Margaret Kester

Margaret Kester, also known as Margaret Schuller, was Rick Kester's wife and one of Joe Carroll's followers.

Pre-2013
Between 2002 and 2005, Margaret was the perpetrator of a series of murders in Arkansas in which six people were stabbed to death. Eight years prior to The Following, she made contact with Joe Carroll. Sometime after, in 2009, she met and married Rick Kester. In 2010, when Rick tries using a knife to kill his future victims, his wife allows him to stab her. However he stabs too deep and Margaret has to go to the hospital. Margaret lies to the police, saying Rick did it out of anger and that he's abusive making the police believe it was assault. However Rick doesn't get arrested because Margaret doesn't press charges.

2013
In The Poet's Fire, when Ryan Hardy and the FBI investigate Rick's house Ryan opens one of the closets and Margaret comes out with a knife but is subdued and tells him she's Rick's husband. Later, she tricked Debra Parker into thinking that Rick had tried to kill her. He had in fact stabbed her in the abdomen as a dare by the other Followers. As it turns out, she was also a member of The Followers. She killed Troy Riley in The Poet's Fire when she ambushed him with a knife. She escaped, but in the process her husband, Rick Kester, was shot and killed.

She returns in Mad Love, she kidnapped Ryan Hardy's sister as a trap to murder him "off book" as payback for Ryan killing her husband. Ryan went to save his sister and he brought Mike Weston with him in case things went south. When he arrived she knocked him out and tied him to a table. She then put electromagnets on his chest to interrupt the pacemaker. Ryan tried to reason with her that she didn't want to kill him because then Joe Carroll wouldn't have been the one to do it. She reasons that she's only stopping the pacemaker so technically the stab wound Joe inflicted during the struggle in Sarah Fuller's house would be the thing that killed him. Before she could succeed and kill him as she made Ryan's sister watch Ryan die; Mike who had been waiting outside for some sort of signal shot her to death and effectively saved Ryan and his sister.

Known victims

 * Unspecified dates in 2002-2005: Six unnamed people (stabbed)
 * 2013:
 * Troy Riley (stabbed in the throat)
 * Unnamed man (stabbed in the abdomen)
 * Jenny Orson (abducted; threatened and presumably intended to kill)
 * Ryan Hardy (assaulted and attempted to kill by deactivating his pacemaker; was rescued)

Trivia

 * She mentioned having multiple foster fathers, suggesting that she was an orphan who grew up in the system.
 * Margaret was the first member of The Followers to defy Joe Carroll's master plan having been driven to the brink by her husband's death.
 * Margaret was the first follower related to another follower by marriage.
 * Margaret along with her husband Rick were both killed by a main character.
 * Margaret was the first known person to be killed by Mike Weston.