The X-Files (TV Series)

Paper Hearts (1996)

David Duchovny: Fox Mulder

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Quotes 

• Mulder : Scully, do you believe that my sister Samantha was abducted by aliens? Have you ever believed that? No. So what do you think happened to her?

  Scully : What are you saying you believe now?

  Mulder : I don't know. I don't know what happened. I don't know what to believe. I just know that I have to find out now.

• Scully : Mulder if you destroy evidence, we may never know what happened here

  Mulder : I know what happened here. She was strangled. He use an eight gauge electrical cord. He took something from the body postmortem, a trophy, a piece of fabric cut from her clothes in the shape of a heart

  Scully : Your saying you got all these details from your dream ?

  Mulder : No, I know this MO, I know it from memory

  Scully : Who's MO ?

  Mulder : John Lee Roche. He killed thirteen 8 to 10 year old girls, this makes 14. It was a difficult case . He was extremely hard to catch. By 1990 ,ten victims had been found scattered across the eastern seaboard, the earliest dating back to 1979. VICAP named the case 'Paper Hearts' because of the trophies the killer took. All the victims were abducted from their homes. Reggie Purdue brought me in because he thought I could get in the killers head

  Scully : Did you ?

  Mulder : I concluded we were looking for a salesman. Someone who travelled around a lot, who could gain people's confidence, someone ordinary. Turns out Roche was a vacuum cleaner salesman. His job took him all over the Northeast. He'd be in someone's home, demonstrating his vacuum and he'd be checking out their kids. He'd choose a victim and then comeback for them months later

  Scully : But it was your profile that caught him. What about the trophies he took, the cloth hearts ?

  Mulder : We never found them. But we didn't need them. He had them on 13 counts of murder and he admitted to 13, and the polygraph said he was telling the truth, but it always bugged me about this case. I always wanted to find these hearts and count them, see if they really added up to , I guess they didn't

  Scully : If nothing else, I think I can explain your dream. I don't think you ever stopped thinking about this case . I believe you solved it in your sleep.

  Mulder : You think that I've had this information about the 14th victim all this time and been processing it subconsciously ?

  Scully : You said it yourself once. You said that a dream is an answer to a question we haven't learnt how to ask. You did good work Mulder. Lets identify this girl so we can put her to rest.