After teasing it in the beginning of the season—along with in some previews that hadn't yet aired—True Detective Season Three finally implied that the Purcell case might be connected to the Season One Yellow King crime.
In a scene showing Hays's 2015 interview with Elisa Montgomery, the documentarian tells him about a past case while pulling up a newspaper cover showing the actual faces of Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle and Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart.
"Dolls are used as signifiers in the human trafficking underground," she says. "Like this blue spiral, it's code for pedophiles. In 2012, two former Louisiana state police stopped a serial killer associated with some kind of pedophile ring. Despite evidence of accomplices, the case never went wider."
"I think I read about that," Hays responds. "So What are you saying? I think at this point I deserve an explanation."
Montgomery continues:
"I think what happened to the Purcell children was connected to a similar group. I think one or both of their parents sold them off. Probably with the cousin's help. That's why they're all gone. Vanished. Killed. Kept silent. These groups, they take runaways. Outright kidnapping. And wider investigations are consistently curtailed. In both the Louisiana and Nebraska cases high level politicians and businessmen we're implicated—people with the power to make these things go away."
Now, Montgomery's narrative is pure speculation, but it's impossible to ignore the similarities between these two cases, where powerful businessmen were behind the disappearance of local children and massive cover-ups. What's interesting is that some have theorised that the dolls were simply placed around Will Purcell's body were used as a tactic to throw off investigators to incorrectly think it might be some sort of satanic cult or pedophile ring.
At this point, it's still unclear if this is actually connected to the True Detective Season One murders, but we do know that Montgomery is right about one thing: There is a cover up going on. As we learn in this episode, Hays and Roland West are somehow blackmailed by Hoyt into covering up his link to the Purcell case after they accidentally murder Harris James.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
