“Only Murders In The Building” Season 2, Episode 9 is filled with some shocking revelations that shed light on Bunny Folger’s murder case. At the end of the episode, Mabel Mora and her fellow podcasters finally surmise who could be the criminal mastermind behind Bunny’s murder, but the episode leaves us on a cliffhanger without explaining the motive behind that murder, and hence we would love to explore the possibilities based upon the hints presented in the episode. The episode also brings closure for Charles-Haden Savage, who has been yearning to find the truth about his father’s hidden life. So without any further ado, let’s look deep into the important events of “Only Murders In The Building,” Season 2, Episode 9.
Spoilers Ahead
Teddy Dimas is Will’s father.
Throughout “Only Murders In The Building” Season 2, Oliver Putnam was struggling to determine whether Will Putnam was his biological son or not. He took a DNA test to prove to the world that Will is his son, and in Episode 9, he was finally able to find out the truth. After reading the report, Oliver cheerfully assured Will that he was a Putnam, and that was a sigh of relief for Will, but there was something that Oliver was hiding. He even told his best buddies, Charles and Mabel, that he was a little “Greek-ish” and not completely “Irish,” which was why Will’s DNA report showed Greek lineage. However, whatever Oliver said to Charles, Mabel, or Will was a complete lie. A lie told to save the family.
Later in the episode, when Oliver met Teddy Dimas in the elevator, he finally revealed to him that he was his son’s biological father, and that was the truth. So yes, Teddy was having an affair with Oliver’s wife, Roberta, but Teddy was unaware of the fact that he was Will’s biological father until Oliver told him so. But at this point in time, Oliver didn’t want to hold any grudges against Teddy or fight him anymore. He instead requested Teddy that he keep the secret a secret. Oliver couldn’t see his son struggling with these new revelations as they had already taken a toll on his emotional and mental health. It was after ages that father and son were able to mend their relationship, and Oliver didn’t want it to get bitter again. He even asked Roberta never to tell Will about her affair with Teddy. Fortunately, both Roberta and Teddy agreed to bury the secrets of the past so as not to let them ruin their present and future.
Rose Cooper Came To Arconia Disguised As Leonora Folger
In Episode 9, Charles, Mabel, and Oliver found the real “Rose Cooper” painting, which was hidden inside a compartment in Mrs. Gambolini’s cage. The painting belonged to Bunny’s mother, Leonora Folger, and thus Charles tried contacting her in order to return the painting. However, when he called Empire Assisted Living, he found that Leonora Folger hadn’t left the facility for quite a long time, and she wasn’t exactly verbal. When he checked her picture on the Empire Assisted Living website, he realized that the woman who visited Arconia in Episode 2 wasn’t Leonora but an imposter.
The woman who visited Arconia knew quite a lot about Charles and his father, and thus he was certain that this particular woman could only reveal the truth about him. Charles scrutinized the real “Rose Cooper” painting once again and noticed that his father was wearing the same watch that he had gifted him, and thus he opened the back cover of the watch only to find an address engraved on it. He contacted the person living on 25 Willow Dr. in Lake Placid, and the voice he heard on the cellphone was quite familiar. Charles was able to connect the dots and finally conclude the identity of this imposter. It was Rose Cooper who had come to Arconia, impersonating Leonora Folger, but why?
Through their investigation, Charles, Mabel, and Oliver had found out that there was a person who had been asking Bunny to return the painting, and therefore, they suspected that the same person might have killed Bunny, but it didn’t seem like that. It can be surmised that it was Rose Cooper who requested Bunny to return her painting, but she refused to do so as it belonged to her family, and it could be the same reason why Rose Cooper impersonated Leonora in order to get back her painting, but Bunny had hidden the real one somewhere else. Nevertheless, after Charles talked to Rose Cooper on the phone, the woman herself paid a visit to his apartment and finally revealed the truth.
Until now, Charles believed that his father had something to do with Rose’s death or disappearance. Rose revealed to him that his old man only tried to protect her from her abusive husband. There were blood stains on Charles’s father’s clothes when he was arrested, and it can be speculated that he had a little fight with Rose’s husband. However, he was probably the main suspect in Rose Cooper’s disappearance, which is why he did some prison time. Nevertheless, the entire motive for such a revelation was to make Charles realize that his father was not a bad guy, but whatever he did, he did in order to protect a woman in an abusive relationship. Rose Cooper finally showed Charles a painting hidden underneath the original one, in which Rose had painted a young Charles and his old man looking at Arconia as if it was the only dream he was willing to live with his son. The first painting was for Rose Cooper herself, who wanted to remember Charles’s father as her lover. But she dedicated the second painting to Charles’s father, who wanted to be remembered as a father to his boy.
