| “ | You think you can have God without the Devil? You can't. | „ |
| ~ Floyd justifying his Satanist altar |
Floyd Feylinn Ferell, sometimes called Lucky, is a prolific serial turned proxy killer, who appeared in season 3 and 13 of Criminal Minds, Lucky and Lucky Strikes. He was portrayed by Jaime Kennedy.
Lucky[]
Floyd Feylinn Ferell was born to a normal, strongly Christian family in 1970, somewhere in Florida, USA. At age seven, he was caught biting a chunk of flesh from his baby sister Lori and sent to the Hazelwood Hospital for the Criminally Insane for examination, where he was labelled psychotic and a danger to society, and ended up spending the next eleven years of his life at the facility. He told doctors that he believed himself to be possessed by a flesh-craving demon, which he blamed for his paraphilic desire to eat other humans, specifically girls and women. During his stay, he was put under heavy medication, which kept his cannibalistic urges at bay, but also caused drastic weight gain. In order to help him find the root cause for this delusion, the staff tried to treat him through art therapy, allowing him access to literature relating to satanism and artworks depicting cannibalism and the Devil, particularly the late works of Francisco de Goya, infamously known as the Black Paintings. When these efforts only made him display a newfound worship of Satan, by the time he was seventeen, the doctors declared him incurable and attempted to convince the state of Florida to keep Floyd at Hazelwood indefinitely, as due to him being a juvenile, his release was imminent, but their requests were denied, forcing them to release him on his 18th birthday. On that day, the guard who unlocked his cell, obviously displeased with the decision, sarcastically suggested he should be nicknamed Lucky, a name that both stuck and hallmarked Floyd's extraordinary luck, as only years after he left, the asylum had a large fire that killed the lead child psychologist, who had been in charge of his treatment, and destroyed many files, with his being among those listed as lost.
In the coming years, Floyd shortened his name, presumably to hide his history at the mental hospital, settled down in Bridgewater, joined the local parish under Father Marks and opened an eatery, Feylinn's Fine Bar-B-Q. He continued to practice satanism in a small chamber beneath his house and would regularly meditate in a bizarre trance-like manner. At some point, he chose to act on his fantasies and started killing prostitutes around the area, claiming 10 victims between 1988 and 2007. He disposed of the bodies by freezing them in his basement at home, hacking off their legs and cooking their remains at his BBQ. He prepared each woman after a specific recipe he had thought of and would rate them with smiley or frowny faces in his journal. He would also draw an inverse pentagram on the torsos, presumably to honor Satan.
His crimes were only noticed in late 2007, when rather than eating his latest kill, a young local woman named Abby Kelton, he dumped her body in a park after force feeding Abby ten index fingers, each from a previous victim of his, apparently wanting the public to know about his existence and to immediately start mocking the authorities, The BAU promptly arrived in Bridgewater to investigate, soon finger-printing the digits and discovering Floyd's true body count, but this did not throw him off. Instead, Floyd plants a previously unknown eleventh body at the church and abducts another woman, a hiker named Tracey Lambert, knowing that the community would band together to go look for her in the forest she was last seen around. He joined the troupe, not as a searcher, but as the caterer, serving the unknowing townsfolk stew made from the already murdered Tracey. He decides to use the opportunity to kidnap Sheryl Timmons, one of the volunteers and keeps her imprisoned inside his meatlocker with some of the still-frozen bodies. The BAU's profile determined that the unsub had likely been institutinalized before and discovered Floyd's identity through his recovered file at Hazelwood. The agents take him into custody during one of his prayers in the cellar and locate Sheryl, along with four bodies, Tracey's not among them.
During his interrogation with Agent Morgan, Floyd acts simple-minded, speaking in a tone suggesting diminished mental capacity and heavily insinuates that he is being manipulated by an unknown "friend" of his. When confronted with his cookbook, he openly states his preferences for lean, fit women, saying that thin ones are usually drug addicts, which gives them a "funny" taste. He also asks to speak with Father Marks and appeals to the reverend by owning up to his break in faith. When the father attempts to console him ("God is in all of us"), Floyd shows his true colors and off-handedly reveals that he fed the search party the flesh of the missing woman ("So is Tracey Lambert"). Floyd breaks into a fit of manic laughter, delighting at the sight of an enraged Marks lashing out at him, as the latter is pulled out of the room, all the while cursing the man for making him and his following commit sin, before he himself is led off and placed back into the Hazelwood psychiatric ward.
