Here’s the *Real* Reason Bold & Beautiful’s Bill Blackmailed Steffy and Finn

We still can’t explain Ridge’s man bun, but this case we’ve cracked!

In the wake of last week’s reveal that Bill and Ridge are working together to put Sheila behind bars, Bold & Beautiful viewers found themselves asking one very important question: Why did Dollar Bill get Sheila released in the first place?

You’ll recall that after Sheila confessed to Taylor, Ridge and Steffy that she’d shot and killed — or so she believed — Finn. (You can read a recap of her confession here.) Sheila was carted off the jail and it seemed as if things might slowly get back to normal… until Bill stepped in to blackmail Steffy and her back-from-the-dead spouse into keeping quiet about what happened in the alley that night.

If they didn’t, Bill promised, he would press charges against Taylor for having shot him years earlier.

More: Take a peek inside Brooke’s closet!

Flash forward a few months, and here’s Bill, working with Ridge, to have Sheila locked away. But if that’s the case, why, viewers have been asking, did he have her released in the first place? As Jamie (and approximately a billion other Bold & Beautiful fans) asked on Twitter, “I know it’s a soap but come on, Bill got Sheila out of jail so he could put her back in jail?”

Same! I know it’s a soap but come on, Bill got Sheila out of jail, so he could put her back in jail?

— Jamie💔 (@Jmood17) March 16, 2023

On the surface, it seems like a questionable-at-best move.

But while it’s a stretch, there is a certain logic to what Bill is attempting to do. As the episode airing on March 15th showed, Bill is very clearly trying to get his “girlfriend” to confess all of her past sins. He even went so far as to say that he, too, had killed people.

We then saw flashbacks to several of the vixen’s past crimes, including that time she killed Lance (played back in 2002 by Adam Huss, who was most recently a temporary recast of General Hospital‘s Nikolas) with a swarm of bees.

More: Here’s when Ridge and Brooke’s son is coming home

It seems Bill and Ridge have taken a look at Sheila’s past arrests and figured out that prison has proven to be a temporary stopgap where her malicious machinations are concerned. Sooner or later, she is released (or escapes) and, after declaring that this time she’s really, truly changed, proves otherwise.

It seems their goal is to make sure this time, she goes away forever and ever, amen.

Now, the reality of the situation is that when combined with her previous record, attempting to murder both Finn and Steffy, then fleeing the scene of the crime, would be enough to keep Sheila locked away for the rest of her natural life. Perhaps, however, Ridge and Bill figure a she-devil such as Ms. Carter might have some sort of unnatural lifespan, making the only way to keep their families safe is to make sure her next prison stay has no end date.

Now, there are an awful lot of “real-world” questions that I’m willing to bet the show glosses right over. Like why the FBI seems to be not only sanctioning Bill attempting to coerce a confession our of Sheila, but sleeping with her as part of that effort. At what point did the FBI become involved… before or after that “night on the beach” we’ve heard so much about? Did Bill perhaps re-don the infamous sword necklace because it has been turned into a high-tech listening device? Is Ridge wearing a wire inside his man bun, thus explaining the rather unusual styling choice?

As we await the answer to those questions and many others, check out the gallery below in which we look at just some of the many, many crimes Sheila might eventually confess to Bill!