'His & Hers' Ending, Explained: Who Is the Killer in the Netflix Miniseries?

“There are at least two sides to every story. Yours and mine, ours and theirs, his and hers…which means someone is always lying.” If those opening lines didn’t give it away, the Netflix drama His & Hers, which debuted on January 8, is a twisty psychological thriller where nothing is as it seems. The series, based on Alice Feeney’s mystery-thriller novel of the same name, stars Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal as news reporter Anna Andrews and detective Jack Harper, who both have connections to a shocking murder case in their rural Georgia hometown—oh, and they’re estranged spouses, too.

The threads of why Anna and Jack are so interested in this case—beyond her desire to report on a sensational news story and his obligation as local law enforcement—are just the tip of the iceberg here. Dahlonega is the kind of small town where everybody knows everyone, and the locals have plenty to hide. Anna and Jack do too, which is why they’re both also suspicious of the other’s involvement in the case.

The six-episode thriller is stacked with surprising revelations, multiple murders, and a conclusion you probably didn’t see coming. Read on as we break it all down, including how it leads to the shocking ending of His & Hers.

Who killed Rachel Hopkins in 'His & Hers?'

The brutal murder of Rachel (Jamie Tisdale), who was found stabbed to death multiple times on the hood of her car in the middle of the woods, is the initial incident that sets off all of the action in the series. It’s what brings Anna, freshly back at her job at a news station in Atlanta after a long absence, back to Dahlonega to report on the story, and puts Jack on the case with his partner, Priya Patel (Sunita Mani). By the time His & Hers concludes, two more women are dead: Helen (Poppy Liu) and Zoe (Marin Ireland), both of whom, like Rachel, were childhood friends of Anna’s.

Potential suspects abounded: Could it have been Rachel’s husband, Clyde (Chris Bauer), a pizza chain mogul with his own secrets? Jack, who had his own very recent history with Rachel? Or Lexy Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse), the Atlanta news anchor who took over Anna’s job and has her own connections to Dahlonega?

As it turns out, the answer is none of them—and the perpetrator is someone you likely never suspected. The killer was Anna’s mother, Alice (Crystal Fox), who uncovered a secret from the friend group’s past and plotted revenge on behalf of her daughter. When we meet Alice, she appears to be a kind but confused woman suffering from dementia. (At one point, she’s found wandering around alone, and Jack is called to bring her home.) But this, apparently, was all an act. As she points out in the handwritten confession that she leaves Anna at the end of the series, nobody thought to suspect her, so they didn’t. “They could have stopped me, but they see what they want to see—even when the truth is right in front of us,” she writes.

Why did Alice kill Rachel, Helen, and Zoe in 'His & Hers?'

Rachel, Helen, and Zoe were all childhood friends of Anna’s, and all attended the fancy St. Hilary’s private school. Unlike her friends, Anna was a scholarship student, and her mother worked at the school as a cleaner. The connection between their past and the murders quickly becomes evident when friendship bracelets are found on both Rachel's and Helen’s bodies.

If adult Rachel was a mean girl, teenage Rachel was an absolute monster. On Anna’s 16th birthday, she schemed to take Anna and another classmate, the awkward Catherine (Astrid Rotenberry), out to the woods, where she, Helen, and Zoe got them drunk and then brought in men who paid Rachel to come and assault them. Catherine managed to run away, but Anna was raped as her “friends” looked on and recorded what happened.

Alice doesn’t discover this until much later, after Anna disappears in grief over the death of her baby girl. So Alice could still feel close to her daughter, she would watch videos that Anna had kept in her childhood bedroom. While most of these tapes were clips from her news reports, the 16th birthday video was there too—and once Alice sees what happened, she plots to kill Rachel, Helen, and Zoe.

Both Tessa Thompson and series creator William Oldroyd have spoken about what a surprising turn it is that Alice is the killer—but why her emotional motive ties the twist together. Oldroyd told The Wrap, "It makes sense that Alice wants to stay connected to her daughter when her daughter leaves, so she watches her on TV, and then that is seeing that [assault] then puts everything into motion."

"We didn’t want to put anyone in any sort of doubt as to whether Alice was motivated to kill them," he continued. "For me, there’s no question that a mother would feel such a strong reaction to do those things."

The reasoning, Thompson explained to the outlet, also speaks to the show's larger themes. "I loved that we could create an ending that felt very surprising, but also very fresh," the star said. "I can’t think of a show where I’ve seen an elderly Black woman be the killer, and also the reason, which is essentially the depth and ferocity of a mother’s love, which is such a unique motive."

How were Jack and Rachel connected in 'His & Hers?'

There’s a reason Jack was so eager to pin Rachel’s murder on Clyde, and why he was so uneasy about giving a DNA sample to the medical examiner: Rachel and Jack were having an affair. In fact, they had sex in his truck the same night she was murdered.

