He was Alex Lynch, a fifty-three year-old welder with a small trucking company outside of Williamsburg, Virginia. Before he went on his killing spree, hed never committed a single crime. He was a law-abiding, tax-paying, model American citizen. When Rachel and her partner at the time (and older gentleman that had since been given desk jobs after blowing out a knee on another case) finally caught up to him, he had just taken his seventh victim. The maniac had even applauded Rachel when she found him in the victims bedroom. Rachel often looked back to that moment, Alex Lynch clapping for her with the victims blood all over his hands.

Those two weeks of Alex Lynchs life had been studied and documented closely by criminal profilers and ravenous media outlets over the years that followed. According to the official story, Alex Lynch returned a weed eater he had borrowed from a neighbor in his neighborhood along the outskirts of Williamsburg. The men had words over a ding in the weed-eaters cover and in what Lynch later described a blinding sort of rage where I left my body, he struck his neighbor in the face with the weed eater. He then turned the body of the weed eater around and continued to strike his neighbors face while he was on the floor. Lynch could not recall when the man died but he kept striking and striking until the entire back end of the weed eater was destroyed, and the lower half of his neighbors face had been like jelly.

Lynch later told Rachel and other FBI agents that hed nearly called the police to report what hed done, but hed been too amped up on adrenaline to make any sense of what hed done. He claimed to have enjoyed what hed done and within two or three hours had started to figure out how he might be able to do it again without being caught.

His next victim came just fourteen hours later in the small town of Poquoson, in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. He killed an ex-girlfriend and her husband in their home. The husband was killed with a knife directly through the throat. The ex-girlfriends fate was considerably worse. When her body was found the following day, she was missing two fingers, most of the skin from her face, and had been stabbed seventeen times. Some of the stab wounds had been done with a knife, but some had been done with a screwdriver.