General Hospital Head Writers Break Down Who Shot Drew Reveal, Tease ‘Huge Drama’ Ahead (Exclusive)
The question on everyone’s lips in Port Charles — Who shot Drew (Cameron Mathison)? — was answered on the Thursday, January 8 episode of General Hospital when the victim’s wife, Willow Tait (Katelyn MacMullen), flashed back to the night of the crime and recalled firing two bullets into the congressman’s back. Soap Opera Digest got the inside scoop from the show’s head writers, Elizabeth Korte and Chris Van Etten, about what went into crafting the whodunit, the dramatic implications of the big reveal and more!
Building A Mystery
Though Drew wasn’t shot until September 2, 2025, Van Etten says that the seeds of the shooting were really planted well over a year before, when Drew and Willow — who was at the time very much married to Michael (then-Chad Duell) — shared their first kiss, which ultimately led to their infamous sex session in her children’s nursery at the Quartermaine mansion. He explains, “The idea was hatched, really, around the time of Drew and Willow’s affair, which would serve as a real split in the family and cause a big reaction across the canvas. It would send both Willow and Drew down a road that could cause a bunch of people to have problems with them … or singularly with Drew.”
Elaborates Korte, “From the point of the affair, and then certainly from the point of its exposure [at the Qs’ holiday party in December 2024], that was a beginning to really see how many people would have organic problems with Drew. Drew is doing one thing; their goals are another way.” From there, she says, “The real decision to build towards a ‘one of these people shot Drew, who could it be?’ [storyline] probably started to take shape in the spring of that year [2025]. We definitely gave ourselves the whole summer to plant those seeds, but the actual ‘Let’s do this!’ was probably April of last year.”
Drew’s mounting conflict with Curtis and his decision to blackmail Curtis’s wife, Portia, are examples of the seeds the scribes began to plant once they had settled on undertaking a whodunit. But at that time, a critical piece was missing from the chessboard. Reminds Van Etten, “Michael was, at that point, off the canvas. Another big part of [our planning] was that we knew that the Quartermaine family and General Hospital needed Michael as a character back on the canvas. So we very carefully took our time to find the right moment to bring him back, knowing that he was going to be among [the] prime suspects.” Adds Korte, “And pivotal to what was happening with Drew and with Willow.”
Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
Even before Michael returned to Port Charles in late May 2025 in the form of Rory Gibson, the character was a presence in the story. Notes Korte, “One of the real sort of telling moments for Drew and that really sealed enmity towards both Drew and, to an extent, Willow — or at least made you see why other characters would question her — were the beats around when Michael was burned and Carly’s decision to take the kids, Willow wanting her kids back by any means necessary, and on Drew’s advice, essentially using her position as Michael’s wife and power of attorney, even though they were openly separated by that time, to exert control over his medical decisions. That really firmly placed her with Drew. Everybody’s impulse was that Drew was pulling her strings.
“All along,” Korte continues, “That was one of the questions we wanted to answer, or at least lay in: How much of this is Willow and how much of this is Willow being influenced by Drew? And not from a place of evil, but with the best of intentions, Drew was meddling and pressuring big-time, and part of what was driving him was that he wanted to be Willow’s hero. He wanted to solve this huge problem for her.”
What was obvious to the writers long before they scripted the shooting itself is that it needed to be Willow who pulled the trigger. “I think Elizabeth was the first one to say it, and I completely agreed,” recalls Van Etten, “When she said it, I was like, ‘Absolutely.’ To me, this was the culmination of a snowball effect on Willow. One thing after another was building to this moment where she finally opened her eyes and found herself in a pit of her own making, and had to act to get out of it. And the best way that she could assert herself, to protect herself and begin to get back what she had lost in the course of her relationship with Drew, was to target him.”
Staking The Obvious
By late summer, the show had built up plausible motives for a wide swath of characters, from the aforementioned Willow, Michael, Curtis and Portia to Willow’s mother/Drew’s one-time lover, Nina (Cynthia Watros), and his former mother-in-law, Alexis (Nancy Lee Grahn), who Drew did dirty by filing a restraining order that blocked her access to her granddaughter, Scout (Cosette Abinante). The writers say they had fun figuring out ways to loop more players into the web of suspects, “But I don’t think we had to work very hard to,” Van Etten points out. “I mean, they were right there at our fingertips because of their relationships and how everything had fallen out with Drew. Alexis was fun to play with,” he adds. “I don’t want to blame it on her being a Cassadine, but she’s got a history of violence of her own. To me, she was absolutely, entirely capable of having done it, given her own history and given what had happened to Sam [Kelly Monaco] and her love for her family and her responsibility for Danny [Asher Antonyzyn] and for Scout and given how far Drew had pushed her.”