Lucky Strikes[]
Floyd is kept at Hazelwood for ten years, gradually being granted special privileges due to his status as a model patient, such as unsupervised visits to his family and bible study in Bridgewater, albeit with an ankle monitor. He is now given different meds to be kept in check and while he still prayed to a shrine to the Devil, he managed to convince the new head doctor that it was part of his new born-again-Christian belief to pay respects to both God and Satan. Many people in his hometown, however, like Lee-Ann Kelton, mother of Abby Kelton, are still certain of his guilt and have unsuccessfully rallied to bar him from the church.
In 2017, after returning from a bible study lesson, an orderly brings him his meal, sausage links, his apparent favorite, which he turns down, claiming to have already ate. Meanwhile a prostitute is found murdered near Bridgewater, her legs missing and all ten of her fingers cut off. His lawyer cites this turn of events as evidence for Floyd's innocence, claiming that he was used as the fall guy for the true killer, who used his state of confusion at the time and that he only admitted to the killings due to suggestioning by the BAU. Combined with his supposed rehabilitation, he is sent to live with his sister Lori Buccio and her son Jody while the case is reinvestigated. The BAU, on the other hand, first suspects a copycat killer of Floyd, then, after finding another body without Floyd's typical marks, a previously unidentified, and thus far dormant, dominant partner, before they set their sights back on Floyd, due to details in the M.O matching exactly his own far too closely. He is questioned, but his family firmly believes in his innocence, as he had truly found to God, now freed from his carnal desires and been fully reintegrated into society, bringing up his monitor as proof for his lack of involvement. The BAU determines that the device is obsolete and could easily be tricked, but they lack hard evidence to implicate Floyd.
Reexamination of Evonne Westbrook's body, the victim prior to the hooker, reveal that she had bite marks not seen on other victims and further query of Johanna Manning, Evonne's fiancée, as she had been a low-risk target unlike the others, uncover a potential accomplice of Floyd, Marcus Manning, a fellow bible study attendant and brother of Johanna, who also had a history of attacking others for cannibalistic reasons, as well as a fetish for biting them. The team pieces together, that Floyd had been teaching him his M.O and conditioning Marcus into giving in to his cravings and turned him into a full-blown killer by 2017, loyal and susceptible to his every whim, with intentions of using him as a patsy to get out of Hazelwood, which revealed Floyd's real persona: cunning, calculating and highly manipulative, having faked his psychological problems or at least played them up after his arrest to get lenience during the trail. Marcus then kidnapped Lee-Ann upon Floyd's wish and was about to kill her when the BAU tracked him down. The agents attempt to pry a confession out of Marcus, but he refused to incriminate his mentor, claiming responsibility for the all fifteen killings before slitting his own throat. As they could not charge Floyd with the first thirteen murders again, they continued to look for evidence connecting him to Marcus' victims.
In the end, analyst Penelope Garcia discovered that while ten fingers were fed to the last victim, Rebecca Strong, and her fingers were eaten by Marcus, only five were found in his digestive tract, meaning that five fingers were missing, At the last court hearing that would have cleared Floyd of any guilt once and for all, SSA David Rossi put forth a warrant for a search of Floyd's person, requesting a X-ray scan of Floyd's stomach, which would prove that Floyd not only ate Rebecca's fingers, making him an accessory to Marcus, but was involved in all the murders, both in 2007 and the current ones. Finally snapping, Floyd tries to lunge at Rossi, screaming death threats and expletives directed at him and his team, as he is restrained and led out of the court, this time not back to Hazelwood, but to a regular prison as he had just disproven his insanity plea and thus become fit to stand trial.
External links[]
- Floyd Feylinn Ferell at the Criminal Minds Wiki
- Floyd Feylinn Ferell at the Antagonists Wiki