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Rustin Spencer " Rust" Cohle is a fictional character portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the first season of HBO's anthology television series True Detective. He works as a homicide detective for the Louisiana State Police (LSP) alongside his partner Marty Hart, portrayed by Woody Harrelson. The season follows Cohle and Hart's hunt for a serial killer in Louisiana across 17 years.
The character of Rust Cohle and Matthew McConaughey's performance have gained critical acclaim. McConaughey received a Critics' Choice Television Award and nominations for a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance.
The series gradually reveals Cohle's backstory. He was born in Texas but raised in Alaska by his survivalist Vietnam veteran father after his parents divorced. He has not seen his mother since he was a child. He returned to Texas as a young man and joined the Houston Police Department, eventually becoming a detective in a robbery squad. Sometime in the mid to late 1980s, his two-year-old daughter, Sophia, was hit by a car and killed; a tragedy that destroyed his marriage. Devastated by the loss, Cohle grew evermore unstable, eventually killing a crystal meth addict who had injected his own child with the drug. His superiors offered him a chance to avoid prison by working as an undercover detective in a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), which he did for four years; Cohle notes that this was over four times as long as most undercover detectives are kept in rotation. During this assignment, Cohle became addicted to drugs, and eventually killed three drug cartel members in a shootout at the Port of Houston, while being shot multiple times himself.
During his recovery, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Lubbock. Upon his release, he was offered retirement with full pension, but he declined that offer in favor of transferring to a homicide unit. His superiors then transferred him to Louisiana, where he lives only for his work. Cohle has synesthesia and suffers from hallucinations from his drug-using years undercover.
The series takes place in two time periods: 1995–2002, in which Cohle and Hart work together to find the killer; and 2012, when Cohle, who has by now quit the state police and become an Alcoholism, submits to an interview with LSP detectives Maynard Gilbough and Thomas Papania regarding the murders. Cohle sees through the detectives, and realizes that they think he is the killer. He uses the interview to find out what information the detectives have on him and the case.
During their investigation, Cohle interviews prostitutes who may have known Lange; he purchases in an effort to combat his insomnia. Seeking a rural brothel in Vermilion Parish called the Ranch, Cohle assaults some local johns and uncovers its location. At the Ranch, Cohle and Hart gain access to Lange's diary, which contains repeated references to "Carcosa" and a "Yellow King". In the wreckage of a burnt-out church Lange attended, they find more structures and a painting on the wall depicting a human figure wearing antlers.
Cohle escapes and kidnaps Ginger who takes him to meet Reggie's cousin and partner, Dewall. Dewall refuses Cohle's fake business offer and threatens to kill him if they were to cross paths again. Hart follows Dewall to their rural meth lab in the swamp and calls Cohle to provide the location. Hart and Cohle methodically search the property while side stepping various booby traps. When Hart discovers that the Ledoux partners have kidnapped and abused two children, a boy and a girl, he executes Reggie in a fit of rage. Dewall is killed after he flees and blows up on one of his own explosive booby traps. Cohle stages evidence to support the story that Reggie opened fire on them, forcing Hart to kill him in self-defense. Afterwards the two are hailed as heroes, and receive commendations and promotions. Of the two children only the girl was rescued alive.
Cohle becomes obsessed with reopening the case and pursues several leads, including a private Christian school run by Billy Lee Tuttle that had been closed amid rumors of child sexual abuse. He also visits the Ledouxs' surviving victim, now institutionalized with catatonia, who tells Rust about a third attacker, and begins screaming when Cohle asks her about the man's apparently scarred face. Tuttle complains to Cohle's superiors, who suspend Cohle and order him to leave the case closed. That night, Maggie arrives unexpectedly at Cohle's apartment and seduces him as revenge for Hart's infidelity. Hart finds out and gets into a fistfight with Cohle in front of the entire department. Cohle quits the force the same day, and becomes a drifter and an alcoholic. He initially returns to Alaska and supports himself as a fisherman. Upon his return to Louisiana in 2010, he works as a part-time bartender. In 2012, a murder similar to the Lange case from 1995 occurs and Cohle is seen in the vicinity of the body, arousing the suspicion of LSP detectives Gilbough and Papania. They believe that Cohle may have been the killer in 1995 because he led Hart to every break in the case and seemed to know everything about the killer's Modus operandi. They interview Cohle and Hart, who both refuse to cooperate once the purpose of the interview becomes clear.
Cohle meets with Hart, who has also quit state CID and runs his own private investigation firm; he tells him that he has found evidence leading to the killer. Hart is skeptical and still resentful, but Cohle convinces him to help with the investigation by showing him a videotape he stole from Tuttle's home. The video is over twenty years old, and shows numerous masked men abusing and killing Marie Fontenot, a missing child whose name had come up in their investigation seventeen years prior. Cohle and Hart track down the original case's chief investigating officer, Sheriff Steve Geraci, and interrogate him at gunpoint. Geraci tells them that his superior, the late Sheriff Ted Childress, ordered him to halt the investigation; Childress was one of Tuttle's relatives. They soon discover that the Tuttle and Childress families—to whom both Reggie and Dewall Ledoux belong—are related, and have long histories of child abuse and murder. They ultimately discover that the killer is a Childress, and go to a relative of the late sheriff's home to investigate.
Recovering in the hospital, Cohle falls into a coma for a number of days. After he wakes, Cohle informs Hart that while in the coma he felt the loving presence of his deceased father and daughter. Cohle leaves the hospital with Hart and looks up at the night sky, telling his partner, "Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning."
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