Timothy Foyle

According to Professor Landry, Tim Foyle was loyal, hardworking...kind of a kiss-ass, a linear thinker, and not very imaginative. Turns out he was wrong about pretty much all of it, except the hardworking part. After overhearing a conversation between a prospective employer and Landry in which Landry pretty much ruined Tim's chances at getting the job he wanted, Tim flipped. Not in a psycho, ranting-and-raving looney tunes kind of way. More like a psycho, revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold kind of way.

Tim killed Dean Cyrus O'Dell after hearing that conversation. He had had a bug on Landry's phone — who knows for how long — and, after hearing another conversation that let him know that Cyrus had found out about Landry and the dean's wife's affair, he saw his opportunity. After very publicly flipping out on his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Tim went to the dean's office with Landry's clothes and shot him, staging the scene as a suicide — a scene envisioned by Veronica Mars in her "Plan a Perfect Murder" paper. Then, he waited. And waited.

There's no way to know what would have happened if Mindy hadn't gone to Keith Mars to find out the truth about who killed Cyrus. Cyrus's death had been ruled a suicide, so if Keith hadn't started poking around, all his hard work and imaginative planting of clues might have been for naught. He would have killed a man in cold blood and gotten away with it. However, when Keith and Veronica began picking away at Mindy and Landry's alibis, his plan was set into motion. As the case against Landry and Mindy mounted and they began suspecting each other, Tim worked with Veronica — under the guise of clearing Landry's name — to plant more suspicion against Landry.

It all would have worked, if he hadn't gotten overconfident. Landry was arrested; the case against him was solid. But the school asked Tim to take over Landry's class, and he asked Veronica to be his TA. When his students begged him to explain what happened with Landry, he told the story. Unfortunately, in his excitement to be the center of attention, he forgot that Veronica's skills as a detective aren't only limited to being good in the field. He let slip elements of the story that he couldn't have known, and Veronica discovered the bug in her own phone. Veronica put two and two together, and Tim was busted. He confessed. There's no happy ending to this story of the cold sociopath, though: the dean is still dead, and now Mindy is dead as well, and the brilliant profiler, Professor Landry — who clearly misread his teaching assistant — is going to jail for manslaughter.