The Red Dahlia: Part 3

The case closes on the Wickenham family. Through telephone tapping, Langton learns that Charles Wickenham performed an abortion on his nervous younger daughter, Emily, and may have been the father of her child; the same material establishes that he had abused his arrogant elder daughter, Justine. The family, including Wickenham's ex-wife Dominique, closes ranks.

Anna Travis is given photographs of Justine and Dominique at sex parties, the latter showing Dominique, described as a former prostitute, having sex with her stepson Edward. The photographs break the family's front and supply the pressure the inquiry needs, but they do not by themselves prove the killings. Mrs Hedges, the housekeeper and a woman fiercely protective of the girls, also believes Emily was abused, and her loyalty to the daughters sits against her knowledge of what Wickenham has done.

The decisive evidence comes from outside the family. Edward's bullied girlfriend, Gail Harrington, rings the police and names Charles Wickenham, having seen him with the two victims. That identification gives the inquiry its proof.

The murderer is cornered and exposed as a man who killed in the style of the Black Dahlia out of vanity, to see whether he could get away with it. He escapes and hides in a ventilator shaft, where he is found dead, locked in to suffocate, almost certainly by the housekeeper, still protective of her girls. She is not arrested. The resolution therefore withholds the arrest and the trial. The responsible man dies at the hands of the housekeeper, the family's secrets are exposed without being prosecuted, and the case ends on the cost to the daughters rather than on a courtroom. La Plante's own press note for the series promises a world of sadistic cruelty and a murderous secret, and the ending delivers that secret without the legal reckoning that would normally follow it.

Its strength is the reveal as a family tragedy rather than a chase. The killer is a father whose crimes are inside his own house, and the solution is a set of secrets rather than a confession, which ties the Black Dahlia imitation to a specific and domestic motive. The abuse and the abortion are the family's crimes, and the resolution leaves the daughters exposed rather than protected. The avenger is a servant, not a detective, and the title's idea of being above suspicion is turned against the family that believed itself shielded.

The weakness is that the resolution bypasses the courts. The killer dies at the housekeeper's hands and she is not arrested, which leaves the case without the judicial accounting a procedural usually supplies, and the two available accounts of the death do not fully reconcile whether he was captured and killed or locked in to suffocate. It is nonetheless the conclusion of the series' most watched story, drawing around 7.87 million, the second largest audience of the run, and the part's grim family material and moral ambiguity mark it as a deliberate departure from the tidier resolution of series one. The Travis and Langton thread is left, as ever, unresolved.