‘Untamed’ Ending Explained: Who Killed Jane Doe?

Untamed takes viewers on a wild ride, centering on the darker side of America’s national parks.

While they’re filled with stunning beauty and epic wildlife, in the Netflix show, they can also be home to drifters, drug smugglers and murderers. Untamed follows ISB ranger Kyle Turner (Eric Bana), who works in the investigative services arm of the national parks in Yosemite.

The show begins when two rock climbers are almost killed by a girl’s body that falls from the top of the iconic El Capitan mountain. When Turner is called in to investigate the death, he quickly discovers this wasn’t just some accident or a suicide. The girl, who is called Jane Doe, has a gunshot wound, and her legs have numerous cuts and lacerations, as if she’s been hunted.

Untamed’s shocking finale doesn’t just uncover who Jane Doe truly was; it also reveals a deep secret that Turner and his ex-wife Jill (Rosemarie DeWitt) have been keeping for years.

Here is everything to know about how Untamed ends.

Warning: Untamed spoilers ahead!

What leads up to the ending of Untamed?

Throughout the investigation, Turner discovers more and more about the mysterious girl who died. He learns that, as a runaway, she went by the name Grace and had been living in a squatter camp in the park after escaping from an abusive foster home.

Turner enlists new Yosemite ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) to help him on his investigation, which quickly leads them down a dark path. They discover that the girl has a strange X tattoo, which is the same symbol they’ve found on numerous drug bottles in the Yosemite area.

Complicating the investigation further is the park’s reclusive wildlife management officer, Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel). Throughout his years with the park, Maguire has become somewhat feral, preferring to live nomadically throughout the park and losing his sense of right and wrong. Plus, with his hunting skills, Turner begins to suspect that Maguire might be the culprit.

Things get even more complicated when Turner discovers a pill bottle with the same strange X marking in Maguire’s camp. That connection helps prove to Turner that something bigger is happening in the park. He and Vasquez dig deeper, exploring some of the most remote areas of the park, and they end up discovering an old mine. Inside is something they could have never imagined — a giant drug lab that’s been producing the pills that come in the bottles with X markings.

Turner goes into the park to confront Maguire, who is already waiting for him and hiding on a hill with a sniper rifle. As the investigator starts to rummage through Maguire’s camp, he gets shot in the abdomen, and a chase begins. During the chase, Maguire attempts to threaten Turner by mentioning a secret the audience has yet to learn about.

As a skilled hunter, Maguire chases Turner through the forest, waiting for him to slow down as he bleeds out. Eventually, Turner collapses and starts to lose consciousness as Maguire finds him and points a gun at his head. But before he can pull the trigger, Maguire is shot and killed by Vasquez, who had secretly followed Turner to the campsite.

At the same time, a squad attempts to raid the lab, leading to a massive shoot-out culminating with the drug dealers detonating an explosive, destroying the lab.

Afterward, Turner is seen in the hospital recovering.

What is Turner and Jill’s secret in Untamed?

Throughout the show, audiences regularly see Turner talking to his son Caleb, but it’s eventually revealed that he isn’t real and has been dead for years. In the final moments of Untamed, audiences learn what happened to Caleb.

Jill tells her new husband that their son was killed in the park by a man named Sean Sanderson. Initially, nobody knew what happened, but then Maguire revealed some startling information. As the park’s wildlife manager, he had a series of trail cams set up around the park. One of the cameras recorded the murder, finally revealing what happened and who committed the atrocious act.

Throughout most of the series, audiences are led to believe that Turner is the one who ruined his marriage with Jill. But in the finale, her confession reveals that it was actually she who destroyed their relationship. Overcome with grief and anger, instead of going through the legal process, she secretly paid Maguire to blackmail Sanderson, forcing him to return to the park where Maguire then murdered him and hid the remains.

But with Maguire dead, they no longer need to worry about their secret being revealed.

Who killed Jane Doe?

With Maguire dead and the drug lab destroyed, Turner uses the last moments of the finale to finally learn more about Grace, who he discovers is actually named Lucy. After running a DNA test, he also uncovers that his boss, Chief Paul Souter (Sam Neill), is actually her father. Lucy was born out of wedlock to someone Souter was having an affair with, so he tried everything he could to keep her out of his life.

Turner confronts Souter, and he finally learns what happened in Lucy’s final moments before falling from El Capitan. The Chief admits that he’s the one who dropped Lucy off with the abusive foster family. After years of horrific treatment, she ran away from the home and made her way to Yosemite, where she started living in a squatter camp. Eventually, she began approaching Souter, asking for money and trying to insert herself back in his life.

He reveals that at one point she even snuck into his house and took his granddaughter out into the woods to play without asking. Worried by Lucy’s increasingly bold behavior and what it could do to his family, Souter thought he’d confront his daughter at gunpoint, hoping to scare her enough to stop. But after seeing him with the gun, Lucy started to run away. Terrified that she’d go to the authorities and accuse him of trying to murder her, Souter shot her in the leg and tracked her through the forest.

In her final moments, Lucy ran to the peak of El Capitan. Confronted with two options, either jumping or allowing herself to be captured by Souter, she decided to leap. After confessing, Souter dies by suicide and falls into the river below.

What happens to Turner at the end of Untamed?

After confronting his own potential death and solving the case, Untamed’s final scene shows Turner packing up his belongings and leaving the park.

The show doesn’t give any indication of where he’s going or what he’ll do from here, but Turner seems satisifed and ready to discover what the next chapter in his life will bring.