Without Sin Ending Explained: Who Killed Maisie Tomlinson?

What Happened to Maisie Tomlinson?

Her best friend Cleo hit her over the head with an amethyst ornament in a fit of rage, accidentally killing her, after the two teenage girls had fought over the revelation that Maisie’s boyfriend Teddy had been secretly sleeping with Cleo. ‘Maisie started saying horrible things about my mum and I just wanted her to stop,’ Cleo tearfully confessed, ‘I didn’t mean to kill her.’

The flashback does indeed show Maisie suggesting Cleo was only sleeping with Teddy because he was a drug dealer and could get some gear for her addict mum, and she was trying to steal Teddy because no one else, including her mum, wanted her. Harsh, but not justifying-murder harsh.

So why and How Did Charles Get Framed For Maisie’s Murder?

On the night Maisie died, she and Cleo had been partying at Maisie’s family home with aforementioned drug-dealing wrong’un Teddy and his mate Lee, who – luckily for them – was the nephew of Roman McKeller (Con O’Neill, Happy Valley), part of the town’s resident sleazy crime family who get up to all sorts of mischief, mostly involving drugs.

When Maisie died, Lee called his dodgy Dad for help, and the McKellers decided to send Charles (Teddy’s Dad, who had also been selling drugs for them at the time) to the house on the pretence of stealing Stella’s car, but actually to frame him for the murder. When he got there, Charles broke in to steal the car key, believing nobody to be at home, but shockingly discovered Maisie’s bloodied body. 

In the meantime, Cleo had used Maisie’s phone to text Stella, pretending to be Maisie and asking her to come home because she was scared after seeing someone lurking outside. Stella arrived home from the pub just in time to catch Charles kneeling over Maisie’s body, giving the police a seemingly open-and-shut case, despite Charles protesting his innocence.

Why Did Teddy Let His Dad Take the Blame?

This one’s more complicated. Cleo did say that Teddy never would have allowed the plan to go ahead if he’d known it was his dad the McKellers were framing, but once he found out he didn’t exactly do anything to stop it either. Why? According to Teddy, partly because he’d ‘never have survived in prison’, and partly out of resentment for his dad’s controlling ways: ‘Some days it was easier, I felt better knowing that you weren’t there controlling me any more. That I could live my life.’ The fact that confessing the truth would have landed him on the wrong side of the McKellers probably didn’t help.