Close to Home Recap: Deacon
On any given Halloween, it's not uncommon to find a number of scary countenances out and about. But on this particular night, one made its way into the home of a woman and decided to kill her in a particularly gruesome way. Not content to just kill her, it appears that the woman was tortured - perhaps strangled, then revived and strangled again. The only suspect is a waif of a woman who turns up with her shirt and purse, attempting to burn them across town. But she doesn't seem to possess the strength needed for such a crime.
As the crew investigates the scene, details seem scarce. When they find someone from an AA meeting who knows the woman doing the burning, he says that she told him that her father may have been involved, so a warrant is obtained to search the father's house, but it is on sketchy ground, at best. An unfortunate turn when a notebook turns up there containing details of killings that happened years before and it looks like the man may be a notorious serial killer, so the search is on for some more solid evidence.
The only thing that they can find are some hand written notes in the margins of community citations where it appears that he has been stalking the victims. In the latest case, it looks like he's been watching the house to record when the husband came and went and the woman was home alone. This could perhaps be argued as the job of a community watchman, but it could also be argued as a serial killer's motives, but it's shaky ground and they need something else, so they look for similar crimes that perhaps didn't result in death, and that's when they find someone from a few years back who didn't die, and that's what solidifies it.
Apparently The Professor (as he wanted to be called) fancied himself as a bit of an intellectual, but this woman said he was anything but. He would choke her and revive her, over and over, and then she provided some rather humiliating details that would essentially destroy the reputation that he had so lovingly built up over the years, and that was strangely enough to get him to confess to all nine murders without so much as a trial. He just didn't want anyone knowing his secret.
