Netflix’s ‘The Residence’ is a murder thriller set against the backdrop of the White House during a State Dinner gone wrong in a thousand different ways. The already tense evening becomes more so because the Chief Usher, AB Wynter, has died. Since it is a very sensitive case and must be solved as soon as possible, Cordelia Cupp, the greatest detective in the world, is called upon to crack the case. The enthusiastic birdwatcher examines the case with her sharp eyes that never appear to notice anything. While others are quick to dismiss the death as a suicide and wash their hands clean of it, Cordelia’s insistence on working through every single detail leads her to the truth.
The first suspects are the White House staff, nearly all of whom have a grudge against the Chief Usher. To start with, Jasmine Haney, AB’s assistant, was ready to fill his shoes upon his retirement. However, when he indicates that he is not leaving for the next couple of years, she goes crazy. There is Tripp Morgan, the President’s brother, who finds that AB is going to tell on his habits of stealing, which would get him expelled from the White House. There’s Harry Hollinger, the chief advisor to the President, who believes that AB overheard something he should not have and is willing to do whatever it takes to silence him.
There is the pastry chef, Didier Gotthard, who is upset with AB for dismissing all his suggestions and not allowing him to express his creativity. The engineer, Bruce, is upset with being summoned to work when he wishes to be with his family, while Elsyie Chayle and Sheila Cannon fear that they are going to be fired by AB and wish to retain their employment at all costs. At first glance, there appear to be too many loose ends, but ultimately, Cordelia is able to sift through the mess and get to the bottom of things. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Why did Lilly Schumacher Kill AB Wynter?
Many individuals have a myriad of reasons why they would like to see AB Wynter dead and buried, and yet despite many people being drawn into the case, there is only one murderer, and that is President’s social secretary, Lilly Schumacher. We see her coming into conflict with AB on every aspect of the house throughout the series. He is an old-fashioned kind of fellow who feels that tradition should be respected, even the small things, such as the gingerbread house during Christmas or the room in which the guests are to be entertained. Lilly, however, is eager to “modernize” the setting, but what she does appears too helter-skelter to accomplish anything well.
She reprimands the First Gentleman, Elliot Morgan, as an indecisive man, yet she cannot plan anything without adjusting the plan at least three times. Even at the eleventh hour, she keeps things ongoing, which results in further confusion and chaos for the staff. In taking responsibility for something, she is ready to wash her hands of it and puts the whole onus on AB. At first, one can brush her off as a very incompetent individual who landed the job due to her wealthy parents, but that is not the case. It appears that she is determined to tear down every tradition and all the good things about the house and make it something that people cannot tolerate. For instance, when Cordelia describes the Blue Room as being like the lobby of a hotel she would not live in, Lilly interprets it positively. It appears that although individuals such as AB Wynter and the other staff members truly care for the house and getting things right there, Lilly despises everything about it, and all her actions are influenced by this feeling. AB is aware of it, but that is not the threat he makes to Lilly. He discovers that under the guise of all the blasphemous remodels she has been doing to the house for years, money is what she is after. AB traces the accounts and discovers all kinds of corruption that Lilly is involved in, from pilfering money to abandoning contracts to whoever she pleases without regard for procedure. He even goes so far as to make a list of all the felonies she’s been committing all these years, all of which could put her in a whole lot of trouble.
Her family may have the funds to prevent her from serving time in prison, but it would still be a storm for her to be embroiled in this kind of scandal. During the evening of the State Dinner, AB accosts her, and it is she (not Harry Hollinger) that he is addressing when he yells that he “will tell them everything” during which the carpenter overheard him. Lilly understands that AB’s diary is what she has to get her hands on, but all she manages to grab in the scuffle is the final portion of his writing, which she rips off. It is as if a suicide note to her, and that is when she conceives the idea of murdering AB and saving herself from whatever issues are coming her way.
Why Did Lilly Attempt to Get the Door Shut? What was the weapon used for murder?
