Who's the killer in The Crow Girl? The Swedish novels kept the same secret
The Crow Girl, Paramount+'s six-part thriller starring Eve Myles as DCI Jeanette Kilburn and Katherine Kelly opposite her, is adapted from a Swedish crime trilogy by Erik Axl Sund — the pen name of Jerker Eriksson and Håkan Axlander Sundquist. The setting moved from Stockholm to Bristol, but the central twist crossed over intact.
Full spoilers for series 1 (and a few for series 2) below.
So who's the killer?
The killer the police are hunting is Dr Sophia Craven — the psychotherapist helping them hunt the killer. And Sophia Craven is also Victoria Burkeman. They're one woman with dissociative identity disorder, a legacy of years of childhood abuse, with neither identity fully aware of the other.
There's a further wrinkle: the young men whose bodies open the series weren't beaten to death by her. They died in an organised fighting ring run by a network of abusers. Victoria recovered the bodies and left them in public places — to force the police to look at what the network had been doing for decades.
Who she did kill
Victoria's direct victims across the two series are her father Ben Burkeman — who abused her throughout her childhood and killed her daughter Madeleine — plus Carl Lowry, stabbed in his hospital bed, and Vincent Dwyer in series 2. Her father died in a fire she started. The series presents it all as a revenge campaign against the specific men responsible; the police, understandably, still class it as serial murder.
The novels kept the same secret
The twist isn't a TV invention. Sund's trilogy — beginning with Kråkflickan in 2010, published in English as a single 2016 volume titled The Crow Girl — runs on exactly the same reveal, with the character names lightly anglicised for television:
- Jeanette Kihlberg — became DCI Jeanette Kilburn.
- Sofia Zetterlund — became Dr Sophia Craven.
- Victoria Bergman — became Victoria Burkeman.
Swedish readers sat on that secret for fifteen years before the show borrowed it.
What happened in series 2?
The second series, which arrived on Paramount+ in July 2026, deals with the fallout: Jeanette pieces the identities together, takes a non-fatal bullet to the leg in the finale confrontation with Piers Stirling, and wakes to find Victoria gone. As of August 2026, a third series hasn't been confirmed — though the trilogy's final act remains unadapted, so the material is there.