The Crow Girl ending explained: Who was the killer?

No one does murder better than the Swedes. Murder investigations, we mean, those of the fictional kind. Anyone who's seen Swedish crime shows like Wallander or Beck can easily attest to that.

To kick off the year, Paramount Plus has given us another killer show in that vein called The Crow Girl, which follows DCI Jeanette Kilburn as she investigates what's happened to unidentified young men who start showing up dead around Bristol, beaten and pumped full of anaesthetic.

Based on a trilogy of novels by Erik Axl Sund — the pen name of Swedish author duo Jerker Eriksson, and Håkan Axlander Sundquist — Paramount's Crow Girl adaptation moves the story from Sweden to England without losing any of the thrills originally established in this popular book series of the same name.

With the help of psychotherapist Dr Sophia Craven, Kilburn makes some shocking discoveries in her hunt for the killer, the kind that makes you want to claw your eyes out when the words "To be continued…" suddenly appear, followed by the credits.

Thankfully though, answers will definitely come, because Paramount has already confirmed a second season of The Crow Girl is flying in sometime soon.

But while we wait, let's see how season one came to an end and why we're so desperate to find out what happens next.

The Crow Girl ending explained: Who was the killer?

Answers come at the end, but they also raise plenty more questions (as you might expect from a mystery show that's super keen to set up its second season). What we do know now at least is how and why these poor young men died in the first place.

It turns out that a dentist named Carl Lowry and many of his posh friends, including a self-made billionaire called David White, and Peter Drake, the principal of Beecham College, hosted illegal fighting matches for their own amusement.

Asylum seekers living in England were promised financial rewards to compete, but many died in the process. After, these dead immigrants were hidden away on Ben Burkeman’s farm where the caretaker, named Vincent Dwyer, would feed their corpse to the pigs, thereby removing all of the evidence.

Does that mean customers who ate the pigs also ate people? Squeal!

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The reason we know all this now is because Sophia Craven actually knew this all along too. In fact, she's the one who broke into the cold storage unit where the bodies were kept and left them in places where the men responsible would be incriminated. The plan didn't quite work, though, because there wasn't quite enough evidence still to connect them to these deaths.

That means justice must still be won for the likes of Daniel Rexha (17), Faisal Qureshi (21), and Samuel Osman (18) in season 2.

So what is Sophia's connection to all this? What's her real agenda here? It turns out Sophia's father Ben was actually one of the men who regularly attended this illicit fight ring (named "the Leaders Of Commerce") and he'd been abusing her long before that, well into Sophia's childhood. Well, not "Sophia", exactly. Because at the end, we discover that she's not technically Sophia at all. She's actually Victoria Burkeman. And she's a murderer too, but in a very different way.

When Sophia/Victoria was young, Ben seemingly murdered her childhood friend, named Martin Ryan, out of spite. Afterwards, he gaslit his daughter into thinking this was her fault, that she was the one responsible. As if that wasn't awful enough, Ben sexually abused Victoria regularly for years, and even impregnated her with a child that would be named Madeleine. Just when you think it couldn't get any sicker or more depraved, Ben went on to kill Madeleine, his daughter/granddaughter, and blamed Victoria for her own child's murder.

Years later, long after she escaped her father's clutches, Victoria returned to expose all the evil deeds occurring in Bristol using an alter ego named Sophia. When she finally realised the truth, that her father had been lying about Madeleine and that he was now responsible for her death, Victoria retaliated by tying him to a chair and setting him on fire in his own house.

Victoria is quite busy in the finale because even with all that going on, she also stabs the pedophile dentist Carl Lowry in his hospital bed to serve justice. Plus, her mum is tied up in a secret closet as punishment for turning a blind eye to Ben's evil and abuse for all these years. Deserved, quite frankly.

Amid all this much warranted vengeance, Victoria also woos Jeanette, transforming their friendship into something more by the final scene.

The DCI's marriage to Alex has just ended, and it's safe to say she's been feeling vulnerable. But with so much more to reckon with still, The Crow Girl has its work cut out for it in season 2.

Will real justice be served for the deaths of those poor immigrants? Will Jeanette discover the truth about Victoria? And will we ever recover from all these gag-worthy reveals?

The answers to all that and more will soon come our way in The Crow Girl season 2.

The Crow Girl is available to stream now on Paramount Plus – sign up here.

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