With so many people as suspects, all of whom have the motive and the opportunity to murder AB Wynter, Cordelia Cupp finds herself getting bogged down in too many details. It is not until she returns to the White House for a second time that she begins to sense the clues which enable her to understand things better. She had already had her doubts regarding Lilly since the start, right from when she first encountered her asking for AB’s whereabouts. While Lilly attempted to cover it up as a worry, Cordelia could hear the desperation in her voice, though at the time she wasn’t aware enough to know what that desperation was about. She also picked up on the sense that Lilly might have been the one who pretended to be Elliot and instructed the Secret Services to keep everyone off the second floor the night of the State Dinner. But it is only when she realizes that the door of the room where AB was murdered has been shut off that she determines that the person who wanted to close that off is the killer.
After Lilly had realized that she wanted to murder AB, she phoned him and instructed him to meet her on the second floor in order to enable her to clarify things and sort out the issue. Meanwhile, she took Paraquat, a chemical herbicide, from the gardener’s shed and added it to a beverage, which she served to AB when she met him in the Yellow Room. Even though she was suspicious, AB sipped the drink because he wanted to do her the courtesy of the doubt, but her dishonesty was revealed almost immediately because Paraquat acts extremely rapidly, something that she was unaware of. Before the poison could take effect, AB spilled the remaining drink on the flowers, which is why the flowers were scorched when Cordelia discovered them later at night. Since Lilly believed that the poison was not strong enough to work, she tossed the vase at him but it scraped him lightly and hit the wall and left scratch marks. This is when she acquired the heavy clock with which she hit him in the head and he died. All of that had occurred very swiftly, but that had been a brief space of time between AB’s angry argument with Elsyie and she and Bruce re-entering the room. To avoid detection, Lilly waited in the doorway between the rooms. It was here that she discovered a secret ledge upon which she concealed the clock. When she returned to the room, AB’s body had vanished, sending her into a frenzy, hence why she was walking around the house asking everyone if they had seen the Chief Usher. The investigation ultimately began elsewhere, with AB discovered in the Game Room on the third floor instead of the Yellow Room on the second floor.
This made Lilly believe that she would not get caught, and it appeared for a moment as if she might escape. The night concluded with the death being ruled as a suicide, and Lilly had to abandon her inquiry half-way. The days went by, but they did nothing to calm Lilly’s fear of being discovered. She understood that it was just a matter of time before someone would happen to find the clock, but it was such a large item to move without anyone noticing. Therefore, she chose to seal the door, cutting off the access to the passageway and to the murder weapon altogether. But she could not let it come back to her, and so she employed Elliot’s voice to instruct over a phone call to the then Chief Usher, Jasmine. When it was all over, Lilly was finally able to rest, that is, until the Congressional hearing caused the entire case to unravel, with the introduction of the Third Man, that led Cordelia to pick up from where she stopped.
Why does Edwin say Blink? Why did Lilly attempt to frame Elsyie and Bruce?
Through the course of her inquiry, Cordelia Cupp makes a pretty good guess as to the sequence of events that occurred after AB Wynter’s murder. When it becomes clear that the murder actually occurred on the second floor, Bruce and Elsyie become the prime suspects, but Cordelia is still not satisfied. 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 that Cordelia is aware, the killer sneaked into the passageway to wait and ambush Elsyie after she finishes talking with AB and goes out. They entered through the door to murder AB and exited the same, and that is why neither Bruce nor Elsyie nor even the Third Man noticed them.
