Everyone Joe Goldberg Killed in ‘You’ Before Season 5 and Why
With You returning for its fifth and final season this week, it’s easy to forget just how many people Joe Golberg (Penn Badgley) has killed over the course of four seasons. Before returning to New York City with Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) to start a new life together in Season 5, Joe killed a total of 18 people, and Season 4 was his deadliest season yet. In Season 4, his motivation for killing is less defined, but throughout the series, Joe typically kills for three reasons. One, as his twisted way of “protecting” the people he cares about, whether that be one of his love interests or children, like Paco (Luca Padovan) in Season 1 and Ellie (Jenna Ortega) in Season 2. Two, for convenience or to defend himself, if someone attacks him or witnesses something that would surely land him in prison. And three, when someone begins to catch on to or fully finds out about his stalking and serial killing ways. With some figures from his past returning in Season 5, here’s a rundown of everyone Joe has killed in Seasons 1-4 and why.
Joe’s Season 1 Body Count: Five Victims
In the first season of You, Joe Goldberg kills five people in addition to one other man whose death took place before the events of Season 1, which we’re shown via flashback. Before he began pursuing Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Joe had been dating Candace (Ambyr Childers), an aspiring musician who ended up cheating on him with a music producer named Elijah (Esteban Benito). In a flashback, we find out Joe confronted Elijah, who claimed he didn’t know Joe and Candace were together when they hooked up and didn’t care much about Candace anyway, but Joe still pushed him off a rooftop to his death out of anger.
Joe’s first onscreen victim is Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci), Beck’s on-again-off-again ex-boyfriend who he kills in Episode 2. Joe immediately takes a dislike to Benji for being a wealthy hipster with little regard for Beck’s feelings, and lures him to his glass cage in the basement of Mooney’s to get him out of the picture. Though Benji doesn’t really care about Beck and says Joe is welcome to date her, Joe nevertheless decides to kill him by giving him a coffee containing peanut oil, which Benji is highly allergic to. As Joe continues to get closer to Beck, her best friend Peach (Shay Mitchell) becomes suspicious of him and his motives. Peach is also obsessed and infatuated with Beck, even going so far as to take nude photos of her while she’s asleep. Joe sees her as a major obstacle in his relationship with Beck, and though Peach survived his first attempt to kill her, he later succeeds after Peach comes at him with a gun, wrestling it out of her hands, shooting her, and making it look like a suicide.
In Season 1, one of the neighbors in Joe’s apartment building is a young boy named Paco, who lives with his mother Claudia (Victoria Cartagena) and abusive stepfather Ron (Daniel Cosgrove), who is suspicious of Joe’s behavior throughout the season. Joe bonds with Paco over their shared love of reading and feels protective over him, so when he walks in on Ron about to hurt Paco, he stabs him in the throat, killing him.
Finally, in the Season 1 finale, Joe kills Beck, who is horrified to find out the lengths he went to in order to be with her. She’s nearly able to escape, but Joe eventually strangles her and frames Beck’s former therapist for her death.
Joe’s Season 2 Body Count: Three Victims
After killing Beck, Joe flees to Los Angeles under a new name, Will Bettelheim. He assumes this name after kidnapping the real Will Bettelheim, who he contacted for help acquiring a new identity, and holds him captive in a storage unit. When a man named Jasper (Steven W. Bailey) approaches Joe – believing him to be Will – Joe finds out that Jasper had previously contacted Will via the dark web about his services. Will got a bad feeling about Jasper and never ended up meeting him, but still accepted the $3,000 meeting fee. Having no idea what the real Will Bettelheim looks like, Jasper finds Joe and demands his money back, so Joe winds up killing him and putting his body through a meat grinder.
