What happened to Elle in Criminal Minds?
Elle Greenaway was there from the pilot, and she's the one who shot the show's first unsub. Twenty-eight episodes later she was gone, and Criminal Minds spent the next fourteen seasons occasionally bringing her up like an old case file. Here's what happened to her on the show, and what happened to Lola Glaudini off it.
Elle resigns in season 2, episode 6, "The Boogeyman," which aired in October 2006. The chain of events: she's shot in her own home in the season 1 finale, comes back to work too early with untreated PTSD, and then kills a serial rapist the team had been forced to release, claiming self-defense. Hotch knows she's lying. She hands in her badge.
How the show got her there
- "The Fisher King, Part 1" — an unsub who's been stalking the BAU shoots Elle in her apartment. Paramedics revive her.
- "The Fisher King, Part 2" — she recovers physically, but no longer feels safe at home.
- "P911" — she returns to the field, over objections from Hotch and Reid that it 's far too soon.
- "Aftermath" — the team works a serial rapist case. The suspect walks. Elle confronts him and shoots him dead in his doorway on October 19, 2006.
- "The Boogeyman" — she comes back to the BAU only to resign.
Paget Brewster joined as Emily Prentiss three episodes later.
Why Lola Glaudini actually left
Nothing dramatic. Writer-producer Ed Bernero told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that Glaudini was heading back to the East Coast because she was, in his words, unhappy living in Los Angeles:
She was "unhappy living in Los Angeles," Bernero told the paper in 2006.
Glaudini has never confirmed that account or given her own. There's no reported friction with the cast or the producers. She'd been a New Yorker before the show and went back to theater work; she later landed recurring roles on The Expanse, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Ray Donovan.
Did she ever come back?
Not in person. Elle keeps getting mentioned — Hotch brings up the William Lee shooting to Prentiss in "In Name and Blood," Garcia references her after surviving her own shooting in "Penelope," and it resurfaces again when Hotch is arrested in "The Storm. "
She also turns up in the series finale, "And in the End...," when a concussed Reid hallucinates his way through old colleagues. Deadline confirmed at the time that those cameos were archive footage from the actors ' original episodes.
For the record: Elle killed the first unsub ever shot on screen in Criminal Minds — Tim Vogel, the Seattle Strangler, in the pilot.
She also killed the last one she ever encountered. The show's problem was the paperwork on the second one.