All 18 Of Joe Goldberg's Murders From "You" Ranked From Awful To Absolutely Horrifying
If you're not sure by now, let's get one thing straight: Joe Goldberg from You is a serial killer and an irredeemably bad person. Do not let Penn Badgley's deep voice and luscious locks fool you.
Lifetime
Yes you are!
He's flirted with redemption over the years, but the end of Season 4 made it clear that he has fully embraced his dark side. There's also the fact that he killed almost as many people in Season 4 as he did in the other three seasons COMBINED.
Lifetime
Pre-Season 4 body count: 10
Post-Season 4 total: 18
*This refers to people Joe directly killed himself, so it doesn't include the deaths he was responsible for but didn't commit himself (like Natalie and Delilah, for example).
Here's everyone that Joe has killed across all four seasons of You, in order from least to most upsetting:
🚨🚨HUGE SPOILER WARNING 🚨🚨 for You Season 4.
This post contains mentions of sexual assault, murder, and light gore.
18.Ron (Season 1, Episode 10)
Reason: 1) Joe walked in on Ron about to hurt Paco. 2) Ron was suspicious of Joe the whole season.
Method: Stabbed in the throat
Paco's abusive stepdad was awful and will certainly not be missed. Also, murder is bad. Both things can be true! The only downside to this death was that Paco had to witness it and help Joe cover up the crime, which might have left him with some serious PTSD. Like most of the Season 1 deaths, this one wasn't particularly gory.
17.Joe's mother's boyfriend who might be his dad (Season 2, Episode 9)
Reason: He was abusive toward Joe's mother for a long time.
Method: Shot
It's hard to count this death alongside all the others we see in the show given Joe's age and the abusive situation. We didn't learn about it until Season 2 via flashback, but as far as we know, this is the first person Joe killed. This is obviously a horrible thing that happened to Joe as a kid and likely laid the groundwork for a lot of his trauma later on. It also led to Joe's mother leaving him in a group home, which in turn led to his abandonment issues. Yeesh. It's not a good reason to become a serial killer, but yeesh nonetheless.
The show also never explicitly tells us if this man is Joe's father or stepfather, which might make the whole thing even more traumatic.
16.Elijah, Candace's producer (Season 1, Episode 9)
Reason: Joe found out he slept with Candace without knowing she had a boyfriend.
Method: Pushed off a rooftop
This was a quick and relatively non-gory death. We barely spent four minutes of screen time with Elijah, so all we know about him is that he was a record producer who signed Candace to his label, and that he's the second person Joe killed...as far as we know. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Joe didn't kill a single person between the ages of 9 and 30ish.
15.Gemma (Season 4, Episode 4)
Reason: She was catching on to Joe being the Eat the Rich killer.
Method: Had her throat slit
Gemma was easily the most annoying out of Kate and Phoebe's friend group, but she was smart enough to realize that all of her friends started dying when Joe/Jonathan showed up. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
14.Simon Soo (Season 4, Episode 2)
Reason: He was exploiting young, vulnerable artists and taking credit for their work.
Method: Stabbed in the chest
Joe was in a sort of fugue state when he killed Simon, but murder's still murder. The removal of his ear was also entirely unnecessary. Simon's murder is part of Joe's spree as the Eat the Rich killer, but we didn't realize it was Joe until much later in the season.
13.Vic, Lady Phoebe's bodyguard (Season 4, Episode 3)
Reason: Vic caught Joe following Kate and was going to expose him to the group.
Method: Strangled
Poor Vic, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He tried to fight Joe off and shoot him, but was only able to hit the empty space where Joe's two toes used to be. Unfortunately, he wore a tie that day, which Joe, snakey little weasel that he is, used to his advantage.
12.Jasper (Season 2, Episode 2)
Reason: Jasper was trying to get Joe to pay Will Bettelheim's debt and was threatening to cut off more of his fingers.
Method: Stabbed in the chest
Sorry, Jasper, you cheerful mobster. Never stand in the way of a man and his fake identity. His death is mostly memorable because of the way Joe disposed of his body afterwards — he cut it up into smaller pieces and then PUT IT IN THE ANAVRIN MEAT GRINDER. Anyway, like the previous deaths I've mentioned so far, it seemed to happen in the spur of the moment rather than being a pre-meditated attack by Joe.
11.Henderson (Season 2, Episode 4)
Reason: He was sexually assaulting girls by drugging them and taking pictures of them unconscious.
Method: Thrown down the stairs, died from a head wound.
Joe killed Henderson during his first attempt at redemption in Season 2. He'd probably argue that he didn't mean to do it, but Joe's the one who broke into Henderson's house, drugged him, tied him up, and threw him down the stairs when he tried to escape. In Joe's defense, Henderson was a creep. On the other hand, Joe is also a creep.
10.Ryan, Marienne's ex-husband (Season 3, Episode 9)
Reason: He lied in court to retain custody of his and Marienne's daughter and was going to leave Madre Linda, which would make Marienne leave, too, and impeded her relationship with Joe.
Method: Thrown off a building and stabbed in the chest repeatedly
Like Benji in Season 1, Ryan was not a good person before he died, but that's not why Joe killed him. Ryan died because he was an obstacle between Joe and the woman he loved at the time. The way Joe killed him was particularly hands-on and violent, proving that his bloodlust was intact even though he hadn't murdered anyone in a while.
