A Higher Power (Season 3, Episode 15)
Premise: When grieving parents in a Pittsburgh neighborhood start dying in apparent suicides, the BAU hunts a killer who believes he is releasing them from their pain.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 15
- Unsub
- Peter Redding (Scott Michael Campbell)
- Location
- Pittsburgh, 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
- “There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.” (Daniel Webster, read by Rossi)
- Closing quote
- “The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering.” (Ben Okri, read by Prentiss)
- Guest stars
- Paul Schulze as Detective Ronnie Baleman, Jennifer Aspen as Laurie Ann Morris, Renée O’Connor as Pam Baleman, Blake Robbins as Jonathan Morris, Myk Watford as Curtis Fackler
- Director
- Félix Enríquez Alcalá
- Writers
- Michael Udesky
Summary
The Case
“A Higher Power” begins in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Pam Baleman finds her husband, Paul, electrocuted in a locked bathroom. He is the fifth parent of a child killed in a fire at the local rec center, which took 14 children, to die by apparent suicide in three months, each death two weeks after the last. Paul’s brother, Detective Ronnie Baleman, rejects that and calls JJ. With Hotch away, Rossi takes the case although Morgan doubts there is one, and the team notes that suicides usually fall, not rise, after a shared disaster. At Paul’s house Morgan, who renovates properties of his own, notes that whoever dropped the heater into the bath knew the outlet lacked ground-fault protection.
The team’s theory of an angel of death gains ground when young mother Beth Smoler is found dead without a struggle, her baby unhurt in his high chair, and handwriting analysis shows a jumper’s note to be strikingly hopeful. Ronnie goes to the press on his own. Garcia concludes the killer paralyzes victims with a fast-fading drug so they stay awake, and the coroner finds a needle mark in Beth’s hairline. After Curtis Fackler, a father in recovery, dies of a gunshot under the chin with a matching puncture, the remaining doubts fall away. The notes read like the amends to oneself written in recovery programs, so agents and police canvass anonymous support groups near Shadyside. Members recall a man named Peter who kept telling of his brother James, abused by their professor father, slashing his wrists. The team realizes Peter killed James, and Garcia finds the 1984 suicide of James Redding at Brassard and the home of his brother, Peter.
The Team
Hotch takes a day off to talk to his son, Jack, about the end of his marriage, then joins the team in Pittsburgh. He later says he told Jack he would not be around as much, and that Jack hugged him and said everything would be fine. When a colleague shaken by Beth Smoler’s death wonders whether the team changes anything, Morgan says renovating his four properties, like kicking in doors, makes him feel he is improving something.
The ending
Spoiler: Peter’s empty apartment holds a grid of support group meetings with the victims’ names crossed off, all but Laurie Ann Morris, a grieving mother who can no longer hold her young son. Agents find her with Peter as he urges her to let go, and he is arrested, insisting he has done nothing wrong. Laurie Ann is urged to stay for her son’s sake. Ronnie learns that Paul’s name was not on Peter’s lists and that his journal points to suicide after all; he refuses to accept it.
Why it stands out
- The team cites the drop in suicides after both world wars, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 to argue that a spike after a local tragedy is unusual.
- Paul Schulze and Scott Michael Campbell, who play the detective and the killer, both later appeared on Suits.