Here's What Makes Criminal Minds Killer J.B. Allen So Twisted

Season 7 of CBS' fan-favorite crime procedural "Criminal Minds" might have been full of major shake-ups, but the episode "Foundation" is about as classic as "Criminal Minds" episodes come. It focuses mostly on the case at hand — rather than developing much backstory about the personal lives of the agents of the Behavioral Analysis Unit — and the storyline is pretty linear, without many flashbacks or weird profiling scenes where the BAU agents talk directly to the camera. The most classic part of all? Having a mysterious and seriously twisted unsub — in this case, J.B. Allen (TV star Garrett M. Brown), a pedophile and serial killer who holds young boys captive in a cell beneath a trap door in his basement, sometimes for years at a time.

The episode opens with a young family driving down a secluded Arizona highway. It's all fun and games (and plenty of corny jokes from the dad in typical fashion), until they see an obviously wounded and traumatized boy on the road, grasping out for their help. He's Angel Suarez (Jonathan Castellanos), a freshly escaped victim of J.B. Allen, and he's in rough shape. His ankles are chafed from being chained and his feet are cut up from his escape through the cactus-riddled desert. His escape from captivity is a good thing, of course, but Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) suspects that another child who went missing around the time Angel was found, a 13-year-old boy named Billy Henderson (Jackson Pace), might have been taken by the same monster who tortured Angel — and he's right.

In addition to being held in captivity, shackled beneath a house in a cell with no windows, the victims of J.B. Allen face physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their captor. After a lot of working with Angel, Agent Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore) and Agent Jennifer "JJ" Jareau (A.J. Cook) finally break through his trauma-induced silence to learn that J.B. used to bite him, and although it had been a while since the last bite, his bites were so deep that their marks remain as scars on Angel's skin. Morgan identifies with Angel, as he too was sexually abused as a child, so the stakes are high to uncover J.B.'s identity.

Being that it was always dark in the cell, Angel is unable to comment on his abuser's appearance, but the BAU gets a lucky break when Samantha "Sam" Allen (Hedy Burress) visits the police station after seeing the news of Angel's escape. Although Sam's search of her father's basement yields no Billy, she proves invaluable to the team, as she combines her newly uncovered memories with Agent Emily Prentiss' (Paget Brewster) knowledge of child psychology and serial killer profiling. Without Sam, the BAU would never have found out that J.B. picked up his victims at his various real estate development sites by offering to give them rides on his backhoe — and they never would have learned that, of his many properties, his Mesa, Arizona, home would be where he transferred Billy.

At the station, Chief Aaron "Hotch" Hotchner (Thomas Gibson) returns Billy to his parents after saving him from being buried alive in Mesa, a happy moment that builds onto the audience's already raw emotions from the earlier reunion scene of Angel and his mother. But things aren't all sunshine and rainbows.

In an instant, things turn absolutely chilling when the camera focuses on Sam as she looks away from this joyous scene to witness Agent David Rossi (Joe Mantegna) bringing her father into the station, himself now shackled. Their eyes meet, and ... nothing. J.B. looks away without a thought, and the person Sam knew as her father — the man who encouraged her to be involved in her community, offered her his famous chili, and raised her as a single parent after her mom died of cancer when she was 5 — no longer exists. It was all a facade, and she realizes that she has no parents left in this world. 

J.B. Allen was so twisted not only for what he did to those kids, but also for how well he hid his villainous true self behind a family-man mask.