You know, most of Patrick's "tricks" would not hold up in court in a billion years. If you apply logic from a show which respects the rule of court like Law and order SVU, then most of the cases Patrick solved would have failed to stand in court. The accused are entitled to a not say a word....... but somehow Cho get's them to spill everything out when there is minimal evidence to prove anything.   Also, have you ever noticed the lack of forensic presence in the CBI? We never saw a coroner once nor was a case ever solved based on forensic evidence alone............ I'm not trying to put this show down nor am i complaining or ranting, but Heller never used logic when it came to "the mentalist".

season 7 starts 3 years after season 6 ended.  lisbon has retired to stay at home with their little one.  jane and cho are checking out a body that was found in a dumpster outside of a nudist colony.  fischer is still useless except for a single observation she pulled off the internet about how nudist colonies are usually full of ugly people but the victim was actually a former male model.  wiley uses his ninja computer skills to uncover the fact that the colony is actually a low budget nude reality webshow based on the Big Brother style.  PJ eventually roots out the killer by temporarily joining the colony and realizing that the only person in the community that would make eye contact before giving a "full body" visual examination would be the person with something to hide.  all the while abbot just smirks and acts like PJ's little games are acceptable ways to draw out  a killer and will definintely hold up in court.  after cho gives his fail proof interrogation technique of asking "so, why'd you do it" while staring straight through the suspect and into their soul,  they admit that they had to do it, because size really does matter.  the show ends with a fully clothed PJ walking into a silent house and finding a note taped to the outside of the bedroom door......

I have a theory that will answer all of our doubts.
Bruno Heller threw random clues around which he couldn't put together even if he wanted to......... as the clues piled up, it reached a point where things got out of hand and he ended everything in an instant to cover up the fact of what a fucking failure he is as a producer and writer.

I want Red John back but all hope died when the season finale had only that idiotic love crap as a main story.

While watching the Mentalist and following the clues they led me to believe that Partridge was Red John. Naturally, I tried to tie the subsequent hints to him. I had my own theory on everything I could think of, to explain my instincts. Even on the list of 7, which posed more of the question why was it given to Jane at the time, rather than how did Red John know the list before Jane did.
The only thing I could never explain was how did Kristina Frye got zombiefied?
Any theories on that?