…A Thousand Words (Season 5, Episode 20)
Premise: A serial killer tattooed with his victims’ faces stages his own suicide, and the BAU races to find the hidden partner still holding a missing college student.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 20
- Unsub
- Robert Matthew Burke (John Thaddeus), Juliet Monroe (Jolene Andersen)
- Location
- Tallahassee, Florida; Crawfordville, Florida
- 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 sincere artist tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.” (William Dobell, read by Rossi)
- Closing quote
- “I have seen children successfully surmount the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul.” (Mahatma Gandhi, read by Hotch)
- Guest stars
- Dean Norris as Det. John Barton, Holland Roden as Rebecca Daniels, Fred Cross as Trooper Pasternak, David Stanbra as Trooper Creighton
- Director
- Rosemary Rodriguez
- Writers
- Edward Allen Bernero
Summary
The Case
“…A Thousand Words” opens with a man calling 911 to report a body in a warehouse outside Crawfordville, Florida, then shooting himself while still on the line. State troopers find him in a chair, his skin covered in tattooed portraits of women, beside a wall of material on missing women going back ten years. One, Florida State student Rebecca Daniels, vanished while jogging only three weeks ago, and she is the only woman on the wall with no portrait on his body. The BAU drops its weekend plans and is met by Tallahassee detective John Barton, who has been working Rebecca’s case. The dead man rented the warehouse two weeks earlier, for cash, as Bob.
His clippings show one victim a year from across the Southeast, each raped, strangled and left in busy woods, with a new abduction about a week after each body is found. The scene reads as a staged confession, but in the dead man’s journals Reid finds the word “we”: there was a partner, who may still hold Rebecca. That partner, Juliet Monroe, receives his farewell letter asking her to finish what they started. JJ holds off the media, and a colleague takes Barton aside after he keeps calling the victim Becky; he admits the case has gotten to him. A tattoo artist shows Rossi and Prentiss a crude jailhouse cross hidden under a rose, and Garcia, using a prison tattoo database and the name Bob, identifies Robert Matthew Burke, a rapist released in October 1999. Barton knows the name: Burke, a registered sex offender, got a traffic ticket near campus the night Rebecca vanished and was due to give Barton a DNA swab on Monday.
Under black light, invisible tattoos on Burke’s back lead to a blank space holding an embryo: the partner is a woman carrying his child. Juliet tells Rebecca that she loved Burke and calls him her masterpiece, then goes into labor, and Rebecca delivers the baby, a boy Juliet rejects because she wanted a girl. The team profiles a fragile woman drawn to violent men, and prison visitor logs show Juliet visiting the father who raped her, then Burke, more and more often until his release.
The ending
Spoiler: Agents storm Juliet’s house in northern Florida and find her dead after the birth, the baby alive and Rebecca safe; she goes to the hospital to meet her parents. Barton is credited with clearing nine homicides by chasing a routine traffic ticket. Over a later poker game, Morgan presses Prentiss about her Atlantic City weekend plans, and she declines to explain. The team concludes that Burke’s son can do well if he is raised in a loving home.
Why it stands out
- Green Bay Packers player Greg Jennings makes his acting debut as an evidence technician.
- The case leans on Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, and the closing scene lists real killers who had children, among them Albert Fish, Gary Ridgway, and Fred and Rosemary West.