‘Chicago P.D.’: Upton Reveals Dark Family History

Chicago P.D. dove into Hailey Upton’s dark family history after a murder case hit close to home.

The episode first hinted the detective’s history with abuse at the beginning of the hour, when Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger) and Upton (Tracy Spiridakos) wake up in bed together and he gets frustrated, slamming his hand on a table after receiving texts from his sister.

“My sister was supposed to take my dad to the doctor and she can’t,” Ruzek explains as Upton is getting dressed.

“Yeah I get it. I can’t do yelling and I don’t do slamming, not even a little bit,” Upton says as she walks away.

The pair meet later at a coffee shop and he apologizes for his behavior, they agree to put it in the past, but Upton makes it clear that their fling must stay a secret from the squad.

The conversation is interrupted by a call of a woman screaming inside her house and they head to the scene. Upton goes into the house and finds a woman beat up and she dies before help gets there. Ruzek sees a blue car driving away and almost gets run over trying to stop them. The woman turns out to be the wife of an alderman which makes the murder case top priority.

The investigation leads to a young man who claims to be innocent despite being in possession of the getaway car. He claims to have been smoking weed at a park all morning, though the team is convinced it was him.

Certain that she can get the man to confess through a unique approach, Upton steps into the interview room and asks him when his parents started hurting him.

“For me it was worse on the weekends,” she says. “My dad would start drinking early. Like noon. And he’d just sit around, getting more and more pissed off. My brothers and I were just kids. We wanted to have fun, and it drove him crazy.”

“So he’s pick a fight with my mom. Saying that we were being too loud. She’d defend us because, she always did,” she added. “So he’d go after her. And then he’d come after us with anything he could his hands on. Belt, extension cord.”

The reveal gets the man to admit he was at the woman’s house and performed the crime, which impresses the rest of the team, though Ruzek is worried about his new love interest’s well-being.

Later, Jay (Jesse Lee Soffer) finds out that the man was actually far away from the scene of the crime when it happened, meaning that Upton’s tactics had resulted in a false confession. When she tries to talk to him again to find out why he lied, she finds that he hung himself at the jail.

After more digging, the team finds out that the man had been told to take the hit for the crime, when the person who had ordered the hit was the alderman himself, and he was killing his wife who was seeking a divorce after he starting physically abusing her.

The case leaves Upton shattered, despite first claiming she had lied to the man about her past to get him to confess. Later, she tells Ruzek that the stories about her father were true.

“Those were true. He wasn’t like that all the time, sometimes he was funny and sweet. It’s a lot more complicated than people thing,” Upton says.

Chicago P.D. airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.