Chapter 13
Week 05

Finally, with the team returned, they assembled in the conference room and compared notes. "So, what do we have?"

"To everyone outside her family circle Laura Patterson was the epitome of the low-risk victim." Rossi said. "She didn't drink or do drugs; she only dated in public places during the daylight hours, hell she was in bed every night by 10:30. Her only close friend is an 80 year old stroke victim, with whom she spent every Saturday night. She was practically Mary Poppins."

"We looked into the stepmother's accusations." Hotch said. "They're completely unfounded. It looks like Karen Patterson was telling tales about her step-daughter to embezzle money out of her husband/"

"I still don't buy it." Morgan said. "No one is that good without some kind of reason behind it."

"Well she isn't that good." JJ pointed out. "She had a healthy porn collection hidden away and she was buying stuff under someone else's name. It was like she was deliberately trying to look like she was doing right while accepting her own secrets."

"But why keep secrets? Why try so hard? The only problem in her life was her stepmother who has convinced her father that Laura is the original wild child." Blake continued. "What is going on there?"

"I think I might know." Garcia said. "Okay, so Laura had no online life, no social media involvement at first glance, no Facebook, no Twitter, no blog, her e-mail was only for school, but then I realized that she's a knitter."

"So?" JJ asked.

"So there is this place on the web called Ravelry. It's a social media site specifically for people who play with sticks and string; it's a place where you can show off your stuff, swap yarn, check out patterns, all sorts of things." As she was talking Garcia was calling the site up on the big board. "But they also have forums for just about every interest under the sun, there are knitters who also run, knitters who like Dr. Who, knitters who are associated with just about every business out there, the list is just about endless. And for the record I do have an account there and we do have a group for FBI people who knit. And on Ravelry, under the name HomeEcDoc I found her online world. She was a member of no less than forty different interest groups. Now most of these are what you would expect, she was a member of the groups for the classes at the shop where she taught, Cornell Knitters, she's a Firefly fan; she likes to knit shawls, nothing really stood out, until I got to this one." Every group on her page had a pictoral button linking to the specific forum, but one just had a blank box. That was the one Garcia clicked.

"Ravelers of narcissistic parents?" JJ asked.

"There we go." Rossi replied.

"Narcissistic Personality Disorder is similar to Borderline Personality Disorder only without the annoying empathy." Blake said. Narcissists have such an elevated sense of self-worth that they value themselves as inherently better than others. Yet, they have a fragile self-esteem and cannot handle criticism, and will often try to compensate for this inner fragility by belittling or disparaging others in an attempt to validate their own self-worth. It is this sadistic tendency that is characteristic of narcissism as opposed to other psychological conditions."

"They usually turn that sadism on one particular person in their lives, the scapegoat." Morgan continued. "Because the narcissist cannot accept their faults, they spend their time trying to convince themselves that everything they do is perfect. When something goes wrong they can't accept the blame so they must try to convince themselves and the people around them that the problems are coming not from them, but another source. In their mind, by blaming another, they absolve themselves of any wrongdoing, and they can continue to believe and strive to convince others that they are in fact, perfect. But they must first have someone to blame. Enter the scapegoat. The scapegoat is blamed for everything that goes wrong in the family, period. They can do nothing right, any praise or success they earn takes something away from the narcissist. In fact the more successful they are the more emotional abuse the narcissist will heap on them just to maintain their place in the family dynamic. They have to be inherently bad or guilty or wrong in order to provide the narcissist with the support they need."

"Usually the scapegoat is a child in the family." Rossi added. "They don't have the agency to fight back, to convince anyone in their circle that the narcissist is lying, and they're unable to escape. The child of the first wife is the perfect victim, everyone knows how stepchildren rebel."

"That might have been part of what Martha Walderman saw in her." Hotch said. "That might have been part of what she was helping with. The housemate, Tonya, said that Martha convinced her to go no contact."

Rossi looked over at JJ and Garcia. "As hard as it sounds most of the time that's the only way to cope with a narcissist, move to another community and sever as many ties as you can. They're going to keep poisoning the well, telling everyone in their circle that you're a bad seed. So you move to another circle, let them have their fun while you start a new, clean life. That's exactly what Laura did; she moved well away and started a successful life on her own terms. That's why she was such a straight arrow, the straighter her life, the more successful, the more she showed she could do everything just right, the more it hurt her stepmother, the ultimate good girl rebellion. That even explains why she was making a hope chest under Martha's name, it could well have been Martha's idea, to give her the safety to have hopes and dreams that her stepmother couldn't destroy."

"And why she kept a porn collection rather than actually experimenting, she kept her sex drive where the stepmother couldn't use it to shame and abuse her. So…" Blake sighed. "Are we saying that what Spencer and Laura have in common is that they both grew up with mentally ill mothers? Is that what the Unsub was looking for?"

"I doubt it. Few people knew about Diana Reid's illness. And a narcissist looks fine from the outside, someone just doing background, even stalking, probably wouldn't realize she was ill unless they knew what to look for."

"But that's the only commonality we've found so far." JJ pointed out. "These two never crossed paths in any way."

Blake groaned. "Oh, I hate to say it but I wish I'd never met Spencer." She said. "I want to just rip every memory I have out of my head and start fresh with his profile because I know we're missing something and I just can't figure out what."

They were all quiet for a moment. Then Hotch spoke up. "Maybe we can."