is done helping him. While she is walking away, Voit holds her hand over her mouth, but tells her not to be afraid; someone is coming. Moments later, the lights shut off as numerous silenced gunshots erupt. Perry slowly opens the door and holds them at gunpoint. Unfortunately, despite their efforts, when the BAU arrive, Voit and Ochoa are already gone, and the U.S. marshals and nurses on the floor are all dead.
The final stand
Voit is awoken by Perry putting smelling salts up his nose. He immediately demands to see The Disciple, who turns out to be a woman; Voit is everything to her. After waking up Julia, who is hanging by the neck, Tessa tells her that she is important to Voit as well. When he asks to see Julia, Tessa asks Voit about his wife and that she betrayed him, but Julia did not. To get him to remember her, she shows Voit pictures of her and the women whom Cyrus called Lost Girls. Having been manipulated, Tessa tells Voit that Cyrus was his father and that he killed his aunt and uncle. However, this is not true; he accidentally killed his parents, but she doesn't know that and insists that Cyrus killed them. Cyrus killed his sister and his husband to make Voit strong, just like what Cyrus did to her, so she is here to release him. When the BAU proves that Ochoa’s emails were hacked, they know she is safe, so they quickly bring her family into protective custody. Except, if The Disciple hacked her emails anyway, what else would be the reason for kidnapping him? To turn Voit back into a killer, Perry uses a clamp to open her mouth and attempts to place the balloons of spiders down her throat, but Voit protects Ochoa and beats Perry to death while Tessa smiles. After killing him, Ochoa thanks him for saving her and asks why he is acting so weird, and he says that he feels like a god.
She explains that she used Orlov as a pawn to gain access to the network, and because of his betrayal, he killed him. While happy, Voit is rightfully angry that Tessa used the network wrong, since members were to commit suicide if caught, and the network was to be kept secret, which Tessa didnt follow through on. Eventually, the BAU tracks her down to one of the facilities her parents stayed at, Scofield Station. Apparently setting up a patsy, Voit asks for Tessa’s gun and then shoots Ochoa despite her pleas for Voit not to do so. Setting her up, Voit teaches Tessa how to activate bombs so that when the BAU comes, she will blow them up and wipe them out, while he and she will escape. However, Voit rigged the explosives so that Garcia could activate them in time and send the team, HRT, and SWAT into the building. As they enter, Tessa realizes the charges didnt work and goes to run away with Voit as her men shoot at law enforcement. Suddenly, Voit pulls out his gun and tells Tessa it is over, but she quickly pulls the gun out on him too. JJ and Green then enter the room, so she runs away while Voit aims at JJ and Green, threatening to commit suicide by cop before ultaimtley dropping his weapon. When she tries to run away, Prentiss and the other agents are across from her, so she is beaten 3 to 1. Prentiss sympathises with her and tries to get her to give up, but she doesnt want to be held in a cage again, so she shoots at them, only to be tackled and arrested by Alvez.
Back inside the headquarters, Ochoa is revealed to be alive, as Voit had her fake her death instead. Feeling remorse, Voit knows his victims deserve justice and finally states to Rossi that he is guilty of every Sicarius killing. While being transported in a prison bus, Voit strangles a prisoner when the other prisoners recognize him, but this is only a hallucination, and Voit has, for now, resisted the urge to kill.
Heinous Standard
Tessa has been active for less than 3 years and still gets a very high kill count of 43. In the span of only 4 months, she has ordered many brutal murders. Franklin Fowler stabs his victims in the ribcage as torture and forces them to tread water till they tire out and drown. The Zookeeper rapes and tortures several women, and Ronald Graber psychologically tortures 2 families before murdering them and leaving one survivor, then attempts to kill another family. Steve Morris and his partner abduct 9 men, torturing and killing two of them with the Sicarius spiders' M.O. and trying to kill the others, and Kyle Mackey buries women alive and attempts to bury his daughter alive as well. While we don't know how she kills the old men, we see her bury one of their bodies, meaning onscreen villainy, and it can be assumed that it most likely involves torture that she learned from Cyrus. By running the network, she is also assisting the remaining members of the network in torturing and killing their victims, so the kill count would arguably be in the hundreds. Her last plan is also brutal, as she intends to blow up BAU and HRT with bombs so she can escape with Voit and increase the network's size. Some of her victims were criminals, but a lot of them (35 to be exact) were not. Sure, she may not achieve the kill count of Voit, but she runs the network for only a few months instead of years and achieves an insanely high victim count, full of quick killings and slow, drawn-out killings. In total, there are well over 80 victims, and the short time span during which she commits these killings only helps her case.
Mitigating Factors
If this isn't enough reasoning, I don't know what is
Simply put, she is way too tragic for PE or NPE, and she can be considered as one of the most tragic figures on the IH wiki. Before being abducted by Cyrus, she was a successful student, but one day, her professor led her to a car. He did this to many girls in his class, so he could rape them, but Tessa managed to fight back and escape. Constance soon abandoned her loved ones, regularly going to the bar to drink to deal with her trauma. However, a man named Cyrus Lebrun showed up and charmed her, offering her drinks before leaving. He then ambushed Constance in the parking lot and transported her to his home, holding her captive in the basement. It started with starvation, but soon turned to torture when, while drunk, he raped and assaulted her. Next, she learned that her family was dead (while being forced to act as a maid), and that Cyrus burned them alive in their home. For another twenty years, he continued to torture and rape her to make her into his accomplice, forcing her to help in the killing of his enemies, children, and the rape-torture killings of numerous women. After Cyrus was killed, she was brainwashed and was afraid to leave, but eventually came to her senses and broke out of the trauma bonding so she could seduce and kill men matching Cyrus's description.
It is impossible to dismiss the impact of such a tragedy. Years later, she is still deeply affected by it. In her quest for revenge against Cyrus after his death, she resorted to killing elderly people who matched his description. Additionally, she seeks to connect with his nephew, whom she mistakenly thought was Cyrus’s son, hoping that they can bond over their shared experiences. This all played with sympathy in flashbacks, by the characters, and when she bawls her eyes out after being arrested. She also cares for several people, such as her parents, being devastated that she left them and their deaths, and Voit, as she is devastated when she realizes he betrayed her, with her whole goal of orchestrating murders to meet Voit and turn him back to his old self, so they both have to go through the same thing. Overall, way too sympathetic. Rossi also reveals that she has standards against pedophiles and hurting children, but this is minor since she is ordering the network to keep killing, meaning she is an accessory to their crimes against children.
Verdict
Easy yes