Ray Soames
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Ray Soames was an Oregon resident and the son of Anthony and Craig Soames. He was also the brother of Isabel Soames and became the third victim from his high school class to have mysteriously died. (TXF: "Pilot")
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[edit] Biographical Information
Ray Soames was an honor student and attended the class of '89 with Billy Miles, Peggy O'Dell, Karen Swenson and Theresa Nemman.
After graduating with the rest of his classmates in 1989, Ray Soames spent time in Oregon Memorial Psychiatric Hospital and, for slightly longer than a year, he was treated under the supervision of Doctor Glass for post-adolescent schizophrenia. According to the doctor, Ray was unable to grasp reality and seemed to suffer from a form of post-traumatic stress.
After two of his male classmates were found murdered, Ray Soames learned of this and confessed to the murders. He pleaded to be locked up but was unable to produce any evidence that he had committed the crimes. On a warm night in July, he escaped from the hospital and, after being missing for seven hours, he mysteriously died of exposure at the age of twenty in a wooded area of a state park. At the time of his death, his mother, father and sister were all still alive and he had a girlfriend named Laura.
[edit] Investigations of Death
[edit] Local Investigation
An autopsy was conducted on Ray Soames' body and an autopsy report that detailed the findings was signed by Doctor Jay Nemman, who had also signed the autopsy reports for the first two victims. However, on each of the autopsy reports, Doctor Nemman intentionally missed out the fact that the victims each had two small bumps on their lower backs. He also did not note unidentified tissue samples surrounding the marks.
Local authorities, including Detective Miles, attempted to learn if anyone had any information about Ray Soames and the other two victims. They set up a hotline for people to call anonymously if they knew anything about the murders.
It was rumored that the deaths were due to "unexplained phenomenon".
A newspaper article was written regarding Soames' death and was printed before 6 March, 1992, with the headline, "Former Honor Student's Body Found in State Park". The article suggested that the murders could be coincidental or might have been committed by a serial killer. According to a quote by Detective Miles published in the article, the sheriff's office was looking into all possibilities and were seeking the advice of the state law enforcement agencies. Although no leads or suspects had been found at the time the article was printed, it was rumored that a Canadian film technician named Terry Weaver had been taken in for questioning but had denied everything he had been asked, replying to one question by stating his opinion that the local authorities should all "go screw themselves with a fork".
[edit] FBI Investigation
The investigation continued, but local authorities failed to turn up any evidence and the FBI then got involved. They spent a week investigating the three deaths in Bellefleur, Oregon but were ordered to return to FBI headquarters without explanation. The case was subsequently reclassified as an X-file, where it was discovered by Special Agent Fox Mulder in early 1992.
- On March 7, 1992, Mulder claims that he found the case "a week ago".
Around this time, a fourth victim, Karen Swenson, was found dead in Collum National Forest. A different medical examiner signed the latest victim's autopsy report and noted the strange marks on her back. Mulder noticed the differences between Karen Swenson's autopsy report compared to the autopsy reports of Ray Soames and the first two victims. He arranged for Ray Soames' body to be exhumed to see if his tissue was identical to Karen Swenson's. If the tissue matched, it would be clear that Doctor Nemman had left out information in Ray Soames' autopsy report and he would therefore be classed as a suspect.
On March 7, 1992, Mulder traveled to Bellefleur, Oregon, with his newly assigned partner, Dana Scully. On the airplane there, Scully read the newspaper article about Ray Soames' death. After the agents arrived in Bellefleur, they immediately traveled to the grave site where Ray Soames had been buried. As a crane lifted his coffin out of the ground, a harness strapped to the casket suddenly broke and the coffin tumbled down a hill. Mulder ran toward the casket, to see it had been broken open by the fall. Lying inside was a desiccated, mummified body that was definitely not human. Mulder joked it was probably safe to assume that Ray Soames had never "made the varsity basketball team". The coffin was resealed at Mulder's insistence.
Scully, who had been trained as a medical doctor, later examined the body. She determined that it was a hundred and fifty-six centimeters in length and weighed fifty-two pounds in extremis. The corpse was in the advance stages of decay and desiccation. Its distinguishing features included large ocular cavities and its oblate cranium indicated that it had not been human. Scully was definite that the body was mammalian and speculated that it could be a chimpanzee or some kind of ape, such as an orangutan.
Mulder was amazed by the discovery and by the fact that it had been buried in the city cemetery in Ray Soames' grave. He told Scully that other Bellefleur residents and Ray Soames' family would not believe news of the find if they were notified. Mulder also requested tissue samples, x-rays, an analysis of the creature's blood type, a toxicology report and a full genetic work-up in the belief that the body was alien.
Scully suspected that the body was the result of someone's sick joke and found Mulder's theory that it was extraterrestrial to be absurd. She nevertheless continued her examination and processed x-rays of the body. They confirmed that the body was similar to a mammalian but its physiology could possibly be mutated. However, Scully could not account for a small, grey, unidentified metallic implanted object which she had found in the corpse's nasal cavity before 4:37 am, the next morning.
