Legacy (Season 2, Episode 22)
Premise: When a Kansas City detective insists that dozens of homeless people have quietly vanished from his beat, the BAU must find a legal way in before a mission-driven killer strikes again.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 22
- Unsub
- Charles Holcombe (Tahmus Rounds), Steven Foster (Ronnie Steadman)
- Location
- Kansas City, Kansas
- Starring
- Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (A.J. Cook), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness)
- Opening quote
- “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” (Herman Melville, read by Hotch)
- Closing quote
- “Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.” (Charles Chaplin, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Kristoffer Ryan Winters as Detective Cal McGee, Bre Blair as Maggie, Steven Williams as Capt. Wright, Mary Gillis as Mona
- Ripped from the headlines
- The unsub’s maze-like plant is reportedly inspired by H. H. Holmes’s “murder castle,” a hotel built with dead ends, secret passages and soundproofed rooms where he tortured and killed his guests.
- Director
- Glenn Kershaw
- Writers
- Edward Allen Bernero
Summary
The Case
“Legacy” opens with a captive who believes he has escaped and reached a hospital, only to find he has not. At Quantico, Detective Cal McGee of the Kansas City, Kansas, police turns up at JJ’s office with notebooks cataloging everyone he meets on the skid row he patrols. At least 63 vagrants, prostitutes and addicts have vanished, lately a couple a day, yet nobody has reported them missing, and the mayor’s office has just honored him for the drop in crime. An anonymous letter has scolded him for taking credit for work someone else did. Without an official invitation the BAU cannot act, so Hotch and JJ fly back with McGee while the others study his notebooks. Recalling the Yorkshire Ripper, the team pegs a mission-driven killer who sees himself as cleaning house.
Captain Wright, McGee’s commander and his late father’s partner, already knew of McGee’s theory and dismisses it. JJ notices that the letter was postmarked across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, which makes the case federal; Hotch takes it but promises Wright’s men the arrest. Meanwhile a van driver lures a prostitute, Maggie, with the promise of $500 for a private party. She wakes shoeless in a locked room, where a hidden voice lists the diseases of her trade, sentences her to death and gives her until sunrise to escape a vast building. She begs to get home to her baby daughter.
The profile describes a fastidious, indignant loner with one subservient companion, set off a year earlier by a death or the loss of someone who controlled him. A canvass turns up no one who remembers such a man, and Wright scoffs, until the team realizes the abductor must blend in, like a social services worker. When a homeless woman, Mona, climbs into a van, Morgan jumps aboard and the van crashes. The driver, Steven Foster, has no paper trail beyond a driver’s license, and the van belongs to a Cayman Islands shell company.
The ending
Spoiler: In the interview room, an agent convinces the terrified Steven that his master despises him and will punish him for being caught. Steven, whose family has always served the unsub’s, names Charles Holcombe, whose father died a year ago and left him everything, including an old meatpacking plant. Inside, Maggie refuses to beg as Holcombe closes in, and police and agents burst in to stop him. Maggie survives with cuts, asks to see his face and asks someone to check on her daughter.
Why it stands out
- The team quotes the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 women between 1975 and 1980 and said at his trial that God had told him to kill prostitutes.
- The tune Holcombe whistles is “Johanna” from the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, perhaps a nod to the murderous barber.
- Bre Blair, who plays Maggie, later co-starred with Shemar Moore in S.W.A.T. (2017).