Richard Heller

Richard Heller is the son of US Secretary of Defense James Heller and the brother of Audrey Raines. During the course of the investigation into the kidnapping of his father and sister, Heller is subjected to intense interrogation up to and including torture for a period of approximatly three hours at the CTU offices in Los Angeles. During this period virtually no helpful information is obtained.

Later in the day, however, after the capture of the terrorist mastermind, Habib Marwan, it is discovered that a phone call had been made from Heller's cell phone to one in Marwan's posession. Heller is brought back in for questioning. Though intending to conduct the second interrogation himself, CTU Agent Jack Bauer yeilds to Raines pleading to allow her to question her brother. After observing the unsuccessful questioning for several minutes, James Heller enters the room and presses for answers from his son. Richard finally acqueses, though not before claiming he didn't intend to do anything wrong.

As it turns out, the week prior to the kidnappings and subsequent terrorist events, Richard had met a couple, Mandy and Gary, at a bar. After taking them to his home and "getting high", he and Gary had sex while Mandy set up a tap on his cell phone. This tap allowed Marwan to listen in on all of Heller's calls and from them gain the information on the Secretary of Defense's whereabouts. Richard's reluctance to divulge this information is, apparently, twofold: first is his discomfort in divulging his sexuality to his family (though this does not appear to be of supreme concern to his father or his sister, nor is it completely clear why his sexuality needed to be made clear to give CTU the information it needed) and second is the near impossibility of his being able to connect the two events given the limited information he had been presented earlier in the day. Nevertheless, Secretary Heller remains disappointed in his son, not because of his sexual orientation, but because he had refused to divulge information that, in the end, would've been helpful to the investigation.