Season 2, Episode 9: Ending Explained – Is Cinda Canning The Real Criminal Mastermind?
At the end of episode 8, Mabel noticed glitter on the neck of Detective Daniel Kreps, which made it certain that he was the one who stole the matchbook that had the killer’s fingerprint. At the very beginning of the episode, Kreps, through his voiceover, confirmed that he was the one who stole the matchbook from Mabel and attacked her in the subway. He further revealed to the viewers that he worked as a security guard in Coney Island in order to get an extra income, but his hustle didn’t end there. He even worked as a private detective, helping out other departments in small towns handle cases like homicides and missing persons. And in one such case, Kreps met a woman who turned his life upside down. We will come to this mysterious woman later.
In Episode 9, Mabel finally visited Kreps in order to interrogate him and understand his motives and his involvement in Bunny Folger’s murder. During a heated interaction with Kreps, Mabel noted down two major points that Kreps revealed to her. At first, he told her that he had met with the smartest woman on the planet. Secondly, he said that their podcast, “Only Murders In The Building,” was totally amateurish and that he had done better podcasts like “All Is Not OK in Oklahoma.” After returning home, Mabel recalled these two points and listened to the “All Is Not OK in Oklahoma” podcast once again in order to dig deeper.
“All Is Not OK in Oklahoma,” hosted by Cinda Canning, was a true crime podcast where she solved the case of Becky Butler, who disappeared from Chickasha, Oklahoma, in 2015. In the first episode of the podcast, she told her listeners that freelance police officers from bigger cities came to Chickasha to help the local police find Becky or her killer. As Kreps told us at the beginning of Episode 9, he used to freelance as a private detective, and he was the officer that Cinda Canning was referring to in her podcast. In the second episode, Cinda told her listeners that she used to visit a local grill joint, The Chicken Chug, every night, and there she met a police officer who helped her with the case. The Chicken Chug, as described by Cinda, had the same logo which Mabel noticed on Kreps’s bag, and thus she was able to establish the link between Detective Daniel Kreps and Cinda Canning, and that’s where things got a lot more interesting.
At the end of Episode 9, Mabel went to visit Cinda’s assistant, Poppy White, only to find out that her real name was not Poppy but Becky Butler, which means that Poppy White doesn’t exist. That also explains her existential crisis throughout Season 2, but let’s not go into that for now. Cinda Canning probably used her intrepid podcaster mind to create a fake death or disappearance of Becky Butler in order to create a podcast around her disappearance. Later, she met Daniel Kreps in The Chicken Chug and made an alliance with him to plant fake evidence at the crime scene. Kreps stole Becky’s hair sample evidence from the police vault which he planted in the woods (or the garden) where Cinda’s dog, Bo, found it. After solving Becky’s disappearance and murder, she claimed herself as a brilliant true crime podcaster. But the truth was, Becky Butler never disappeared in the first place, and everything was just a big lie. However, that brings us to the question, how is Cinda related to Bunny Folger’s murder?
Cinda Canning is the most accurate portrayal of the kind of journalism that believes in creating news instead of reporting it. There is too much hard work in investigating a real murder, which is why Cinda took the shortcut and planned a murder instead. Cinda may not be the world’s greatest detective, but she is indeed a brilliant charmer who can easily manipulate people to carry out her wishes. And if this theory is true, we can assume that Cinda used her charm to get Daniel Kreps or someone else to kill Bunny Folger. Later, with the help of Kreps, she put the entire blame on Mabel Mora and her friends, Charles and Oliver, because their podcast was getting way more attention than Cinda’s work. From the very beginning of Season 2, Cinda has been rigorously investigating Mabel, Charles, and Oliver and had already declared them as Bunny’s murderers even without any substantial evidence because she knew that she would eventually prove it with Kreps’s help. And if it was Cinda who orchestrated Bunny Folger’s murder, then it clearly explains her presence outside Arconia, who arrived there with her assistant Poppy to cover Bunny’s murder for the new podcast, just moments after she was killed.
So that was it? Does Bunny die because a podcaster desires fame and attention? Maybe everything Kreps told Mabel about fame and going after your dreams, even if you are not good at it, sounds more apt for Cinda than Mabel. Maybe it was Cinda who was not very good at what she did, and thus she had to cross the moral line to make herself feel worthy. Whatever the case may be, the last episode, i.e., “Only Murders In The Building,” Season 2, Episode 10, will reveal whether Mabel and her friends will be able to catch the real culprit and put him/her behind bars for Bunny’s murder.
