After finding a skeleton in the lake next to a suburban neighborhood, the crew looks into the 1967 disappearance and murder of the owner, a door-to-door cleaning brush salesman, who discovered a few skeletons himself hiding in the closets of his clients.
Tropes:
- Armoured Closet Gay: Glenn Drew, who beat his son when the boy caught him getting a blow job from another man.
- The Atoner: Even though Alice was more than relieved to finally to be free of her abusive husband following his death, Roy still felt guilty and sent her money to help her, as a way to make it up to her.
- The Charmer: Roy was a top salesman because of his ability to charm bored housewives with his good looks and honied words.
- Dead Hat Shot: Roy's hat floating on the surface of the duck pond his body was dumped in is the only indication of his murder.
- Domestic Abuse / Abusive Parents: Glenn was guilty of both.
- Flashback Effects: The flashbacks are filmed with Dutch angles.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Roy was a charmer who used his powers of persuasion to sell brushes to bored wives, raking in that dough. But he was also a Bully Hunter who once killed a man—his best friend, no less!—because that man was abusing his wife.
- Scars Are Forever: Norm Fawnshawe, who became disfigured on the right side of his face in the Vietnam War. His scars are still visible during the reinvestigation in 2009.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Norm became a nasty hermit who claimed toys that accidentally wound up in his yard after getting disfigured during the Vietnam War.
- Suburbia: Roy's sales route is in a classic family neighborhood, complete with kids riding bikes, housewives hanging laundry, and baseballs being tossed back and forth.
- Stepford Smiler: Everyone in Roy’s district, but the Drews get a special shoutout, since it was their Dark Secrets that got Roy killed. To onlookers, they were the picture-perfect all-American family. But in reality, Glenn was having affairs with men, and physically abusing Diane and their son Kevin. Diane even said herself that she was tired of being this trope. When Roy confronted Glenn and demanded he leave them so they could be happy, Glenn stabbed him to death.
- Stereotype Flip: Drew was a closeted gay man decades ago in a Stepford Suburbia, but unlike previous examples in the series, he's the villain, and not even a sympathetic one at that, instead of a benign supporting character or the Victim of the Week.
- Wife-Basher Basher: Roy killed his best friend and went to jail for years because the friend beat his wife. Even then, Roy doesn’t regret it, and gladly confronts Glenn for the same crime.
- Would Hurt a Child: Glenn breaks his own son’s wrist because the boy caught him having sexual relations with another man.
