Charlotte Doran (Haydn Gwynne) was the main villainess of "Political Suicide", episode 3.05 of BBC’s Death In Paradise (airdate February 11, 2014). She was the wife of Saint Marie’s minister of commerce, Jacob Doran.
Charlotte and Jacob had a rough marriage, mainly because of Jacob’s actions. Jacob was very busy in his occupation as the commerce minister and he was also having an affair with an intern, Lena. However, Charlotte still stood up with her husband, despite his infidelities.
But then, it was discovered by Jacob’s secretary, Theo Frazier, that Jacob had been abusing his power to smuggle guns from the island to Mexico. Theo reported this to the media and Jacob was cornered. To avoid arrest, Jacob thought of a meticulous plan to escape the authorities, which consisted of him staging his own death.
Jacob put his plan into action by burying a duffel bag packed with his clothes, money, passport and a gun in the shore of the beach to make it appear that he swam away to his death, he also wrote a suicide note as a final touch. However, little did Jacob know that Charlotte followed him to the beach while burying the bag. Charlotte realised that her husband was planning on leaving her, even though she remained faithful to him. The scorned Charlotte then decided to take matters into her own hands by stealing the gun from the buried bag and confronting Jacob at gunpoint before shooting him to death.
Afterwards, Charlotte wiped her prints off the gun and placed it in Jacob’s hand, using the suicide note Jacob wrote to make it appear that he truly had committed suicide. While Theo and Charlotte’s son, Drew, went to the study to discover Jacob’s body, Charlotte hid behind the study door and then appeared from behind to make it look like she had just arrived in the scene. During the denouement by Chief Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, Charlotte was revealed as Jacob’s murderer. Goodman explained how Charlotte committed the murder before she was arrested by the police.
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