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In the first season of True Blood, we get a scene of the first date between virginal telepath Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton, the new Civil War era vampire in town whom everyone except Sookie assumes will kill and eat her. In the scene, Sookie’s Gran provides the guests in her parlour with little finger sandwiches, after which the courting couple head out for a walk through the woods to Bill’s house. When Bill kisses Sookie he becomes aroused but instead of trying to seduce the equally excited Sookie he immediately escorts her back home.

Sookie later determines that Bill’s association with his vile and despicable vampire friends Malcolm, Liam, and Diane make him an unsuitable suitor and breaks off their courtship for a brief period. Bill promptly pays a visit to the nest and threatens them with someone of a ‘higher authority’ than Eric if they come near Sookie again.

Of course this is not the end of Mr. Compton’s pursuit of the anachronistically innocent Sookie. Girls who have slept with vampires are being murdered all over town, and everyone knows Sookie has been consorting with a vampire, though it’s generally accepted amongst the residents of Bon Temps, Louisiana that the ‘deed’ has yet to be done. When Sookie’s brother is accused of the murders, her grandmother Adele urges her to use her gift of telepathy to clear his name. Bill Compton generously agrees to escort her to Fangtasia, the touristy but dangerous vampire bar in Shreveport owned by Louisiana’s vampire Sheriff Eric so she can gather information on just which vampires the dead girls were ‘familiar’ with.

Sookie’s grandmother Adele is soon shockingly murdered by the big bad wolf. Sookie kills the supposed killer Rene Lenier when he attacks her in the Bon Temps cemetary. Sookie’s telepathy assures her he was indeed the murderer of the dead girls as well as of her beloved Gran as she reads Rene’s jumbled, disjointed thoughts before she decapitates him with a shovel.

Sookie was publicly made a target when she lost her virginity to Vampire Bill and allowed him to feed on her the very night of Gran’s funeral, leaving visible fang marks on her neck. The murder mystery  is laid to rest along with Rene.

Or is it?

Might Bud Dearborn, deceptively slow-talking, square dancing country boy human sheriff of Bon Temps revisit the murder of Adele at some point? After all, it’s only been a couple of months in True Blood time since the murder and new facts may eventually emerge. If Sheriff Bud thinks about it, he may wonder why Rene believed Sookie, a young woman whom everyone including Rene  knew to be on a date with Sam Merlotte at Bill’s Daughters of the Glorious Dead presentation, would be home while believing the elderly Adele would be away from home late at night. What kind of sense does this make? Bud should reflect upon the victim profiles of the murdered women (young, sexually active with vampires) who were strangled while Adele was stabbed repeatedly with a knife. Doesn’t the sudden change in MO strike anyone else as strange? Bud, and the audience, needs to take to heart what he said at the scene of Gran’s bloody murder: “Vampires have been killing people and covering their tracks for a long time”. Andy never considered Bill a suspect while Bud did. Andy was also wrongly convinced Jason was the killer while Bud never believed it was him. Bud was right.

Will Sookie eventually remember Bill implanting a false memory via glamouring into the limo driver who tried to abduct her from the airport on behalf of The Fellowship of the Sun? Could she connect that with what she saw in Rene’s mind, and wonder? It might also occur to Sookie that she had not yet had sex with Vampire Bill when Rene failed to find her home that night from a date with Sam and killed her Gran instead. She should certainly consider the illuminating fact of Bill being capable of the cold-blooded murder of Uncle Bartlett, crippled pedophile though he may have been.

If Sookie searches her memory, she might find it strange that her grandmother was murdered the very night she rejected Bill in favor of Samby pointedly refusing to invite Bill out to coffee with them. After the murder, Sookie turned to the Alpha for comfort and protection.

Sookie may one day look back on how after her grandmothers brutal murder Bill effectively took over Gran’s role in her life-as parental figure, guardian, and protector. In many ways, just as the wolf disguised himself as Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, he has also taken on Gran’s persona-wise, patient, old-fashioned and courtly- a strikingly different Bill from the one we first met that night in Merlotte’s, and the one who sauntered confidently into the palace of the capricious vampire Queen Sophie-Anne.

How did Bill do it, on a practical level?

When Bill comes home to find Eric in his bathtub, he is carrying dry cleaning. His dry cleaning consists of a brown shirt and brown pants. Bill is wearing– a brown shirt and brown pants, exactly the shade of his dry cleaning. So we can assume Bill has at least duplicated one pair of clothing in his wardrobe. Why would he only do that for an innocuous BROWN pair of clothing? Might he have more than one pair of duplicate clothing?

Bill went nuts on the hearth with the pronged toaster just after Bud and Andy have spoken to him about Maudette and Dawn, and he flashes back to his making at the hands of Lorena and he is extremely ANGRY. Cut to Sookie later, maybe one scene? finding Gran. End of Ep.

Sookie was in danger of being stolen by Sam. She had broken up with Bill yet again and was on a date with Sam that very night, at the DGD meeting right in Bill’s FACE. Later, Sookie deliberately did not invite him to have coffee with her and Sam.

Bill had time (Sookie suggested he could get to his home from hers in one minute in the s2 finale) to wiz over to Gran’s, kill her within what? 30 seconds, with his vampire speed and anger?, and vampire back to his house, shower and change into duplicate clothing, and vampire back in time to come up behind Sookie mere moments after she’s found her Gran. Just in time to comfort her, and to threaten Sam when he comes in. Later, Sam found him upstairs standing by Sookie’s window. Why was he upstairs when everyone else was downstairs? When Sam left he opened the shutter and “examined” the cut in Sookie’s window screen.

Later, it was Bill who suggested to Bud and Andy that Gran was not the intended target. The implication is he told them, off camera, about the cut screen and everyone conveniently agreed that the killer was after Sookie.

Sookie later tells the Bunkie (?) Sheriff’s Deputy that vampires wouldn’t kill by strangulation.

Have we ever seen a vampire on TB resist a fresh, bloody corpse? Don’t you think if he HAD to Bill could in fact resist a bloody corpse, especially when he had to hurry out of there before Sookie got home?

Bill also claimed he heard Sookie come home from her date, but he didn’t hear the murderer.

Who is Bill Compton, really? I think we can now finally lay the perception of Bill as Saint to rest.

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