Jay Finch

Minor Character: Las Vegas
Name	Jay Gregory Finch
Gender	Male
Family	Unnamed father (deceased) Addie Finch (mother, deceased)
City	Las Vegas
Status	Incarcerated/institutionalized
Portrayed By	Jed Rees
First Appearance	Leaving Las Vegas

"This is my house. What are you doing in my house?"

Jay Gregory Finch was a spree killer who appeared in season seven of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Background

Jay grew up with his mother at a house somewhere in rural Nevada. Apart from one incident when he was playing football in high school and suffered a head injury, his childhood appears to have been mostly happy. The injury damaged his amygdala and frontal lobe and caused him to occasionally suffer severe headaches. To cool off, he would get in his car and cruise around, sometimes for days.

In December of 2003, he and his mother, who wanted him to move out, got into a heated argument that led to him killing her. He went on one of his usual car trips and eventually ended up at a house similar to the one he lived in. In his exhausted and confused state, he mistook it for his own and went in. When he found two strangers, a mother and daughter named Mary Acheson and Heather Curtis, inside, he killed them both in a fit of rage and left, not noticing that Acheson's son, Danny, was hiding under the sink and saw him kill his mother and sister and take a cookie out of a jar. Before leaving, he fired the rest of the rounds in his revolver into the house's rabbits' pen. A plumber, Robert Guffey, entered the house to do some work, found the victims dead and picked up the phone to call 911, but relented and put the phone back because he had a history of violence towards women and was afraid that the police would pin it on him. Unfortunately, the investigating officer more or less forced a confession out of him and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Meanwhile, Finch drove back home, reported his mother's death to the LVPD and turned in the knife.

Leaving Las Vegas

They built a case against him, but in 2007, Adam Novak, a lawyer and former adversary of Catherine, managed to get him acquitted. Catherine began pursuing a new line of investigation; on the knife that Jay turned in, the murder weapon, there were four sources of DNA: his own on the handle, his mother's, and those of Mary Acheson and Heather Curtis, the latter two of which were never identified as the sources. When she got Guffey to admit that his confession had been coerced, she figured Finch may have been guilty of the Acheson-Curtis murders. Slugs from the rabbits' pen, which Finch fired his remaining bullets at, were matched to the slug extracted from Addie Finch's head and inside the cookie jar's lid, there was a fingerprint in the victims' blood that was matched to Finch.

When the LVPD went to his house to arrest him, he was in the process of making himself a sandwich and barely reacted when he was held up. When Catherine and Nick searched the house, they found a notebook which she had seen Finch writing in during his trial. When she opened it, she found that the pages contained the phrase "There's no place like home" written over and over. Finch was presumably incarcerated or institutionalized afterwards.

Modus Operandi

Finch killed all his known victims, who were women, by first stabbing them in the chest and collar with a kitchen knife and then finishing them off with a single shot to the forehead with a .38 revolver.

Known Victims

• Addie Finch (his mother)
• Mary Acheson
• Heather Curtis
• Danny Curtis (attempted; thought he had killed him but he survived)

Appearances

CSI:Crime Scene Investigation
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	#
Season 7	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	X	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	N/A	1
Total																										1