Rust Cohle

Has shot people before, as he tells the Hart children.

Origin Born: Southern Texas

Raised: Alaska Nicknames "The Tax Man" (due to the way he carries an oversized ledger, as opposed to a tiny notebook the way other cops did).

"Crash" (given by motorcycle gang he went undercover with) Family Sofia Cohle (Daughter, deceased)

Ex-Wife

Father (Vietnam veteran, from Alaska) Psyche: 

Suicide/Need for Death

While he has suicidal thoughts, Rust claims he "lacks the constitution for suicide." [E1] But at the same time, he feels as though he's meant for death. “I’d lie awake thinking about women. My daughter and my wife. It’s like something’s got your name on it. Like a bullet or a nail.” [E2]

Sleep 

He comments that after his transfer to Louisiana, he didn't sleep. He refers to insomnia (and given his self-awareness, that's probably accurate) once during his 2002 interview -- saying that he suffered from insomnia during the Dora Lang investigation. In 1995, he says he doesn't sleep, and another time he says he doesn't sleep, he just dreams. [E1] He also comments about how he would awake thinking about women (his wife and his daughter specifically). Takes quaaludes to sleep, and under at least one circumstance purchased the drugs from a prostitute.

Rust also uses a crucifix as a form of meditation.

Comments About Cohle 

"He'd pick a fight with the sky if he thought it was the wrong shade of blue." - Marty Hart

"I think part of Rust's problem was there were things he needed that he couldn't admit to." - Marty Hart

“I can be hard to live with. I don’t mean to, but I can be critical. And sometimes I’m just not good for people. You know, that it’s not good for them to be around me. You know, I wear them down. They get unhappy … I can’t say the job made me this way. More like being this way made me right for the job.” - Rust Cohle

"Rust had about as sharp an eye for weakness as I'd ever seen." - Marty Hart

“He’s conflict oriented, so when I deny him small arguments, it builds up his energy.” - Laurie (his near-second-wife)

"I can see your soul at the edge of your eyes … it’s corrosive, like acid. You got a demon, little man … there’s a shadow on you, son.” - Reggie Ledoux's Partner

History: Pre Dora Lang Investigation 

Pre-Death of Daughter: 

He worked with the robbery squad in Houston until 1989 -- presumably the year his daughter died.

Death of Daughter:

Sofia Cohle passed while Rust was still married. The doctors said she didn't feel a thing, and only slipped into a coma before her death. Rust describes her passing as: "somewhere in that blackness she slipped out into another, deeper kind."

He also later seems to regret her birth. He says that in her death, "she spared me the sin of being a father." [does this mean he thinks he would've been a bad father, or that all father's are bad given his favor towards women?]. In talking to the detectives, he comments that Sofia had probably the best of options for death. Painlessly, and as a child. And then on having a child: "the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence, into this meat. To force a life into this thresher."

While driving to question Danny Fontenot in 1995, Cohle sees a young girl standing on the side of the road who waves at the car -- he asks Marty "do you believe in ghosts?" The young girl is possibly a vision of his daughter.

NARCO: 

After the death of his daughter, Cohle transferred from the Texas robbery unit to NARCO in 1989. He began to commit his entire existence to his work. At some pointe during this period, he and Claire separated. After spending only a brief period of time with NARCO, Rust encountered a crank dealer injecting his daughter ("attempting to purify her") with methamphetamine. Rust shot the dealer in the head with a 9mm handgun. The State Attorney used this to get Rust to go into deep cover, while avoiding prison. From 1989 to February of 1993, a total of four years, Rust was in deep cover.

Marriage:

Cohle was married a single time, for three years. According to Cohle, the marriage failed because it couldn't stand the weight of their daughter's death. [E1] They began to resent each other being alive. [E3]

He came close to a second marriage with the woman Maggie Hart introduced him to.

Deep Cover/Northshore: 

While in deep cover (presumably HIDTA) during February of 1993, Rust killed three cartel members while also taking three 25s to the side. He was immediately admitted to Northshore Psychiatric Hospital in Lubbock, Texas [timeline needs to be checked, was he still undercover at this time?]. Following his recovery, he was transferred to the Louisiana State Police Department's homicide unit.

Transfer: 

He came from Texas, and nobody in the department knew him. All of his files were classified or redacted. They all thought he was Internal Affairs. On his decision to transfer to homicide, he says it was because of a bible verse which reads "The body is not one member, but many. Now are they many, but of one body." and that he was "just trying to stay a part of the body."

History: 1995-2002 

Rust is renowned among the Louisiana State Police for his interview techniques, racking up more arrest assists than probably any other detective at the time. It seems the only times he's comfortable lying are the times he's earning a confession.

History: 2012 

Come 2002, Rust now works four nights a week at a Louisiana bar. He's quit battling his alcoholism, and on his days off, he starts drinking at noon.

He no longer has visions -- those stopped sometime after incorrectly sealing the Dora Lang case in 1995.

Visions: 

"Vision is meaning, meaning is historical." -- Rust Cohle

Rust has "visions" as a result of drug use during his time undercover in the (presumably Texas) High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (or HIDTA). These visions ceased a few years after he got clean. Presumably he got clean in 1993, before moving to the Louisiana State Police. And the visions were present during the 1995 Dora Lang investigation.

Despite having the visions, Rust says he "could always tell what was real and what wasn't" and so he'd just roll with it. But he also qualifies that most of the time he was convinced he'd lost his mind, "but there were other times I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe."
 * While driving to question  Danny Fontenot  in 1995, Cohle sees a young girl standing on the side of the road who waves at the car -- he asks  Marty  "do you believe in ghosts?" The young girl is possibly a vision of his daughter.
 * On the drive home after leaving The Ranch, reading portions of Dora Lang's diary, and examining a pamphlet for the Friends of Christ church Rust witnesses fires in the sky (either spreading or rescinding, it's unclear).
 * Outside of the burnt Friends of Christ church, he sees a flock of birds rise from the field and briefly form the same spiral pattern found (tattooed? drawn? marked?) between the shoulder blades on Dora Lang's body.