Who killed Robin in Midsomer Murders? It wasn't the ex-con everyone suspected
The episode is "Who Killed Cock Robin?" — series 4, episode 4, first aired on ITV on 9 September 2001. Robin Wooliscroft vanishes from the village of Newton Magna, and six weeks later his body is pulled out of the village well in front of half the parish. If you've just watched it — or given up halfway — here's who actually did it.
The short answer
Robin was killed by his own wife, Bridget Wooliscroft, and her brother Frank Lightbourne, the village garage owner. Frank struck Robin twice on the back of the head with a wrench; the pair then dumped his body down the well, where it sat undiscovered for six weeks.
Why everyone suspected the ex-con
The obvious villain is Melvyn Stockard — a former criminal Barnaby once put away, now reinvented as the village squire, paying for the church roof and lording it over Newton Magna. Barnaby doesn't trust him for a second, and the episode leans into it hard. Stockard is up to something — a shady horse-doping scheme with disgraced Irish vet Sean O'Connell — but murder isn't it.
At the well, Stockard even taunts Barnaby with a nursery rhyme:
"Ding, dong, bell, pussy's in the well. Who put him in?"
He knew where the bodies were buried, as he put it. Just not this one.
The real motive
Robin was about to leave. On the night of 11 July he planned to run away to New Zealand with his lover, Valerie Megson, the farmer's wife. He never made it to Heathrow. The two people most humiliated by his escape plan — his wife and her cash-strapped brother — got to him first, at Frank's garage. The giveaways Barnaby pieces together:
- The watch — Robin's watch, inscribed "V to R", smashed at 11:05pm on 11 July. Bridget destroyed it herself.
- The car — Robin dropped his Honda at Frank's garage that evening; Frank quietly sold it on for around £8,000.
- The debts — Frank owed roughly £30,000 and was about to go bust. Bridget cleared the lot. Sisterly love, and payment for services rendered.
There was a second victim
Mary Mohan, Valerie's closest friend in the village, is murdered in her cottage — pills forced down her throat in a clumsy attempt to fake a suicide. That was Frank too, using the spare key she kept under a stone. She knew too much.
What happens to Stockard?
He doesn't walk away clean. Stockard planted the watch to frame the killer once he'd worked out who it was, and Barnaby arrests him for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Frank and Bridget are led away in handcuffs at Julie and Chris's wedding reception — Bridget screaming abuse at Valerie on her way out.