Season 3 of True Detective opens in 2015, where the elderly and retired police detective Wayne
Hays is interviewed for a crime series, known as True Criminal. As the documentary’s director,
Elisa Montgomery, interviews Wayne about his life, his experiences on the force,
and a specific case featuring missing children Will and Julie Purcell,
Wayne struggles to remember key details due to his worsening memory loss. Wayne’s adult son,
Henry, helps his father navigate his memories and recount the truth about not only the most
pivotal case of his career, but also the love story he experienced with his late wife, Amelia.
Back in 1980, Detectives Wayne Hays and Roland West are assigned to find the young children,
Will and Julie Purcell, who were reported missing by their alcoholic father,
Tom. Wayne and Roland look into both Tom and his estranged wife, Lucy, as suspects.
The detectives turn to Will’s teacher, Amelia, for any insight into the childrens’ lives,
and Wayne immediately is struck by Amelia’s beauty and intelligence. Unfortunately,
Wayne uses his tracking skills developed in Vietnam to find Will’s body in a nearby cave,
his corpse arranged as if in prayer, surrounded by white dolls.
As Wayne and Roland investigate the Purcell family, they discover that Tom might not be
the missing Julie’s real father, as Lucy has a history of cheating on him. The estranged
Purcell parents then receive a mysterious note at their home declaring that Julie is alive and
that Tom and Lucy need to let her go. Throughout the investigation, Roland grows close to Tom and
tries to help him overcome his grief and his long fought battle with alcoholism.
Wayne and Roland then interview a farmer who claims to have already spoken to the
police about seeing Julie and Will in the woods before they went missing,
and that there was a car close by with a black man and white woman inside. Wayne and Roland
next meet the local woman who handmakes the white dolls found near Will’s body,
claiming that several were recently bought by a black man with a milky eye. When Wayne and
Roland find a man matching that description, Sam Whitehead, he denies any knowledge of the dolls.
As the investigation continues, the town quickly sets their sights on trash collector Brett Woodard
as the prime suspect. Brett was one of the last people to see Will alive, and has developed a bad
reputation amongst his neighbors due to racism and his mental health struggles following his service
in Vietnam that destroyed his own family life. As a mob forms to enact their own vigilante justice
against Woodard, the vet arms himself and fights back against his attacking neighbors, killing
many civilians before the police arrive and Wayne is forced to put him down. Wayne is immediately
disturbed by the disregard the entire town, city leaders and residents alike, have for Woodard’s
life. When the police find a treasure trove of evidence in Woodard’s home connecting him to the
Purcell case, including Will’s backpack, Wayne becomes unnerved. District Attorney Gerald Kindt
leads the charge in quickly closing the case and pinning it all on Woodard to appease the public.
Meanwhile, Wayne and Amelia have pursued a relationship with each other and fallen in
love. Amelia has developed her own interest in the Purcell case, and uses information gathered from
Wayne to work on a book and publish an article in the local paper condemning the police’s handling
of the case. Kindt tells Wayne he must publicly denounce the article and discredit Amelia,
but Wayne refuses, causing Kindt to demote him. Wayne then confronts Amelia for using him, and
contemplates breaking up with her, but ultimately realizes his love for her and instead proposes.
In 1990, Wayne and Amelia are now married with two young kids. Amelia’s book on the
Purcell case proved itself extremely popular, but her relationship with Wayne has become
strained due to him blaming her for using people to prop herself up. This sentiment
is echoed at a book signing event, where Amelia is publicly confronted by a black
man with a milky eye for profiting off other people’s pain. Despite this,
when Wayne is informed that Julie’s fingerprints were shockingly discovered at a recent robbery,
Amelia throws herself into reopening the investigation as the subject of her next book.
In the past ten years, Wayne and Roland have fallen out as friends, as Roland remained loyal to
the police department, despite their mishandling of the Purcell case. With the case now reopened,
Roland makes amends with Wayne and recruits him to help find the resurfaced Julie. In
the intervening years, Roland has helped Tom sober up and turn his life around,
though Lucy has died of an overdose, and her cousin, Dan, went missing shortly after.
