He quotes literature, manages bookstores, and offers a charming, sensitive face to the world. But Penn Badgley’s Joe Goldberg, the central figure of Netflix’s addictive thriller You, hid a monstrous reality beneath that carefully crafted facade. For five seasons, audiences were pulled into his dangerously compelling internal monologue, witnessing firsthand how he justified obsessive stalking, calculated manipulation, and, ultimately, cold-blooded murder. Joe Goldberg’s journey twisted romance into terror, leaving a trail of devastation across coasts and continents. As Joe moved from New York to Los Angeles, festered in suburban Madre Linda, unravelled in London, and finally faced a reckoning back in NYC, his body count steadily climbed. Now that his story has reached its conclusion, fans are left wondering about the true extent of his lethality. Exactly how many lives did Joe Goldberg personally extinguish during his reign?
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WARNING: Spoilers below for Netflix’s You Season 5
To be clear, this isn’t just a tally of every character who died across the show’s five seasons, as plenty of blood was spilled by others caught in Joe’s orbit, most notably his equally disturbed wife, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). Instead, this overview zeroes in on the individuals confirmed to be killed directly by Joe Goldberg himself. These are the deaths where Joe was the hand wielding the knife, pushing someone from a roof, administering the poison, or pulling the trigger, whether acting out of obsessive “love,” calculated self-preservation, or driven by the fractured, dissociative state he experienced later in his deadly career. Let’s follow the trail, season by season.
Season 1: The Beck Obsession (5 Kills)
Joe Goldberg’s murderous path began, fittingly, amidst the bookshelves of Mooney’s in New York City. His immediate, all-consuming obsession with aspiring writer Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) became the catalyst for his first string of kills. These initial murders were largely driven by Joe’s perceived need to eliminate any rivals for Beck’s affection or anyone who might expose the darkness he desperately tried to conceal. He quickly established a chilling pattern involving his infamous glass cage, disturbingly rationalized motives, and meticulous cleanups.
First to meet his end was Benji Ashby (Lou Taylor Pucci), Beck’s vaguely artistic on-again-off-again boyfriend. Joe viewed Benji as an entitled obstacle and fundamentally unworthy of Beck. After luring him into the bookstore basement’s glass cage, Joe exploited Benji’s severe peanut allergy, lethally dosing his coffee with peanut oil. Joe then methodically removed Benji’s teeth and incinerated the body, demonstrating a horrifying level of premeditation and disposal skill from the outset.
[RELATED: You Season 5 Ending Explained: What Happens With Joe Goldberg?]
Following Benji, Joe turned his attention to Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell), Beck’s wealthy, possessive best friend who harbored her own intense feelings for Beck and instantly distrusted Joe. Joe’s first attempt to kill Peach, bludgeoning her with a rock during a jog, failed. Undeterred, he stalked Peach to her family’s Connecticut estate, culminating in a confrontation where he shot her with her own gun and meticulously staged the scene as a suicide, complete with a forged note.
Season 1 of You also revealed, through flashbacks, a murder predating Joe’s fixation on Beck: Elijah Thornton (Esteban Benito). Joe discovered Elijah, a music industry contact, was having an affair with his then-girlfriend Candace Stone. Consumed by a jealous rage, Joe impulsively shoved Elijah from a tall building to his death, hinting at the deeper roots of his violence beyond calculated obsession.
Back in the present timeline, Joe’s protective feelings towards his young, abused neighbor Paco (Luca Padovan) led him to kill Paco’s stepfather, Ron (Daniel Cosgrove). Joe fatally stabbed the abusive police officer in an alley, easily justifying it to himself as a necessary act of rescue. This very act, however, directly enabled his final Season 1 kill.
When Guinevere Beck inevitably discovered Joe’s hidden box of trophies — mementos from Benji and Peach — revealing his true nature, Joe traps her in his cage. Beck cleverly managed to trap him inside momentarily, but her escape was foiled by Paco, who ignored her cries for help out of loyalty to Joe. Escaping via a hidden key, Joe cornered Beck again. While the act itself wasn’t explicitly shown, the narrative heavily implies he strangled her, cementing his ultimate act of possessive control by silencing the person who saw the real him. He then completed his twisted narrative by framing Beck’s therapist, Dr. Nicky (John Stamos), for her murder.
Season 2: California Consequences (3 Kills)
Haunted by the reappearance of Candace Stone (Ambyr Childers), an ex he mistakenly believed he’d already killed, Joe fled to Los Angeles in Season 2 of You, stealing the identity of a man named Will Bettelheim. In the sprawling, sun-drenched city, he attempted to leave his past behind but quickly found a new obsession in charismatic chef Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti).
