Elle Greenaway

Elle Greenaway is a fictional character from the CBS crime drama Criminal Minds, portrayed by Lola Glaudini throughout the first season and the beginning of the second season.

Background

Before joining the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), Greenaway was assigned to the FBI's Seattle field office with a specialty in profiling sexual offenders, a skill that would prove to be useful to the BAU. Elle's unnamed mother is Cuban, and she is fluent in Spanish, as seen in "Machismo". Her father was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty, as was fellow profiler Derek Morgan's father.

Time at the BAU

Elle Greenaway joined the BAU directly after success in the pilot episode "Extreme Aggressor". Unit Chief Jason Gideon, who had recently returned to active duty in the BAU, used her file as a guide and labelled her impatient, instructing her to correct the characteristic. After being hired, Greenaway quickly became good friends with the team's media liaison, Jennifer Jareau (JJ).

For a year and a half, Greenaway was relatively successful in the BAU, aiding her colleagues in solving cases and capturing the criminals responsible until the season one finale, "The Fisher King (1)".

Elle was involved in a hostage situation, when a mentally unstable man, on his way to a medical conference with his caretaker and doctor were on a train along with Elle, who was going to interview a child murderer. In the ensuing events, he wounded his caretaker, and nearly shot Elle, but was stopped by Reid, who was on board. Elle suffered some stress due to the event along with her failure to stop the caretaker from being shot.

During the finale, Randall Garner, a criminal the unit is investigating, ambushed Greenaway in her apartment and shot her. He then reached his fingers into her bullet wounds and wrote the word "RULES" on the walls with her blood.

After this trauma, Greenaway went on a four-month leave of absence in an attempt to heal and move on with her life.

Despite having physically recovered from her injuries, she remained psychologically traumatized, as seen in the post-shooting changes in her personality—once open to others and full of laughter, Greenaway became distant, withdrawn and hypervigilant.

When she returned, a case involving a serial rapist affected her deeply, to the point that she panicked during an undercover operation, an action that prevented the team from obtaining probable cause to hold the assailant in custody. She shot the alleged rapist in cold blood. Claiming that he had drawn a gun on her first, Greenaway was ruled by local authorities to have acted in self-defense, although her BAU colleagues clearly thought otherwise.

Reid, in particular, blamed himself for not having seen the signs of her impending breakdown and prevented the shooting, because on a previous night he had dropped by her room to check on her and saw that she was drinking, and had a worrisome effect.

A short time after the shooting — during the episode "The Boogeyman" — Greenaway resigned from the BAU. Handing in her badge and gun to Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner, she told him that she wasn't admitting guilt and added that if she had to do everything again, she wouldn't change a thing.

With her resignation, Elle left the BAU permanently, and was eventually replaced by Emily Prentiss.