As the FBI investigates the disappearance of college students, Jack Crawford recruits a criminal profiler, Will Graham, and a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter -- who is secretly a serial killer and a cannibal.

Will Graham helps Jack Crawford search for a killer who buries his victims alive to grow mushrooms; Will, starting to trust Hannibal, opens up about killing Hobbs; Freddie Lounds lurks around the investigation.

Determined to give Abigail closure, Will and Hannibal take Abigail back to the scene of her father's crimes. But things take a turn for the worse when the copycat killer strikes again.

A series of family murders takes place, and Will determines they were conducted by each of the families' missing children, who were abducted and brainwashed into killing their old families for their "new family."

Will and the team track a serial killer who has a gruesome ritual; Hannibal tries to drive a wedge between Jack and Will; Jack's wife, Bella, starts therapy with Hannibal.

A nurse at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is brutally murdered by a patient, Dr. Abel Gideon, in a manner similar to the "Chesapeake Ripper", who hasn't committed a murder in two years - the same timespan as Gideon's incarceration.