his four-year-old son, Jack, so no charges are brought against him. In an earlier episode, “Aftermath” (205), profiler Elle Greenaway shoots multiple rape suspect William Lee when the team can’t amass the evidence necessary to convict him. She claims self-defense, and with no witnesses to dispute her story, she isn’t charged, either, but she leaves the FBI.
Both acts could have been considered vigilantism, when the rules of law and order are bypassed in favor of a more immediate brand of justice. Greenaway actively went after Lee, and even though Hotchner was in the midst of the situation with the man who had kidnapped Haley and Jack (and had already murdered Haley), Hotchner could have arrested Foyet rather than killing him on the spot.
Joe Muller, in the episode “Retaliation” (511), is an ex-cop who helps ex-con Dale Schrader murder three people and evade the FBI. He’s pressured into doing this because Schrader has abducted Muller’s family and will murder them if Muller doesn’t cooperate. Muller is, in fact, an honest man who got caught in a bad situation.
But sometimes good cops just plain go bad, like Deputy Sheriff John Clark Battle, who shoots Penelope Garcia, the team’s technical analyst, in the episode “Lucky” (308) and is captured in “Penelope” (309).
Unfortunately, law enforcement officers who dishonor their badges aren’t confined to fiction. Lucille Place of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was concerned when her daughter Susan, who was seventeen, and Susan’s sixteen-year-old friend, Georgia Jessup, went to the beach with an obviously older man. He said his name was Jerry Shepherd, and he was twenty-six. Place watched as he loaded the girls into his Datsun, and she wrote down the license plate number—but missing one digit. The date was September 27, 1972. Place never saw her daughter or Georgia alive again.
Because Place had the license plate number wrong, when she reported it to the police it didn’t match up with anything. After six months, Lucille realized her mistake. When she added in the missing 2 from a county designation code, the match turned out to be a blue Datsun from Martin County. The car belonged to a jailed Martin County deputy sheriff named Gerard John Schaefer. Place went to the jail where Schaefer was being held in March 1973, bearing a picture of her daughter, but he denied ever having seen her.
Schaefer was in jail because he had picked up two hitchhiking teenage girls earlier that summer. He warned them that he was a deputy sheriff, which was true, and that hitching a ride was illegal in Martin County, which was false. To keep them safe, he told them, he would drive them home, and the next morning he would personally take them to the beach.
He showed up in the morning, but instead of heading to the beach, he took the kids to a remote part of swampy, bug-infested Hutchinson Island. When the girls protested, he said he wanted to show them an old Spanish fort. He stopped in a wooded area, drew a gun, and told the girls that he meant to sell them into sexual slavery. Then he handcuffed and gagged them, slipped nooses around their necks, and had them balance on the bulbous roots of a tree while the other ends of the ropes were tied to the tree’s branches. Should one of the girls slip off the root, she would be hanged.
That was as far as Schaefer got. He checked his watch and told the girls he had to run off for a little while, but he’d be back.
An investigation later showed that he had to go take care of police business. When he returned, in uniform and driving his official vehicle instead of his private car, the girls had escaped. He called his boss, Sheriff Richard Crowder, and confessed to trying to scare two teenagers out of hitchhiking, but perhaps he had let things go a little too far, he said.
Crowder fired Schaefer and then arrested him. The former deputy sheriff made bail and cut a deal, accepting a single charge of aggravated assault. He was
Both acts could have been considered vigilantism, when the rules of law and order are bypassed in favor of a more immediate brand of justice. Greenaway actively went after Lee, and even though Hotchner was in the midst of the situation with the man who had kidnapped Haley and Jack (and had already murdered Haley), Hotchner could have arrested Foyet rather than killing him on the spot.
Joe Muller, in the episode “Retaliation” (511), is an ex-cop who helps ex-con Dale Schrader murder three people and evade the FBI. He’s pressured into doing this because Schrader has abducted Muller’s family and will murder them if Muller doesn’t cooperate. Muller is, in fact, an honest man who got caught in a bad situation.
But sometimes good cops just plain go bad, like Deputy Sheriff John Clark Battle, who shoots Penelope Garcia, the team’s technical analyst, in the episode “Lucky” (308) and is captured in “Penelope” (309).
Unfortunately, law enforcement officers who dishonor their badges aren’t confined to fiction. Lucille Place of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was concerned when her daughter Susan, who was seventeen, and Susan’s sixteen-year-old friend, Georgia Jessup, went to the beach with an obviously older man. He said his name was Jerry Shepherd, and he was twenty-six. Place watched as he loaded the girls into his Datsun, and she wrote down the license plate number—but missing one digit. The date was September 27, 1972. Place never saw her daughter or Georgia alive again.
Because Place had the license plate number wrong, when she reported it to the police it didn’t match up with anything. After six months, Lucille realized her mistake. When she added in the missing 2 from a county designation code, the match turned out to be a blue Datsun from Martin County. The car belonged to a jailed Martin County deputy sheriff named Gerard John Schaefer. Place went to the jail where Schaefer was being held in March 1973, bearing a picture of her daughter, but he denied ever having seen her.
Schaefer was in jail because he had picked up two hitchhiking teenage girls earlier that summer. He warned them that he was a deputy sheriff, which was true, and that hitching a ride was illegal in Martin County, which was false. To keep them safe, he told them, he would drive them home, and the next morning he would personally take them to the beach.
He showed up in the morning, but instead of heading to the beach, he took the kids to a remote part of swampy, bug-infested Hutchinson Island. When the girls protested, he said he wanted to show them an old Spanish fort. He stopped in a wooded area, drew a gun, and told the girls that he meant to sell them into sexual slavery. Then he handcuffed and gagged them, slipped nooses around their necks, and had them balance on the bulbous roots of a tree while the other ends of the ropes were tied to the tree’s branches. Should one of the girls slip off the root, she would be hanged.
That was as far as Schaefer got. He checked his watch and told the girls he had to run off for a little while, but he’d be back.
An investigation later showed that he had to go take care of police business. When he returned, in uniform and driving his official vehicle instead of his private car, the girls had escaped. He called his boss, Sheriff Richard Crowder, and confessed to trying to scare two teenagers out of hitchhiking, but perhaps he had let things go a little too far, he said.
Crowder fired Schaefer and then arrested him. The former deputy sheriff made bail and cut a deal, accepting a single charge of aggravated assault. He was
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