Once upon a time, there was a girl. She wasn't a particularly special girl; in fact, in most ways, she was very ordinary. There was one thing about her that was very unusual, even unheard of, though: she loved monsters.

It was her life's dream to meet a real monster. Whenever stories of a monster in the closet or under the bed reached her ears, she eagerly joined her friends in the search, not because she wanted to "kill" it, but because she wanted to meet one.

No one could understand her strange attraction to beasts; she herself had no explanation for it. Still, her parents decided that it was an ultimately harmless idiosyncrasy, and that she'd outgrow it when she grew up and realized monsters weren't real. In the meantime, they let her have her fun; what was the harm?

Then, when the girl was ten years old, burglars broke into her home and killed her parents. She managed to escape them by hiding in her closet, but she was alone.

Of course, this was a traumatizing event for the girl, and the loss of her parents broke her heart. There was one thing about it that she salvaged, though: it was that night that she realized that monsters were real, and what they really looked like. She learned, that night, that monsters - real monsters - didn't have scales or fur; they weren't covered in slime; they didn't have horns, fangs, or claws…no; monsters - real, truemonsters - were people. And so it was that, even though her heart broke with the death of her parents, the girl's lifelong dream of meeting a monster was revived, and she pursued it with renewed eagerness.

She went into foster care, was eventually adopted, and her adopted parents did their best to raise her well, but to no avail; she wanted to be with monsters. She sought out the worst-reputed people in her neighborhood and spent as much time with them as she could manage. When she reached ninth grade, she dropped out of school and ran away, joining a local gang. She became addicted to heroin, allowed herself to be abused by local drug dealers, and was ultimately left with not a penny to her name…and yet, she believed she was happy. She believed that she was living out her dream of being with monsters.

Then, one day, when she was twenty-six years old and out wandering the streets, she saw him.

He was a young man, younger than her, and clearly very well-to-do; he was clean cut, very handsome, and had an air about him that suggested that he was used to money and power…and the moment she looked in his eyes, she knew: he was a real monster. She could see it right away; there was a bottomless darkness in his eyes, a boundless evil that he practically emanated.

In that moment, she knew her life was a lie. The people she had allied herself with weren't real monsters, weren't truly evil; no, they were just very sad, very broken, or both. They were nothing. This man, however…he was everything she had ever dreamed of.

She had to speak to him, even if it was the last thing she would ever do. She approached him; she had nothing to lose, after all.

The man - whom she didn't at all know - then surprised her by doing something that was entirely the opposite of what she would have expected of the monster she somehow intuitively knew him to be: he took her in.

He gave her a second chance at life. He gave her a home, helped her get clean, got her back on track with her education…he gave her everything she had lost or given up, and what was more, he was kind to her; in fact, he became the closest thing to a father she ever had, even more so than her birth father had been (which was saying something).

This went on for years, and she started worrying that she'd made a mistake, that maybe he wasn't evil, after all. Then, once she had gotten as far in her education as she could go without making a decision about what she wanted to do with her life, he came to her, sad and forlorn, and told her to sit down; that he had a terrible secret that he needed to tell her.

Even before he told her, she knew it would be that he was a monster. She hadn't exactly predicted that he would be the infamous Red John, but the revelation didn't surprise her. He didn't seem to understand her, though, and he spun her a web of being in a symbiotic relationship with a demon and being determined to save the world. She knew every word of it was a lie, and that he was the demon he claimed to be possessed by. Still, she also knew that he would kill her without a second thought if he feared she was a liability, and that if he knew that she knew what he really was without realizing that she wouldn't turn on him for it - that she actually loved him for it - the potential for misunderstanding could prove fatal to her. So, she decided to play along, to pretend to believe his story.

When he started bringing in more and more people, forming a circle of friends that only grew, it was she who encouraged his other friends' belief in his ridiculous story, telling how he'd helped her and how she believed in him.

What was more, when she decided what she wanted to do with her life, she decided to commit herself to him ultimately: she decided to plant herself right in the middle of the criminal justice system. She did it partly to punish those idiots like the ones who had killed her parents and to whom she had given her whole life, the ones who were a disgrace to the name of evil; and, also, she was the first of Red John's allies in the criminal justice system to start throwing a wrench in the investigation into him.

Things have gone up and down for her since then, but she is, and will always be, the most trusted and dangerous of all of Red John's friends, for, unlike the rest of them, she knows exactly what he is…and what's more, she loves him for it.

This woman's name is Madeline Hightower - or, in Red John's circle, his "Darling Black Dove". How can that be? The following chapters are what you didn't see of her in Season 3…