Wayne and Roland meet a homeless kid who claims to have met the now adult Julie, saying that she
had called herself a princess who had escaped the pink room to find her missing brother. Wayne and
Roland also look into the officers responsible for finding Will’s backpack in Woodard’s home,
leading them to former police detective Harris James, who now works as head of security for the
powerful Hoyt family. Tom then goes on TV during a press conference to beg Julie to come home. Julie
then calls the police and claims that Tom is not her father and that he needs to leave her alone.
Kindt begins to suspect that Tom is involved in Julie’s disappearance, and pressures Wayne
and Roland into making Tom a prime suspect. Tom is devastated by Roland’s betrayal and takes matters
into his own hands, finding Dan and forcing him to reveal information he had previously
withheld from the police, including the fact that Lucy had been paid off by her powerful employers,
the Hoyt family, to keep something quiet. Tom then breaks into the mansion of Hoyt family
patriarch Edward Hoyt, where he discovers a pink room, before being murdered by Harris
James. Tom’s death is staged as a relapse into his addiction, which Roland now blames himself for.
Wayne then discovers that Harris had visited Lucy just before her death, and could have
orchestrated her overdose. Wayne becomes sure that Harris was responsible for planting Will’s
backpack in Woodard’s home, and that the Hoyt family must be connected to the Purcell case.
Worried about the Hoyt family’s power, Wayne and Roland secretly and illegally apprehend Harris
to interrogate him. When Harris breaks free and attacks, Wayne and Roland are forced to kill him
and hide his body. Wayne and Roland’s partnership and friendship becomes strained, due to Roland
resenting Wayne for dragging him into something so dangerous. Edward Hoyt then contacts Wayne,
informing him that he knew they had killed Harris, and threatens Wayne’s family if he doesn’t
immediately drop the investigation. And so, a defeated Wayne resigns from the police force.
In 2015, the true crime interviews have reinspired
the dementia-suffering Wayne to solve the Purcell case once and for all. The documentary’s director,
Elisa, theorizes that the state wanted to pin the crimes on Woodard to cover up a massive
government affiliated pedophile ring, like the one uncovered in Louisiana by detectives Rust
Cohle and Marty Hart, but Wayne dismisses this theory. Wayne then reconciles with his old friend,
Roland, to partner up one final time. As the duo reopen the case,
Wayne becomes convinced that someone is watching and following him,
though everyone around him thinks he is paranoid and seeing things due to his worsening dementia.
The new investigation eventually leads the retired detectives to Junius, a black man with
a milky eye, who reveals himself to be the man watching Wayne, anticipating his arrival. Junius
explains that Edward Hoyt’s daughter, Isabel, lost her husband and child in a car accident,
and Junius was tasked with tending to her declining mental state. When Isabel noticed Julie
at a company picnic, she realized how much the girl looked like her own dead daughter. And so,
Junius started paying Lucy to allow Isabel to play with Julie as if she were her actual daughter.
When Isabel became erratic and tried to take Julie permanently, Will intervened to stop her,
resulting in him accidentally hitting his head and dying. Harris James then paid Lucy to not
only keep quiet about the arrangement, but to allow Isabel to keep Julie forever to raise as
her own. Julie then grew up in the pink room until the guilt ridden Junius helped her escape. Junius
then takes Wayne and Roland to Julie’s last known location, a convent, where the nuns reveal that
Julie died years prior. The case is now closed, and Wayne and Roland resolve to remain friends,
despite feeling disappointed in discovering Julie’s death. Upon their departure from
the convent, they meet a groundskeeper named Mike, and his young daughter, Lucy.
As Wayne later rereads Amelia’s book on the Purcell case, he realizes that Julie’s
neighbor and childhood crush, Mike, is the groundskeeper at the convent,
and that Lucy must be the daughter of Julie, who may in fact still be secretly alive and living
happily with her new family. His love, Amelia, had done the thing Wayne could never do. She solved
the case. Wayne races to Mike’s home to confirm his suspicions, but before he gets his answers,
he suffers from another bout of memory loss. Unsure of where he is or why he is there,
Wayne is completely oblivious that it is an alive and well adult Julie who
finds the disoriented Wayne and helps him call Henry for help. Henry picks up Wayne,
but takes note of the seemingly random address that his father had somehow found himself at.
As the season comes to a close, Wayne is joined by his children, Henry and Rebecca, his many
grandchildren and his lifelong friend, Roland. As Wayne enjoys seeing his family all together, he
thinks back on his love, Amelia, who despite his memory now failing him, has never left his mind.