Cold Comfort (Season 4, Episode 14)
Premise: A killer embalms young women alive to recreate the woman who raised him, while a psychic’s promises to a desperate mother divide the BAU.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 14
- Unsub
- Roderick Gless (Sam Littlefield)
- Location
- Olympia, Washington
- 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), Kevin Lynch (Nicholas Brendon)
- Opening quote
- “And so, all the night tide, I lay down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in the sepulcher there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea.” (Edgar Allan Poe, read by JJ)
- Closing quote
- “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.” (Stuart Chase, read by Rossi)
- Guest stars
- Michael Biehn as Detective Ron Fullwood, Vondie Curtis-Hall as Stanley Usher, Cybill Shepherd as Leona Gless, Lolita Davidovich as Sandra Lombardini, Matt Winston as Ivan Bakunas
- Director
- Anna Foerster
- Writers
- Dan Dworkin & Jay Beattie
Summary
The Case
“Cold Comfort” opens in Olympia, Washington, where Sandra Lombardini begs Detective Ron Fullwood for her missing daughter’s necklace so that a psychic can read it. A mudslide in a state park has uncovered an embalmed young woman, the first of four blond, blue-eyed women taken roughly three months apart; the latest, Brooke Lombardini, disappeared four days ago after her restaurant shift. Two more bodies turn up, all embalmed while still alive under barbiturates, with matching haircuts, newly double-pierced ears and signs of necrophilia. The team profiles a wealthy, socially awkward loner in his twenties remaking his victims into a woman he lost, and compares him to Ed Gein. Rossi clashes with the psychic, Stanley Usher, who claims Brooke is alive and feels tired and heavy; Usher turns out to have faced fraud charges in Oregon.
A funeral home points the team to Ivan Bakunas, a former apprentice who did up female corpses in a wig. He is caught heading for Vancouver and admits to necrophilia but not murder; he is attached to shoes taken from a dead local weather presenter, since only the genuine article makes his fantasy real. Meanwhile a woman calls 911 whispering that she is Brooke and is being held captive, and Sandra recognizes her voice. Brooke’s captor, Roderick Gless, drugs her, calls her Abby and demands bedtime stories. The genuine-article insight sends the team to a robbed grave: Abigail Hansen, a Dutch au pair who worked for Patrick and Leona Gless and all but raised their son. While his parents were away on a cruise, Abigail died, and Roderick was found curled up beside her body days later.
Roderick emptied his trust fund years ago and left no paper trail, but the agents suspect his guilt-ridden father has been secretly wiring him $50,000 every six months. Usher points to water, and a family photo suggests the abandoned Gless house on Mercer Island, but the Western Union office places Roderick elsewhere. Agents storm that location and find Brooke drugged but alive, and she is reunited with her mother. The spot is nothing like the rocky shore the psychic described.
The Team
It is JJ’s first day back from maternity leave, wearing a citrine for her son Henry’s birthstone and fighting separation anxiety. She is drawn to Usher’s hope for Brooke, putting her at odds with Rossi.
The ending
Spoiler: The next morning Rossi finds JJ in early and tells her she need not give up her beliefs but must trust the team’s methods. He admits that years ago, on a Georgia kidnapping, a local psychic sent the investigation the wrong way and the boy died, then welcomes her back.
Why it stands out
- Vondie Curtis-Hall guest-stars as psychic Stanley Usher and Cybill Shepherd as Leona Gless.
- Michael Biehn took the role of Detective Fullwood the day after his father died, to keep his mind off the loss.
- Randolph Mantooth, who plays Roderick’s father, starred in Emergency! as paramedic John Roderick Gage.