The Hunting Wives’ ending eventually revealed the identity of Abby Jackson’s killer. [Spoiler Alert] Well, it wasn’t Jill Thompson, nor did Sophie O’Neil have any role to play in the killing. Abby was killed by Margo Banks because the teenage girl had found out a secret that could have turned Margo’s entire life upside down. The truth was, Margo had gotten pregnant with Brad, Abby’s athletic boyfriend whom Margo had been “using” for a long time. But Margo couldn’t afford to be pregnant.
Margo’s husband, Jed Banks, had made it clear that even though they had an arrangement, Margo couldn’t see another man, and the news of Margo’s pregnancy would have destroyed their marriage and her prospects of a luxurious life. Additionally, she and Jed had tried in the past, but it didn’t work out, and if a chauvinist like Jed had found out a college kid got Margo pregnant, then it would have only bruised his male ego, if nothing else. So you know that Margo was treading dangerous water there, and therefore she decided to get an abortion. But it wasn’t the end of Margo’s problems. Maple Brook was a close-knit community with its own share of evil. None of them was really a fan of the “A” word. Abortion was a sin in the eyes of the community, and once again, Margo couldn’t let anyone know that she had “killed” the child in her belly, especially when her husband was running for governor of Texas and voiced his support for anti-immigration and anti-abortion laws. You see, this secret was like a ticking bomb, which could have blown everything apart, and therefore Margo was willing to do anything in her power to hide the truth.
Now, you may ask, how did Abby find out about the pregnancy? Well, Brad confessed to pedophile Pastor Peter Lightfoot that his “girlfriend” had conceived, and he wasn’t talking about Abby. Pete didn’t know about Margo and Brad’s fling, hence he thought Brad was talking about Abby. Pete himself was attracted to Abby and wanted to try his luck with the young girl; therefore, he told Abby that Brad had told him everything. But Abby, who already suspected Brad’s affair with an older woman, connected the dots and arrived at the conclusion that it was Margo who got pregnant. The thing is, Abby just wanted to threaten Margo with the information so she would leave her boyfriend alone. She walked to the lake house to confront Margo, but it didn’t go well, I suppose. Well, we don’t actually know what happened on the night of Abby’s murder. We saw her walking in the woods. We saw Margo shooting her from behind. But we don’t know what went down before that. Everything is a blur, because the two main characters in the show were under the influence of drugs, and their words can’t be trusted. So I’ll try to fill in this huge gap in the story, and put together a timeline of Abby’s murder. But it goes without saying that I could be wrong, so if you have any alternative theory, please do drop it in the comment section below.
Shortly after her last conversation with Brad’s mother, Jill, Abby went straight to the lake house, where Margo, Sophie, Jamie, and Brad were partying. Due to the power outage, the four people decided to play some nice games to spice things up and even snorted some lines of Xanax, so you know none of them were in their right minds. I believe Jamie and Brad left the lake house long before Abby showed up there and confronted Margo with her secret. Sophie had already lost it, and even Margo wasn’t thinking straight, so she might have ended up making Abby angrier than before. Under normal circumstances, I believe Margo would have been able to deal with the situation in a better way, but with all those drugs and booze in her system, she lost her charm and wits. So maybe Abby and Margo had an argument, and Abby threatened to expose her secret to the whole town. Abby left from there, and Margo went straight back to the lake house, pulled out a gun from Sophie’s purse, and went after Abby in the woods. It could be assumed that Sophie, who really had no idea what was happening, followed Abby and interacted with her in the woods, which was when we saw these two women on the trail camera footage. Abby might have walked ahead, and by the time Margo caught on to her, she shot her from behind. She didn’t talk. She didn’t try to convince her anymore. She just pulled the trigger and killed her to hide her secret. Later, Margo likely called her brother, Kyle, and dragged Sophie’s body away from the lake house so that no one would suspect her or Jed. She also asked Kyle to get rid of the murder weapon, Sophie’s gun, but Kyle, being one of the stupidest people in the world, sold the gun to one of his friends, who ended up using the same for a robbery, making Sophie the prime suspect in Abby’s murder.
Margo loved Sophie and had developed a soft spot for the new woman in her life. She didn’t want her to take the fall for her mistakes and therefore decided to frame Jill Thompson, whom she suspected was blackmailing her with explicit pictures of her and Brad. Margo planted Abby’s phone in Jill’s house, and thankfully she didn’t have to do much after that, as Jill herself dug her own grave by killing Abby’s mother in a fit of rage. So at that point, everyone except Sophie believed that Jill killed Abby, and Sophie was going to blow the whistle on the truth, but then she too ran her car over Kyle, making her a murderer in a real sense. The question here is, will Sophie be able to understand Margo’s plight now, considering she herself has her hands soaked in blood? These two make an unlikely pair, if you ask me, though I guess, in the end, they are destined to end up together, but let’s see how it pans out in the next season.