The FBI agents visited the state psychiatric hospital where Ray Soames had been a patient and met with Doctor Glass. The doctor told Mulder that he had not treated Ray Soames with hypnosis and introduced the agents to Billy Miles, who was experiencing the same symptoms as Ray Soames had.
The exhumed body was later stolen and the laboratory where Scully had studied it was destroyed. In a fire, the x-rays, pictures and other evidence that Scully had gathered were also destroyed. The only piece of evidence not destroyed was the metallic implant Scully had found in Ray Soames' nasal cavity. She had kept the artifact in her pocket and continued to keep it there. The vandal was never found or identified but Scully believed that Doctor Nemman and Detective Miles were responsible for the destruction. She could not explain, however, what the men could have wanted with the corpse.
The same night, Mulder came to the unlikely conclusion that Billy Miles was somehow responsible for the deaths of Ray Soames and the other three victims. He also theorized that Ray Soames and the other victims had been summoned by the forest to go there and that the two marks on each victim's back was from some kind of tests being performed on them that caused a form of genetic mutation, explaining the strange corpse in Ray Soames' coffin.
Mulder, Scully and Billy Miles left Oregon and traveled to the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.. Under hypnosis conducted on March 22, 1992, Billy Miles claimed to have been directed by an unidentified alien force that had given him orders through an implant in his nose. When Section Chief Scott Blevins told Scully that she had insufficient evidence to prosecute the case, she revealed the implant she had been keeping in her pocket. Scully believed the artifact was the communication device that Billy Miles had described earlier and announced that she had performed an analysis of the implant which had revealed that the object's material could not be identified.
Section Chief Blevins gave the implant to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, who filed it away inside a box in a large storage room within the Pentagon. The box contained many other similar implants, surrounded by rows upon rows of shelves, all containing similar boxes. (TXF: "Pilot")
- According to Billy Miles while hypnotized, he and his friends had been having a party in a forest to celebrate their graduation when a bright light came and took him away. An unidentified group had then told him to gather his friends so they could be tested. Ray Soames may have been among his friends at the party, having definitely graduated in the same year.
[edit] Background Information
In an early script of The X-Files' pilot episode, a character named Danny Doty confessed to murdering the first three victims, rather than Ray Soames' claim that he murdered the first two victims, as in the televised version of the episode. Danny Doty was convicted of murdering only one victim, as there was virtually no evidence linking him to the deaths. Mulder and Scully visit him in prison to learn if he knows anything about the murder of Karen Swenson. It is inferred that Doty confessed not because he committed the crime but because he wanted protection that he would receive by going to prison, a motive that Ray Soames possibly shared in the televised version of the episode. After Mulder and Scully learn that Billy Miles is the killer, it is revealed that Doty felt the same murderous impulses as Billy Miles, and Mulder surmises that Doty confessed because he was scared by what he was capable of. The character's ultimate fate is unclear after Billy Miles confesses to the murders.
Ray Soames still exists in the script. His family is said to have disappeared but Danny Doty tells Mulder and Scully that the Soames family were all killed. However, neither explanation nor an alternative one is proven to be accurate.
The final revision of the script describes the corpse lying inside Ray Soames grave as, "a shriveled, child-sized humanoid figure lies. It has a strange football-shaped head and mottled leathery skin. It actually may not be human at all." Later, Scully objects more to Mulder's belief that the corpse is extraterrestrial than she does in the final episode, stating that the person who killed Ray Soames, wherever he has been buried, is still running around loose. Mulder argues against immediately going in search of the killer, as Scully seems to suggest, and refers to the murderer as "someone the FBI or anybody else hasn't caught for three years." Instead, Mulder advises that he and Scully take a few hours to properly analyze "who or what this thing really is", referring to the strange corpse. Mulder's reference that law enforcement agencies have been searching for the killer for three years gives an indication that the murders probably started in 1989.
Furthermore, the name "Raymond Soames" can be seen on a tombstone near the start of the Season 2 episode of The X-Files, "Irresistible", and a date of death is given as 1989. However, although the reference is a deliberate "inside joke" to the Ray Soames seen and referenced in the pilot episode, it is unclear whether the two characters are one and the same or completely different. If the two are meant to be the same character, Soames' body would presumably have to have been found between the time of the pilot episode, which is set in March 1991, and "Irresistible", taking place in November 1994. It is possible that the strange corpse in Ray Soames' grave is indeed Soames, as Mulder suspects in the pilot episode, but it seems unlikely that the corpse would be reburied or that a tombstone would be constructed bearing Soames' name, if not to mark where his body lay.
| Students in the Class of '89 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ray Soames | Karen Swenson | Peggy O'Dell | Theresa Nemman | Billy Miles |
