Limelight (Season 3, Episode 13)
Premise: When a storage unit sold at auction turns out to hold a sadistic killer’s journals, the BAU works with a fame-hungry Philadelphia agent to find the man who wrote them.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 13
- Unsub
- Jeremy Andrus (Christopher Allen Nelson)
- Location
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Starring
- David Rossi (Joe Mantegna), 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
- “I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.” (Euripides, read by Rossi)
- Closing quote
- “For we pay a price for everything we get or take in this world, and, although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won.” (Lucille Maud Montgomery, read by Rossi)
- Guest stars
- Andrea Roth as Jill Morris, Wendy Braun as Kat Townsley, Chris Snyder as Shawn Overholt, Michael Cotter as Stu, Jeremy Cohenour as Dwayne
- Director
- Glenn Kershaw
- Writers
- Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie
Summary
The Case
“Limelight” opens at a Philadelphia storage auction, where two bargain hunters win a unit and find journals of violent sexual fantasies. Jill Morris, an ambitious agent at the Philadelphia field office and an admirer of Rossi, sends him the pages, and he drives up with Reid. The renter used a fake name, Louis Ivey, and paid cash until he fell behind. Rossi sees nothing proving the fantasies were acted out until Jill shows him hair she says came from the boxes, and the team is called in.
Childhood drawings, old pornography, trade-school textbooks and dresses altered to fit a man build a picture of the writer, and Reid finds in the handwriting a fixation on electric shock. That signature matches the unsolved murder of Dana Foster, a real estate agent killed in a Bucks County cellar after meeting a buyer who gave the name Louis Ivey; Hotch and Rossi find that the killer wired his device into the house’s power. Garcia ties three more bodies, left beside highways in Maryland, New Jersey and New York in 2002 and 2003, to the same man, and the team profiles a sexual sadist who works with electricity, targets successful women and wears their clothes to relive the torture. Jill announces the hunt to the press, and Hotch rebukes her. An anonymous caller using the killer’s word for women, “bleeders,” leads police to a grave holding Mimi Adams and Sara Coswell, taken on the same day.
Reporter Kat Townsley is abducted after her car is rear-ended. Jill, lured by an email and a call that seem to come from Kat, goes alone and is taken from a parking garage. An internet café manager recalls a big blond man with a white van, and by narrowing a list of electrical workers to the area around the garage, café and storage unit, Garcia finds the address.
The Team
Over drinks Rossi realizes Jill once sat in his 1997 academy seminar and that the hair was her own, planted to win the BAU’s commitment; he warns her that her ego will cause trouble. When Hotch learns of it, Rossi defends her as himself 20 years earlier and admits he once put himself first and made killers famous while their victims were forgotten.
The ending
Spoiler: Agents storm the killer’s hideout and rescue Jill, who clings to Rossi; Kat does not survive. The killer, Jeremy Andrus, 41, matches the profile, and he answers questions about other remains only by pointing. Jill insists she is not a victim, then steps out to a crowd of reporters asking about book deals and tells them the case is closed.
Why it stands out
- Andrea Roth plays Jill Morris, a Philadelphia agent whose appetite for fame, and indifference to the damage it may cause, grows clearer to the team as the case goes on.
- The episode cites real killers Ted Bundy, Gerard Schaefer and the nurse Charles Cullen, whose victims Hotch names to make the point that the public remembers killers rather than those they killed.