Who poisoned the Commodore in Boardwalk Empire? There's a confession on screen — and fans still don't buy it

Louanne Pratt, the Commodore's maid, admits to it in the season 1 finale "A Return to Normalcy," which aired December 5, 2010. She'd been feeding him arsenic — Paris Green, the rat poison the penultimate episode is named after — over roughly nine months, in his stew, his tea biscuits, and his toothpaste.

Her stated motive

Dr. Carl Surran lays out the findings in front of Nucky, Jimmy, Gillian, and Sheriff Halloran. Louanne's first answer is that it must have gotten in there by accident. That doesn't survive the observation that her own food was clean. Asked why she did it, she doesn't hedge:

"Because if I'd used a shotgun, I'd have to clean up the mess myself."

She'd worked for a man who called her the woman who empties his chamber pot and quizzed her on the League of Nations for sport. Nucky blocks the arrest, hands her cash, and tells her to change her name and leave Atlantic City. She gives him a Bible with a page marked. The camera never shows the page.

Why fans think it was Gillian

Because the previous episode, "Paris Green," builds a case against Jimmy's mother and never dismantles it:

• Motive — the Commodore's illness is what finally brings Jimmy to his father's bedside, which is what Gillian wants.
• The canister — Jimmy vomits after eating a cookie at the house, then finds an empty tin of Paris Green in the kitchen trash.
• The confrontation — he tells Gillian that whatever she wants to do is fine with him. She says nothing, and the scene ends there.
• The recovery timing — the poisoning stops right after Jimmy confronts her.
• The convenience — Louanne's confession arrives one episode later, and Nucky pays her to disappear rather than let her testify.

Reviewers at the time read episode 11 as Gillian's doing. Salon's recap in 2010 stated flatly that Gillian had been slipping the arsenic into his food.

The case for taking Louanne at her word

Access, mostly. The poisoning ran from Christmas onward, in food prepared daily in a kitchen Gillian didn't work in and rarely entered. The Commodore's dog Jerry ate the leftovers and died. A months-long dosing schedule fits the person cooking every meal better than it fits a visitor.

Did the Commodore survive it?

He did, and it bought him about a year. He recovered enough to recruit Jimmy and Eli into a war against Nucky, then died in the season 2 episode "Under God's Power She Flourishes," released December 4, 2011 — stabbed by Jimmy with a trench knife after attacking him with an antique spear.

For the record: Gillian was in the room when it happened, and she's the one who told Jimmy to finish it.