Suzanne and Lawrence Silvan

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**Suzanne and Lawrence Silvan**, also known as **The Mommy and Daddy Murderers** are the main antagonists of the "Criminal Minds" novel *Finishing School*. The Silvans are a married couple of child abductors who would regularly kidnap girls and raise them into adolescence, until Suzanne poisoned them in mercy killings and insisted Lawrence find her a new group of girls to raise.

## Background

Suzanne was born sometime in the 1960s and raised on a small, secluded farm in Ames, Iowa. As a child, Suzanne was abused verbally and physically by her father Jacob Hamilton and, when she reached adolescence and began menstruation, the abuse became sexual. At some point, Suzanne's father impregnated her, forcing her mother Tess into bringing her to a back-alley abortionist, whom she also had render Suzanne completely infertile. Shortly after Suzanne's abortion, Tess, unable to deal with life anymore, committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, with Jacob dying soon afterward when a gun he was cleaning went off and shot him. Not much is known about Lawrence's early life, other than he attended a college in Atlanta, Georgia. Surviving on her own for several years, Suzanne met Lawrence Silvan in Atlanta, Georgia, and the two instantly fell in love, marrying after Lawrence graduated from college and got a job working for a high-end logging company. Suzanne was obsessed with having children, but her childhood abortion left her unable to conceive, so, in 1988, she managed to convince Lawrence to abduct three children, all of them little girls, who Suzanne renamed and raised as her own. For ten years, he and Suzanne raised the three children happily until they reached puberty, to which Suzanne killed them in 1998 by overdosing them on her prescription medication while Lawrence was at work. While Lawrence was greatly unnerved by this, he remained faithful to Suzanne and continued to follow her orders, abducting three more girls after burying the original three in the woods. Since then, he moved the family to Bemidji, Minnesota, where after another decade or so of normalcy, Suzanne killed off her current batch of children when they grew too old for her liking, having Lawrence bury them as well. Months prior to the events of the book, he made plans to move the family to another state and start anew.

## Finishing School

To complete this plan, he abducted two more girls and intended to frame a coworker for the latest murders by planting evidence into a car that he sold to the man. In 2008, a trio of hunters stumbled on the bodies of the last three girls, prompting the local police to call in the BAU to help investigate the murders. Coincidentally, however, the BAU, while investigating the second set of murders, were interrogating the same man and caught him in the act. Lawrence was arrested, but not before he managed to warn Suzanne of the authorities in a phone call, telling her to run. She fled to her childhood home, but the BAU, realizing her destination, got there first, and she was arrested. Suzanne feigns innocence, putting the blame squarely on Lawrence, who she claims had told her he had adopted all their children, also stating she had no idea he was killing them. Rossi manages to break Suzanne down when he tells her that Lawrence had confessed to molesting the girls, causing the completely horrified Suzanne to blurt out a confession, all the while bemoaning the fact that she had failed to protect her girls. While a state trooper takes Suzanne away, Rossi tells her he had lied, as Lawrence never said he had sex with the girls, but he had confessed to his and her crimes and was willing to go to death row for her. The tabloids would come to call the abductions and murders Suzanne and Lawrence committed "The Mommy and Daddy Murders".

## Profile

The victims appearing well taken care of, lacking any sign of sexual abuse, and the lack of ransom demands suggest the unsub abducts children due to being unable to have any of their own. The clothes the children were buried in implies an unsub of a middle-class background and, as the girls were held for years, it means the unsub either works from home, keeps the girls captive in some secluded location, or has a partner. The girls being killed when they reached adolescence means the unsub likely loved them as children, but hates them as women, believing they would lose control of them when they started growing up.

However, when it became apparent that it was a team they were dealing with, probably a married couple, the BAU profiled the husband as the abductor and the wife as the killer; the husband would do the grunt work, be mild-mannered, subservient, non-threatening, and completely abhorred to violence; while the wife, who probably had a very abusive childhood, would be the one in control. Suzanne believed that by killing her girls before they grew up, she was keeping them pure, stopping any men (including her husband) from tainting them and hurting them, making her a type of Angel of Death.

Suzanne referred to poisoning the girls as "sending them to finishing school" for reasons never explained; even Lawrence remained in the dark as to the expression's origin. It's presumed Suzanne believed the girls would have a better chance at peace and maturity ironically if they were dead and "in a better place" than if they grew into women when they were alive.

## Modus Operandi

The couple targeted young girls, all of whom would fill out the spots as their daughters. At Suzanne's order, Lawrence would abduct them, usually three at a time, while Suzanne would raise the girls Larry abducted as her own. She would rename them, school them, and, presumably, bar them from leaving the house. When the girls reached adolescence and began their period, Suzanne, to protect them from any men, including her husband, who would want them sexually, poisoned them with hydrocodone, a barbiturate she was prescribed for her chronic pain and nightmares. After killing the girls, Suzanne would dress them in homemade clothing and wrap them in layers, the first layer being blankets, the second winter clothing and the last plastic tarps; the girls would then be buried in graves Larry dug in the forest he was currently working in.

## Known Victims

* Unspecified date, Ames, Iowa: Jacob Hamilton (Suzanne's father; presumably shot by Suzanne; his death was deemed suspicious)
* Atlanta, Georgia:
	+ 1988: The first set of victims (abducted; all were eventually killed by Suzanne):
		- Ellen
		- Two other unnamed girls
	+ 1998: The second set of victims (abducted; all were eventually killed in Bemidji, Minnesota by Suzanne):
		- Abigail Mathis
		- Heather Davison
		- Lee Ann Clark
* 2008, Bemidji, Minnesota: The third set of victims (abducted by Lawrence; both were rescued):
	+ Sophie Scheckel
	+ Unnamed girl