9.Malcolm (Season 4, Episode 1)
Reason: Said awful things about Marienne, including calling her a whore
Method: Stabbed in the chest
Joe killed Malcolm because he said mean things about Marienne, who he assumed had broken Joe's heart. Little did Malcolm know, Joe had Marienne locked in a glass cage in the bowels of London at the time. He's not just a serial killer, he's a hypocrite, too! The murder itself may have been reactionary, but the methodical, bloody disposal of Malcolm's body (set to the tune of Cardi B's "I Like It") was a not-so-gentle reminder that Joe is as cold-blooded and ruthless as they come.
8.Benji (Season 1, Episode 2)
Reason: He was Beck's ex who she still had feelings for, which didn't let her freely date Joe.
Method: Joe fed him peanut oil because he knew Benji was allergic
This was the first murder we saw Joe commit on screen, and Benji was also the first person we saw get locked in the infamous glass cage. He was admittedly not a great person, but death by anaphylactic shock (aka severe allergic reaction) is a terrible way to go. This was definitely the goriest of the Season 1 deaths, and Joe seemed to genuinely enjoy killing him. Chilling stuff.
7.Hugo (Season 4, Episode 10)
Reason: He walked in on Joe interrogating/intimidating Tom.
Method: Stabbed in several locations
Hugo's death was kinda baffling because as Tom Lockwood's bodyguard, you'd expect him to have considerably more martial arts training than bookworm Joe. And yet, Joe killed him in five seconds with the ease and precision of a professional assassin. This was also the first of three Joe-caused deaths in the Season 4 finale, giving the episode the highest kills per episode rate of the whole series.
6.Tom Lockwoood (Season 4, Episode 10)
Reason: He was getting in the way of Kate having a happy life with Joe, and he knew Joe's real identity.
Method: Asphyxiated with a plastic bag
Like all the women Joe loved before her, Kate also has a man in her life who Joe considers an obstacle. So, what did Joe do? Planned and executed his girlfriend's dad's murder. Tom wasn't a good man, but it's still jarring to see how righteous Joe felt killing him, to the point that Imaginary Rhys said, "This was a good kill." Joe's dead-eyed expression while Tom suffocated didn't help either.
5.Rhys Montrose (Season 4, Episode 7)
Reason: 1) Joe formed an intense parasocial relationship with Rhys and hallucinated that Rhys was blackmailing him into committing murders. 2) Tom Lockwood basically blackmailed Joe to kill Rhys, who he considered a political rival.
Method: Strangled
Poor Rhys Montrose. He'd never met Joe and was probably a decent guy who just wanted to be a good mayor of London. And what did he get? Genital torture and strangulation.
4.Peach (Season 1, Episode 6)
Reason: 1) She was obsessed and in love with Beck and a constant obstacle in her relationship with Joe. 2) She was coming after Joe with a gun.
Method: Joe shot her and made it look like a suicide
You might be able to argue that Joe killed Peach in an act of self defense — she was chasing him with a gun, after all — but the fact that he tried to kill her on a previous occasion makes him guilty in my book. Peach wasn't perfect, but she was nowhere near as bad as Joe, an actual serial killer. It really reveals the depths of Joe's hypocrisy that he was happy to kill someone who behaved exactly like he did.
3.Love Quinn (Season 3, Episode 10)
Reason: Joe wanted to run a way and start a life with Marienne and Henry, but Love would never allow that.
Method: Aconite injection
The icon, the legend, Love Quinn. Joe's wife might have been a ~tad~ impulsive, but she was his equal in every way. Things were only ever going to end badly between this pair of obsessive serial killers, but there's a part of all of us that wanted her to make it out of Madre Linda instead of Joe. It wasn't the most graphic of Joe's kills, so what really makes it upsetting was Joe's cold, self-righteous attitude about the whole thing.
2.Guinevere Beck (Season 1, Episode 10)
Reason: She didn't love Joe anymore and found out that he'd been stalking her the whole time.
Method: Strangled
Oh, Beck.
If you ever found yourself thinking during later seasons that Joe might not be so bad after all, you'd do well to remember Season 1 and the way he decided to stalk Beck and ruin her life two seconds after setting eyes on her. All because she was a woman who walked into a bookstore. Joe was at his absolute creepiest in Season 1, and even though the following seasons floated the possibility of redemption for him, the shadow of Beck's death is just too big to escape. She was just a normal person who fell into a horror movie. The show was especially cruel by giving us hope that she might escape a couple of times. We were so naive.
1.Eddie (Season 4, Episode 10)
Reason: He was standing guard outside Joe's apartment while Nadia searched for clues that he was a murderer.
Method: Slit throat
Eddie! Sweet boy! You did nothing wrong!
Eddie's was the final death of Season 4, and it's the most upsetting because of what it symbolizes. His fate (and Nadia's) were the final gut punch the season needed to show us exactly who Joe Goldberg is now. Remember when he didn't hurt kids? Welp, that's over. Killing Eddie (a teenager) and framing Nadia (also a teenager) is Joe fully embracing his dark side with relish. He's protected by Kate's money and influence (which he made possible by killing her father) and doesn't feel guilty about these murders like he used to. That can only signal more carnage ahead in a potential Season 5.