Hoggs Hollow (Season 2, Episode 4)
Premise: Toronto detectives find that a young wife’s fatal fall was the latest of three deaths in one Hoggs Hollow house, each ruled an accident.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 4
- 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), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- John Ralston as Christopher Parsons, Hilary McCormack as Juliet Parsons, Edward Ruttle as Eric Parsons, Alan Van Sprang as Superintendent Charles Bishop, Tanisha Thammavongsa as Celine
- Director
- Sudz Sutherland
- Writers
- Aubrey Nealon
Summary
The Case
“Hoggs Hollow” opens with Celine Windt celebrating with restaurant partners and accepting cocaine from a woman she meets at the bar. She comes home drunk at 4 a.m. to her husband, Christopher Parsons, who sends her to the guest room, where someone she knows lies in wait and attacks her. She is found at the foot of the stairs. Superintendent Charles Bishop, whose detectives see an accident, lets the detectives take over after they point out the head wound and the heels she never removed.
Christopher’s daughter, Juliet, tells the detectives Celine had affairs, some at the house. The autopsy finds alcohol, cocaine and a benzodiazepine, a head injury and signs of asphyxiation, and powder on her cuff leads to a shuffleboard bar on Ossington. A partner who paid her bar tab says Celine had just made a fortune from the sale of their restaurants. Naomi, the woman who supplied the drugs, says a client paid her to test whether Celine was using; he is Christopher’s son, Eric, who is arrested for administering a noxious substance.
Christopher reveals that his first wife, Natalie, drowned in the family pool a decade earlier. Bishop led that inquiry, with Holness as a junior investigator, and later handled the death of family assistant Danika Coulter in the same house, ruled a heart attack. Danika’s brother says she and Christopher had fallen in love. The detectives come to see Juliet, protective and possessive of her father, as the link. Told her father is the lead suspect, she sends them to a pond where Eric walks, and divers recover an ashtray carrying Eric’s and Celine’s DNA. Eric says the killing was Juliet’s idea.
The Interrogation
Juliet’s alibi for Danika’s death rested on Bishop’s notes saying Danika arrived at nine, but he had changed the wording, and she may have stayed the night. Holness confronts Bishop, who reports his error to professional standards and asks for a full review. At the Parsons home, the detectives take Christopher and Juliet through each death. Christopher admits Celine wanted to sell the house and move to Quebec, and that he told Juliet despite Celine’s wish to keep it from her. Juliet says she handled it because someone had to, and she is arrested for Celine’s murder.
The ending
Spoiler: Juliet pleads not guilty, but her father and brother are undermining her denial, the Crown is confident, and a cold case unit takes up the earlier deaths. The detectives reflect that they arrived two bodies too late.
Suspects’ fates: Juliet Parsons, arrested; Eric Parsons, arrested.
Why it stands out
- Holness reveals that she worked the Natalie Parsons drowning as a junior investigator under Bishop, from whom she says she learned half of what she knows.
- A 2022 street renaming, which turned Ryerson Crescent into Hedge Brooke Crescent, helped keep the three deaths from being linked.