Everyone loves bad stuff when it happens to someone else. It's like when there's a car crash, and everyone's gotta stop and rubberneck...Mattson ranting about his hatred of humanity
Shelby Mattson is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode “Spectator Showing”. He is a serial bomber who _targets a group of tourists who are unknowingly surveying the site of his mother's murder.
He was portrayed by Will Tranfo as an adult, and by Wolfgang Schaeffer as a child.
Biography
Background
Mattson lived a nomadic life with his mother Audrey, starting off being born in Texas, then living in Little Rock and then New Orleans. Mattson saw Audrey being beaten by his father, Karl Blair, and was presumably beaten by Blair also. Audrey fled with a young Mattson to Montreal, Canada, changing her name to Sally Parker. Mattson was deeply traumatized by the abuse he suffered, and he started acting out by committing a number of assaults, including one with a baseball bat and another with several beer bottles.
Everything collapsed when Audrey was boarded at a house on Manner Street when she grew old, run by a serial killer responsible for murdering her as a final victim before he cashed her checks per the killer’s usual patterns. When the eight people the killer murdered were found in the basement of the home, the killer committed suicide with a bombing when responders arrived to arrest him. Mattson was riddled with regret and self-hatred, leaving flowers at the memorial in front of the house to honor Audrey. Numerous tourists would come to see the house on guided tours for months, and one woman, named Laura Kirkman, stepped on the flowers Mattson left for his mother. Mattson was furious and decided he would punish the group for how his mother was treated, hoping to bomb them all like the serial killer committed suicide. Mattson tracked every member and constructing bombs that were designed to be scrapbooks in the mail, as mock memorabilia of their lives to farcically objectify them like he saw them objectify Audrey, which they’d read through just before they’d die when the bombs went off after they returned to America. Each family would receive sympathy cards with obscene, harassing messages to add salt to their wounds.
"On Spectator Showing"
Mattson killed Joseph Ainsworth and Sheila Stretcher with his bombs, but Rhonda Kirkman and her daughter Sophie lived. Mattson bought a dead person from grave robber Wayne Beecher, who Mattson blew up in a shed with his homemade explosives to test them, having dressed the man up as Laura. He then put a picture of Rhonda picking up the bomb in a sympathy card and mailed it to Laura, with the message "Fun and games to follow".
Joel Reynolds was next to die, and Mattson prepared the bomb he was arranging for Laura. Mattson stalked Laura and chatted her up in the hospital where she took her daughter, lying he was seeing his mother and asking who the girl’s doctor is. He then slipped into Rhonda’s room with a fake bomb and narrowly dodged Agent Luke Alvez of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. During the distraction, he lured Laura out of the police station by lying he was her daughter’s doctor. Kidnapping her, Mattson took her to Rhonda’s house and tasted a cop at the scene. He restrained Laura to a chair and talked about how Audrey hated working for a “disaster tour” as one of the many jobs she supported herself and Mattson with, and how the tour of her murder was no better. While placing the last bomb on Laura, the agents storm the house, and Mattson grabs a button and lies that it is the detonator. The agents realize it’s the camera switch, and when they openly say they know he doesn’t want to kill himself, he rushes for the real detonator, but Agent Jennifer Jareau shoots Mattson dead.
Trivia
- Mattson is inspired by three real-life criminals:
- Mark Anthony Conditt, a.k.a. “The Austin Serial Bomber”, a serial bomber and spree killer responsible for numerous explosions in Texas, starting with letter bombs on victims’ doorsteps, and who committed suicide by another bombing which also injured a policeman.
- Luke Helder, a.k.a. "The Midwest Pipe Bomber", an American serial bomber, guilty of a nationwide spree of letter bombings, with a manifesto enclosed to taunt police.
- Robert Smallwood, a serial killer of women whose sister was the eighth woman murdered by the Edgecombe County serial killer in North Carolina.
External links
- Shelby Mattson on the Criminal Minds Wiki
