Shadow Unit

Case Files


Teasers & Deleted Scenes

Ashton, VA, 2002

Wilson Currey was 31 and working as a Bank of America branch manager when he was tried and acquitted for the murder of his 58-year-old mother, with whom he was living. It was easy to prove that Currey killed her in self defense; all the evidence at the scene, as well as on the body and on Currey, indicated his mother had attacked him with a kitchen knife. She was known to be verbally abusive and unreasonably demanding, and the neighbors testified her behavior had been erratic for the past month. The coroner didn't find any sign of brain deterioration leading to dementia, but he didn't rule it out.

Currey would never have appeared on the ACTF's radar if he'd stopped there. But he was involved in another self-defense killing a year later. This time the would- be assailant was Currey's girlfriend of six months, Ellie Mendoza, and the weapon was a broken beer bottle.

In both cases, cause of death was a crushed windpipe. Currey was larger and stronger than either assailant, but was unarmed, and testified that he tried to disarm his mother and Ms. Mendoza, but failed. The defensive wounds on his hands and arms supported that statement.

When he killed his next-door neighbor six months later, again in self defense, the ACTF entered the investigation and determined that Currey was provoking violent, delusional behavior in his victims. This gave him justification for the murders he wanted to commit, and a legal defense against prosecution. His first murder freed him from the influence of his abusive mother and allowed him to inherit her property. After that, murder became Currey's solution to any interpersonal conflict.

He was the only child of his parents, who divorced when he was eleven. He was subsequently raised by his mother, who bullied him and manipulated him into continuing to live with her. Shortly before his mother's murder, the woman Currey had been dating for three months broke up with him, citing his relationship with his mother as the reason.

Wilson Currey was the fifth anomalous host taken alive, and the first to be committed directly to Idlewood. He also became one of the treatment program's tragedies. He died shortly after admission of cranial trauma, when he provoked an orderly who had been insufficiently briefed on Currey's condition and the precautionary procedures related to it.

Currey's death, and the subsequent death of orderly Tony Clifford, prompted a complete overhaul of the management, training, and security at Idlewood.

--from the notes of Supervisory Special Agent Stephen Reyes