Solitary Man (Season 5, Episode 17)
Premise: The BAU tracks a lonely trucker who abducts women along the interstates, tests them in his rig and kills those who fail, while he fights to keep his daughter.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 17
- Unsub
- Wade Hatchett (Bradford Tatum)
- Location
- Edgewood, New Mexico
- 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
- “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.” (Tennessee Williams, read by Prentiss)
- Closing quote
- “Family is a haven in a heartless world.” (Christopher Lasch, read by Morgan)
- Guest stars
- Gabrielle Carteris as Nancy Campbell, Morgan Lily as Jody Hatchett, Brynn Samms as Courtney Campbell, Obba Babatundé as Sheriff Frank Sanders, Melissa Culverwell as Lynn Clemons
- Director
- Rob Hardy
- Writers
- Kimberly Ann Harrison & Ryan Gibson
Summary
The Case
“Solitary Man” opens with a father telling his young daughter, Jody, a bedtime tale about a lonely king hunting for a queen, while the same man stops to help a bartender, Tanya Hill, whose car will not start in the rain. Tanya is later found strangled in a ditch in Edgewood, New Mexico, the fifth woman in about six months left beside Interstates 40 and 25. No police department has asked for help; the BAU spots the pattern in its highway serial killer database, and a geographic profile shows the killer heading home to Edgewood each time. The sheriff doubts that a single local body makes a series. None of the women were raped, and all were posed curled up as if asleep. Skin and metal shavings are under their nails, and diesel and table sugar on their clothes point to a trucker hauling them in his rig.
The man picks up a hitchhiker and holds her captive and questions her about God and whether she wants children before killing her. Soon after, Nancy Campbell vanishes from a rest stop while her teenage daughter, Courtney, is texting; they live in Phoenix and were only driving through. Agents find the hitchhiker’s body in nearby woods, and Garcia ties four more deaths to the killer, bringing the count to ten. The team asks why he walked past Courtney to take Nancy, decides he tests women as companions and kills those who fail, and then sees that Nancy is a mother: he may want one for a child of his own. Meanwhile a woman tells the trucker, Wade Hatchett, that Jody is going to an adoptive family, since he lives in his cab and cannot care for her.
Garcia narrows the independent truckers in custody fights to Hatchett, a widower whose wife died in a house fire and who was found unfit and charged with neglect. A body off I-40 is not Nancy but Lynn Clemons, Jody’s foster mother, killed more brutally and not posed, and the agents realize Hatchett is coming for his daughter.
The ending
Spoiler: Prentiss reaches Jody first and finds her paintings of the sleeping “queens,” the dead women from her father’s stories. Hatchett arrives using Nancy as a shield. Jody talks to him and asks him to let the queen hold her, and he sends Nancy out to her, then speaks of going to a better place. Agents order him to turn around; Jody is later said to have lost her father. Prentiss is troubled that the couple adopting Jody backed out, but learns that an aunt has come forward to raise her.
Why it stands out
- A Johnny Cash cover of “Solitary Man,” the 1966 Neil Diamond song that gives the episode its title, plays in the bar in the opening scene.
- Gabrielle Carteris, who plays Nancy Campbell, spent the 1990s as Andrea on Beverly Hills, 90210; Nancy reminds her daughter that she went to high school too.