Who killed in The Residence? The ending of Netflix's murder mystery series explained

Warning! Below are spoilers from The Residence.

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In classic detective story style, in The Residence the truth about the murder was revealed at the end, when everyone connected with the case was gathered in one place. However, this did not happen right after their meeting – at its beginning Cordelia Cupp did not yet know the identity of the perpetrator, but at the end of the meeting she knew the truth.

From the beginning, the most obvious suspect seemed to be Harry Hollinger, who obstructed the investigation, insisted on closing it quickly and seemed conflicted with A.B. Wynter. But was he actually the one who committed the crime?

Cupp took everyone to the playroom and the journey through the White House and the memories of that day began. She recalled that A.B. Wynter had taken a dose of poison, but that his death was due to a blow to the head with a blunt instrument and took place before his wrists were slit. Nor did he die in the playroom, where he was found.

He was drawn there from room 301. There was spotted Tripp Morgan, who, as it turned out, found A.B. Wynter dead beside him when he awoke in that room. It was he who moved Wynter's body from Room 301 to the playroom, where he left him. It was also Morgan who repainted Room 301 to cover the traces of blood. It was also Tripp who slit Wynter's wrists and tossed a knife next to his body to make the scene look like a suicide. He did this after finding a letter next to Wynter, suggesting that he had taken his own life. In this way, he wanted to cover up his mistake with moving the body from another room.

But A.B. Wynter didn't die in Room 301; he was moved there from another room – the bedroom, where Kylie Minogue found blood. He was taken there for a moment when he was moved from the yellow office by Bruce Geller, a White House technical worker. Bruce have taken care of the body thinking he was covering up the crime of Elsyie Chayle, a maid with whom he was close. Elsyie that evening had quarreled with Wynter and said she would kill him, so Bruce assumed she had committed the crime and decided to help her.

Who killed in Netflix's The Residence?

But are either Elsyie or Bruce to blame? Although Lilly Schumacher tried to frame them for the crime, they weren't the ones who killed Wynter. It was Lilly who did it, because Morgan not only represented everything she hated about the White House and the people in it, but also prevented her from reinventing the place, and above all, threatened her because he knew all about her crimes. He documented how she embezzled money and all her other misdeeds and planned to turn her in.

Lilly Schumacher played by Molly Griggs | The Residence, Paul William Davies, Netflix, 2025

Lilly couldn't let him do that, so when a page from Wynter's diary, which was perfect for a suicide note, came into her hands, she decided to set everything up to make it look like he had taken his own life. But when she failed to poison him, she hit him over the head with a clock and killed him that way. She would have gotten away with it if Cupp hadn't remembered the door in the yellow oval office, which had been bricked up after the crime. Jasmin had the door bricked up at the behest of Elliot Morgan, the president's husband, or at least that's what she thought. It turned out, however, that Lilly had claimed to be him. She was the one to blame for everything.

So Cordelia Cupp solved this intricate crime in the eighth episode of The Residence.

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