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Christopher Pelant

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Nickname(s)

Hacktivist (himself)

Aliases

Bassam AlfayatJustin Trimple

Additional Information

Gender

Male

Date of Birth

1986

Date of Death

2013

Status

Deceased

Occupation Information

Occupation

IT instructorHackerWaiter (alternative reality)

Show Information

Portrayed by

Andrew Leeds

First Appearance

The Crack in the Code

Last Appearance

The Next in the Last List of Appearances [Source]

"Trying to make the system secure, we make it more complex. But the more complex we make it, the more insecure we actually are." ―Pelant[src]

Christopher Pelant or The Hacktivist was a serial killer introduced in the season seven episode "The Crack in the Code".

Contents

• 1 History
• 2 During the Series
  • 2.1 Season Seven
  • 2.2 Season Eight
  • 2.3 Season Nine
  • 2.4 Season Ten
• 3 Modus Operandi
• 4 Known Victims
• 5 Trivia
• 6 Notes

History[]

Christopher Pelant was born in Denmark in 1986 (according to Booth in The Corpse on the Canopy). After moving to the US as a child, he became an American citizen and was raised in the town of Pitt Meadows, Virginia. According to Sweets in The Past in the Present, his parents divorced when he was young and he was close to his father, though they rarely saw each other.

During high school, Pelant asked his guidance counselor, Carole Morrissey, to write him a letter of recommendation for Stanford, but she refused. In response, he hacked into her computer and wrote the recommendation himself. Pelant then killed her with a katana he "borrowed" from his grandfather, who obtained the weapon while serving in the Pacific theater during WWII. He then buried her, hoping he would never be caught. Being obese at the time of the murder, he placed pictures on his high school's online yearbook making it look like he was thin, which later distorted the proportions of the force of the fatal blow and the weight of the murder weapon that the Jeffersonian team calculated. He then began rapidly losing weight to further corroborate his story.

Before Pelant became a serial killer, he was already a computer hacker who had a strong belief that the U.S. government was corrupt. He demonstrated his hacking skills twice: first, by shutting down the Senate website in 2009, and then hacking into the Pentagon security system to shut down the Department of Defense network in 2010. This endangered the lives of countless U.S. soldiers, but he claimed it was to expose apparent corruption in the FBI (the company who built the network only got the contract to do so from campaign contributions). His calling card both times was leaving a question written in blood-like letters on the websites: "Where's the website?" on the Senate site and "What are you defending?" on the Pentagon's. He was eventually arrested, convicted of wire and computer fraud, and sentenced to house arrest for two years.

"I'm not a criminal. I'm a 'hacktivist'." ―Pelant[src]

Pelant harbored resentment towards the FBI after his conviction, motivating him to seek revenge. He hacked his ankle monitor to make the monitoring company believe he was still at home, allowing him to steal the blood of five FBI agents and acquire a bang stick (an object used by divers to repel sharks). He then killed a woman with it, placing her remains in various locations for the FBI to find and planting the agents' blood on the bones. After the bones were discovered and scanned at the Jeffersonian, the computers were infected with a worm that Pelant had intricately carved into their surface.

In order to escape arrest for the crimes he committed, he used his hacking skills to erase his true identity, making it appear as though he was an Egyptian citizen named Bassam Alfayat. Alfayat's records said he had lived in Egypt until the age of six and attended boarding school in England and Canada, before finally attending high school at Stanford. This made sure any crimes committed by "Christopher Pelant" couldn't be tied to him, and he was extradited to Egypt, where he stayed for months until he made his way back to the United States.

During the Series[]

Season Seven[]

• The Crack in the Code

Pelant places the skull and spine of his victim in front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln and leaves the message "Where is the Rest of Me?." He then proceeds to leave the rest of the bones in a storage area where the FBI keeps information regarding its informants. After this, he reaches out to a reporter named Ezra Krane, who had previously covered his trial and gives him all the details of his crimes and the FBI's corruption. Later Pelant gets nervous and kills Krane in order to ensure the identity of his source remains a secret. Pelant then hacks various hospitals to have Krane's body cremated before an autopsy can be made. When brought in for interrogation, Pelant doesn't deny being responsible for the murders, but also points out that his ankle monitor gives him a solid alibi.

