Killer Instinct
Soap Opera Digest: The story featured a slew of potential suspects. How did you settle on Tad?
Megan McTavish: What really appealed to me about it being Tad is that it’s so understandable, to me anyway, that having found out that this man knew where Kate was and having been denied Kate all these years, [he could have reached a breaking point]. In the episode where he told Dixie, he talked about this, that even he didn’t recognize the man he became that night and all he could think about was the men, these evil men who hurt children — Greg Madden, [his biological father] Ray Gardner … He couldn’t fight back when he was a child but now he can. And I felt it was very interesting, a good person doing a fairly evil deed, driven to that and then having to live with that. There were other people on the canvas who could have passed this off; I think this is going to eat at Tad for some time to come. Tad’s eaten up by it. He’s not able to justify it. It was never Tad’s intent to kill him, but he takes the burden that Greg died on his soul. He’s a man of conscience, a good man who was driven through love of his child to try to break this maddening — no pun intended — villain. He went over the edge and he knows it. But it’s not simple. It’s not evil person killed evil person.Digest: Did you have a second choice murderer?
McTavish: Well, you know, I had a number to choose from and I didn’t decide right away [that it was Tad]. I considered everybody. I drive everybody crazy with, “I’m not sure yet who did it.” I sort of followed it through with everybody: “Maybe it was Del and Di.” “Maybe it was Julia.” Then you play out in your head all the emotional ramifications. And then when I got to Tad, I stopped dead and thought, “This is it. This is the biggest emotional ramification I could have.” And that’s our goal with whatever event we put into the story: to have the event trigger emotions, trigger relationships, trigger new and positive things.Digest: At the time you scripted the demise of Greg, had you determined that Tad was responsible?
McTavish: No, I launched [the mystery] before I did. I did that years ago with the Will Cortlandt murder. I didn’t know until halfway through writing it [that Janet was the killer]. It was sort of the same here. I knew there was someone good [in terms of options]; golly, we certainly had people who had motivation. I had a healthy crop of choices. I considered David and then I thought, “That’s certainly good, too, but it’s not quite as rich.” I was afraid that if it had been David, it might have been too predictable, to tell you the truth. But I literally sat down and wrote the story eight different ways and when I got to Tad, I saw, “Oh, my God, I’m gonna make myself cry. This is the best.” And everybody agreed with me, Julie [Hanan Carruthers, executive producer] and the network [execs], when I said, “What if it’s Tad?” Digest: Why did you make the decision, since you re-enacted various murder scenarios in Josh’s mind, not to show Tad’s actions?
McTavish: [When he finally confessed] I wanted the day to be about Tad, not the event. I didn’t care how he actually did it; I cared about why.Digest: Tad went through tremendous hoops in the hopes of getting Zach and Dixie acquitted of his crime. Why, to your mind, did he not just step forward and confess?
McTavish: I think that he was going to, and perhaps he made the wrong decision by not, but Krystal had told him, “Whoever killed that man should not do a day in prison for it.” Tad was about to come forward and decided not to in that moment. Digest: Finally, will Josh ever discover who killed his father?
McTavish: As you’ve seen, he has a lot of trouble when Zach and Dixie are acquitted. He wonders, “Am I going to have to live with never knowing?” He did love this guy as a father and someone killed him. So this really is hard for Josh because he never does find out who killed his dad, at least not in what we’ve written thus far. So he has to find another way to come to terms with it. The audience gets their solution, but Josh does not. It remains a secret to a lot of people.
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