Who killed Ruth in The Oval? The murder weapon went missing from Nancy Hallsen's kitchen drawer

Season one, episode five. Barry Hallsen is at the police station identifying a body, and the detective delivers the detail that launched a thousand group chats: Ruth — Barry's ex, kidnapper of his daughter — was stabbed to death with a seven-inch kitchen knife. Meanwhile, across town, Nancy Hallsen reaches into her kitchen drawer to make her husband lunch and discovers her seven-inch kitchen knife is gone.

Reader, the look on that woman's face.

The case against Barry, which was airtight and also wrong

To be fair to Nancy, her son was not helping himself:

• no alibi for the night in question, plus a lie to the detective about having one;
• a documented grudge against the victim, on account of the whole child abduction thing;
• and then a box turns up hidden in his bedroom containing a bloody knife and a pile of cash.

Barry got arrested. Nancy visited him in jail and asked her own child, to his face, if he did it. The bloody-knife box was eventually revealed as a plant — a setup, stash courtesy of Ruth herself, because of course it was.

The part where the victim declined to participate

Here's the thing about asking who killed Ruth: nobody did. Ruth turned up extremely alive, walked out of The Oval, and got her own spinoff, Ruthless, where she spent multiple seasons trying to escape the Rakudushi cult. The corpse with her face was never really the point; it turned out Ruth had an identical twin, Denise, and this show treats interchangeable Truesdale sisters as a load-bearing plot device.

"I'm going to get my daughter no matter what," is how Melissa L. Williams summed up Ruth's whole operating system — and a woman that determined does not die in episode five.

So who killed Ruth? A trick question the show asked with a straight face for weeks. The knife was real, the setup was real, Barry's jail time was real. The death was the only fake part.