Catching Out (Season 4, Episode 5)
Premise: When a killer who makes himself at home in his victims’ houses strikes across California’s farm country, the BAU follows the rail lines to find him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 5
- Unsub
- Armando Salinas, “Highway 99 Killer” (Andre Royo)
- Location
- Modesto, California; Lockeford, California
- 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), Jordan Todd (Meta Golding)
- Opening quote
- “Plenty sits still. Hunger is a wanderer.” (Zulu proverb, read by Prentiss)
- Closing quote
- “Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea, and the East and West, the wander-thirst that will not let me be.” (Gerald Gould, read by Prentiss)
- Guest stars
- Pepe Serna as Ruben Garcia, Linda Bisesti as Joann Nelson, Victor Warren as Detective Daniels, Omar Leyva as Cesar Jimenez, Jim Cody Williams as Modesto Bull
- Ripped from the headlines
- Inspired by the case of Ángel Maturino Reséndiz (also known as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez), the “Railroad Killer,” a drifter who rode freight trains and burgled and killed people in homes near the tracks around Houston, Texas, in 1998 and 1999.
- Director
- Charles Haid
- Writers
- Oanh Ly
Summary
The Case
“Catching Out” sends the BAU to central California, where a burglar has bludgeoned sleeping victims in Bakersfield, Fresno, Chico and Sacramento, then stayed for hours to eat their food, shower, try on their clothes and sleep in their beds. His DNA is everywhere, but there are no prints, no car and no witnesses. In Sacramento, the BAU has a task force agent, Liman, retract the nickname he coined, “Highway 99 Killer,” warning that it narrows the investigation, and sends surplus officers home. In Modesto, where a new couple has been killed, a neighbor saw someone on their balcony hours after they died, and the killer has left his dirty clothes on the husband’s body. The team reads this as a homeless man taking over another’s life, and the cleaners missing from under the sink suggest he huffs solvents.
Reasoning that he must be riding freight trains, the team learns from a rail cop and a hobo camp about life on the rails and the symbols drifters leave each other. The profile describes a transient aged 25 to 45, bruised from hopping trains, with a rash around his mouth and nose from sniffing, and dressed in his victims’ clean clothes. Garcia finds his DNA in three more farm towns, the earliest in Tehachapi, and each killing lines up with a local harvest, pointing to a migrant farm worker. After another couple dies, he leaves behind a newspaper using the old nickname, mocking the investigation. In Tehachapi, a hobo sign marked the house of the first victim, Mildred Younce, 68, as a place where a kind old woman traded food for work.
Pawn-shop footage and farm-camp records lead to Armando Salinas, who has a record for theft and assault and whose prints were in Younce’s house. His half-brother, Ruben Garcia, explains that his work crew threw Armando out; Armando has trailed him ever since, leaving him money at the camps, and has always talked of having a home and a bed of his own. Police flood Lockeford, where the crew is working.
The Team
JJ, in her third trimester and nearing maternity leave, has a teammate feel the baby kick and hints that she has a plan to cover her absence.
The ending
Spoiler: Salinas is spotted fleeing a house, and Morgan chases him onto a moving freight train while Hotch races alongside by car; how the chase ends is not spelled out. Afterward, JJ introduces her stand-in, Agent Jordan Todd, who turns out to be the woman Morgan flirted with at a coffee shop, and the team teases him about it.
Why it stands out
- Meta Golding first appears as Jordan Todd, who fills in as the team’s liaison during JJ’s maternity leave.
- The title comes from rail slang: hopping a freight train is called “catching out.”