Though it cleared the three of them, it opened the board wide for anyone to be the killer again. Having exhausted all she could do in finding out what happened to AB, Cordelia now has the only choice, which is for the killer to confess. This is why she invites all the suspects to return to the house, so she has all of them at hand, and she waits for them to mess up. The detective puts it in terms of a mockingbird who opens its wings so its prey would blink. This action notifies the bird where they are, and that’s how it snatches the insect. Cordelia employs the same strategy on the suspects. She is sure that among them is the killer, but she doesn’t know who until one of them makes a move. She instructs Edwin to observe “the blink,” which is what occurs at the end. When Cordelia breaks the news of the day of the secret door and why it is sealed off, Lilly interrupts. At this point, a hypothesis has formed that Bruce and Elsyie killed her together. When questioned as to who sealed the door, the finger is pointed at Jasmine, who responds that Elliot instructed her to seal it, but once again, he denies it was him. This is the second time that Cordelia finds him at the end of an order which is said to have been specially issued by him when he clearly denies it. Having already suspected Lilly, Cordelia doubts, but she doesn’t say anything. Later, Lilly herself puts up her hand. She blames it all on Elsyie and Bruce, saying she witnessed them murder AB, but since she had sympathy for them, she did not report it. She further states that she provided the half-torn paper note from AB’s diary to them so that they could pretend that it was a suicide. When questioned as to why she closed the door, she rationalizes it away as fear that Cordelia might return and realize she was present in the room that evening.
By utilizing an already framed narrative and adding a nugget of truth, Lilly believed that she could convince all parties that Elsyie and Bruce had killed AB. Who would believe them, after all? And it would likely have happened exactly the same way if it hadn’t been for Cordelia, who was not able to stop questioning why Lilly would seal the door. In addition to that, she also realized that Lilly would have known the note was inside AB’s pocket, but she didn’t because she wasn’t present when Cordelia found the note on AB’s body. This is the “blink” that she had been seeking, and Edwin sees it as well. As soon as Lilly comes out as the fourth individual on the second floor that evening, the whole puzzle falls into place. Cordelia opens the sealed door and, as one would expect, discovers the clock in the corridor, proving that Lilly is the killer of AB Wynter.
Why did Bruce and Tripp Attempt to Conceal the Body?
As soon as Cordelia Cupp laid eyes on the body of AB Wynter, she knew that he did not die in the Game Room. She knew he had been transferred from another location, and it is upon Kylie Minogue appearing, screaming about the blood in the Lincoln Room, that she understands the murder took place in the Yellow Room on the second floor. Now that she is aware of where the body was transferred from, the question lingers: who transferred it and why? At the end, it is revealed that AB’s body was transferred twice by two individuals.
Upon Lilly having killed AB, she abandoned his body in the Yellow Room, where Elsyie and Bruce stumbled upon the body independently, which also made them accuse each other of murder. Elsyie believed Bruce murdered AB for her, and Bruce believed she murdered AB to protect herself from losing her job. Nonetheless, he still wanted to assist her, so he would hide the body. He was the one who moved it from the second floor up to the third floor. He carried it through the Lincoln Room (that’s the blood) and up through the hidden staircase intended for staff members. It was him that the Third Man witnessed that evening. Furthermore, out of all the suspects, Bruce was among the few individuals physically capable of pushing the body through the stairs. Interestingly, Bruce stashed the body in Room 301, which was off-limits for the bogus renovation. He believed that no one would discover the body there. When Bruce went over to Tripp’s room to unclog his toilet, Tripp went to 301, where he got drunk and passed out, which Bruce did not know.
When Tripp woke up, he discovered AB’s body lying next to him. He became frightened and decided to move the body to the Game Room. It was his turn that flashed twice and was noticed by the young Vusi Nhlapho from as far as the other side of the road through the window of his hotel room. On noticing the blood on the room wall, Tripp painted over it, hoping that nobody would discover it. It was not until he had relocated the body to the Game Room that Tripp discovered what appeared to be a suicide note and believed AB had committed suicide. He was actually really stupid for having relocated the body for nothing, but this did not stop him from committing another silly act. To make it appear like a suicide, he took the knife from Didier’s room and cut both of AB’s wrists, without knowing that it would make the entire thing appear more suspicious and lead Cordelia in the correct direction. Read More: Is The Residence a True Story? Is Cordelia Cupp Based on a Real Detective?
