The Residence Ending, Explained: Who Killed AB Wynter?

Netflix’s ‘The Residence’ is a murder mystery set in the White House during a State Dinner that goes wrong in a thousand ways. The already stressful night is made more so by the revelation that the Chief Usher, AB Wynter, has died. Because it is a highly sensitive matter and needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, Cordelia Cupp, the best detective in the world, is brought in to solve it. The avid birder looks at the case with her keen eyes that don’t seem to miss any details. While others are quick to rule the death as a suicide and wash their hands off it, Cordelia’s firm stance over thoroughly checking every single thing leads her to the truth.

The primary suspects are the staff of the White House, almost all of whom have a bone to pick with the Chief Usher. To begin with, Jasmine Haney, AB’s assistant, was all set to take his place once he retired. However, when he makes it clear that he is not going anywhere for the next few years, she loses her mind. There is Tripp Morgan, the brother of the President, who discovers that AB is going to report his stealing habits, which would lead to him being kicked out of the White House. There’s Harry Hollinger, the President’s chief advisor, who thinks that AB heard something he shouldn’t have and is ready to do anything to keep his secret.

There is the pastry chef, Didier Gotthard, who is frustrated with AB for refusing all his ideas and not letting him work creatively. The engineer, Bruce, is angry about being called into work when he wants to spend time with his family, and Elsyie Chayle and Sheila Cannon believe they might be fired by AB and want to keep their jobs at all costs. At first sight, there seem to be too many moving pieces, but in the end, Cordelia manages to clear away the clutter and get to the heart of the matter. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Why did Lilly Schumacher Kill AB Wynter?

A lot of people have a lot of reasons to want AB Wynter dead and gone, and while a lot of people get involved in the case, at the end of the day, there is only one killer, and that is the President’s social secretary, Lilly Schumacher. Throughout the show, we see her constantly clashing with AB over every single detail about the house. He is an old-school guy who believes in respecting tradition, even if it is the little things, like the gingerbread house on Christmas or the room where the guests should be entertained. Lilly, on the other hand, wants to “modernize” the place, but her efforts seem too chaotic to do anything well.

She chides the First Gentleman, Elliot Morgan, for being an indecisive guy, but she can’t seem to plan anything without changing the plan several times. Even at the last minute, she keeps things moving, which leads to more confusion and disarray for the staff. When it comes to taking responsibility for anything, she is quick to wash her hands off it and places the entire blame on AB. At first, one could dismiss her as a highly incompetent person who got the job because of her rich parents, but that’s not it. It seems that she is focused on dismantling all the traditions and the good things about the house and turning it into something that no one can stand. For example, when Cordelia says that the Blue Room feels like the lobby of a hotel she wouldn’t want to stay in, Lilly takes it as a good thing.

It seems that while people like AB Wynter and the rest of the staff actually care about the house and making things work there, Lilly hates all of it, and all her actions are directed by this emotion. AB knows it, but that’s not what he threatens Lilly with. He finds out that in the name of all the blasphemous changes that she has been making to the house over the years, the money is what she is really after. AB follows the accounts and finds all sorts of corruption that Lilly is entangled with, from stealing money to giving up contracts to whoever she wants without care for protocol. He even makes a detailed list of all the felonies she has been committing all these years, all of which could land her in a whole lot of trouble.

Her family might have the money to keep her from going to prison, but it would still be quite a storm for her to be caught up in a scandal like this. On the night of the State Dinner, AB confronts her, and it is her (not Harry Hollinger) that he is talking to when the carpenter hears him shouting that he “will tell them everything.” Lilly knows that AB’s diary is what she needs to get her hands at, but all she gets during the altercation is the last piece of his writing, which she tears off. It reads like a suicide note to her, which is when she gets the idea of killing AB and saving herself from whatever problems are headed her way.

Why did Lilly Try to Have the Door Sealed? What Was the Murder Weapon?

