‘Lady in the Lake’ Ending Explained: Who Killed Cleo Johnson?

Lady in the Lake is the story of one woman’s quest to solve two murders — and another woman’s journey to becoming one of the victims. It’s also the story of the different kinds of external prejudice and internal strife experienced by two minority communities in Baltimore, Black people and Jewish people. Set in the tumultuous late 1960s, it’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a fiery critique of American racism. 

Airing on Apple TV+, Lady has two leading players. The first is Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), a desperate Jewish housewife turned would-be reporter whose ambition — and secret connection to the family of the first victim, a little Jewish girl named Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle) — leads her to some unexpected places. The second is Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), an overworked and underpaid Black mother who is forced to participate in an attempted assassination. Throughout the season, the closer Maddie gets to the truth, the further Cleo gets from safety.

There’s a lot going on, is what we’re saying.

But don’t worry! Just in case you need to get everything straight in your own little reporter’s notepad, we’ve put together everything you need to know about the ending of Lady in the Lake — warning: major spoilers ahead!

Who killed Tessie Durst?

Not who you think! It was indeed the twitchy fish store employee Stephen Zawadzkie (Dylan Arnold) who abducted the little girl from the store. He unsuccessfully attempted to rape her, and was discovered by his mother, Kasha (Masha Mashkova), who killed the girl to cover up the crime. Maddie learns all of this second-hand from her reporter colleague Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), because she’d been unconscious following a vicious attack by Kasha, who killed herself shortly thereafter. 

So Kasha, not former military guinea pig Stephen, was the actual murderer. Reggie Robinson (Josiah Cross), the gangster whose presence in the fish store at the time of Tessie’s abduction connects her killing to that of his friend and co-worker Cleo Johnson, was just a red herring as well.

Who killed Cleo Johnson?

Nobody! And that’s the big mystery that Cleo, our narrator, has been trying to keep under wraps all this time. Her appearance at the end of the big dream sequence in episode six was no dream: She’s really alive, and she really comes to visit Maddie in the hospital to explain how and why. Turns out that Cleo was never killed by anyone — least of all by Reggie, whose circumstantial connection to Tessie and whose dumping of “Cleo’s” body into the fountain in the middle of the lake naturally made him suspect number one.

It’s true that Reggie received the order from his ganglord boss, Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), to silence Cleo following her unwilling involvement in a botched high-profile hit that Shell ordered. But fate has something worse in store for Reggie: His beloved girlfriend, the gifted singer Dora Carter (Jennifer Mogbock), died of a heroin overdose sometime that evening. 

Desperat, Cleo and Reggie devise a plan: They dress Dora as Cleo — most notably using her trademark blue coat — and deposit her corpse where no one will find it until it’s too waterlogged and rotted to be recognizable. As long as Shell believes she’s dead, he won’t come after her — or the thousands of dollars she scammed from him through a rigged lotto the night she disappeared. 

Okay, so what do Cleo and Maddie do now that Cleo’s still alive?

They take down Shell Gordon, that’s what. He’s the man responsible for so much misery in Cleo’s life, including everything from ordering her murder (duh) to the gambling addiction that cost her her relationship with her father. Now, with Maddie’s newspaper connections, Cleo finally has a way to stop him.

Dressing in male drag, Cleo sneaks into Shell’s records room and snags direct evidence of his criminal profiteering. In exchange for laying off the Cleo Johnson “murder,” Maddie gets the cooked books from Cleo, publishes the findings, and topples Shell from the throne. Reggie ties up the final loose end: He falsely confesses to Cleo’s imaginary murder — penance, Cleo says, for the crimes he really did commit. 

Where do Cleo and Maddie end up? What’s up with Cleo’s nightclub performance? Do Maddie and Ferdie stay together? And who was the real father of Maddie’s son again?

After a final, bitter meeting with Maddie in which she rejects the idea that they could ever be friends in the world as it is, Cleo leaves with her husband and kids for Paris, where she assumes the name and nightclub-singing career of her late friend Dora. It’s the perfect cover story.

Maddie publishes the story of the lady in the lake, but without revealing the truth, and becomes a successful writer and reporter. In the process, she moves back to a predominantly white neighborhood from her place in the Bottom. She appears to maintain her relationship with her angry teenage son Seth (Noah Jupe), who’s actually the biological son of Tessie’s dad, Maddie’s ex-boyfriend Allan Durst (David Corenswet). (Maddie’s affair with Allan’s father Hal, played by Mark Feuerstein, was another red herring, though it did necessitate a backroom abortion.) 

However, Maddie loses her relationship with ex-cop Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) — the very relationship that cost him his job when his racist colleagues on the force found out. Few good deeds go unpunished on Lady in the Lake.

What does the ending of Lady in the Lake mean? Lady in the Lake ending explained:

The best way to sum up Lady in the Lake’s view of its main characters and their respective positions in the American system is simply to refer to its plot. At least until the surprise ending of episode six cleared things up, Maddie was investigating a murder, but Cleo was the victim of that murder. Even though Maddie is subjected to a great deal of both unthinking and deliberate racism against Jews, and even though her mid-life crisis stems from very valid concerns about her own life, her plight pales in comparison (no pun intended) to the way Cleo is forced to live on the edge.

Cleo’s boss is a mob boss. Her son is suffering from sickle cell anemia. Her struggling husband’s stand-up comedy routine makes jokes about lynchings that are as likely to get him blackballed as hired. Her best friend is a junkie. Her father abandoned her. She can’t get a straight job with a politician because of her association with the mob boss. The mob boss’s idiot minions drag her along on a mission to kill said politician. She winds up having to fake her own death in order to avoid execution.

All of this happened without her deliberately sticking her nose in somewhere. Maddie had to go digging in other people’s pain to attract the attention of a psycho like Stephen Zawadzkie; Cleo’s life or death situations were just a fact of her life. 

Can such a gap in experience and circumstance ever be bridged? The show seems to take a glass-half-empty approach to that question. It’s true that Black Baltimoreans bust up a Nazi rally, since the Jews’ enemies are their enemies too. But the last images of such unrest are the riots and brutal crackdowns that erupted following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; Cleo, meanwhile, wearily scoffs at the idea that she and Maddie could be friends. The severing of Maddie’s ties to Ferdie and to her adopted neighborhood are other datapoints to consider when assessing the show’s take on cross-racial solidarity against robber barons and fascist mobs. In Lady in the Lake’s world, at least, the outlook is grim.

Will there be a Lady in the Lake Season 2?

Probably not, as the first season adopts the entirety of the source novel by author Laura Lippman. It’s possible the show could be turned into some kind of anthology series, involving different ladies in different lakes — this happened to The Terror, originally just a limited-series adaptation of a single novel by Dan Simmons — but you don’t need Maddie Morgenstern’s reporting skills to figure out that this is an unlikely outcome.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.