• The Past in the Present

Pelant, who is up for the possibility of parole, frames Brennan for the murder of her friend, Ethan Sawyer, a schizophrenic mathematician whom she had asked for help with the case, exploiting the fact that his delusions included a belief that Brennan's new baby, Christine, was a 'demon'. Altering video footage and using supplies stolen from the Jeffersonian, he ensures that people who love Brennan and are capable of solving his crimes are removed from investigation one by one. Caroline recognizes this and her hope for bringing justice for Brennan and his victims lays with the Jeffersonian team still being on a case, aided by the fact that Cam didn't conceal crucial evidence of samples of Sawyer's hair in Brennan's car. Eventually, Brennan's father convinces her that she shouldn't trust the system given Pelant's computer skills, thus making her go into hiding.

Season Eight[]

• The Future in the Past

In the Season 8 opener, Bones is still on the run, still attempting to find a way to prove Pelant has framed her, while Pelant is currently teaching a night class in computer skills at a nearby college. She manages to uncover the bones of Pelant's former school counselor, whom he murdered in order to ensure his place at Stanford by forging her recommendation; Sweets is able to identify this as key passages of the recommendation later fit with Pelant's writing style rather than the guidance counselor's. It is revealed that Angela and Bones have also been communicating using flowers with various coded meanings. Cam tells Edison to send details of both the bones and the flowers to Booth via email, knowing it will draw Pelant out. Knowing of the flower's code Pelant waits at the next drop point for a flowered message and encounters Hodgins who he taunts into strangling him into unconsciousness. Hodgins reveals this fact to Sweets who realizes it uncovers the third aspect of Pelant's personality and gives this information to Angela, showing that it fits into Ethan's pyramid. Booth convinces Flynn (the agent who took over for Booth when Booth was taken off the case due to manipulation by Pelant) to arrest Pelant for hacking into the FBI email system just as Cam had hoped and he is detained.

Meanwhile, Bones has snuck into the Jeffersonian and is using Cam and Edison's work to analyze the bones further; based on her observations of his gait, she determines that Pelant was in fact fat in high school and thus could have used a light weapon to deliver a heavy blow. The FBI discovers his grandfather's Japanese sword and it matches the killing blow to his high school counselor, he is finally arrested for at least one murder. Angela uses the explanation Sweets provided of Ethan's pyramid to find an encryption key that breaks some of Pelant's code and reveals how he superimposed Bones into security footage.

Just when things start to seem settled, Caroline reveals that the man they know as Pelant is in fact, according to DNA, fingerprints, and background records, Bassam Alfayat, an Egyptian diplomat who is being taken back to Egypt by their government, begging the question of which identity was real. As a final act, Pelant/Alfayat gives Bones a Marigold symbolizing pain and grief, and in return, Bones slaps him across the face. When Bones tells Booth what the flower means, Booth throws it into a nearby wastebasket and they both leave, only to have the camera zero in on the flower in the wastebasket, which is then retrieved by Agent Flynn.

• The Corpse on the Canopy

Angela and Hodgins wake up with a skinned body above them. They figure out that it was Pelant who placed it there. They identify the victim as a private military contractor and track Pelant to his place of work. Pelant hacks into a security firm's firewalls and takes control of a drone and targets a school full of children in Afghanistan. At the same time, he hacks into Hodgins' bank accounts and starts draining all his money. He forces the team to make a choice between the school and the money and Hodgins' chooses the children while Booth and Flynn pursue Pelant. In pursuit of Pelant, Flynn is shot and injured by robotic machine guns while Booth opens fire on Pelant, grazing his face from behind, and causing severe damage to his right side. He drains all the money from Hodgins' account so now Hodgins is broke. He is last seen stitching up his face with supplies he took from a dead veterinarian.

• The Secret in the Siege

Pelant has a heavy scarring to the right side of his face after being wounded by Booth, manipulates a woman named Anna Samuels into killing FBI agents who were involved in a raid on a separatist religious cult that went wrong. He has been stalking Booth and Brennan since their last encounter. At the end of the episode, during which they had decided to get married, Pelant calls Booth and tells him that he changed the rules when he shot him. He also forces Booth to turn down Brennan's proposal, threatening to kill more innocent people and pinning them on him if he refuses or even if he tells her why he does it. Unwilling to let that happen, Booth tells Brennan that the relationship they have is enough. She accepts this, but is left heartbroken, although Booth still vows to kill Pelant one day.

