STATUS: DECEASED

After several missing children who were presumed dead suddenly resurfaced, Red recalled the bizarre fairy tale of Lady Ambrosia. The story depicts a woman who gathers unwanted children, raises them with the promise of eternal youth, and makes them disappear. In the case of Ethan, a nonverbal autistic boy, his disappearance years earlier was staged as a drowning. The task force discovered that Ethan's parents were overwhelmed by taking care of him, and Ethan's mother arranged for an adoption agency employee to discreetly handle the situation. The employee, Noah Shuster, was collaborating with Lady Ambrosia, with whom he had two children: one who died in an accident and another, Theo, whom they rejected and burdened with guilt over his brother's death.

Ethan used his drawing skills to give Liz clues about Lady Ambrosia's whereabouts. A SWAT team eventually tracked the kidnapper to a schoolhouse in a wooded area, where she kept a group of children and killed each of them before they reached puberty, using a myth to make them believe she was simply turning them into butterflies. Noah revealed that after his and Lady Ambrosia's first child died in an accident, she wanted to save other children by "setting them free." After learning the truth about his parents' murdering scheme, Theo killed his mother and then himself.