The ABC series The Rookie is a network police procedural focused on the life of a beat cop heading into its seventh season. This means that the cases the characters work on each week can differ. Still, The Rookie has no shortage of serial killers in its ranks, and Season 6’s “Training Day” introduced a new one: The Pentagram Killer. However, the case was not as straightforward as some might think. In fact, the titular training day in The Rookie’s fourth Season 6 episode has nothing to do with the new serial killer on the show. Rather, it follows Tru Valentino’s Officer Aaron Thorsen, after Season 5’s finale shooting, returning to duty.
He is paired with Eric Winter’s Tim Bradford, who puts him through a high-stress regimen designed to see if he’s really over the trauma of nearly dying from both bullet wounds and complications after surgery. On his first day back, Aaron Thorsen proves his mettle, cracking a murder-for-hire case and getting a punch in the face for his trouble. The rest of The Rookie’s regulars work together to solve the murder of Cheryl Budny, whose body bears the signature mark of the Pentagram Killer. Nathan Fillion’s Officer Nolan suggests that a new documentary inspired the killer to return or a copycat. Eventually, the identity of the Pentagram Killer becomes very straightforward, but the case itself is complicated and messy.
The Rookie Has a History With Serial Killers Despite Being a Beat Cop Show
Rosland Dyer Was the First Serial Killer to Menace Officer John Nolan and Friends
Despite trying to be a show about beat cops, there are a lot of television conventions in The Rookie. The officers get into gunfights almost every week, and patrol officers like Nolan or Melissa O’Neill’s Lucy Chen likely wouldn’t encounter serial killers as often as they do. The primary serial killer The Rookie’s characters encountered was Rosalind Dyer, played by the late Annie Wersching. However, from the second the character first appeared onscreen, she wasn’t working alone.
Over the course of five seasons, three of Dyer’s acolytes have surfaced to cause trouble for the Mid-Wilshire Police Division. Michael Cassidy’s Caleb Wright was her protégé, introduced in the same episode as Rosalind, Season 2, Episode 10, “Dark Side.” He was killed in the operation to rescue Chen, after he kidnapped her and buried her alive. Lucy Walter’s Beth Weston, a defense attorney who kidnapped the District Attorney prosecuting Rosalind. She killed Beth’s parents for her in return for that. Finally, Thomas Dekker played Jeffery Boyle, an acolyte of Rosalind’s whose case crossed over with the now-canceled The Rookie: Feds.
The Pentagram Killer is unrelated to Rosalind Dyer and her army of creepy killer students. In fact, he got away with his crimes, as the Pentagram Killer was never identified. Eventually, the murders stopped. While the characters in The Rookie are able to solve the case, even identifying the Pentagram Killer, “Training Day,” is not actually a serial killer case. Still, a lot of people end up dead or injured. Yet rather than the complex profile of villains like Dyer and her acolytes, these killers are born of regular, old human tragedy.
Who Is the Pentagram Killer in The Rookie?
When Nolan and Lisseth Chavez’s Officer Celina Juarez respond to a call in a city park bathroom, they find the body of Cheryl Budny. When Mekia Cox’s Detective Nyla Harper and Alyssa Diaz’s Detective Angela Lopez arrive, they quickly determine Cheryl wasn’t killed at the scene. They also discover a gruesome pentagram carved into her mid-section, the signature of the Pentagram Killer. Active in the 2000s, Cheryl matched the profile of his past victims. Juarez makes a rookie mistake and says the name “Pentagram Killer” on the open radio, creating a sensation around the investigation.
“The Pentagram Killer is wanted in connection with a string of unsolved homicides in the early 2000s. His victims were all middle-aged females.” – Harper describing the killer’s history.
Nolan and Juarez are left to clean up that mess, specifically running down the dozens of tips that came in from citizens. However, one of them, from a woman named Opal Jesper, strikes Nolan as credible. When the two officers visit her home, she tells them that she believed her husband (not named in the episode) was the Pentagram Killer. By way of proof, she offers up a cigar box that contains California Driver’s licenses belonging to the victims. She also later tells Nolan her husband gave her jewelry they couldn’t afford on his commercial fisherman’s salary. She also says she found a pair of women’s underwear in the car, but she threw them away. “I didn’t want to know,” she tells Nolan.
Did the Pentagram Killer Murder Cheryl Budny?
