PAPER HEARTS

      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.

Mulder dreams of a red light that leads him to the corpse of a young girl buried in a park. When Mulder awakens he heads to the park and finds the girl's skeleton. The girl was murdered by John Lee Roche, a serial killer who murdered 13 girls and cut a heart out of the clothes of each of them. Mulder explains to partner Scully how in 1990 he helped catch Roche by deducting that he was a vacuum cleaner salesman who traveled along the East Coast where the girls bodies were found. The cloth hearts were never found, although he confessed to all of the murders.

By performing an autopsy on the girl's body Scully finds that the girl died in 1975, meaning Roche started his murders before the FBI thought he did. The agents search Roche's old car, and discover 16 cloth hearts within it. The agents visit Roche in the prison hoping to determine the identities of the remaining two victims. Roche agrees to identify the location of one of the remaining victims after Mulder hits a basketball shot in the prison gym. That night Mulder dreams of the night of Samantha's abduction, but instead of aliens taking her, Roche does. The next day Mulder asks Roche where he was the night Samantha was abducted. Roche tells him he was on Martha's Vineyard and had sold a vacuum cleaner to Mulder's father. Mulder finds the vacuum he was talking about in his mother's house.

After convincing Skinner to permit them further access to Roche, the agents talk to him, who reveals the location of one of his remaining victims after revealing that he knows exactly what happened the night of Samantha's abduction. An autopsy of the body reveals it to not be Samantha Mulder. Roche tells Mulder the final body is Samantha's but he'll reveal where it is only if Mulder takes him to the scene of the abduction. Mulder releases Roche from prison and brings him to his family's old house on Martha's Vineyard. Roche explains exactly what happened the night of Samantha's abduction, but Mulder tells him the house they are in was bought after Samantha's abduction, convincing him that Roche is not telling the truth. Mulder tells Roche that he'll be bringing him back to prison the next day but that night after another dream of Roche taking Samantha, Mulder awakens to find Roche gone.

Using Mulder's credentials, Roche kidnaps a girl whom he met on the plane to Martha's Vineyard. The agents head to the site of Roche's old apartment in Boston and find him with the girl in an abandoned school bus nearby. Roche holds a gun on the girl and tells Mulder that he'll never know for sure whether the last victim is Samantha or not if he kills him. Mulder kills him anyway. In his office Mulder stares at the final cloth heart and puts it away, unsure of whether it belonged to Samantha or not.

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