True Detective Explained

(TL;DR: the whole Tuttle family is a group of rapey, pedophilic, murdering psychopaths with a penchant for incest. They will be caught by other agencies as investigations follow up after the events of the finale.)

True Detective's last episode aired today.
It was pretty clear during the midst of the season that the show was centered around the psychs of the two leading men rather than being a full blown serial killer-cult mystery.

This is the reason why there are some people complaining that there are some loose ends that haven't been explained.
Like, what about the tape and the people in it? Were others involved and were they caught?

Well, let's just walk through everything we know and build up what could or couldn't have been.


We know that the Tuttle family is a bunch of crazy fucks.
Sam Tuttle, who is the father of Billy Lee Tuttle(the church guy) and uncle of Edwin Tuttle(the governor), is said to have been a total fucked up son of a bitch.
He's said to have exploited young children and that he only liked them once.
He also had many children out of wedlock.
One of them was Ted Childress, the Vermilion Parish Sheriff.
This Childress played down the Marie Fontenot disappearance by saying that the girl went away with her birth daddy.
Errol Childress is the son of Ted Childress and the grandson of Sam Tuttle.
But we do know from the tape that it's not true and she was raped by a group of five men who wear masks.

Guy Francis - the guy who had info on the Yellow King - killed himself in jail, a day after Rust interrogated him.a
He was driven into killing himself by a jail guard whose surname is - you guessed it right - "Childress".

We also know that all the children and women who disappeared and were killed had a connection with BL Tuttle's organisation.

So, what does it all mean?

Sam Tuttle is the main man behind everything.
He is the patriarch of this grizzly fucked up cult bullshit.
The 5 men are members of this family only. They will probably caught as the investigation by various agencies goes on after the events of the finale. Rust and Marty have done their part.
The 3 men our detectives did caught(Ledoux cousins and Errol) were products of this cult who rapes and sacrifices children but weren't directly involved in it or major players in it. What they did was scout and bring victims to Sam Tuttle and his partners and develop the drugs that the victims were induced with.

Here's the deal with Errol: He was exploited as a child. His father burnt his face. And he became the way he is now as a result of what he went through as a kid.

The murder and placement of Dora Lange is due to this itself.
Sam Tuttle and his other asshole partners had no hand in Dora's murder. In fact, such public depiction would even bring attention to their secret cult.
But Errol - who grew up and was abused in the fucked environment of the Tuttle family - developed a dark side of himself and started killing women and children too.
BL Tuttle, knowing that his asshole father would get caught because of his bastard brother's son's actions, came in with a task force to do damage control and cover up the case.
The were lucky that only Errol's acolytes - DeWall and Reggie - were caught and Errol went unscathed in 1995.

But what about Carcosa?
Carcosa, as shown in the last episode - is this isolated set of mazes where Sam Tuttle and others performed their rituals.
Errol was exposed to this place as a child and has been acting as a groundskeeper because grandpa Sam Tuttle is either too old or dead in 2012.
.
The Lake Charles depiction came some time after BL Tuttle killed himself.
Maybe old Billy was keeping a leash on Errol all this time and Errol repeated his 1995 behaviour after he was gone.


Okay, I have put up a lot in here and it could have been structured in a better way but whatever this isn't my job.

Here's a picture of all the major players to help you understand all this more properly:

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