Gretchen Lowell

Gretchen Lowell terrorized the Pacific Northwest for a decade as the serial killer known as the Beauty Killer. She is the primary antagonist of the series, but also helps the protagonists to take on other killers throughout the series.

### Aliases

Beauty Killer, The Serial Killer Centerfold, The Queen of Hearts, The Queen of Evil, Gretchen Stevens

### Occupation

Nurse, Med Student, Psychiatrist, Serial Killer

## Pre-Series

Gretchen's recorded history begins as a teenager, when she walks out of the woods into the town of St. Helens, Oregon. She spends some time there, using the name Gretchen Stevens, and is fostered by the Beaton family before killing James Beaton and leaving with Colin Beaton. Her next known appearance is in Utah, where she is arrested at 19 for passing a bad check, now using the name Gretchen Lowell. At some time during this period she also gives birth to her daughter, Lily, whom she gives up for adoption two years later. She claims to have worked as an ER nurse and to have gone to medical school, but dropped out.

Gretchen then proceeds to kill just a metric fuckton of people in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, choosing victims from all backgrounds and inflicting a variety of tortures on them, "She was consistent with the torso damage. She cut them, stabbed them, carved them, burned them sometimes. But there was a Chinese Menu of other psycho shit. Sometimes she made them drink drain cleaner. Sometimes she dissected the bodies. Removed their spleens. Took out their appendixes. Tongues." Before finally infiltrating the Beauty Killer Task Force, claiming to be a psychiatrist who's given up her practice to write a book. She offers to help the officers on the task force to cope with the stress of the job, offering group talk sessions and individual therapy sessions. During this time she begins an affair with Archie Sheridan, culminating in kidnapping him, taking him to a basement in Gresham, and torturing him for ten days before calling 911 and turning herself in. She gives him CPR for thirty minutes until the ambulance can arrive. Gretchen claims that Archie is victim number two hundred.

During sentencing she agrees to a plea deal: She pleads guilty to five murders in Oregon and six in Washington and Idaho, as well as to kidnapping and attempted murder of Archie Sheridan, and will meet with Archie Sheridan weekly to give up locations of further bodies and information about people she has killed, in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.

## Heartsick

Gretchen asks to see Susan Ward upon learning that she has been interviewing Archie Sheridan and those close to him. She has gone several months without giving up any names of victims, up until the morning that Archie brings Susan to see her. That morning she gives the name before he arrives and identifies the victim from pictures when he arrives, before he comes in to talk to her. He then brings Susan in, and Gretchen identifies the fact that Susan had been sexually abused by her teacher, Paul Reston. Gretchen claims to have deduced this, but in fact Gretchen knows from her own past relationship with Reston. Gretchen then gives Archie her full confession about how she killed the girl she confessed to that morning.

After apprehending Reston, Archie travels to Salem to see Gretchen. They talk, and she claims she will take him to Stockholm someday. Despite her protests, Archie declares that he won't come to see her anymore, and leaves.

## Sweetheart

Gretchen is attacked by a guard at the prison, and claims that she will only give the name of the guard to Archie Sheridan. However, when he arrives she refuses to tell him either. The guard turns up dead of an apparent suicide. Archie plans to come back to re-start the Victim Identification Project, but Henry Sobol steps in and has Gretchen transferred to a penitentiary in Eastern Oregon, preventing Archie from seein her. En route to the Eastern Oregon site, Gretchen kills her guards and escapes. She goes first to Archie's children's grade school, making a call to Archie from there before leaving two lunch boxes containing halved organs in the school office. She then meets Archie behind the Arlington(?) Club and drives to a cabin in the mountains with him, close to the path of the oncoming wildfires. There