Wade Weller is a counselor at the Angel City homeless shelter and serial rapist/killer. His character was introduced fully in the episode Return to Sender.
History[]
Weller was born on September 15, 1984 under the name Ryan Mills to a woman named Susan. Susan Mills was a heroin addict who worked as a prostitute to support her drug habit and her son. One night, by the time Ryan was almost fourteen, they met a man named Henry Jinks who took them off the streets and moved Ryan and his mom into his place at Marina Del Ray. Eventually Jinks started raping Ryan. Susan claims not to have known but she did know Henry insisted on sharing one of the home's two bedrooms with Ryan. (She occupied the other.) After a while Henry stopped bringing drugs into the house and gave Susan $20,000 to leave Los Angeles and start her life over in San Francisco. She came back on her son's 14th birthday but Henry had moved away with Ryan.
Eventually Ryan grew up, changed his name to Wade Weller and started abducting, raping, and killing runaway teenaged boys. During the investigation into one of these boys disappearances Ryan got spooked and contacted defense attorney Phillip Stroh for advise on how to deal with the situation. Stroh gave him advice and told him that he would eventually call in the favor one day. Wade Weller was never arrested so he didn't end up in the system.
When Phillip Stroh was arrested and put on trial for rape and murder himself he contacted Weller via an inmate named Keith Mapleton and instructed him to start write threatening letters to the primary witness in the case: Rusty Beck. After Mapelton, delivered the message, Weller killed him in the same manner he killed his victims and began writing Rusty letters over the next few months. When Rusty showed no signs of backing out of testifying Stroh sent another message via an inmate named Russell Jackson which instructed Weller to write threatening letters to Captain Sharon Raydor in addition to the ones to Rusty.
After Weller killed Jackson he wrote the letters to Sharon as instructed but neither party showed signs of backing off. Finally Stroh got impatient with Weller's progress and sent one last inmate named Jesus Mario Chavez to deliver a message: "You have one week to kill either Rusty or Sharon." After the message is delivered Weller kills Chavez and dumps his body into a pond. However, this catches the LAPD's attention as they note the three similar murders and learn that Chavez was bringing him Red Wings pencils and a notebook that matched the threatening letters sent to Rusty and Sharon, causing them to realize they were hunting the letter writer as well.
During the months between being instructed by Stroh to threaten Rusty and the order to kill him, Weller conducted extensive surveillance upon the Major Crimes Division and those connected to them in preparation for the murder. Weller was able to discover Rusty's SIS mission to capture him and, in disguise, visited the chess park five different times to watch Rusty and establish himself as a regular. He also spent months flirting with gay bartender Gregory Boone who lived in the same building as Sharon's condo. As a final preparation, Weller played chess with Rusty in the park, put on music to disguise their conversation and pretended to be a part of the SIS operation. Weller added to the act by pointing out imperfections in Rusty's wardrobe and got Rusty to tell him the details of the protection detail. Weller made sure to hide his face well, but his actions drew the suspicions of SIS Lieutenant Chuck Cooper who had the chess pieces with Weller's fingerprints collected.
Having gotten all he needed, Weller finally went home with Boone, murdered him in the same way as his other victims (apparently to gain access and control of Boone's apartment) and dumped the body in a remote canyon far from his usual dump sites in hopes that Boone's corpse wouldn't be discovered -- but it was due to a coincidental investigation into a missing boy scout in the same remote location. Weller then used Boone's car to gain access to Sharon's building and lured Rusty into Boone's apartment under the guise of it being a safe room. However, by this point, Boone's body had been identified and his connection to Sharon's building revealed.
As Weller went to kill Rusty, he made the mistake of bragging that the couch cover was to avoid making a mess which drew Rusty's attention at the last moment. Rusty dodged Weller's attack while Sharon, having been alerted about the threat to Rusty, ran to the apartment and broke the lock in, using a fire extinguisher to break the lock. Weller fled, briefly exchanging fire with Sharon and managed to escape out the window, but not before he suffered a neck wound that left his blood, and, thus, DNA, behind.
Rather than running right away, Weller returned to work at Angel City as he wanted to say goodbye to Tyler Lang, a boy who was the one person Weller felt truly cared about him and vice versa. After Tyler returned, Weller told the boy he had to go because he failed to complete a job for someone. While Weller initially planned to just say goodbye, Tyler convinced Weller to take him with him.
