Cul-De-Sac (Season 1, Episode 10)
Premise: A respected defence lawyer is shot dead in an alley, and the detectives look past a vengeful client to her quiet street, where a neighbour is hiding a notorious past.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 1, Episode 10
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha)
- Guest stars
- Rachael Crawford as Susan Wright, Kamaia Fairburn as Penny Wright, Carolina Bartczak as Willa Fenwick, Jonathan Goad as Brad Turner, Matt Gordon as Noah Wright
- Director
- Sharon Lewis
- Writers
- Sam Godfrey & Jillian Locke
Summary
The Case
“Cul-De-Sac” opens at a prison, where a visitor asks an inmate about a necklace. That evening defence lawyer Willa Fenwick pleads with her 17-year-old daughter, Erica, to stay home, tells neighbour Tom Rhodes they cannot go on, and is shot in an alley. Her firm suspects former client Trevor Tavernes, a convicted drug trafficker who has been threatening her, but the close-range shooting, with two missed shots, looks emotional, and his men are accounted for.
Willa had stepped back from work a month earlier, fearing she was followed. Her last call came from a phone stolen at a nearby bar, Lokale, and footage shows her arguing with neighbour Susan Wright, who says Willa was having an affair with Tom, husband of their friend Margot. A Walther PPK with its serial number filed off turns up in Tom’s garage and matches the bullets, but Margot’s dash cam shows Tom at a hotel in the Beaches when Willa died. Margot also once followed Willa to Brighton Institution, where Willa had visited Brad Turner, serving life for killing his mother as a teenager in the 1990s.
Turner says Willa posed as a journalist to ask about his accomplice and former girlfriend, Ruth Keller, who took a plea deal and vanished in 2013, and showed him a heart-shaped locket matching the one taken from his mother. Ruth’s corrections file shows she is Susan, living next door under a new face and name with husband Noah and daughter Penny. Susan says Willa found the locket in her jewellery box and threatened to expose her, though she offered to leave town. Her alibi has gaps, and Noah owns a Walther PPK.
The Interrogation
During a search of the Wrights’ home, Noah suddenly confesses that he filed off the serial number and planted the gun at Tom’s. The detectives believe he is shielding Penny. Forensics put the shooter at about 5′4″, and Erica, tricked over an exhibit that closed years ago, admits she and Penny used fake IDs to go to Lokale that night and that Penny left early.
With Susan beside her, Penny is told how she took a stranger’s phone, lured Willa to the alley, shot her with her father’s pistol and called Noah, who hid the gun. One detective tells her that their own father was once suspected of something terrible. Penny breaks, recalling the reporters, vandalism and lost friends she endured as a small child when her mother was exposed, and says she could not live with Willa’s silence being only temporary.
The ending
Spoiler: Penny sobs that she is sorry as she is taken away, while Susan begs the officers not to take her. Afterward, one detective assures the other that they are nothing like their father.
Suspects’ fates: Noah Wright, other or unclear; Penny Wright, arrested.
Why it stands out
- This is the first-season finale; season 1 ran ten episodes on Citytv from February to May 2024.
- Ruth Keller’s plea deal is compared in the dialogue to the Homolka case.
- Graff wins Brad Turner’s help by offering to donate Pablo Neruda’s collected works to the prison library.