Season Nine[]

• The Secrets in the Proposal

Though not featured in this episode, after three months of trying to find him, Booth doesn't have any sort of leads on Pelant. Booth and Brennan are conflicted, with each other, and fighting, after Booth accepted then turns down Brennan's proposal. Once Pelant finds out, he calls Booth while he and Brennan were together, and said he would kill five random people, and Brennan can't know why Booth changed his mind. The two become distant, but Brennan talks with an old friend of Booth and decides to have faith in Booth that he wouldn't have declined her proposal without a good reason. At the end of the episode, after the couple made up, the kitchen clock starts blinking the wrong time before going back to the right one, proving or at least implying that Pelant is still spying on them.

• The Sense in the Sacrifice

"You and I are destined to die together... Someday. I hope not today, but that's up to you." ―Pelant to Brennan

As Angela installs more anti-hacking firewalls in the Jeffersonian computers, the Jeffersonian staff, Booth, and Flynn use a donated body to stage a Pelant-style crime scene to try to flush Pelant out. They send Flynn to pose the skinned body as Prometheus in a painting. Although the plan does work, Pelant, who has bugged Flynn's car, catches onto them, kills Flynn, and uses his body for the crime scene instead. Pelant tries to woo Doctor Brennan, thinking that he would be able to win her over based on his analysis of Sweets' research, which 'confirmed' that Brennan can change her mind about people. In the end, however, Brennan refuses Pelant, who thought that Brennan would pick him instead. Though he has the intelligence, Brennan still wants him dead, even if it means her death. Booth calls Pelant's bluff, shooting him in the neck, "disconnecting the computer", and ultimately killing him, and then proposes to Brennan, telling her the truth behind his refusal. She stated that she knew that it was something like that and that he made the right choice.

In this episode, Pelant reveals to Brennan that there is another serial killer still at large. Pelant may or may not know them personally, but he has "a reason to believe it's a woman."

• The Ghost in the Killer

Brennan has nightmares about Pelant and his possible companion The Ghost Killer, becoming rather obsessed with this new killer.

Season Ten[]

• The 200th in the 10th

In the alternate reality, Pelant makes a brief cameo as a waiter to tell Brennan she has a phone call.

• The Next in the Last

When the Jeffersonian are investigating a corpse that had their hands cut off, on the obelisk with a flower and a message of "be warned", they start to investigate connections to Pelant. They discover links to his previous cases and discover a copycat murderer using the Modus Operandi of Pelant. They eventually reveal the killer to be Leelah Strawn and find evidence at her house including a newspaper clipping. They also recover Hodgins's money drained two years ago, and Pelant himself is later seen in a video but Brennan turns it off deciding to leave Pelant in the past where he belongs.

Modus Operandi[]

Pelant had no consistent method in his crimes, though his murders were usually very complex and involved severely mutilating the victims, sometimes in order to implant messages into their remains. When he manipulated Anna Samuels into killing, her victims were shot with a 9mm pistol, first once in the neck to kill them and then ten more times in the body. He also based some details of Samuels' crimes on research papers written by Sweets.

He used messages written in blood to sign his work on the Senate website and the Pentagon security system as well as Inger Johannsen's murder investigation during The Crack in the Code. Ever since he was put under arrest for Ethan Sawyer's murder after the team proved Brennan's innocence, he started to leave flowers next to some of his later victims similar to how Brennan communicated with Angela between Seasons 7 and 8.