Also, in Season 2, Joe grows closer to his new neighbor Delilah (Carmela Zumbado) and her 15-year-old sister Ellie. Ellie is an aspiring filmmaker and befriends a famous stand-up comedian, Henderson (Chris D’Elia), who, unbeknownst to her, sexually assaulted Delilah when she was underage. Joe follows Ellie to Henderson’s house one night when she asks Henderson for feedback on her short film, and Joe kills him after seeing him put a drug in Ellie’s drink. Though Joe only kills two people in You Season 2, we also get another flashback, this time to Joe’s very first kill when he was just a kid. Echoing Paco’s situation in Season 1, when Joe was a child, his father also physically abused his mother, leading to Joe shooting him to protect her.
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Joe’s Season 3 Body Count: Two Victims
In Season 3, Joe tries to be a family man, but as usual, his eyes wander from his equally murderous wife to other women in the fictional town of Madre Linda. First, Joe begins spying on their next-door neighbor Natalie (Michaela McManus), but this infatuation is short-lived, as Love (Victoria Pedretti) kills her out of jealousy in the first episode after finding Joe’s box of stolen items belonging to her. Joe’s first kill of the season doesn’t take place until Episode 9, after he’s moved on to obsessing over their local librarian, Marienne (Tati Gabrielle). Marienne confides in Joe that her ex-husband Ryan (Scott Michael Foster), a popular local news reporter, lied in court to get custody of their daughter Juliette. Both he and Marienne were addicts when they were first married, but while Marienne eventually got clean, Ryan continued to use drugs but used his positive public image to smear her and retain custody despite being largely absent as a father. Seeking revenge and to eliminate any obstacles to him being with Marienne, Joe kills Ryan in Episode 9.
In the Season 3 finale, Joe finally decides he can’t stand being married to Love anymore, as her murders have put a strain on their marriage and Joe has already moved on to obsessing over Marienne. Once Love finds out about Marienne, she invites her to their house to tell her the truth about Ryan’s death. Marienne encourages her to leave Joe, but Love decides to kill him instead. Before she can do so, however, Joe kills her by injecting her with aconite and then burns down their house, faking his own death and framing her for murder-suicide.
Joe’s Season 4 Body Count: Eight Victims
After killing Love and faking his own death, Joe moves to London to start a new life as Jonathan Moore, where he once again intends to leave his murderous past behind him. However, a mid-season twist reveals that Joe has a second, even darker dissociative personality who takes over and commits a string of murders without his knowledge, meaning Joe kills more people over the course of Season 4 than in any of the previous ones. The mysterious Eat The Rich killer ends up being Joe himself, and he kills a number of Kate’s friends, including her boyfriend, Malcolm (Stephen Hagan). His motivations for killing Kate’s friends in Season 4 are somewhat pettier in comparison to most of his previous kills. Joe kills Malcolm because he’s kind of an asshole, Simon (Aidan Cheng) because he took credit for the artwork of a poor young artist, and Gemma (Eve Austin) because she accused Joe of being the Eat The Rich killer and pointed out that her friends only started dying after he showed up.
Also in Season 4, Joe kills Lady Phoebe’s (Tilly Keeper) bodyguard, Vic (Sean Pertwee), after he catches Joe following Kate and grows suspicious of his behavior. He later kills Rhys Montrose (Ed Speelers), believing him to be the Eat The Rich killer, before realizing he himself was the killer all along. In the season finale, Joe kills three more people – Kate’s billionaire father, Tom Lockwood (Greg Kinnear), because he knew about Joe’s past and had been secretly controlling Kate’s life for years, and Tom’s bodyguard, to ensure there were no surviving witnesses to Tom’s kidnapping and murder. Lastly, Joe kills Edward (Brad Alexander), one of his own students and Nadia’s (Amy-Leigh Hickman) boyfriend. Because Nadia found out about Marienne’s kidnapping and helped her escape, Joe kills Edward in order to frame Nadia for his murder and prevent her from speaking out against him.
All five seasons of You are now streaming on Netflix.
- Release Date
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2018 – 2024
- Directors
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Marcos Siega, Lee Toland Krieger, Cherie Nowlan, DeMane Davis, Kellie Cyrus, Marta Cunningham, Martha Mitchell, Victoria Mahoney, Erin Feeley
- Writers
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Justin W. Lo
