June Meets John Dorie’s Dad in Fear the Walking Dead 613 Trailer: “J.D.”

June Dorie (Jenna Elfman) finds a new mystery — and her father-in-law — in the first look at Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 Episode 13, “J.D.” When the gunslinger widow splits off to gather information to help stop an oncoming threat, she breaks into an RV decorated with evidence and newspaper clippings documenting decades-old crimes: female victims of a Houston area serial killer. “ANOTHER EMBALMED WOMAN, FEW LEADS,” reads one headline pinned to a board with polaroids of locations defaced by “the end is the beginning” graffiti, the same cryptic message preached about by underground doomsday cult leader Teddy (John Glover).

“This episode coming up is one I’m very excited about. It’s gonna be a big episode of change, and really show the evolution of where June is now,” Elfman says in the episode’s trailer, above. “And just when you least expect it in this apocalypse, you run into someone who just might totally turn your world upside down.”

That world-upending someone is Mr. Dorie (series newcomer Keith Carradine), the reclusive ex-policeman father of the late John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt). In Season 6 Episode 4, “The Key,” John tells Rabbi Jacob (Peter Jacobson) about the case that ruined his father’s career — and his life:

Women were going missing in the Houston area. Bodies showing up miles away. The term didn’t exist then, but I suppose the fella doin’ it is what we’d call a serial killer. Detectives found him living on this compound out in the desert with a bunch of people he brainwashed into thinking he was the second coming or somethin’. Really, he was just some two-bit mortician spouting on about death and new beginnings … just a bunch of nonsense dressed up to sound profound. Everybody knew this guy was guilty. They couldn’t pin any of the murders directly to him, at least not with anything that would stick in court. Then, my dad found something, a purse belonging to one of the missing women, squirreled away in the back of that guy’s closet. That was enough to put that sumbitch away for the rest of his life.

But John’s father planted the purse, breaking the rules to get a dangerous criminal off the street at the cost of his career and his marriage. John’s father became a reclusive alcoholic who never saw his son again.

Teddy’s twisted modus operandi is revealed in full in Season 6 Episode 11, “The Holding,” where the unfaithful are embalmed and preserved as walkers. It’s not a fate befitting Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), now the prized captive of Teddy’s underground group threatening to unleash a nuclear apocalypse with the submarine key stolen from Morgan Jones (Lennie James).

“J.D.,” from first-time Fear director Aisha Tyler (Criminal Minds), is streaming early starting May 13 on AMC+ and premieres May 16 on AMC Network.

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 premiere Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.