His use of Sweets' psychological research on everyone he faced could indicate that he functions as the Anti-Sweets, like how Heather Taffet is the Anti-Brennan and how Jacob Broadsky is the Anti-Booth. Some of the crimes he commits not only depend on computers and other forms of technology, but also on human behavior, such as the behavior of the people he faced during his crime spree. Pelant is quite adept at reading human psychology and use it to unhinge and manipulate his enemies. He uses the information he accumulated from Sweets' files to manipulate people into doing exactly what he wants them to do in order to use the criminal justice system against them. All of this alludes to Pelant's comment about how the system becomes more insecure as people upgrade its security measures to make it more complex, all due to human error because of their dedication to the system, the innate reliance on a governed set of rules over common sense, and, compared to Pelant, an inability of the majority of the population to intellectually match its overall level of complexity. This appears to rival Sweets' level of understanding in regard to the complexities of human behavior, making astute observations on their psychological patterns to profile suspects, identify killers, and even predict their behavior, all while referencing textbook mental conditions to determine whether they're capable of murder. However, he was also the Anti-Sweets in his inability to truly understand this insight, believing that Sweets' observations about how Brennan had changed over time meant that he could convince Brennan to return his displays of 'affection,' as he was incapable of recognizing that Brennan had fallen in love with Booth due to their shared dedication to finding justice and protecting innocent people in the process of arresting and/or killing murderers like him. Pelant was also visibly surprised when Hodgins strangled him until he was unconscious, after searching through and reciting Sweets' profile on him, wrongly believing he posed no threat by assuming Hodgins was too good a person to resort to physical violence, only to get caught in the line of fire as a result, and since Hodgins told Sweets that Pelant wanted to be killed, it allowed Sweets to gain a key piece of psychological insight that helped Angela learn how to decode Sawyer's triangle. Although he can be equally stubborn when it comes to bringing his patients' issues to the light, but while Lance Sweets refuses to push their personal boundaries, whereas Pelant would go through extremes to bring out their personalities' darkest aspects, especially in Booth's case. This was seen when he tricked Booth into believing he kidnapped Brennan, only to have Booth attack him in his house to get him and Brennan kicked off Ethan Sawyer's case, when he forced Booth to call off his engagement with Brennan without telling her why under threat of mass murder, challenged Brennan by bringing her attention to the Ghost Killer, (which affected her even months after he died), and attempting this directly with Booth and Brennan on their final showdown with Pelant at the abandoned Keeler Power Plant in central Maryland.

Known Victims[]

• Actual Victims
• Victims by Proxy

• June 2003: Carole Morrissey (snared, hung upside down and slashed to death and gutted with a katana)
• Inger Johannsen (killed with a bang stick, dismembered and her spine and skull removed)
• Ezra Krane (killed with a bang stick and hung from a flagpost)
• Ethan Sawyer (drugged him with tubocurarine, cut his arteries and left him to be eaten by wolves; framed Brennan for the murder)
• Xavier Freeman (tortured to the point of cardiac arrest with repeated needle punctures to the spine, then flayed and mutilated and posed like Vesalius)
• Special Agent Hayes Flynn (shot with security Gatling guns; survived, was later killed and posed like Prometheus and his liver was removed while he was still alive)
• The students of a girls' school in Afghanistan (threatened to kill with a drone strike; averted)
• An unnamed veterinarian (apparently stabbed; killed for access to his office and supplies)

Alan Friedlander (shot once in the neck and shot ten more times post-mortem by Anna Samuels)

Jeff Stone (shot once in the neck and shot ten more times post-mortem by Anna Samuels)

Lance Sweets (attempted shooting by Anna Samuels)

Trivia[]

• He is regarded as the most dangerous and recurring serial killer in the entire series.
• He had a grandfather that served in WWII who was befriended by Max Keenan in order to gain information. He brought over many Japanese weapons from his time in WWII, including the Japanese katana Pelant used on his first victim.
• The right side of his face was badly mutilated by a shot from Booth into Pelant's car's windshield, which Pelant had to sew up himself using tools from a veterinarian he killed. His right eye also glazed over, hinting that he was partially blinded in that eye.
• Booth shot Pelant in the base of his neck, severing his spinal column. While going after Jacob Broadsky, Booth mentioned in The Killer in The Crosshairs while investigating the death of Walter Coolidge that severing the head from the spinal cord is a gold standard for snipers. They call it "Disconnecting the Computer." It was the same method that Booth used to kill Pelant with his handgun.
• The old computer Pelant owned in The Crack in the Code was an IBM 7501 Console Card Reader made in 1958. However, it was based on discrete transistors rather than old vacuum tubes which makes it questionable how there would be a vacuum tube missing from inside the computer. Although, Pelant may have possessed gas lamps or old vacuum tubes among his collection of obsolete electronics to build his bang stick.
• The computer virus/worm delivered via the bone etchings, which Pelant personally devised and carved, could be considered a form of Arbitrary Code Execution (aka ACE exploit), a real-world method of computer security exploitation. While it may not be feasible to use carvings on bones to produce an ACE exploit, the core concept of using seemingly random imputs to generate a series of code within a program, thus making the program do something it normally shouldn't, remains a valid real-world technique. (In this case, the imaging program which rendered the scans of the bone etchings he left on Inger Johannsen's remains gave Pelant remote access to the Angelatron; forcing it to overheat to the point of starting a fire, allowing him to access her computers whenever he wants, and hack into the FBI servers by proxy.)
• Pelant has the highest known I.Q. of all of the villains to appear on the show,

