"Paper Hearts" is the tenth episode of the fourth season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files. It premiered on the Fox network on December 15, 1996. It was written by Vince Gilligan, directed by Rob Bowman, and featured guest appearances by Tom Noonan, Rebecca Toolan and Vanessa Morley. The episode is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, although it is tangentially connected to the series' wider mythology. "Paper Hearts" was viewed by 16.59 million people in its initial broadcast, and received positive reviews, with critics praising Noonan's guest role. The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files. Mulder is a believer in the paranormal, and the skeptical Scully has been assigned to debunk his work. In this episode, Mulder and Scully find that a child killer (Tom Noonan) who Mulder had helped to apprehend several years earlier had claimed more victims than he had confessed to; the resulting investigation uncovers a possible link to the disappearance of Mulder's sister, Samantha. Gilligan came up with the concept for "Paper Hearts" when thinking about the series' longest running storyline, the abduction of Samantha Mulder; he came up with a story questioning whether Samantha had not been abducted by aliens, but was rather murdered by a child killer instead. "Paper Hearts" was written specifically with Tom Noonan in mind for the role of Roche, and was amongst the first television work the actor had done. Plot Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) dreams of a red light that leads him to the corpse of a young girl buried in a park in Manassas, Virginia. When he awakens, he heads to the park and finds the girl's skeleton. The girl was determined to have been murdered by John Lee Roche (Tom Noonan), a serial killer who murdered thirteen girls throughout the 1980s; his modus operandi included cutting a heart out of the clothes of each victim. Mulder had captured Roche by deducing that he committed the murders while traveling as a vacuum cleaner salesman. Roche's hearts were never found, although he confessed to all of the murders. Dana Scully's (Gillian Anderson) autopsy of the skeleton finds that the victim died in 1975, suggesting that Roche's killing spree started much earlier than the FBI had previously thought. The agents search Roche's old car, where they discover sixteen cut-out hearts.