Joseph "Joe" Carroll

[Joe Carroll]

Joseph "Joe" Carroll

Basics

Name: Joseph "Joe" Carroll


Series/Fandom: The Following


Age: 47-50 (depends on the jumps in time taken in this RP)


Race/Species: Human


Gender: Male


Sexual Orientation: Fluid


Occupation: Former Professor (romantic literature) and failed novelist. Now a notorious serial killer.

• Appearance
• Personality
• History
• Equipment
• Skills

• Appearance
  
  Height: 6'1"
  
  
  Weight: 210
  
  
  Hair: Dark brown, almost black, with some grey sprouting
  
  
  Eyes: Dark brown
  
  
  Body: Lean, athletic
  
  
  Attire: When not wearing state-issued prison uniform? Whatever I need to wear at the time. Comfort, of course, is key, although sometimes a disguise is required.
  
  
  Handsome, suave, uses a smile or emotion to manipulate whatever person or situation he is faced with at any given moment.
  
  
  
• Personality
  
  Narcissistic, charming, manipulative, sociopathic, educated, debonaire, obsessive, sardonic, resourceful, cunning, erratic.
  
  
  
• History
  
  A native of London, UK, Joe Carroll's childhood (about which little is known and he has spoken seldom of) brought him to the United States where he attended the Lightford Academy as a teenager. It was at Lightford where the shy Carroll, who was secretly denying, through moral and religious teachings inherited in childhood, the violent impulses already stirring within him, first learned how to kill. His mentor at the school, Dr. Arthur Strauss, encouraged the youngster who was not the professor's best student, by showing him how to remove victims' eyes with admirable precision. Strauss could hardly have realized then how Carroll would later emerge as a killer who sought notoriety for his crimes, a departure from his mentor's belief that murders should be committed privately.
  
  
  An ardent follower of romantic literature, Carroll went on to become a popular professor in the genre at Winslow University in the Richmond, Virginia, area, focusing on authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, and idolized obsession with Edgar Allan Poe. He was an inspiring teacher for his students, engaging them in the subject matter and always encouraging their abilities. At Winslow, he met and eventually married fellow professor, Claire Matthews, and from their union a son, Joey, was born. Failing at his first attempt to become a writer like Poe, Joe's debut novel The Gothic Sea, was severely panned by critics worldwide, even while Poe's last and unfinished work, The Light House, had been its inspiration. It was Carroll's idea that he would finish what Poe had started, and began to believe he himself could be Poe. The obsession followed him into much darker territory, when the commercial failure of The Gothic Sea sent him spiraling into the sinister confines of his own mind and awakened something deadly within him he had long denied.
  
  
  Following Poe's ideas about the insanity of art and that nothing was more beautiful than the death of a beautiful woman, Joe Carroll surrendered to evil temptations and started murdering female college students at Winslow, long undetected as the murderer himself. Because Poe had claimed one's eyes were identity and windows to the soul, Carroll's horrific calling card for the murders became the gouging out of his female victims' eyes. He would later recall, when examined by psychologists and incarcerated for his crimes, that he was obsessed with watching the eyes of his victims as they died, finding the vanquishing of life and the moment of death a beautiful art form in itself.
  
  
  It was Carroll's wife, Claire, who introduced her husband to FBI Agent Ryan Hardy, when Hardy approached her for literary assistance during the murder investigations. Encouraged to seek out Joe's expertise, Ryan Hardy began his fateful association with the man he would eventually catch and help prosecute for the Virginia Campus Murders of 14 young women. Having been manipulated from the beginning by the charming Joe Carroll, even feeling inspired himself while auditing Carroll's classes, Ryan became entangled in a life changing spectacle that would haunt him for over a decade after. Falling in love with Joe's wife, Claire, had not been part of the plan, and it was she who Ryan had initially been following when, instead, he ended up following Joe Carroll on the night of a failed murder of Sarah Fuller. Saving Sarah's life, Ryan nearly lost his own when Joe stabbed him in the heart, requiring the permanent use of a pacemaker to keep Ryan alive.
  
  
  Convicted of the murders, sent to Death Row and divorced by Claire with no ability to see their young son again, Joe Carroll should have disappeared into obscurity until his later execution. But Carroll used the years to his advantage, manipulating prison officials and outside visitors who were themselves psychologically disturbed and desperate for guidance. Eventually, Joe Carroll secretly became the leader of an elaborate cult of "Followers", mentored by the murdering professor just as he himself had been schooled in his "art" by Dr. Strauss. The young and emotionally vacant, the violent seekers of leadership and encouragement for their own demented fantasies of killing, all such lost souls were ripe for Joe Carroll's molding into something serving only his own purposes, a dangerous, obedient cult of serial killers doing his bidding. Raising hell on the innocent, Escaping prison. Tending to unfinished business with Sarah Fuller and others. Finding Claire and Joey. Getting even with Ryan Hardy, for capturing him and for an affair with Claire after she divorced her murdering husband. Ryan Hardy become Joe's next obsession, just as denying an eerie connection to Joe Carroll, became Hardy's ongoing obsession as well.
  
  
  
• Equipment
  
  Various knives preferred, depending on location and situation. Will also make use of any other weapons and objects available for the task at hand.
  
  
  
• Skills
  
  Manipulating others, inspiring students, cooking, getting himself out of difficult predicaments and being highly resourceful.
  
  
  

Theme Song

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