Rite of Passage (Season 5, Episode 19)
Premise: Called to a Texas border town after three severed heads appear outside the sheriff’s station, the BAU hunts a killer who has preyed on migrants for years.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 19
- Unsub
- Ronald Boyd, “Santa Muerte” (Mike Doyle)
- Location
- Terlingua, Texas
- 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
- “A lion’s work hours are only when he’s hungry; once he’s satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.” (Chuck Jones, read by Prentiss)
- Closing quote
- “Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” (Helen Keller, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Marlene Forte as Sheriff Ruiz, Kurt Caceres as Omar, Justin Huen as Richard Corral, Alex Quijano as Deputy Gentry, Casey Nelson as Deputy Gannon
- Director
- John Gallagher
- Writers
- Victor De Jesus
Summary
The Case
“Rite of Passage” sends the BAU to Terlingua, Texas, a small border town where three severed heads have been left outside the sheriff’s station. One is a day old; the other two belong to people who died months ago and were buried, then dug up and beheaded recently. The DEA, worried that the Lugo cartel is moving cheap black tar heroin into town, has asked the team to look. Outside the station, men loyal to local drug trafficker Omar Morales protest his arrest by deputies. Sheriff Eva Ruiz, a former Brooklyn homicide detective, thinks her deputies have the wrong man. She has counted more than 20 missing immigrants and believes someone has been killing them for years.
The medical examiner finds that the victims were older, one nearly blind, and that sand was driven deep into their airways, so they were probably made to run through the desert. Questioned, Omar describes the far worse mutilation a cartel would use and says people blame Santa Muerte, the saint of death. Omar is released over the protests of Deputy Ronald Boyd, and another fresh head appears. The team profiles a predator who picks off the weakest stragglers, runs them down, may be weak himself and is staying close to the case. With help from migrant advocate Richard Corral and Garcia’s search of utility records, agents raid a safe house in a stable, where a young boy says a man took his mother.
That night Boyd tells Ruiz the boy remembers seeing a sun as he crossed and drives her to a barn with a sun mural. When she notices his limp, from a teenage injury, she recognizes the profile; he resents her as a meddling newcomer and lets her run. The next morning Boyd reports finding her body, mutilated exactly as Omar described in the interview room, and the agents learn that Boyd overheard that conversation. By then he has gone with Deputy Gentry to collect Omar. He kills Omar with a shotgun, claiming Omar was armed, and Gentry is found dead too.
The ending
Spoiler: Garcia tracks Boyd’s police radio as he drives off-road into the desert, and Hotch keeps him talking; Boyd says a Texas death sentence is the right end for someone like him. At his trailer agents find where he beheaded his victims and an old news story about his father’s death as foreman of Golden Harvest grain and feed. At the Golden Harvest barn, Boyd comes at the agents firing and is shot. Corral begins gathering DNA from families to name the dead, and Ruiz’s old Brooklyn colleagues are to be asked to honor her.
Why it stands out
- The profile cites a real case: Cary Stayner, the Yosemite killer, who drove far from his crimes to leave cigarette packs and driver’s licenses that would mislead investigators.
- Ruiz names St. Jude as the patron saint of police; St. Jude is better known as the saint of lost causes, and St. Michael is usually counted as the police patron.
- The real Terlingua had only about 58 residents in 2009, a scattering of buildings on dirt roads rather than the paved town shown on screen.