The Residence Ending, Explained | TIME

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Residence.

Executive producer Shonda Rhimes is taking a break from the world of Bridgerton to serve up something with a little less romance and a lot more red herrings: The Residence.

Created, written, and produced by showrunner Paul William Davies (Scandal, For the People), the new Netflix murder mystery series, all eight episodes of which are now streaming, centers on the investigation and subsequent Senate committee hearings surrounding the death of White House Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) on the night of a state dinner President Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald) and First Gentleman Elliott Morgan (Barrett Foa) were hosting for Australia.

After Elliott’s mother discovers A.B.’s body in the third-floor Game Room, idiosyncratic detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba)—an avid amateur birder in her spare time—is brought in by Maryland Police Department Chief Larry Dokes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) to take on the case. Over the course of the next seven episodes, the show jumps back and forth between the night of the murder and the hearings to illuminate what happened that evening from the perspectives of a number of different White House residents, guests, and staff members.

The Residence keeps viewers guessing right up until the near end, only revealing the true culprit and their motivations in the final stretch of its feature-length finale.

Read More: The Residence Is an Overstuffed White House Whodunit With a Delightful Detective

Who killed A.B. Wynter?

The eighth and final episode of The Residence, aptly titled “The Mystery of the Yellow Room,” opens by rehashing the night of the state dinner from the perspective of A.B. himself, right up until the moment he walked into the Yellow Oval Room, where he was killed.

Then, in the present-day, Cordelia finally appears before the Senate committee overseeing the hearings to relay the story of how she solved the murder. After discovering some new clues at the White House that she realized she missed the night of the state dinner, Cordelia gathered her full roster of suspects and walked them through what she had already figured out.

Although A.B. was killed in the Yellow Room, engineer Bruce Geller (Mel Rodriguez) had moved A.B.’s body from the Yellow Room to the Lincoln Bedroom before carrying him up the stairs to Room 301, the room undergoing a fake renovation, and placing him next to a sleeping Tripp Morgan (Jason Lee), the president’s degenerate brother. Bruce did all this thinking he was covering up the crime of his lady love, housekeeper Elsyie Chayle (Julieth Restrepo), who had gotten into a fight with A.B. earlier that evening. When Tripp woke up next to a dead A.B., he panicked and moved the body down the hall to the Game Room. Then, fearing he’d be blamed, Tripp stole a knife from the office of pastry chef Didier Gotthard (Bronson Pinchot) and used it to slit A.B.’s wrists in order to make his death look more like a suicide.

However, none of those people were the true culprit. After realizing that a large painting had been moved into the Yellow Room to try to cover up the fact that a door to a passageway that led to the neighboring Treaty Room had recently been sealed and hidden away by a new wall, Cordelia was at long last able to deduce who the killer was: White House social secretary Lilly Schumacher (Molly Griggs).

Rich heiress Lilly hated not only the White House itself, but everything it represented: the history, the traditions, the staff. She had wanted to reinvent the residence and, to her, that meant tearing it down both literally and figuratively. So she hated A.B. because he represented what the White House represented, and he loved and cared about the house and the people who lived and worked there. After finding A.B.’s journal in the library, Cordelia figured out he had not only been documenting Lilly’s bad behavior, but had been keeping a record of all the money she had misappropriated as well as the various criminal statutes and ethical codes she had violated securing contracts, trading favors, and much more.

On the night of the state dinner, Lilly had found out A.B. was planning to expose her and had tried to rip the journal out of his hand. When she realized that the scrap of a page she had come away with could be read as a suicide note, she formed a plan to kill A.B. and frame it as a suicide.

First, she went to the White House gardening shed and secured some poison in the form of the pesticide paraquat. She then called A.B. and told him to meet her in the Yellow Room for a chat before calling the Secret Service, impersonating the First Gentleman, and telling them to clear the second floor. After giving A.B. the page of journal back and watching him put in his pocket, she slipped him some poison in a glass of scotch. However, she quickly realized he hadn’t drunk enough to die and ultimately ended up bashing him over the head with a large clock she grabbed off the room’s mantle. She then escaped into the Treaty Room passageway and stuffed the clock into a secret storage drawer before the rest of the night’s events unfolded.