But when the bullets were fired, many fans jumped to the conclusion that Willow was the culprit. In fact, Digest ran a poll listing 13 suspects, and Willow received the highest number of votes, netting 31% of the total. Did Korte and Van Etten ever ask themselves if Willow being the guilty party was too obvious? “Before we answer that question,” says Van Etten, “I would like to say that I too noticed, from my own sampling, early on at the very moment, everyone went straight to Willow. But from what I saw in the days and weeks after, the opinions changed, and they began to be totally spread out. Like when I watch a football game and they show a chart of where a quarterback’s passes are going to, the thoughts were going all over the field. Initially, everyone thought Willow, and then everyone went, ‘It could be this one, it could be that one!’ I mean, I’ve seen a lot of people thinking it was Scout!
What we didn’t want to do was trick the audience,” he continues. “The only way that a good mystery works is if you give the audience all the information and allow them to draw conclusions, over the course of the time. So those who thought it was Willow at the start and continue to think so will be rewarded.”
Acknowledges Korte, “There is a convention in soap opera that the person who stands trial is never guilty. And so to be able to put [Willow] on trial and hold until the very end and give to Trina [Tabyana Ali] and Kai [Jens Austin Astrup] the realization that it was her [turns that convention on its head]. You can suspect her all you want, but we didn’t affirm it until the trial was already underway.”
Blame That Tune
Ah, yes, Trina and Kai. The intrepid amateur detectives were in Drew’s house at the time of the shooting. Not only did they hear gunshots, but they heard a highly specific ringtone — “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star,” which fans (and Trina and Kai) now know is the ringtone Willow has programmed on her cellphone for when little Wiley (Viron Weaver) calls her.
That audio clue was deliberately baked into the mystery specifically for Trina and Kai to tie the ringtone back to Willow months down the line. Reports Van Etten, “Virtually from the very start, we wanted there to be one clue that would eventually lead back to Willow. I paid attention [to online fan discourse], and early on, only a few people even caught that sound and wondered if it meant anything. And then as weeks and months went by, people began to circle back to it. So I was very happy that that one thing [was something] only some people noticed, but it was there! It was there from the very start, and we knew from the very start that we wanted to have that piece of evidence and to put Trina and Kai in a position to know it, but not realize that they knew anything until almost the close.”
How To Get Away With Murder?
The show has established that Willow is capable of underhanded acts — toying with Sasha (Sofia Mattsson) and Michael by taking their newborn daughter, Daisy, out of her nursery, for example — but plugging two bullets into the back of a sitting congressman is on a whole different level. Just what should the audience make of Willow and her psyche at this point? Says Korte, “What we hope the audience will see unfolding is that Willow was pushed into a corner and fought back the only way she could in the moment. And then once events started to unfold, she had to maintain — and kudos to the actress; she’s done a fabulous, fabulous job — is that she was legitimately terrified. You would be too if you had shot somebody and you were afraid you were going to get caught! There’s nothing cold-blooded about anything that she has done, but the problem is that she did do this thing, right? The circumstances she was in put her in this impossible position and this is the action she took. And once she had taken that action, she has to continue to deal with it and fight her way through with the long-term goal of loving her children and wanting them back.”
And though she may have given an Oscar-caliber performance on the witness stand, Willow certainly can’t breathe easy as her fate will soon rest in the hands of a jury — or possibly Trina and Kai! “They’re now in the hot seat,” previews Van Etten. “They have information that’s that more or less — 99 percent — cinches the idea that Willow has done this.” Korte picks up, “A couple of things are really weighing on them, one of them being the fact that their actions that night — by not staying in the house, by not calling 911 — allowed these events to unfold. And they themselves sat there in that courtroom and the defense that Alexis has put up was effectively to convict Michael, to argue that it was Michael who did it. So they now are sitting in a position of knowing that an innocent man is being tried — in the court of public opinion, anyway — for having done this. And so they need to decide who they can go to with this information. But they are also themselves in jeopardy because they were in the house that night. It’s not as if they are not at least culpable for not coming forward before now. So, what decision do they make? They’ve got to turn to somebody, but who do they go to?”
Van Etten stresses that this whole messy GH saga is still only really just getting started. “There is so much left to unfold,” he professes. “Revealing who shot Drew is, I think, the end of chapter one or chapter two, depending on how you’re constructing it [laughs]. What happens as a result of Trina and Kai making this realization is going to cause huge drama for the people who have been involved in this trial or anyone who has been implicated — and that’s barely even the beginning!” Sums up Korte, “The revelation of who’s the shooter is — I hesitate to use the cliché ‘just the beginning,’ but all it does is set the table for a whole slew of other revelations and actions by everyone involved.”
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