Pat van Ranken is a neighbor of Ambrose Monk, appearing in the episode "Mr. Monk and the Three Pies". He was portrayed by Holt McCallany (credited as Holt Mccallany).
Domestic Life[]
Pat served as a Sergeant in the United States Army. At some point in his life, Pat married a woman by the name of Rita, with them buying a house in Tewkesbury, San Francisco, California. Sometime after the marriage, he began having an affair with another woman, who apparently bore a resemblance to his wife.
Things Heat Up on the Centennial[]
On a Thursday in 2004, Pat came home one night while Rita was setting out three cherry pies she baked for the town's centennial celebration to cool. The two got into a heated argument, likely over Pat's affair. It was enough to drive him into a rage and shove her into the countertop, where she grabbed a knife. As she approached him, Pat took it upon himself to shoot Rita to death with his 9mm pistol.
Soon after, a representative of the town came by the house to pick up the pies. Not wanting to give away that something was wrong, Pat boxed the pies up and gave them to the representative. Once she was gone, Pat spent around three hours cleaning up the crime scene. He also contacted his affair partner and told her to impersonate Rita by going to an airport and flying to Argentina on the premise that Rita was going to visit her sister, who had contracted an illness. He noticed some things missing from the crime scene during his cleanup, but had to settle them once he disposed of Rita's body. He did so by loading her into the back of his pickup truck and driving out to Melvone State Park just before it closed and burying the body on the grounds.
His agoraphobic neighbor Ambrose Monk, a friend of Rita's, tried to contact her out of concern over the fight and the gunshots he heard, but Pat gave him the lie he cooked up about Rita and Argentina. When Ambrose talked about him leaving, he denied it saying his truck had been broken all summer, a fact disproven by the dead grass the truck had originally been parked on was now visible after Pat reparked it on the lawn.
Evidence, Easy As Pie[]
Pat's cleanup wasn't perfect. While he scrubbed the blood clean with bleach, he left behind one of Rita's shoes, which he tossed in the trash. However, this paled in comparison to his biggest problem: he only recovered three shell casings from the scene, even though he shot Rita four times. After some thinking, Pat figured the only place the shell could be was in the pies Rita had baked and Pat had given to the festival. It would be undoubtedly suspicious if a bullet casing was found in a pie Rita had baked, and Pat's gun was registered to him, so it wouldn't be long until the murder would be found out and tied to him. If Pat wanted to save his neck, he had to get those pies back.
The Raffle[]
The only way he could do so was to win the pies in various contests within the festival. His first chance was to buy tickets for a raffle, with the pie as first prize, the other two being a steak dinner and a gift basket of skincare products. Pat bought dozens of tickets to improve his odds, but the pie ended up going to a local woman named Gladys Dohan (who, ironically, only put one ticket in the bowl). Pat couldn't risk her getting the pie with the shell, so he tried to steal it from her as she was getting into her car. Gladys fought back and sprayed Pat with a can of mace, only for him to grab her head and violently slam it into her steering wheel, killing her. Pat quickly moved her body, got in the driver's seat, and peeled out. Once he was a good distance away in a remote section of Mount Sutro, he checked the pie only to find the shell was not there. He left Gladys and her car wherever he parked and presumably ditched the pie and it's box somewhere else, presumably throwing it off the Golden Gate Bridge nearby.
Oh, Brother...[]
Around this time, Ambrose called his estranged brother, detective Adrian Monk, to come to Tewkesbury and solve Rita's murder. Adrian, already on bad terms with Ambrose after the latter never called after the death of his wife Trudy by car bomb, initially thought his brother was delusional and didn't believe him. (Ambrose felt the death of Trudy was his fault, as he had asked her to pick up some cough syrup for him on the day she was killed, but Adrian didn't know that.) He was about to blow the thing off and leave when he noticed a patch of dead grass under where Pat parked his pickup truck, and started to realize Ambrose might be onto something.
Adrian and his assistant Sharona Fleming went over to Pat's house to investigate under the guise of getting back a bag of flour Rita had borrowed from Ambrose to bake the pies. The duo got more confident that Van Ranken had murdered his wife when they saw the parking permit for Melvone Park on his truck, saw that he had been bleaching his kitchen floor, and saw the one shoe in his trash. After returning to Ambrose's house and discussing what they learned, Adrian and Sharona saw Pat walking away from his house and decided to follow him.
