Only Murders in the Building Season 2 Ending Explained

This article contains spoilers for the Only Murders in the Building season 2 finale.

After 10 more episodes, gallons of Gut Milk, many obscenities sent between Oliver (Martin Short) and Mrs. Gambolini, and wholly unique title sequences, Only Murders in the Building has discovered its true suspect for a second time.  

Much like in the first season, there were a lot of moving parts, and it takes some true sleuthing to figure out the answer to the mystery. We’ll help you go step-by-step so you can understand how the murderer was discovered, what their motivations were, and where the characters are going to go from here. 

Who killed Bunny Folger? 

After much theorizing, we can put all of our predictions to rest. If you had Poppy White (Adina Verson) as Bunny Folger’s (Jane Houdyshell) murderer, you were correct. In fact, Poppy has been instrumental in multiple mysteries in this universe. We found out that Poppy’s actual name is Becky Butler. She was a girl living a mundane, underappreciated existence in Oklahoma. 

After listening to Cinda Canning’s podcast (Tina Fey), Becky decides she wants to disappear, literally, and help Cinda solve the mystery as her new assistant. She changes her identity and flees to New York. She convinces Cinda to hire her and solve the crime, but she never gets the credit she wanted. In this way, she continues to live the same unfortunate life as before. 

This must be when Poppy decides to go really big or go home. She plots another murder at the Arconia after the Tim Kono one is figured out in the first season, but things immediately go awry when Mabel is in the room that night after the kill. The text Mabel receives to get out of the building was from Poppy. If Mabel hadn’t been there, the plan could have gone more smoothly. 

How did our podcasting protagonists figure it out? 

The trio wanted to identify the suspects that would have the most to gain from committing the murder. This is why they start to think that Cinda is the culprit. Killing Bunny and framing it on her main competition in the podcast space would be a surefire way to come out on top of the true-crime murder mystery media world. 

There are a few areas where Poppy was unable to cover her tracks, though, and her attempts to pin the kill on someone else become too difficult to contain once the trio started digging around. Mabel uses her keen insights into Poppy’s frustrations with Cinda to plan the murder mystery reveal party that ensues for most of the season finale. It’s an event where everybody is in the know except Poppy. 

They first claim Cinda is the murderer, but when that doesn’t stick, Mabel attempts to put her ex-girlfriend Alice (Cara Delevingne) in the spotlight. Alice supposedly confirms she’s the killer when she stabs Charles in retaliation for finding her out. Cinda gives Mabel all of the praise that Poppy always wanted, and this was all it took to get Poppy to start spilling her secrets. 

Poppy’s first confession is that she suggested using the artwork of Rose Cooper that was missing from Bunny’s apartment for a podcast, to which Cinda declined. This implicates her in the stealing of the painting. She is also sneezing viciously during the scene, something that is more than coincidental. Lucy (Zoe Margeret Colletti) was in the Arconia’s catacombs the night of the murder and corroborated the killer’s runny nose and throat. It turns out the sneezing is an allergy to the aforementioned bird of Bunny, Mrs. Gambolini. 

Major Clues From Throughout the Season

When Bunny said “14, Savage” to Mabel in her dying moments, she wasn’t referring to anything related to Charles. Instead, it was a misinterpretation of Poppy’s sandwich order at the diner they both went to in the afternoons, the number 14 sandwich. Bunny had evidently seen Poppy there before, but didn’t know any other way to ID her except by her lunch choice. 

Detective Williams (Da’ Vine Joy Randolph) was also able to give Mabel a key piece of information over the phone the afternoon the murder mystery is solved. There was DNA evidence of saliva from a dead girl from Oklahoma on the murder weapon, and Mabel concludes it must belong to Becky Butler. Poppy had revealed her true identity in the previous episode, “Sparring Partners”. This was obviously a major blunder on her part in an attempt to get the heat off Mabel and the rest of the trio and put it on Cinda. 

One last key piece of evidence is the association of the killer to Detective Krepps (Michael Rapaport). Krepps talks to Mabel in the boxing ring about his ties to a beautiful woman who helped solve a mystery. This is a red herring, because we all think this is referring to Cinda, but it was actually referring to Poppy. Krepps is glitter man from the middle of the season, and he was the cop who helped cover up the disappearance of Becky Butler and make it look like a real murder. After getting the rest of the evidence, Mabel is able to understand this key misunderstanding of who was dating Krepps. 

Is there a third season murder victim already?

It would appear that there are no more murders in this building for a while. Oliver gets to start working on Broadway and Charles is acting in some of the productions. It’s been a year since the discovery of Bunny’s killer, and the trio is enjoying living life normally. As is to be expected, though, there is always more murder when Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are around.

One of the fellow actors on stage with Charles, a man played by Paul Rudd, is the third season’s apparent victim. He dies suddenly and in the presence of Charles while monologuing on stage. Much to Mabel’s chagrin, it looks like there will be another mystery to solve this time next year! With minimal evidence and not much in the way of screen time for Rudd, we don’t know how this crime will tie back to our cast of reliable protagonists.