Unfinished Business (Season 1, Episode 15)
Premise: A Philadelphia serial killer resurfaces after 18 years with older victims and new methods, and the BAU works with the retired profiler who never caught him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 15
- Unsub
- Walter Kern, “The Keystone Killer” (Aaron Lustig)
- Location
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Elle Greenaway (Lola Glaudini), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” (Norman Maclean, read by Gideon)
- Closing quote
- “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” (Abraham Lincoln, read by Elle)
- Guest stars
- Geoff Pierson as Max Ryan, Christopher Grove as Scott Harbin, Jeanie Hackett as Anne Kern, Laura Gardner as Sylvia Gooden, Bryan McMahon as Philip Bromwell
- Director
- J. Miller Tobin
- Writers
- Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer
Summary
The Case
“Unfinished Business” begins in Philadelphia, where retired FBI profiler Max Ryan is promoting his new book on the Keystone Killer, who strangled seven women in the late 1980s and taunted police with word-search puzzles before going quiet 18 years ago. After the talk, a security guard hands Ryan a letter from the killer, who was in the audience. It holds the driver’s licenses of his last known victim, Amy Jennings, and of a new one, Carla Bromwell, 47, found suffocated, bound with flex-cuffs and hit hard on the head. Ryan, who once worked with Gideon, insists on joining the BAU as a consultant.
A name hidden backward in the puzzle points to Scott Harbin, a burglar on Ryan’s old suspect list just paroled for a 1988 killing. A SWAT raid on his home finds a woman he has been holding captive, along with a note to Ryan: the Keystone Killer has led them to a different predator. An earlier note had promised a new “gift” within two days. The team decides the killer did not choose his new methods; the blow to the head means he could not control a conscious victim, so he must have been weakened, likely by an injury after mid-1988. At a press conference, Carla’s brother, Philip Bromwell, says the FBI should have caught the killer long ago, and questions turn to Ryan. Ryan admits to Gideon that he hoped his book would lure the killer back, and Gideon urges him to let the team help.
Garcia searches serious car accidents from 1988 and finds Walter Kern, a former Air Force man who crashed on Carla Bromwell’s block and never regained strength on his right side. He once installed home alarms with Harbin. Gideon and Ryan visit his house, where his wife, Anne, says he is with the Boy Scouts and lets them into his darkroom. A scrapbook there has a chapter on every victim and unfinished chapters at the back built on 20-year-old photos: Kern is finishing women he chose long ago, and the crash stopped him on his way to kill Carla. The last chapter is Sylvia Gooden.
The Team
Elle notes that Ryan has no family left in his life and asks Hotch how he keeps a wife and baby while doing this job. Hotch says it comes down to setting priorities; Elle admits she is afraid of looking up one day to find her life gone.
The ending
Spoiler: Kern has left the community center, and his car is parked near Sylvia Gooden’s home. The team storms in as he attacks her; she survives, and Kern is taken alive, telling Ryan as he is led away that the two of them are inseparable.
Why it stands out
- Aaron Lustig guest stars as Walter Kern, the Keystone Killer, opposite Geoff Pierson as Max Ryan, the retired agent who has never stopped hunting him.
- The character of Max Ryan closely resembles Robert Ressler, one of the founders of the real unit when it was still the Behavioral Science Unit.