That would be enough to set off alarm bells for any good investigator, but it wasn’t the only connection between them: Jack is also Zoe’s brother. He’s been living with her and her daughter, Meg (Ellie Rose Sawyer), while he got back on his feet following the death of his and Anna’s daughter and the subsequent breakdown of their marriage. So he’s as close as you could get to not just one, but two of the victims.

What happened to Catherine in 'His & Hers?'

His & Hers first introduces Catherine as an awkward teen whom Rachel enjoys tormenting. (At one point, the then-high-schooler hands Catherine a drink and then tells her it’s urine after she takes a sip.) But it turns out, we’ve met her as an adult, too.

When Anna’s hotel reservation in Dahlonega is suspiciously canceled, her cameraman, Richard (Pablo Schreiber), offers a solution: They can drive out to his in-laws’s lake house and finish filing their report from there before they head back to Atlanta. We’ve known from the start that his wife is Anna’s work nemesis, Lexy Jones, but it turns out that Lexy is actually Catherine.

Anna discovers this after spotting some family photos around the home. Catherine, whose middle name was Alexis, changed her appearance and started going by Lexy—and has her own score to settle with Anna, who she thinks knew about the plan to lure them into the woods 20 years ago. Anna swears she had no idea, but Lexy doesn't believe her.

While the two women are fighting, Jack speeds to get to the lake house to rescue Anna, who had called him for help, thinking Lexy and Richard were responsible for the other murders. He gets there, but only just in time: Lexy has tried firing Anna’s gun at her, only to discover it’s out of bullets. At that next moment, Priya (who had been keeping tabs on Jack, thinking his behavior around the investigation was suspicious) fires her own gun and shoots Lexy in the head, killing her.

What happened to Catherine's sister Andrea in 'His & Hers?'

Lexy didn’t kill Rachel, Helen, and Zoe, though she certainly had the motive. However, her hands aren’t clean either. In a flashback, we learn she’s responsible for the death of her sister, Andrea (Savanna Gann). When Catherine was still a teenager, Andrea fat-shamed her before the family was about to head out on the lake for a boat trip. In retaliation, Catherine took her sister’s inhaler and deliberately emptied the medication from it. Andrea had an asthma attack on the boat, and the family was too far away from shore to get her help before she died.

Later, Clyde reveals that Catherine/Lexy made the mistake of confiding this information to Rachel at some point, and Rachel and Helen later attempted to blackmail her. This all gave ammo to Lexy being a suspect in the murders, but ultimately wound up being a red herring.

If viewers were shocked that Lexy wasn't actually the killer, that was by design. The series creator spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how Anna's colleague was set up to be a suspect—and why their dramatic confrontation was inevitable. "When Anna turns up at Lexy’s family lake house and unloads a handgun at Richard, Lexy is left in no doubt that Anna is the murderer," Oldroyd explained to THR. "Now the choice is simple: kill Anna or be killed. After all, Anna has a genuine motive for wanting all these women dead, and that includes Catherine, who abandoned her that night. The fatal tragedy of the final showdown is that if they had just stopped to ask each other why they’d killed these women, they would realize that neither of them had. But, in the craziness and confusion, they had to fight it out to the bitter end."

What happened to Anna and Jack's baby in 'His & Hers?'

Tragically, Anna and Jack’s daughter, Charlotte, died when she was only a few months old. The couple had gone out for a date night and left her with Alice to babysit. When they came back, the house was surrounded by ambulances.

Alice later says the cause was unexplained (“crib death”) and nobody’s fault, but she felt like she had failed her daughter. The baby’s death spun all of them into grief, with Anna taking a leave of absence from her job for a year and Jack moving back to Dahlonega.

What happens to Anna and Jack at the end of 'His & Hers?'

Things seem to have fallen back into place for Anna and Jack, who have reunited and brought Zoe’s daughter/Jack’s niece Meg into their family, along with expecting a new baby of their own.

But is it still domestic bliss once Anna learns what it took to get it? As Jack and Meg sit with Alice, she finds the handwritten confession note in her childhood room, where her mother explains how she faked dementia to commit these murders and get away with it, all in the name of getting Anna her life back. Killing Rachel, she explains, brought Anna back to Dahlonega. Killing Helen kept her there, and killing Zoe gave her back the family she’d lost. She’d never intended to kill Catherine/Lexy, thinking that going to prison was punishment enough for abandoning her that night in the woods—plus, it allowed for a convenient killer in this juicy story.

She tells Anna that she’s revealing all this now that she’s about to become a mother again, and urges her to “love my grandbabies as I loved you…Show them that a mother’s love never dims, never weakens. It’s constant, continual, relentless.”

The series then ends with Anna making eye contact with her mother, and Alice meeting it with an ambiguous smile.