For the longest time, the Pulitzer-winning author, Aggie Wiggs, had been trying to figure out if her new neighbor, Nile Jarvis, had actually killed his wife, as the rest of the world believed, or if he had become the victim of what we call a media trial. [Spoiler Alert] Well, the penultimate episode of Netflix’s The Beast in Me revealed some unsettling information about the real estate industrialist, which confirmed that Nile not only killed his first wife, Madison, but also made her disappear from the world so that her parents or the police would never recover her body. The thing is, Nile had a lot of pent-up anger inside him, and even though he often tried to stay calm and composed, he sometimes lost control of the monster inside him and became a beast himself. We’d seen a glimpse of his monstrosity at the beginning of the show, when he found FBI Special Agent Brian Abbott trespassing on his private property and smashed his brains out with the butt of his gun. From that moment onwards, there was no air of mystery left around whether Nile was actually the villain in the story, and we were all just waiting for the moment when his crimes would be exposed to the public.
But you see, Abbott’s murder was not an isolated event. It was all connected to Madison, and obviously, it was all about money and preserving their legacy. According to Madison’s brother, Chris Ingram, Nile and his father, Martin, had taken out a massive construction loan to develop Jarvis Yards, but due to a sudden spike in the interest rates, they got caught in a credit squeeze. There was a 200 million dollar shortfall, and while Chris and Maddie’s father paid off half the loan, Nile still had to figure out the rest of it. A year before Madison’s death and disappearance, Nile approached a businessman named Pedro Dominguez, who owned a real estate SPV in the Dominican Republic. However, it turned out Pedro’s fortune was from the cartel, and as soon as Brian Abbott got wind of it, he started investigating Nile Jarvis for money laundering and his ties with the cartel. But no matter how much Abbott tried to gather evidence against Nile, he couldn’t tie him directly to the case and make an arrest. The agency was going to shut down the investigation when Abbott was paid a visit by Nile’s wife, Maddie, who wanted to get rid of her husband by any means necessary. The reason Maddie betrayed her husband was because she knew the kind of monster he was. She wanted to leave him, but if she dared walk out on him, Nile would’ve found her and made her disappear. His whole life, people have gone missing just like that. Maddie implied that Nile Jarvis was a sociopath and he had been killing people from a very young age. However, Maddie was an addict, and Abbott wasn’t sure if her words could be trusted or not. He felt that maybe she was just paranoid; however, the ending of The Beast in Me confirmed that her fears were real. The way Nile killed Maddie, Abbott, and Teddy Fenig established the fact that Nile was a sick monster, a narcissistic serial killer who loved torturing people and killing them for his amusement. Nevertheless, Abbott wanted to help Maddie, but his hands were tied. He couldn’t have done much, and therefore Maddie decided to make the move herself. She was going to leave the city, but before she could escape, Nile found out that she was the one leaking information to the FBI. He confronted Maddie in her art gallery and smashed her head with a vase. Coincidentally, this was the same artwork that Abbott had almost knocked over when he last arrived at the gallery to arrest Pedro. This suggested that he was equally responsible or had a hand in Maddie’s murder because he had the chance to save Maddie’s life, but he didn’t. Well, that was what he believed for the rest of his life, and he tried to bring Nile Jarvis to justice but couldn’t. He died trying, though.
After Nile came back to his senses, he quickly called his father and his Uncle Rick to help him sort out the mess he had created. This was the moment Rick told his brother that he had two options to deal with the situation. He could either help his son and become a part of his crimes, or he could just turn him in to the police and get done with him. For some reason, Martin still had a little faith left in his son and assured himself and Rick that he wouldn’t do it again. Well, he did. A predator like him couldn’t control his urges for long, right? Anyway, Rick and Martin helped Nile clean the crime scene and dumped Maddie’s body in one of their construction and demolition landfill sites so that no one would ever find her again. Abbott and the media tried to investigate Maddie’s sudden disappearance, but he couldn’t procure any evidence to make an arrest. In the end, Abbott had to shut down the investigation, and the FBI gave a clean chit to Nile Jarvis. The animal, who was meant for the cage, was still out in the open, looking for his next victim.
However, it’s quite poetic that in the end, it was Maddie’s murder that actually got Nile arrested. His second wife, Nina, had recorded him confessing to killing Maddie and Teddy Fenig, and even though Nile tried to deny the allegations in the court of law, his uncle Rick became a state witness to make sure that the monster never saw daylight again. I am not sure if Rick ever told the authorities about where they hid Maddie’s body or not. Additionally, the FBI, especially Abbott’s lover, Agent Erika Breton, would never find out what actually happened to him. Neither Rick nor anyone else had any idea that Nile was responsible for his disappearance. And with Nile eventually stabbed to death in prison, I don’t think Abbott will get the justice he deserved. His name will end up in one of the unsolved numerous missing person cases and get buried under the piles of files, which no one will bother to investigate. The only silver lining here is that Aggie Wiggs finally finished the fight that Abbott had started and slew the monster that he’d been trying to hunt down for a very long time.
