Polly’s disappearance case, which was a major plot in Riverdale season 5, came to a tragic conclusion in “Chapter Ninety-Three: Dance of Death” when Betty and Alice found her remains in a junkyard.
While their grief, particularly Alice’s, is explored in the musical episode “Chapter Ninety-Four: Next to Normal,” the thread of how we got to this point may have been lost for some Riverdale fans.
We’ve been on this journey with the Cooper women since the third episode of the time jump and, with The CW’s mess of a schedule due to Covid during the 2020-2021 television season, it’s no wonder the story of what happened to Polly is a little fuzzy for viewers.
Riverdale can be hard to follow in a typical television year, but this one has been marked by preempted episodes and a months long hiatus in the middle of the season. So if you need a recap of the events leading up to the confirmation of Polly’s death, Hidden Remote has you covered!
How did Polly die in Riverdale season 5?
We first learned of the Lonely Highway Killer in the first episode of the time jump, “Chapter Eighty: Purgatorio.” The trucker snatched Tabitha’s friend Squeaky when she was making her way out of town. Unfortunately, in the following episode, Polly suffered the same fate.
To make ends meet, she’d been working the truck stop, offering her services to truckers in need of a warm touch and pleasurable companionship. It stole the light from her eyes, even had her picking up drugs from the Ghoulies, but it’s how she got by and helped put food on the table for her twins.
Sex work involving solicitation is dangerous in general but working a strip of road prone to disappearances and in an area crawling with suspects made Polly ripe for the picking. The Lonely Highway Killer exploited the desperation of women like Polly whose livelihoods depend on endangering themselves.
After her disappearance, Betty worked tirelessly to find her sister. With the help of Tabitha, she even set up a honey trap for the killer and it worked! She caught the Lonely Highway Killer…well, Betty caught one of them.
Her interrogation of the trucker, in “Chapter Ninety: The Night Gallery,” revealed that he wasn’t the only one preying on women up and down the highway. No, Betty needed to find a family of killers in order to not only locate Polly but also bring the killings to an end.
In an inexplicable plot twist, Jughead’s storyline involving the Moth Men bled into Betty’s when they discovered that the family of killers are distantly related to the Coopers through the Blossoms.
Apparently, Nana Rose’s husband fathered several children outside of his marriage. Those babies were given to the Starkweather family who lived in the woods. These children would later adopt the Moth Men myth to keep outsiders away from their home.
Their descendants, the killers plaguing the highway, developed a taste for murder and took turns spiriting young women back to their junkyard. That revelation brought Betty, Jughead, Toni, Tabitha, and Fangs to Old Man Dreyfus’ doorstep.
Together, they took down the Starkweathers along with the help of a Starkweather who wasn’t a murderer. It was Dreyfus who told Betty where to find Polly in the junkyard. Her remains had been left in the trunk of a car.
The Coopers may never know which one of the Starkweathers killed Polly or if they all participated. They may never know for how long she was alive or if she suffered before she died. However, Betty and Alice do have closure now and Polly was finally laid to rest in “Next to Normal.”
New episodes of Riverdale season 5 air Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.