Billy Thornton¶

Billy Thornton is a homeless man who haunts the Pay n' Stay motel and the woods nearby in Radford, and who tells the task force that chimpanzees, John Travolta and "some ladies" abducted him.


Type	NPC
Aliases	The homeless man; "Bob or Bill" (the Pay n' Stay teenager's guess); the chimp man
Affiliation	None; known to the Radford Sheriff's Department
Status	Alive but not found (as of Radford Horrors 04)
First appearance	Radford Horrors 02
Played by	Andre

Description¶

Billy is a rambling man who paces outside the Pay n' Stay and asks arriving agents whether they are the police. He is a heroin user; according to Molly Underhill, he had only recently stopped using in front of the elementary school (Radford Horrors 02; Radford Horrors 04).

History¶

The abduction story¶

Outside the Pay n' Stay, the homeless man told the team that people were kidnapping others in town. He said he had been put in a car, "beat up by chimpanzees", and then "John Travolta touched me inappropriately." Pressed by the agents, he added that the kidnappers picked him up in a van with the chimps and Travolta, that "some ladies" were present but did not touch his "bait and tackle", and that they "got me with their mind control ray." (Radford Horrors 02) The team took the chimpanzee part half-seriously, a callback to Zack's earlier joke about "space chimpanzees". When he left, he told them they should not stay at the Ferry Lodge.

Later in the episode, Kurt asked the IRS agents watching from the white van about a molestation complaint from a local; one replied, "Yeah, he talked to us too. Yeah, he got molested by monkeys and John Travolta." (Radford Horrors 02) See IRS Criminal Investigations.

Tracking him down¶

In Radford Horrors 04, Harold, the Blockbuster clerk, said he had seen a homeless man dragged into a van and driven away, and that he had once given the man a sandwich a month and a half or two months earlier. Kurt took this to be the same man. Sheila, the diner waitress, said she had fed him pancakes a couple of times and saw him every day or two. The teenage staffer at the Pay n' Stay, Charm, had not seen him in a day and guessed his name was "Bob or Bill". Molly Underhill then named him: "Yeah, Billy Thornton." She said that when she offered to take a police report he muttered something about "the Israelis" and stumbled off. Kurt asked her to feed him and offer a cot if he turned up, and she mentioned that she had seen gray vans herself and assumed they were connected to the town's construction (Radford Horrors 04).

Kurt considered it interesting that if the gray van crew had taken Billy, they had let him go, perhaps because no one would believe him. The team never found him again (Radford Horrors 04).

Memorable quotes¶

Quote

"Homeless man claims kidnapped by chimps and molested by John Travolta. There were ladies present." Dante (as Kurt), reading from his notebook (Radford Horrors 04)

Trivia¶

The line about John Travolta became a running joke at the table, along with ponytails (Radford Horrors 04).
Zack established that Huell believes Travolta is a Mormon rather than a Scientologist (Radford Horrors 02).