True Detective Season 3: 10 Craziest Fan Theories
3. Tom Isn’t Julie’s Father
It’s obvious that Tom and Lucy do not have a good marriage, so it’s not too big a leap of faith to assume that Tom might not be the father of both kids.
This theory suggests that the real father returns to abduct Julie, and kills Will either because he gets in the way or simply because he’s Tom’s son and it’s some kind of revenge for Lucy staying married. It’s a stretch, perhaps, but it seems the most likely of the three ‘Tom’s not the father’ theories.
To add to the ever building web of contrasting theories, there’s some suggestion that Julie and Will are children of an incestuous relationship between Uncle Dan and Lucy. Those are allegedly the couple in the wedding sketches, and Dan drilled the hole not to spy on Julie, but to pass her notes because he had genuine affection for his daughter.
The final (and arguably least plausible) layer is that Tom himself is the killer, angry at his children because he knows they’re not really his. The reason he’s so distressed is either because Julie got away, or because someone saw him and his taunting him, hence the letter.