Anna Samuels appears in The Secret in the Siege. She’s a young woman severely traumatized by the loss of her father who was used and manipulated by then at large serial killer Christopher Pelant to commit a series of surrogate murders for him unbeknownst to her, since she believed she was doing it for her late father.
Background[]
Anna Samuels is the daughter of late FBI agent Harris Samuels, who partook in a siege unleashed on a compound in Crystal Creek, Virginia, where a cult was housed. Many cult members were killed as a result, and several agents, including Agent Samuels, were killed as well, Samuels dying from eleven shots total. Anna Samuels was left orphaned as a result, and she soon was institutionalized and diagnosed with complex grief disorder. Serial killer Christopher Pelant, at large at the time and pursued by the Jeffersonian Institute, found Samuels’ records and decided to treat her as a surrogate for a new series of attacks he was unleashing. He doctored videos of himself to look like her father was sending her messages saying the FBI killed her father and covered it up, giving her instructions to kill agents in the siege and who to target to “avenge her father”, even though Pelant was getting revenge for Booth shooting him.
The Secret in the Siege[]
Samuels starts off with killing Alan Friedlander at a picnic area on a hiking trail where she lured him to, killing him in the same way her father was shot and in a place mentioned in Lance Sweets’s work which Pelant used against the team. She then killed Jeff Stone but stayed behind as a witness, using the name Allison Taylor, and said she saw rescued cult member Zane Reynolds shoot the agent dead, leaving behind a red hat in a nearby trash can to support her statement. After Reynolds was cleared after being confirmed as red herring, the team figures out Samuels is the killer, and she is later seen calling Seeley Booth and asking to arrange a meeting to “share more information”. Pelant then causes a car crash to leave Sweets in traffic, sending Samuels after him as her real target. Once the team decrypts the instructions given her and Pelant’s hand is forced revealing the truth about the next attack, Booth, calling with a pay phone since Pelant cut communications, gets the information and rushes to save Sweets. Booth sees Samuels rushing in the same direction herself, and she pulls out her signature gun and walks towards Sweets’ car. In a close call, just as she takes her gun out and is about to fire from behind, Booth, after Sweets doesn’t hear Booth calling out, shoots Samuels down with his own weapon, shattering Sweets’ rear windshield and alerting Sweets to step out and draw his own gun. Samuels is shown, bleeding on the asphalt, having only been injured. She is taken into custody and most likely recovers from the gunshot, and she is either imprisoned or institutionalized depending on her internal state and if she ever recovered from her wounds.
Modus Operandi[]
Anna Samuels targeted FBI agents who were a part of the siege with her late father. With the falsified videos Pelant sent to her which appeared to be from her father, she was given specific victims to kill. Samuels would arrange a meeting with the agents at a designated location, and when arrived, she blitz attacked them. She killed them with a Heckler & Koch USP 9mm pistol, firing a total of eleven shots, including the backs of the heads and to the spine from behind so the bullet would break in two and go into each shoulder blade, to evoke the shots that killed Harris Samuels. She even stayed behind as a supposed witness at Jeff Stone’s murder to falsely accuse Zane Reynolds of the crime and direct focus away from her. When she tried to kill Sweets, she called Booth instead saying she wanted to meet, but she went after Sweets when he was stuck in traffic from an accident Pelant caused and only tried to kill him with at least one shot while he was in his car.
Victims[]
- Alan Friedlander (shot once in the neck and shot ten more times post-mortem)
- Jeff Stone (shot once in the neck and shot ten more times post-mortem)
- Lance Sweets (attempted to in his car in a traffic jam, but was shot instead)