Here's What Makes Criminal Minds Killer Floyd Feylinn Ferell So Twisted

Without its portrayal of twisted serial killers, CBS' "Criminal Minds" would never have achieved the immense popularity that it did. And when we say twisted, we mean it. From killer kids to highly-trained double agents working to uncover the U.S. State Department's secrets, the hit crime procedural chills viewers no matter the unsub. 

Some of the murderers that the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit profiles are even based on real-life serial killers, making them all the more disturbing for audiences familiar with their newsworthy crimes. Others, like Floyd "Lucky" Feylinn Ferell (played by the actor and comedian Jamie Kennedy) from the Season 3 episode "Lucky," are fictional creations, even if some of the details of their crimes are amalgamated from actual cases.

Floyd Feylinn Ferell is a classically creepy "Criminal Minds" unsub in that he has a complicated psyche and meticulous killing methodology. Oh, and he's a cannibal, so that's a bonus if you're looking to get spooked. Here's why Floyd Ferell is such a twisted unsub.

The episode opens with a flashback to 1988, when Floyd Feylinn Ferell was a minor being held at the Florida-located Hazelwood Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He's about to turn 18, so the doctors by law must discharge him, although they're scared that his sadistic sexual fantasies will start becoming murderous realities once he's released. Before we the audience even see the BAU, we already learn about his proclivity for violence — and his worship of the Christian Devil, which he uses to justify his homicidal urges.

Flashforward to present day, when the 19-year-old Abby Kelton is found dead in her town of Bridgewater, Florida, her body totally brutalized. Only her upper half was found, her throat slit. A pentagram was carved into her chest, and she was forced to eat 10 severed fingers, none of them her own — yikes. The BAU deals with a lot of corpses, but the bodies Ferell leaves behind are some of the most disturbingly butchered. Even though there's only one body at this point, the BAU knows they've got a sadistic serial killer on their hands.

Particularly tragic is that when Garcia runs the prints on the fingers found at the scene of the crime, her database easily finds matches for each finger, as all the victims had criminal records for sex work. It was only once a respectable college girl went missing that the local police cared enough to investigate. From the start, it's clear that Floyd Feylinn Ferell is a cold and calculated killer targeting society's low-hanging fruit.

After Agent Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore) finds another victim sitting in the church pews with her neck slashed, the team learns that she was reported missing nine months prior, and Chief Aaron "Hotch" Hotchner has a grim theory: The serial killer had kept her dead body frozen for all that time because ... he is slowly eating his victims. Those fingers that were found in Abby Kelton's stomach? Yeah, they were not only a message about the frequency of this twisted murderer's kills.

When the BAU visits Floyd Feylinn Ferell's home, Agent Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster) discovers, to her horror, that his kitchen hosts a bunch of butcher equipment — although it's his basement that's truly terrifying. There, the BAU discovers three rooms: One with a holding cell for Ferell's newest victims, one with a Satanic shrine, and one with a restaurant-sized freezer full of human bodies waiting to be eaten. Floyd is found praying in his shrine room, and the BAU takes him into custody, where they learn that he kills his victims after 72 hours, then freezes them for later consumption.

A final twist keeps things creepy till the very end: The BAU discovers that Ferell isn't the only one eating his victims. He's also been serving their flesh to the Bridgewater community for quite some time, using his Bar-B-Que restaurant in an attempt to diffuse his guilt about his crimes throughout the town. After watching the story of Floyd Feylinn Ferell unfold, we hope your appetite is more resilient than ours.