At the same time, the LAPD and the FBI attempted to identify Weller. While they had his fingerprints and DNA, neither was in any database. Weller's DNA led them to his mother, Susan Mills, who was able to supply them with his birthday, but could provide no information on his whereabouts beyond when she last saw him in 1998. At the same time, Stroh, presumably because Weller failed him, offered, via his attorney Linda Rothman, to turn Weller over to the police in exchange for a deal. Though the LAPD refused, Stroh supplied them with a list of some of Weller's victims which gave them a starting point in their search.
As Weller prepared to flee town, Detective Amy Sykes linked the couch covers Weller used and two of his victims to Angel City Shelter. By the time the police arrived, Weller was gone, ostensibly to take Tyler to DCFS for a health check. However, the police found his desk with the same type of pencils used the write the threatening letters and fingerprints from Weller's desk matched those of the letter writer.
After getting Weller's phone number from his boss, the LAPD and FBI put into motion a plan to stop him once and for all. With Agent Fritz Howard using Weller's cell phone to track his location, the LAPD instituted roadblocks around the area Weller's phone showed him to be in. With Weller's car contained, Lieutenant Michael Tao sent out an Amber Alert on Tyler Lang, identifying and describing the boy as well as Weller's car. Weller spotted the people around him receiving the Amber Alert on their phones and police heading his way and panicked.
Abandoning Tyler, Weller made a run for it down nearby alleys where the Major Crimes Division was waiting for him. Cornered, Weller took Tyler, who had followed him in confusion, hostage. Threatening to kill Tyler, the cornered Weller backed towards an open door nearby in an attempt to escape. Raydor determined that Weller was too close to Tyler to risk a shot. Marksman Detective Julio Sanchez was also unable to get a clean shot, even with a rifle. As Weller was backing through the door, he was shot in the head by Lieutenant Louie Provenza, ending his reign of terror over Sharon and Rusty.
In “Two Options”, while discussing liability issues, Deputy City Attorney Gloria Lim reminds everyone of how Provenza killed Weller the previous January. Furthermore, Rusty tries to use his SIS operation to catch Weller as his twenty hours of community service for the LAPD, but it is rejected as Rusty's hours had to be served in the summertime.
In “By Any Means, Part 3”, Weller is listed as one of Stroh's accomplices on the murder board following Stroh's return to LA. In an attempt to make Stroh's latest accomplice Dylan Baxter reconsider working with Stroh, Sanchez notes how Weller ended up dead, just like several other Stroh accomplices.
Modus Operandi[]
Weller targeted runaway teenaged boys who came to his shelter, Angel City, seeking help that reminded him of himself. After Weller got to know them he would invite them to his place where he would have them sit down on his couch covered in plastic. He then proceed to stab them twice in the chest and once in the neck. After killing his victims he would bury the bodies in his backyard or dump them in random locations. When Stroh started sending convicts to his house he had them sit on the couch too and stabbed them to death and dumped their bodes in public places. The exception was Gregory Boone who was dumped in the mountains in the hope the police wouldn't find his body.
Known Victims[]
- The first series of attacks (all raped and killed)
- Fifteen unnamed teenage boys
- Billy Pryor
- Alex Brown
- Andrew Collins
- Johnny Miller
- Gary Barton
- Charles Perry
- The second series of attacks (killed only on Stroh's orders)
- Keith Mapleton
- Russell Jackson
- Jesus Mario Chavez
- Gregory Boone
- Rusty Beck (attempted)
- Tyler Lang (held hostage)
Trivia[]
- A deleted scene for "Return to Sender Part 2" suggests that Tyler Lang may have been able to lead the LAPD to the bodies of Weller's victims.
- Weller's interactions with Lang, aside from his taking him hostage, indicate that he may have genuinely cared for him and didn't intend Lang to be a future victim. Weller waited to flee specifically to say goodbye to Lang, showed real reluctance to take Lang with him and admitted that he felt like Lang was the only one that really cared about him. Its possible Weller saw Lang as a kindred-spirit and only threatened him as an act of desperation when surrounded by the police.