With so many suspects, each with the motive and the opportunity to kill AB Wynter, Cordelia Cupp finds herself getting entangled in too many details. It isn’t until her second visit to the White House that she picks up on the clues that allow her to get a better sense of things. She had had her suspicions about Lilly since the beginning, right from the moment she first saw her inquiring about AB’s whereabouts. While Lilly tried to disguise it as a concern, Cordelia could sense the panic in her voice, but at the time, she didn’t know enough to realize what that panic was about. She also had a hint that Lilly may have been the one to impersonate Elliot and tell the Secret Services to keep everyone off the second floor on the night of the State Dinner. But it isn’t until she notices that the door of the room where AB was killed has been sealed off that she concludes that whoever wanted to shut that down is the murderer.

Once Lilly knew that she wanted to kill AB, she called him and told him to meet with her on the second floor to allow her to clear things up and settle the matter. In the meantime, she stole Paraquat, a chemical pesticide, from the gardener’s shed and put it in a drink, which she then offered to AB while meeting with him in the Yellow Room. Despite being suspicious of her, AB took a sip of the drink because he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but her deception came to light almost instantly because Paraquat works incredibly quickly, which she didn’t know. Before the poison took hold, AB poured the rest of the drink on the flowers, which is why they were burned when Cordelia saw them later that night.

Because Lilly thought that the poison wasn’t potent enough to do its job, she threw the vase at him, but it barely scraped him and hit the wall, where it left scratch marks. It was then that she got her hands on the heavy clock with which she struck him in the head, and he died. All of this happened quickly, but this was a short window between AB’s heated conversation with Elsyie and her and Bruce returning to the room. To keep herself from being seen, Lilly hid in the passageway between the rooms. It was here that she found a secret shelf where she hid the clock. By the time she returned to the room, AB’s body was gone, which threw her into a panic, which is why she was going around the house, asking everyone whether they’d seen the Chief Usher. The investigation eventually started at a completely different point, with AB being found in the Game Room on the third floor rather than the Yellow Room on the second floor.

This convinced Lilly that she wouldn’t be caught, and for a while, it seemed she might get away with it. The night ended with the death being declared a suicide, forcing Cordelia to stop her investigation midway. Time passed, but it did nothing to assuage Lilly’s fear of being found out. She knew that it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled upon the clock, but it was too big of a thing for her to move without being seen by someone. So, she decided to seal the door, completely cutting off the access to the passageway and the murder weapon. However, she couldn’t let it come back to her, so she used Elliot’s voice to give the order over a call to Jasmine, the current Chief Usher. Once it was done, Lilly could finally rest, that is, until the Congressional hearing led the whole case to unravel, especially with the arrival of the Third Man, resulting in Cordelia picking up where she left off.

Why does Edwin say Blink? Why did Lilly Try to Frame Elsyie and Bruce?

Over the course of her investigation, Cordelia Cupp gets a pretty good sense of the chain of events that happened following AB Wynter’s murder. Once it comes to light that the murder actually took place on the second floor, Bruce and Elsyie emerge as the only suspects, but Cordelia is still not convinced. It isn’t until she notices that the paintings in the rooms have been moved that she realizes what has happened. Returning to the Yellow Room, she discovers that the door connected to the other room has been sealed shut. But it was still open on the night of the murder. Now, Cordelia knows that the murderer used the passageway to hide and wait for Elsyie to end her conversation with AB and leave. They then came through the door to kill AB and left the same way, which is why neither Bruce nor Elsyie or even the Third Man, saw them.

While it cleared the three of them, it left the board wide open for anyone to be the murderer all over again. Having done everything she could to find out what happened to AB, Cordelia now has the only option, which is for the murderer to reveal themselves. This is why she calls all the suspects back to the house, to have all of them right in front of her, and she waits for them to make a mistake. The detective explains it to FBI agent Edwin Park in terms of a mockingbird who flaps its wings so that its prey would blink. This move alerts the bird of their location, and that’s how it catches the insect. Cordelia uses the same technique on the suspects. She knows that one of them is the murderer, but she cannot ascertain who that is until one of them makes a move. She tells Edwin to watch for “the blink,” which is what happens in the end. When Cordelia reveals the role of the secret door and the importance of it being sealed off, Lilly interjects.

