Who is the killer in Ballard? Details from the Bosch spin-off, explored

Amazon Prime Video's Bosch spin-off series, Ballard Season 1, concluded with a shocking finale, which finally revealed the identity of Sarah Pearlaman's killer.

Nikita fame Maggie Q stars as Detective Renée Ballard, whose team was assigned to seemingly unrelated cold cases of dead women. After Renee is assigned to investigate the murder of a councilman's sister (Sarah), she discovers that her case might be related to the string of these cold cases.

Renee finally catches the killer in the Ballard finale, who is revealed to be Gary Pearlman, Sarah's stepfather and Councilman Jake's father, who also murdered the other women and collected one of their belongings as trophies.

After Sarah mistakes these trophies as his stepfather's infidelity and suspects that he is cheating on her mother, Gary murders her for going through his stuff and covering up his past murders. During interrogation, Renee and his team finally discover the perverse reason for Gary's actions.

More on this in our story.

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Who is the killer in Ballard? Exploring the motives behind the string of murders

While Renee is primarily assigned to investigate the murder of Sarah Pearlman, her team is also investigating a string of seemingly unrelated murders. However, Ballard takes a shocking turn when Renee connects these victims' DNA to Sarah, and it is revealed that their killer might be the same.

Thanks to this DNA sampling and the only surviving victim who helped Renee, she is finally able to uncover the true identity of the killer, who is none other than Gary Pearlman. After the surviving victim identified Pearlman as the killer, it was clear that he was responsible for murdering 14 women, including his stepdaughter.

As a child, Gary Pearlman's mother left him when he was eight years old, following which he had an abusive childhood, where his father would beat him up and blame him for his wife's abandonment. As the finale revealed, this deeply affected Gary's mind and created a resentment towards women who prioritized their careers.

Gary Pearlman believed that these women were not 'marriage material' and should be punished for abandoning their families and prioritizing their careers (like his mother). Two of these victims, namely Laura Wilson and Naomi Bennett, were targeted specifically by Gary because they were about to take a big step towards their dream jobs.

While Laura left her barista job and was cast in a commercial, Naomi got her dream job in a beauty salon, making them tragic victims of Ballard's killer.

Sarah Pearlman, Gary's stepdaughter, was the only woman who was not targeted for this perverse motive.

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Maggie Q breaks down the shocking identity of the killer in the Ballard finale

While Renee Ballard is based on Michael Connelly's novel series, the author also took inspiration from the real-life detective Mitzi Roberts, who solved many cold cases back in her day.

In an interview with Variety, Q discussed how the Bosch spin-off series used many of Mitzi's cold cases as their inspirations for Gary's murders to suggest that serial killers are among us and are often hiding in plain sight. While they think that leaving a string of 'unrelated' crimes is smart, there is always a line that connects them, like Renee did with DNA sampling.

Talking about the shocking identity of the killer, Q said:

“I liked that it was somebody not only that you didn’t suspect, but sometimes their reasons for doing these things are a lot smaller than you think.''

She added:

''They’re not bloodthirsty vampires; they’re traumatized people. That’s one of the things that I learned during the process of training for this show that was very surprising to me.”

Ballard Season 1 is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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