 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 was 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 . 