Despite all this turmoil from the revelation that Opal Jesper’s husband was the Pentagram Killer, he did not kill Cheryl Budny. Opal tells Nolan her husband died seven years earlier, and she only discovered his “trophies” after that. Ironically, Juarez’s mistake in saying the Pentagram Killer’s moniker over the radio, gave Opal the justification she needed to finally report this discovery.
Opal knew her husband couldn’t have killed Cheryl Budny, and she even had second thoughts about coming clean when Nolan and Juarez showed up.
Still, the police believed they had a copycat serial killer on their hands, who was perhaps gearing up to kill again. Perhaps the idea that someone would continue murdering (as inspired by her husband) is what motivated Opal Jesper to tell the truth. Still, it wrecked her life. She lost her friends, and she no longer felt safe in her home. In fact, Nolan implies at the end of “Training Day” that she will face charges and a conviction for hitting the reporter with her car. Especially since so many other members of the press caught the accident on video.
Detectives Lopez and Harper ended up with no suspects tied to the Pentagram Killer, so they went back to looking at Cheryl’s life. She had a lot of enemies for a middle-aged suburbanite, specifically at the school she worked at. Her biggest enemy was Conrad Battaglia, who later confessed to killing her. He said it was an accident, but after posting horrible things about her on the school’s unofficial online message board, he tried to make it look like the Pentagram Killer did it. However, Conrad was killed before he could be arrested and charged.
Who Is Jeff Budny, the Man Lucy Chen Shot?
Earlier in the episode, Jason Wiles’s Jeff Budny was told of his sister Cheryl’s murder, and he didn’t take it well. When Nolan and Juarez went to question Conrad, they instead found his wife Justine murdered on the kitchen floor. She had been stabbed multiple times. Lopez and Harper thought Conrad killed her, but it turns out he was also a victim.
It was Jeff Budny, who apparently owned 87 guns, who wanted to kill Conrad in retaliation but not before making him “feel pain” like Jeff did, which is why Justine was killed. While treating Conrad for his injuries in the street, Jeff Budny shows up and shoots him. He also tries to kill Bailey, Lopez, Harper and Chen, who are there in the street. Chen feels especially insecure because she failed her detective’s exam, so she risks her life by rushing across the street to arrest Jeff. She’s shot, but Jeff only hit her radio.
Lucy tries to take him in alive, but she shoots him just as he raises his rifle to fire at her. At the end of the episode, Lucy is deeply distraught at the thought of having killed Jeff Budny, even though he was now a serial murderer. She is emotional and grateful to learn he made it through surgery and, presumably, will face justice for the lives he took.
Was The Rookie’s Pentagram Killer Based On a Real Case?
The Serial Killer Was a Spectre Hanging Over the Episode Not a Real Threat
Often, network procedurals like The Rookie will draw from real-life headlines for their storytelling. In this case, it seems the Pentagram Killer is an original creation for the show and part of the fictional history of Los Angeles. If there were any parallels to the real world, this killer may have been inspired slightly by the infamous “Night Stalker,” Richard Ramirez, who operated in both L.A. and San Francisco in the early 1980s. Unlike the show’s Pentagram Killer, Ramirez was arrested in 1985. During his trial, he infamously drew a pentagram on his hand, showed it to reporters and shouted “Hail Satan!”
It’s equally possible the use of a pentagram as a calling card for this fictional serial killer was chosen simply because of its pop culture association with the occult and “devil worship.” The pentagram is an ancient symbol with many meanings, however. Ironically, the one shown on Cheryl Budny’s body had the peak of the five-pointed star pointed to the top. Drawn this way, the pentagram has been historically associated with protection from evil and demonic forces among those who believed in such things. It’s only when a single point is facing downwards that it’s associated with evil. Perhaps this was an intentional clue from the production to foreshadow that Cheryl’s murder was not committed by the Pentagram Killer.
The crux of the Pentagram Killer story on The Rookie was meant to deal with Lucy Chen’s feelings of inadequacy after she failed her detective’s exam. At first, she was relegated to simple, almost pointless guard duty securing the area around the crime scene. Later, when the shootout with Jeff Budny got underway, Lucy put herself on the line to help bring it to a close. Her final scene in the episode focused on her fear that she’d killed him. Even though it was a legitimate shooting, Lucy didn’t want to be responsible for taking someone’s life.