Potato Sacked[]
Of course, where he was going was to the festival, where the next game was a potato sack race. The race was all filled by the time Pat arrived, and he was only able to even enter the race by taking a ripped sack. Pat played aggressively, tripping up some of the other racers, some of whom were children. The pie, however, was the 2nd place prize, so in order to make sure he won that, he tripped up close to the finish line, "losing" first place to a little girl, but gaining the second pie. This garnered more suspicion from Monk and Sharona, who wondered why he would try to win a pie instead of the first place prize of a radio (Monk even disassembled the radio to see if there was something inside it Pat would want, much to the dismay of the girl who won the race.)
Once Pat had the pie, he got to a quiet empty place away from the festivities and dug around in the pie, but alas, he didn't find the shell casing in that one either. He walked off and left the pie behind, unaware Monk and Sharona had been watching him, baffled as to what he could be looking for. Upon talking with Ambrose about it, it jogged his memory about Gladys' murder and how she was photographed when she won the pie from the raffle in the newspaper. Thus, the trio was able to determine that the pies were the key factor to the mystery. They called Captain Leland Stottlemeyer to town to pitch their theory. While Stottlemeyer did naturally trust Adrian, he found their evidence flimsy at best and informed them that "Rita" boarded a plane to Buenos Aires the night she was killed. The group realized if they were going to solve this, they had to get the next pie themselves.
Bingo!...Right?[]
Once Stottlemeyer had left, Sharona found a list of the events for the Centennial and discovered the final pie was to be the grand prize for a game of Bingo the next day, and Sharona called Stottlemeyer and Lt. Randy Disher to the scene in preparation. Like before, Pat got multiple bingo cards to increase his odds of winning the pie. Adrian arrived with even more bingo cards to swing things more in his favor. In spite of that, Pat still had the winning card. While taunting Adrian that he'd "save him a piece", he flipped the chits off his card and sent them flying. It was through this action that Adrian realized that Pat was trying to find the shell casing, thinking the shells went flying everywhere when he killed Rita. Pat tried to get in his truck and leave to get the shell, but Stottlemeyer and Disher arrived before Pat could leave. The two got Van Ranken to set down the pie on the hood of his truck, and it was here that Adrian explained that Pat had been looking for the shell casing. Once the summation was concluded, Sharona took it upon herself to search through the pie and find the casing.
It was never the pies...[]
However, to everyone's surprise, Sharona found nothing in the pie. Stottlemeyer and Disher stormed off and Pat was free to go. With this knowledge in hand, Pat returned to his home to re-enact the crime and see if he could figure out where the shell really went at the same time Sharona and Monk recreated it. For his version of the recreation, he threw four empty bullet casings into the air to see where they landed. In his test, he found out at the same time Monk and Sharona did where the shell had really gone: the flour bag Rita had borrowed...the one that was now back at Ambrose's house.
With that, Pat went next-door to ask Ambrose for the bag back, claiming he wanted to make some chili. When Ambrose pointed out that flour isn't used to make chili, Pat dropped the pretense and pulled out his gun to take the flour bag back. Ambrose quickly shut the door on him and locked it, going for his phone. However, Van Ranken ripped the phone lines out of the house, leaving him unable to call for help. Pat was unable to find a way into the building, so he grabbed a nearby can of kerosene to set the house on fire, hoping to either smoke Ambrose out or at least destroy the shell casing, which Ambrose found after sifting through the bag. Ambrose's agoraphobia prevented him from escaping the house on his own, requiring Adrian to rush in and save him. Pat waited at the back of the house for Ambrose, where Stottlemeyer and Disher found him, having been informed of the situation by Adrian. Pat weakly tried to lie and say he was investigating the fire after seeing the smoke, but the two told Pat to put his hands on his head. He was also mockingly informed by Disher that Rita's body had been found in the park 20 minutes prior.
Pat van Ranken was then arrested for the murders of Rita van Ranken and Gladys Dohan, alongside arson and the attempted murder of Ambrose Monk.