Ray Porter

Ray Porter is a lobbyist who appears in The Knight on the Grid. Ever since his death, he was only referred to, by the main characters, as The Lobbyist.
==History==
Booth and Sweets identified him as a potential victim of The Gormogon, reflecting The Corrupter from the Major Arcana in the Tarot cards sewn on the tapestry from the Gormogon Vault. When they brought him to the FBI, he merely scoffs at the idea of a cannibal targeting him because he was a widow's son, having lost his father when he was six, and because he went to visit the Anatolian Region in Turkey with his fellow Knights of Colombus to visit the mythical site of the Garden of Eden, having arranged the trip himself (which reflects one being a "pretender to the throne" according to Sweets). He passes off their warning as "influence peddling" and defiantly questions how stupid they think he is, which further pointed out his status as a corruptor and his stupidity according to Brennan. 
When Gormogon set off a bomb, using his teeth as shrapnel, in a vain attempt to kill Booth and Brennan, they realize it's because they know Ray Porter was his next target. Booth barges into his mansion, where he finds the naked Porter, positioned in the same manner as the Silver Skeleton of the Widow's Son and his mouth tied with a rag. He tells Booth the attacker went downstairs wielding a knife before Booth sees Gormogon fleeing through the front door and chases after him only to lose him. Ray Porter was saved initially, but by the end of the episode, he was stabbed to death by The Apprentice, who was hiding in his closet.
He was cannibalized, and his remains were sent to the Jeffersonian by The Pain in the Heart, spread across various bone storage drawers from Limbo. Gormogon also sent the mandible directly to Brennan along with a pair of silver screws, wanting her to add the mandible to the Silver Skeleton, but she refuses. The team examines the mandible, but while Zack tells the team that he found traces of PMMA used in making synthetic plastics for homemade dentures, Brennan later examines it more closely, and discovers that they were teeth marks made by Gormogon, but he chewed on the bones using a set of dentures made from canine teeth stolen from multiple skulls from Limbo. She comes to the conclusion that Zack is Gormogon's apprentice, having stolen the teeth from bone storage to craft Gormogon's dentures and arranged for the explosion that mutilated his hands when they tried recreating the process of crafting homemade dentures, but Zack took the brunt of the explosion himself to avoid hurting Hodgins. After using this fact to refute Gormogon's logic, Brennan convinces Zack to reveal the location of Gormogon to Booth, who later kills the cannibalistic serial killer in his house. Zack Addy confesses to "killing" Ray Porter and gets admitted to McKinley Psychiatric Hospital in exchange for full co-operation with Caroline Julian to avoid going to prison.
In The Perfect Pieces in the Purple Pond, he admitted to Sweets that he only gave The Master information on where to find Porter, but he never stabbed him. Sweets wanted him to tell his friends the truth, but Zack was afraid that since he is still an accessory to murder, if his secret were to come out that Booth would throw him in prison, and Hodgins assured him that he would not do well in prison. Sweets wanted him to tell the truth because he believes that The Apprentice is still out there, but Zack told him that "The Master" killed him in order to recruit Zack because "there could only ever be two." He reminds Sweets that unless he gives him permission, if he tells anyone the truth, then he would be violating doctor-patient confidentiality. the episode ends with Zack at the sanitarium and Sweets keeping Zack's secret, despite his concerns about him.
In The Hope in the Horror, after a close-to-death encounter with The Puppeteer, Zack admits to Booth and Brennan that he didn't kill Porter. Brennan agreed to re-examine the evidence and Booth agreed to help him get released from the institution.
Brennan starts re-examining the evidence in Porter's murder in The Brain in the Bot, and states that the evidence from her preliminary reexamination is inconclusive thus far. Booth later reveals to Brennan that he was able to move up the court date for Zack's appeal within the next two months to consider new osteological evidence, and while she has no evidence of the sort at such an early stage, Booth nonetheless has faith that the team will find what they need in time.
Porter's remains and murder scene are re-examined by Jack Hodgins in The Flaw in the Saw, and he comes across evidence on one of his ribs that could potentially exonerate Zack: the bacterial signature of The Apprentice preserved by Anthrax found in one of the stab wounds. After presenting the new evidence to Cam, she refuses to accept it and accuses Hodgins of planting evidence. Despite the fact that she refuses to accept the evidence, she goes over Hodgins' findings as he furiously leaves. Nonetheless, Cam and Brennan ultimately throw it out as was later revealed.
In The Steal in the Wheels, after all recent attempts to find new evidence at the murder scene pointing to Zack's innocence fail, Hodgins searches for the body of the Apprentice, Porter's real killer, to prove he killed Porter and not Zack. With the help of Doctor Gordon Wyatt, Hodgins locates the Apprentice's body buried in an inverse Masonic coffin beneath an acacia tree, and he's discovered to have what is presumably Porter's dried blood on his right cuff, the evidence needed to exonerate Zack being brought into the light.
In The Day in the Life, Zack has his appeal where Hodgins testifies that the blood found on the Apprentice's body was an exact match to that of Ray Porter, proving that the Apprentice was the killer rather than Zack, who has since rescinded his false confession. When Caroline brings up the possibility of him planting such compelling evidence since it was almost nine years after the murder, Hodgins explains that he also established a protocol where no one examined the evidence alone to prevent any accusations of evidence tampering. Ultimately, in light of this new evidence, Zack's conviction in the murder of Ray Porter is reversed and his life sentence gets overturned. While Zack is exonerated for Porter's murder, the charge of aiding a known killer still stands. As a result, Zack will still need to serve the last thirteen months on that charge before he is finally released back into society, which he accepts with grace as that time period means nothing compared to what he was facing before.
Category:Characters
Category:Murder Victims
Category:Season 3 characters