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"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | My family's been here for a long time. | „ |
| ~ Childress to detectives Rust and Martin. |
Errol William Chilldress is the titular main antagonist of the first season of True Detective, a live-action series streamed by HBO.
He is a seemingly normal man from Louisiana who is eventually investigated by detectives Rust Cohle and Martin Hart due to suspicion he is involved in multiple murders.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- It is revealed that his family is involved in the Tuttle Cult, which involves human sacrifices that Childress participated in order to receive spiritual guidance and ascension form his deity, Hastur. He thus became the leader de facto after the death of his father.
- One of his victims was a woman named Dora Lange in 1995, and she was found by detective Rust Cohle in a ritualistic pose, with deer antlers above her head and seemingly praying to a lonely tree. Rust notes that this was not his first murder.
- Children were also not safe from him, as it is implied he is behind the death of a girl named Rianne Olivier. Also, as the detectives investigate his crimes they come to find a girl who managed to escape him, but she has enough trauma to be terrified when remembering the encounter, even calling him the "spaghetti monster", due to the scars on his face.
- When encountered by the detectives for the first time, he is seen posing as a normal groundkeeper and manages to avoid suspicion, and also tells the detectives that his family has been in Louisiana "for a long time".
- He is likely involved in the widespread ritualised sexual abuse of children at schools run by the Tuttle Foundation, as one of the surviving victims tells Rust that one of the main abusers was a large man with scars.
- He participates in the kidnapping, rape and torture of a young boy and girl alongside two accomplices, Reggie and Dewall Ledoux. This results in the death of the boy. The surviving victim later tells Rust that of all her abusers, he was the worst, and is traumatized to the point that she can only scream when asked to recall what he did to her.
- In 2005, when the city of Louisiana was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, and since Reggie was supposed to be the mastermind of all crimes, he managed to continue killing an indefinite amount of people between this year and 2012, when another woman was found dead in a manner similar to that of Dora Lange.
- When he is finally tracked by Rust and Martin, he ambushes them by waiting inside Carcosa, a kind of religious altar hidden within various halls, and tried to kill both of them, wounding both with an axe and almost succeeding in killing Rust, only failing because of being fatally shot in the head.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- His past with his family has no doubt helped shape him into the way he became, with the scars on his face being proof of the rituals that his father made to him in order to teach him about the Tuttle Cult, and also why he was once called the "spaghetti monster". This abuse alienated him from the rest of society and makes him tragic. He also says that he's going to do "what they did to me" to his victims ("they" being his family), which implies that his crimes are a way of re-enacting the abuse he suffered from the cult.
- Also, while he has an incestuous relationship with his sister, he is not seen mistreating her, and even takes his time to explain to her his spiritual state and telling her that he sometimes sees the "infernal plane". Given that he has no pragmatic reason to tell her about such personal matters, this shows he may genuinely love her, her being the closest thing to a normal familiar relationship he ever had.
Trivia[]
- According to showrunner Nic Pizolatto, the reason Errol's murder of Dora Lange was so ostentatious was because he was intentionally trying to attract attention in the hope that the investigation would lead to the Tuttle cult being exposed. If this detail had been included in the script it would have made Errol even further from pure evil.