Dr. Robert Mills is a serial killer appearing in Blindness in Season 2 of Perception, known under the moniker The Invisible Reaper.
Background[]
Robert Mills was a dedicated quantitative psychologist, happily married with a daughter who took ballet lessons. On the night after her recital, a driver on his earpiece collided with their car from not paying attention to the road. His wife died instantly from the impact, his daughter being left quadriplegic, with the driver still getting out of the car to talk on the ear piece. Mills then became passionate about spreading awareness on cognitive blindness. However, with his emphasis on the studies and people not caring about his persona traumas, he failed to appeal for driving without cellphones as a law, his defense for Officer Kevin Conner over not seeing his colleagues beat a suspect was trashed and Conner was still convicted, and a civilian referee even wrote a letter to the papers commandeering the judge and obscenely defaming Mills by refusing to accept his studies, believing Conner to be another cop turning a blind eye to police brutality, so to speak. Mills finally saw his world crumble when his daughter died from complications of the accident. Once he finally snapped, he planned a murderous vendetta against all the people he was opposed by to spread his message, using cognitive blindness in their murders to add insult to injury and make more people pay attention to offer public awareness where it failed before. He started with luring the driver who killed his family to an unfinished overpass by misplacing traffic cones on the road. Then he sabotaged an elevator so the committee chairman who rejected his law proposition would fall down the empty shaft while busily talking on his cellphone. Once he avenged his family, he decided to up the ante in his crimes to further shock the world.
Blindness[]
To restore Officer Conner's name and support his studies, he killed Judge Walter Cleland, the judge presiding over Conner's trial. He stabbed the judge in his chambers, put on his robe, pretended to be him enough people wouldn't notice, then called a recess. He then killed Frank Lemmons, the coach by stabbing him while he was disguised in an alligator mascot costume. Everyone else focused so intently on the winning shot, they never saw him slip out and ditch the mascot outfit in time. When a wannabe killer tried to stab a stage performer in front of witnesses and falsely confessed to Mills' two known murders, Mills took it further and murdered Officer David Keopfer, the Internal Affairs official assigned to Conner's case. He brought him in dead, wearing sunglasses in a wheelchair, with a neck brace covering his stab wound. When Daniel Pierce and Kate Moretti arrived, they saw what happened and revealed his wound by removing the brace. Conner being the prime suspect in all of this, he was continuously interrogate and searched, but with Daniel seeing a book of neuroscience in a hallucination of the gator mascot when Conner was interrogated one last time, he realized finally that Mills was always responsible. They tracked his history and put the whole picture together, even finding his two other murders. They knew he wouldn't confess, so they set up a pre-recorded interview on the news in hoes he would confess. When they provoked him enough from carefully challenging his profiles and science, as well as mentioning his family's history sympathetically, he finally confessed so his message could be heard. After he told the story of his family's deaths, he confessed to the murders and his motives behind them. he was then arrested and taken into custody once the interview was over.
Modus Operandi[]
Mills targeted the driver responsible for killing his wife and daughter as well as others responsible for his case and other cases he represented based on his life's work. His signature methods involved challenging their cognitive blindness, either using it against them to murder them or using it against witnesses so they would't discover they were dead until it's too late, acclimating to directly stabbing them as he crusaded more through his murders.
Known Victims[]
- Unnamed driver (the man who killed his wife and daughter in a car accident; drove off an unfinished bridge by misdirecting traffic cones)
- Unnamed congressman (rejected his proposed bill for safer driving; sabotaged an elevator, making him fall down the empty shaft)
- Judge Walter Cleland (the judge presiding over Kevin Conner's trial: stabbed in the neck, then posed as him during another trial to call recess)
- Coach Frank Lemmons (wrote a cruel review on his defense for Conner; stabbed in the neck wearing a gator suit during the winning shot of the game he reffed)
- Officer David Koepfer (the IA officer who investigated Conner; stabbed in the neck; posed in a neck brace and wheelchair and left in his precinct postmortem)
- ADA Craig Scarlis (the prosecutor in Conner's trial; likely attempted, but was stopped)