Bloodline (Season 4, Episode 13)
Premise: A nomadic family that has stolen girls and killed their parents for generations strikes in Alabama, and the BAU follows the clues a rejected captive remembers.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 13
- Unsub
- Dad (Andrew Divoff), Kathy Gray, “Sylvia” (Cynthia Gibb), The Kid (Slade Pearce)
- Location
- Harvest, Alabama; Madison, Alabama
- Starring
- David Rossi (Joe Mantegna), Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner (Thomas Gibson), Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster), Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), Jordan Todd (Meta Golding)
- Opening quote
- “There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues of human society are created, strengthened and maintained.” (Winston Churchill, read by Prentiss)
- Closing quote
- “The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.” (Mario Puzo, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Adair Tishler as Cate Hale, John Bishop as Jim Scheuren, Sierra McCormick as Lynn Robillard, Brett Rice as Det. Bates, Paul Benz as Deputy Bo Whitaker
- Director
- Tim Matheson
- Writers
- Mark Linehan Bruner
Summary
The Case
“Bloodline” begins with a mother and father gently waking their son, who is almost 10, for a moment they say he has waited for all his life. In Harvest, Alabama, Geoff and Nancy Hale are found with their throats cut and their 10-year-old daughter, Cate, gone; her biological father, Jim Scheuren, found the bodies. The two wounds differ, one clean and one hesitant, so the team looks for two killers. Cate has epilepsy, and her captors have no medicine. When she has a seizure, the father wants her killed, but the mother refuses, and Cate is left 84 miles from home, alive.
In a gentle cognitive interview, Prentiss draws out a car trunk, an RV in the woods, tinkling bells, a boy her age and a word the mother uses for him, puyule, which Prentiss knows as Romanian. An RV park owner recalls a quiet foreign family who left at night and scattered glass across their site, and the team reads the rituals as a twisted version of Romany tradition. Garcia finds 30 similar crimes across the country going back to 1909. Then another couple is killed in Madison, Alabama, and their daughter, Lynn Robillard, is taken. A hair on Cate’s blanket belongs to Kathy Gray, a girl abducted in 1971 after her own parents were murdered: the family steals young girls to raise as wives for its sons.
A burned-out RV full of stolen clothes, tinfoil and a pickpocket’s mannequin hung with bells tells the team the family steals for a living, and police catch Kathy shoplifting at a nearby mall. She insists she is Sylvia and that she killed the Hales alone. Two agents work her, one gently reminding her of the girl she was, the other confronting her with the crime scene photos, until a list of local fences makes her give away one name. Agents arrest her husband there, and the boy is found as well.
The Team
Jordan Todd tells Hotch that JJ is coming back early from maternity leave and that she is returning to counterterrorism. She warns him that the team takes its cue from a leader who shows little emotion and asks him not to take JJ for granted. Earlier, Rossi tells Morgan that Todd was right that the team hides behind clinical language.
The ending
Spoiler: Lynn’s aunt and uncle are driving in to collect her. A translation of Kathy’s parting words to her son reveals she told him not to mention his brothers, and elsewhere another boy nearing 10 is told he is becoming a man.
Why it stands out
- This is Meta Golding’s last appearance as Jordan Todd, the stand-in liaison while JJ was on maternity leave, which A.J. Cook was also taking in real life.
- Andrew Divoff and Cynthia Gibb guest-star as the couple who abduct young girls as future brides for their son.