Matt Butler Character Analysis

Matt Butler is captain of Osborne High’s football team. He’s set to attend college on a football scholarship and then, ideally, play professionally. Matt is the second victim of David Ware, the Osborne Slayer. David murders Matt in the abandoned locker room after school one evening, slicing open his skull and scrambling his brains in a mocking nod toward Matt’s anxieties about having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition common among football players that’s caused by repeated head injuries. At the time of Matt’s murder, he struggles between making his coaches and father proud and respecting his (and his mother’s) very real fears about the possibility of developing CTE. Lately, Matt’s anxieties about the brain condition have worsened—he’s been misplacing everyday objects, and memory loss is an early symptom of CTE. However, the novel hints that David Ware has been hiding Matt’s belongings—David tends to toy with his victims before he murders them, moving around their personal belongings to make them paranoid.