With every new episode of Riverdale, it's becoming more obvious the mysterious Black Hood is a member of the Cooper family. At this point, though, it could be anyone in that band of blonds: Hal Cooper, Betty's long-lost brother, or maybe even Betty herself. ("Dark Betty" is scary, guys.) Your guess is as good as ours.

And a new Reddit theory builds on this idea—that the Black Hood is a Cooper—but with a twist. According to a user named -lCrackers, the Black Hood is Betty's biological mother...but that woman isn't Alice Cooper. It's Penny Peabody, the shady lawyer for the Southside Serpents. Yes, you're reading this correctly. We now have a new theory which posits Penny Peabody as both Betty's biological mother and the Black Hood. That's two bombshell reveals at once.

But the evidence is pretty strong. -lCrackers suggests that Alice and Penny are half-sisters, and that Alice took Betty away from Penny when she was born because she didn't think she could handle a child. Fast-forward to roughly 17 years later: Penny's now grown up and seeking revenge on Alice for taking Betty and for painting the South Side as this criminal hotbed. She wants to show everyone the North Side is just as gross and corrupt—hence why she became the Black Hood.

If Penny's been on the South Side this entire time, it's entirely plausible that she observed Betty from afar, which would explain how she knows so much about her. And because Penny is paid in "favors," she has the connections to make this Black Hood operation seamless. Perhaps she's hiring people to do the dirty work—the killing—for her, and she's just pulling the strings. That would explain why those two Black Hood letters had different handwriting: one came from Penny, and the other from one of her accomplices.

It's an ironclad theory, to be honest. Penny has both the motive and the means to be the Black Hood. Also, she looks just like Betty. This is, hands down, the most convincing hypothesis we've come across thus far—and the one most likely to be true. Of course, we'll have to keep watching to find out for sure.

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