Mare of Easttown Kidnapper Motives & Victims Explained

HBO’s Mare of Easttown sees the titular police detective investigating a year-long kidnapping case as well as a murder. Initially dovetailing with its murder mystery, the series revealed the truth about the kidnapping, including the identity of the culprit and his victims, a couple of episodes before the end of the show. However, Mare of Easttown moves on quickly from the kidnapping, leaving some questions remaining about the motives of the kidnapper and the experiences of his victims.

The kidnapping first appears as a plot point in the premiere of Mare of Easttown. Dawn Bailey stages a protest over her missing daughter Katie. Dawn accuses the police department of indifference after not making progress in Katie’s case for over a year. The kidnapping represents a failure for Mare, another trauma which she is struggling to overcome. She has essentially given up hope of finding Katie, admitting in a private conversation that her daughter is “a needle in a million haystacks.”

However, events lead Mare and Detective Zabel to the home of the kidnapper. They encounter a young girl who describes narrowly avoiding being kidnapped by a man in a blue van and provides a license plate that leads them to Wayne Potts, a previously un-introduced character who works at a local tavern. When the girls he has kidnapped begin shaking a pipe to alert the police, Potts panics and shoots Zabel. In the ensuing gunfight, Mare is wounded but eventually able to kill Potts and save the girls.

After the incident, Mare is treated as a hero, being returned to her job as a police detective and receiving an apology from Dawn. However, she remains haunted by the incident, including the death of Zabel, whom Mare had a romantic connection with. While many fans came up with theories tying the disappearances to the murder of Erin McMenamin, in the end, the kidnapper’s motives and methods were much simpler and much uglier than many suspected.

Katie’s Case In Mare of Easttown Explained

Wayne Potts began kidnapping women over a year before the events of Mare of Easttown, with the abduction of a girl named Hillary from a nearby town. It isn’t revealed exactly how he took Katie, but it seems likely that it was similar to the method he used to abduct Missy Sager: first picking her up for sex work and then strangling her into unconsciousness. From there, Potts kept Katie in his attic, tying her up and gagging her whenever there was likely to be someone else around. Despite theories the two cases were linked, Potts wasn’t involved in Erin McMenamin’s murder.

Potts’ methods are fairly crude, but they were effective because of Katie’s vulnerability. She was a teenage mother who struggled with addiction and was seemingly distant from her family and most friends. Dawn admits that she had been “gone” before the kidnapping, suggesting a distance in their relationship. Because Katie was likely doing survival sex work on the street, there would have been no record of where she was heading or who she was seeing.

The lack of concrete clues led to Mare’s difficulty solving the murder, as well as Dawn’s frustration. The local police department’s reluctance to accept help from county or federal agencies could have also prolonged the kidnapping. While Zabel downplays his crime-solving abilities, it is ultimately only when he and Mare work together, and receive a lucky break in the form of a witness linked to Mare’s friend Tammy, that they are able to finally solve the crime. Katie returns home but is traumatized by the experience, yet as with many other aspects of Mare of Easttown’s story, there is at least a suggestion of both her and Dawn beginning to heal.

Mare of Easttown’s Kidnapper Motives Explained

Potts is killed before he can explain his motives or frame of mind for the kidnappings, but the answer as to why he did it is likely much simpler than Mare of Easttown’s murder plot. Katie tells Missy that Hillary disappeared, and was likely murdered, after she became pregnant with Wayne’s baby. This implies that Potts was raping the women that he held captive. The case is similar to the tragic real-life Ariel Castro kidnappings. For Potts, the kidnappings were his way to keep a small group of sex slaves that he could inflict violence upon as he wished.

It would be too simplistic to say that Potts, and men like him, are motivated by sex. All of the women kidnapped were sex workers who he could have picked up normally. Rather, Potts was likely motivated by a desire for control and hatred of women. Physical and sexual abuse is a common theme in the series, from Erin’s abusive father to the allegations against Deacon Burton. Sadly, while Mare of Easttown is a fictional series, many real acts of violence against women are motivated by similar feelings.

Potts likely chose his victims based on their marginal status in society. All three were sex workers and drug addicts. This led Mare and the rest of the police to see their disappearances as part of their transient lifestyle instead of being linked to violent crime. This also has echoes in real-life crimes like the murders of Robert Pickton, where societal prejudice led to police apathy.

Mare of Easttown’s Kidnapper Victims

Wayne Potts had three confirmed kidnapping victims. The first was Hillary, whose disappearance was likely ignored in a similar manner with police never thinking to link the two missing women together. She helped Katie through withdrawal before getting pregnant by Potts, at which point he likely killed her. It is also possible that Potts had previous victims that Katie never met or knew about from the “Delco” area where Mare of Easttown is set.

Katie Bailey was the second victim and was held in Potts’ attic for over a year. Katie is a single mother with a young son and the daughter of Dawn. She would have grown up roughly alongside Mare of Easttown’s other teenage characters. She had difficulty with drugs and was distant from her family. She is still alive after Potts’ death but is struggling to recover mentally from her ordeal.

Missy Sager was Potts’ final victim. Like the others, she was working as an escort and was a drug user. Based on her conversation with Potts, she is an Easttown native. Missy was kidnapped in Mare of Easttown episode 4 and was only kept in the attic a short time before being found by Mare and Zabel. Missy didn’t appear in the show after her rescue and isn’t connected to the knot of families that defines Mare of Easttown.

Ultimately, Wayne Potts’ kidnappings in Mare of Easttown are more reminiscent of brutal real-life violence against women than the kind of twisty mystery plot that viewers may have been expecting. Rather than being a criminal mastermind, Potts is simply a violent man who gets away with it because of the social status of his victims. Mare of Easttown‘s kidnapping plot is a reminder of how simple, ugly, and dramatically unsatisfying most violence is.

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