No one sees true night. What's really there in the dark....It's not that they can't see, they simply don't. They feel an elemental force that scares them into the deepest reaches of their minds, but they refuse to see the actual source. Something watching them, just out of their reach, something cold and frightening, something inhuman.Jonny's opening monologue.
They made me watch!!!Jonny finally remembers what happened.
Jonathan "Jonny" McHale, also known as True Night is a villainous protagonist in the crime-drama TV series Criminal Minds. He is a psychotic vigilante who appears in the season three episode "True Night".
He is portrayed by Frankie Muniz. In-costume scenes as True Night were portrayed by James Lew.
Biography
Jonny McHale was a successful comic book artist, living in Los Angeles with his girlfriend, Vicky Wright. One night while walking home from the store, Vicky reveals that she's pregnant and Jonny proposes to her. What was a happy moment does not last, when a gang leader named Glen Hill interrupts them. Despite Jonny offering them a little money to leave them alone, the gang grabs Vicky and beats up Jonny. They drag Vicky into an alley where they gang-rape her and force Jonny to watch. Afterwards, they murder Vicky and nearly kill Jonny, but he survives. Unfortunately, after awakening, Jonny blocked out the memory, so he couldn't really remember what his attackers looked like and they were never arrested.
Sometime after the incident, Jonny, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, dons a hooded trench coat and armed with two machetes finds an alley with members of the 23rd Street Killers. He slaughters five of them, afterwards drawing up a comic called "True Night" where a hooded figure slays werewolves.
True Night
After slaying two more gang members, Jonny catches the attention of the BAU. Despite being very reluctant, Jonny attends a comic book signing, but flees when he starts to suffer a delusion. While fleeing, he's hit by a car, and after the driver gets out to check on him, Jonny, presumably in his True Night persona, chokes him, only letting go when the wife of the driver starts yelling at him. Jonny gets up off the ground and wanders onto the crime scene, where his agent finds him and takes him home. Despite the agent's concerns, Jonny gets annoyed with his agent and fires him. That night, Jonny dresses like True Night and slaughters six more gang members and kidnaps Glen Hill, who he tortures and then decapitates.
After dreaming of Vicky, Jonny begins to hear her voice and follows it into an apartment below him. Meanwhile, the BAU put out a profile for the killer, and various people, including Jonny's agent all come forward. Jonny returns to his apartment and trashes it after becoming enraged. Having got the tips on Jonny McHale, the BAU bust into his apartment and arrest him. They bring him in and interrogate him, eventually ending when Jonny remembers his girlfriend's death and the murders. Afterwards, Jonny is locked up in a mental hospital where he continuously calls Vicky's cellphone just so he can hear her voice.
List of Victims
- Five nameless 23rd Street Killers members - Dismembered with machetes.
- Two nameless 23rd Street Killers members - Dismembered with machetes.
- Jasper - attempted; briefly non-fatally choked, was released
- Six nameless 23rd Street Killers members - Dismembered with machetes.
- Glen Hill - Abducted, disemboweled, and dismembered with machetes.
- Total - 14
Gallery
Trivia
- Jonny is inspired by multiple real-life and fictional criminals:
- Pedro Rodrigues Filho, a Brazilian serial killer vigilante responsible for the murders of gang members to avenge the death of his pregnant girlfriend.
- Joseph Christopher, a.k.a. "The .22 Caliber Killer" and "The Midtown Slasher", a serial killer of men and boys of color across New York out of paranoid schizophrenia, using a shotgun and knives while prowling the streets, and was reported to have choked a man to near-death in one attack.
- William Masters, a.k.a. "The Tagger Vigilante", a vigilante and murderer guilty of picking a fight with two graffiti artists, shooting them both and killing one. Masters csrried swords around with him in public to look tougher.
- Eric Draven, the protagonist of the pulp fiction film The Crow and the last role of Brandon Lee, who was killed from a poorly maintained prop gun while on set. Draven also rampaged on a gang after the murder of his fiancé by their members, and Jonny’s career as a comic book artist is likely an illusion to the story originally being a comic series.
- Coincidentally, the actor who fired the fatal shot, Michael Massee, starred in Criminal Minds as serial killer Jacob Dawes, along with many other villain and otherwise character roles. Massee has now passed away from stomach cancer, but not before giving an interview where he’s publicly spoken for the only time about the shooting of Lee.
- Paul McCormack, a.k.a. “The Handcuff Killer”, the main antagonist of the film The Killing Hour. “Mac”, as he’s nicknamed, is a serial killer in the interest of murdering people tied to the gang-rape and murderer of a sex worker. However, he’s revealed to have been the leader of the gang and her killer, murdering his accomplices as witnesses. Someone else draws premonitory pictures that symbolize his crimes.
- Walter Sparrow, the protagonist is hidden villain of The Number 23. Sparrow is a writer responsible for the murder of a woman he was in love with, a memory he buried until he wrote it in a book about the 23 enigma he published and later stumbled across without any recollection of it.
- Jonny is the first UnSub in the series to have been the main focus of the episode since he had the most screen time and he was revealed to be the killer in the beginning.
External Link
- Jonny McHale at the Criminal Minds Wiki