By this time, a theory has developed that Bruce and Elsyie may have committed the murder together. When asked who sealed the door, the finger is pointed towards Jasmine, who claims that Elliot told her to do it, but again, he says it wasn’t him. This is the second time Cordelia finds him to be at the end of an order that is claimed to have come directly from him when he expressly denies it. Having already suspected Lilly, Cordelia has doubts, but she doesn’t voice them. Eventually, Lilly herself speaks up. She places all the blame on Elsyie and Bruce, claiming she saw them kill AB, but because she felt bad for them, she didn’t tell anyone about it. She also mentions that she gave the half-ripped note from AB’s diary to them to make it look like a suicide. When asked why she sealed the door, she explains it away as panic about the possibility that Cordelia would come back and figure out that she was there in the room that night.

By working with an already established narrative and throwing in a grain of truth, Lilly thought she could convince everyone that Elsyie and Bruce had murdered AB. After all, who would believe them over her? And it would probably have happened exactly like that if it hadn’t been for Cordelia, who couldn’t stop asking why Lilly felt the need to seal the door. Moreover, she also noted that Lilly knew the note was in AB’s jacket pocket, but she couldn’t have known it because she wasn’t there when Cordelia found the note on AB’s body. This is the “blink” that she had been looking for, and Edwin recognizes it too. Once Lilly reveals herself to be the fourth person on the second floor that night, the entire picture clears up. Cordelia unseals the door and, as expected, finds the clock inside the passageway, confirming that Lilly is the one who killed AB Wynter.

Why did Bruce and Tripp Try to Hide the Body?

From the moment Cordelia Cupp sees AB Wynter’s body, she knows that he wasn’t killed in the Game Room. She knows he has been moved from somewhere else, and it is when Kylie Minogue comes screaming about the blood in the Lincoln Room that she realizes that the murder actually happened in the Yellow Room on the second floor. Now that she knows where the body was moved from, the question is: who moved it and why? By the end, it turns out that AB’s body was moved twice by two different people.

After Lilly killed AB, she left his body in the Yellow Room, where Elsyie and Bruce found it separately, which also led them to suspect each other of the murder. Elsyie thought Bruce killed AB for her, and Bruce thought she killed AB to save her job. Still, he wanted to help her, so he decided to hide the body. It was he who moved it from the second floor to the third floor. He took it through the Lincoln Room (hence the blood) and up the secret staircase meant for the staff. It was him that the Third Man saw that night. Moreover, of all the suspects, Bruce was one of the only people who were physically strong enough to move the body through the stairs. Interestingly, Bruce hid the body in Room 301, which was closed for the fake renovation. He thought that no one would find the body there. When Bruce went to Tripp’s room to unclog his toilet, Tripp went to room 301, where he got drunk and passed out, which Bruce didn’t know.

When Tripp woke up, he found AB’s body next to him. He got scared and decided to move the body to the Game Room. It was his watch that blinked twice and was seen by the young Vusi Nhlapho from all the way across the street through the window of his hotel room. When Tripp saw the blood on the wall of the room, he painted over it, hoping that no one would find it. It was after he had moved the body to the Game Room that Tripp found what looked like a suicide note and thought that AB had killed himself. He felt really foolish for having moved the body for nothing, but that didn’t stop him from doing another foolish thing. To make it look more like a suicide, he used the knife from Didier’s room and slit both of AB’s wrists, not realizing that it would only make the whole thing look more suspicious and turn Cordelia in the right direction.

Read More: Is The Residence a True Story? Is Cordelia Cupp Based on a Real Detective?