Notes[]

• Due to his unparalleled hacker and computer skills and his appreciation of the fine arts (albeit for self-gratification) Pelant could also be viewed as the Anti-Angela.
• It's possible that Pelant discovered the truth about Glen Durant and his shadow government and covered his tracks to avoid getting detected or killed by Durant. These actions could have led to his first crimes; hacking into the Senate website and the Pentagon security system. He must have decided to lead Brennan and Booth to the Ghost Killer so they can inevitably discover the conspiracy through the McNamara's background hoping that Durant or his agents would kill them if he failed to make Brennan see him in a new light and/or kill them. Sweets mentioned that Gordon Wyatt wrote a book on the role of sexual sadism in female serial killers. Implying that Pelant may have reviewed Bones and Booth's Psychological Case Files from Dr. Wyatt to be even more thorough. He also may have read Dr. Wyatt's book and used its psychological information in conjunction with his intelligence to locate and identify the Ghost Killer, even breaking into Limbo to investigate her victims' remains and X-Rays.
  • Possible evidence of this is in The Lance to the Heart; when the team finds Glen Durant's blackmail files. Angela pointed out that he saved his digital files on old punch cards and tape, and Pelant, who was able to break into the Jeffersonian on many occasions, owned an old computer in his debut; an IBM card reader from 1958, which he could've used to look through Durant's digital files to verify the existence of his conspiracy, and dug up information on the McNamaras when he investigated the Ghost Killer, only to then erase himself from security cameras, leave everything exactly as he found it, and leaving no genetic material to cover his tracks and keep himself from being discovered and pursued by Durant's agents, as is their respective modus operandi. Pelant could've used all the information he dug up when he investigated the Ghost Killer to determine whether Booth and Brennan would be capable of digging deep enough to eventually catch wind of the shadow government, who blackmailed Giles McNamara partly in exchange for Durant's assistance in hiding the crime scene photos of Stephanie's first victim, Maya Zinkow, thereby making a big enough mess to attract Durant's attention to them, which is why he directed Brennan to the Ghost Killer in the first place.

v • d • eBones Characters Main Characters Temperance Brennan · Seeley Booth · Jack Hodgins · Angela Montenegro · Camille Saroyan · Lance Sweets (season 3-10) · James Aubrey (season 10-12) · Zack Addy (season 1-5,11-12) · Daniel Goodman (season 1) Recurring Characters Caroline Julian · Max Keenan · Clark Edison · Daisy Wick · Wendell Bray · Colin Fisher · Vincent Nigel-Murray · Arastoo Vaziri · Finn Abernathy · Oliver Wells · Rodolfo Fuentes · Jessica Warren · Douglas Filmore · Christopher Pelant · Jared Booth · Alex Radziwill · Hayes Flynn · Christine Booth · Parker Booth · Marianne Booth · Hannah Burley · Michael Hodgins · Michelle Welton · Gordon Wyatt · Billy Gibbons · Jacob Broadsky · The Gormogon · Avalon Harmonia · Amy Hollister · Rebecca Stinson · Tim Sullivan · Heather Taffet · Thomas Vega · Marcus Geier · Andrew Hacker · Aldo Clemens · Oliver Laurier · Maggie Magregor · Paul Lidner · Noel Liftin · Roxie Lyon · Padme Dalaj · Grayson Barasa · Beth Mayer