The drama is taken to the next level: General Hospital’s head writers reveal the reason they chose Willow as the one who shot Drew.

As General Hospital‘s writers built toward the “Who Shot Drew” mystery that kicked off last September, there was no shortage of suspects from whom they could have picked a culprit.

But, Head Writers Elizabeth Korte and Chris Van Etten share with Soap Opera Digest, it quickly became clear to them that the character who should be revealed as Drew’s (Cameron Mathison) shooter was Willow Tait (Katelyn MacMullen), his now wife. Here, Korte and Van Etten explain why.

Down And Out

For Korte, the dramatic possibilities of Willow being the perpetrator of the crime were too juicy to pass up. “We definitely wanted to see how the weight of bad decisions [would play out],” she notes. “Arguably, Willow’s real bad decision was just to fall into this affair with Drew,” which kicked off while she was still married to Michael (Rory Gibson), Drew’s nephew. “And then, once she did, every decision she made — as sometimes happened — really spiraled to work against her.”

Continues Korte, “When we laid it out and realized that Willow was the best character to be the one who shot him, we were then able, hopefully, to build in that spiral, the layering of things which she had done — and any single decision that she had made in the course of [this spiral], you saw hopefully clearly why she was making it.”

Much of which ties back to her traumatic upbringing, some of which was spent in the notorious sex cult known as Dawn of Day.

“This is a woman who, because of the stuff that she had been through, sort of has a need to … I hesitate to say, ‘seek approval,’ I want to find better words than that, but Drew’s regard was something that she was sort of conditioned to want,” Korte points out. “And then every decision that she made with his input really turned against her.”

The most dramatic and gutting example of that would be when Michael triumphed in the custody case and Willow found herself denied even so much as visitation with her young children, Wiley and Amelia. Says Korte, “When she lost her kids, that for her was so devastating that from then on, she’s kind of — no matter how it seems — been in panic mode, I think. She will do anything to get her children back. And so that leads to a number of very bad decisions and then ultimately the realization that the person who is the impediment to getting her kids back is not actually Michael, it’s Drew.”

Oopsy Daisy

After the June 2025 birth of Michael’s daughter with Sasha (Sofia Mattsson), sweet little Daisy, some odd things began taking place around the child that gave Michael and Sasha so much pause, Sasha ultimately left the country with her baby girl.

All the way back in July, several months before Drew was shot but after the writers had already begun to plot the whodunit, Willow was revealed to be the person responsible for those unsettling Daisy-related events.

Asked what the impetus was for laying in that information about what Willow at that time, Korte says, “It was to reveal to the audience that Willow was capable of underhanded actions, of manipulative behavior.”

But, she reminds,”In retrospect, if you look at it, you’ll see nothing she did to Daisy was in any way, shape or form endangering the child, putting her at any physical risk.

All she did was change her onesies and move her within the house one time. It is the first indication that Willow is capable of not nice behavior, but within the frame of the not nice behavior is the fact that the baby was never in any jeopardy at all. There was never ever harm intended or done to Daisy.”

Which is not to say that Willow’s behavior wasn’t calculated. “What it really was,” Korte reasons, “was psychological warfare! Again, at that point in her evolution, she sees Michael as the opposition.

She has not yet come to the realization that the real person who is the obstacle between her and regaining her children is Drew.

At that point, she considers it to be Michael, and so part of what she’s doing is [reacting to], ‘How can this injustice have happened, that I have been stripped of my children and he not only has my children, but he has a child with her? I mean, he’s the one who slept with another woman, got her pregnant, has this baby with her, and yet I have been deprived of my children!’”

According to Van Etten, Willow’s aborted wedding to Drew last July — her cancellation of which came on the heels of her discovery that he had been sleeping with her mother, Nina (Cynthia Watros), at the time their own affair had gotten underway — was when Willow first realized that Drew, not Michael, was who she should really be furious with.

“It was the first [realization], but it was not the last,” he says. “It was at that moment that her eyes were opened to Drew, but in the subsequent rollout, he made a case and she agreed — at least on the surface — that with her [custody] case, her best chance of reestablishing her family was with him at her side. And at that point,” he Van Etten concludes, “she began to play a very long game.”

Are you glad GH picked Willow as the shooter, or would you have preferred another culprit? Let us know in the comments below!