Joe Goldberg’s first L.A. victim was Jasper Krenn (Steven W. Bailey), a menacing figure owed money by the real Will Bettelheim. Discovering the identity theft, Jasper violently confronted Joe, even cutting off his fingertip as a warning. Facing immediate exposure and danger, Joe lured Jasper to his new cage location — a storage unit — under the pretense of payment. Once inside, Joe killed him. The disposal of Jasper’s body was particularly horrifying. Joe transported the corpse to Anavrin, the upscale grocery store where he worked alongside Love, and used the industrial meat grinder to eliminate the evidence..
Joe’s next kill was driven by his warped morality. He discovered that Henderson (Chris D’Elia), a popular comedian, was secretly preying on underage girls, including Ellie Alves (Jenna Ortega), the younger sister of Joe’s neighbor Delilah, whom Joe felt protective towards. Breaking into Henderson’s home to find proof and record a confession, Joe ended up struggling with the comedian. During the fight, Joe pushed Henderson down a flight of stairs, causing his death. Joe quickly adapted, staging the scene and leaking evidence of Henderson’s predatory behavior, framing the death as accidental while casting himself as a vigilante delivering justice.
Season 2 also provided crucial context for Joe’s entire pathology through childhood flashbacks. Fans learned that as a young boy, Joe witnessed his mother, Sandy, suffering abuse from her partner. Finding a handgun, young Joe shot the man, killing him in a desperate attempt to protect his mother. This foundational act of violence forged the dangerous lifelong association in Joe’s mind between violence, love, and protection, setting the stage for the man he would become.
Season 3: Suburban Secrets and Lies (2 Kills)
Season 3 saw Joe thrust into the environment he despised most: the idyllic yet toxic suburb of Madre Linda. Married to Love Quinn, whose own murderous nature had been shockingly revealed, and raising their infant son, Henry, Joe felt utterly trapped. His personal kill count slowed this season, partly because Love was busy dispatching neighbors like Natalie Engler (Michaela McManus). Joe’s two direct murders were driven by his consuming desire to escape his marriage and pursue his latest fixation: his library colleague, Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle).
With Love now cast as the villain in his internal narrative, Joe’s obsession fully transferred to Marienne. He identified her ex-husband, Ryan Goodwin (Scott Michael Foster), as the primary obstacle to his fantasy relationship. Ryan was depicted as manipulative and was engaged in a bitter custody battle with Marienne. Believing he was “helping” Marienne, Joe ambushed Ryan in a parking garage. He pushed the man off the roof and then, to ensure the kill, descended and stabbed him repeatedly before attempting to stage the scene as a mugging gone wrong.
Joe’s final, climactic kill of the season was Love herself. Discovering Joe’s plan to leave her for Marienne, Love paralyzed him with aconite (wolfsbane), intending to kill him just as she had her first husband. Joe, however, had anticipated this move. Having researched her past, he had preemptively taken adrenaline. He revealed he was unaffected by the poison, turned the tables on Love, and injected her with a fatal overdose of the same toxin. In a grand, manipulative flourish, Joe staged an elaborate escape: cutting off two of his own toes to fake his death, writing a suicide note framing Love for all of Madre Linda’s recent crimes, and setting their house ablaze with her body inside before disappearing to chase Marienne across Europe.
Season 4: London’s Psychotic Break (8 Kills)
Relocating to London under the alias of Professor Jonathan Moore, Joe Goldberg initially seemed determined to change his ways, attempting to resist his obsessive and violent compulsions. However, he quickly became entangled with a circle of privileged, obnoxious elites and found himself seemingly stalked by a mysterious figure dubbed the “Eat The Rich Killer.” The season delivered a massive twist. As fans find out in the final half of Season 4, Joe had suffered a severe psychotic break, developing a dissociative identity where his darkest impulses manifested as an imaginary version of Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), an author and aspiring politician he’d briefly met. Consequently, many of the murders initially attributed to the Eat The Rich Killer were committed by Joe himself during these dissociative states.
The bloody spree began with Malcolm Harding (Stephen Hagan), Joe’s arrogant colleague and neighbor. Joe awoke after a night of heavy drinking to find Malcolm stabbed to death on his kitchen table, with no memory of the event. Operating on grim instinct, Joe dismembered the body and scattered the parts across London, unknowingly cleaning up his own crime.
Next was Simon Soo (Aidan Cheng), a pretentious artist from the elite circle. Simon was found stabbed in his gallery, his ear gruesomely severed in a performative act characteristic of Joe’s Rhys persona. While grappling with these events, Joe consciously killed Vic (Sean Pertwee), a bodyguard who grew suspicious of him. Feeling threatened by Vic’s scrutiny, Joe engaged in a brutal struggle in a crypt, ultimately strangling Vic and burying him in Simon Soo’s fresh grave. Gemma Graham-Greene (Eve Austin), another disliked member of the social set, was the next victim of Joe’s Rhys persona, found stabbed at a country estate. Joe, still consciously unaware, helped Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie) dispose of the body, deepening their bond through shared secrecy over a crime he himself committed.
The horrifying peak of Joe’s delusion came when his conscious mind became convinced that the real Rhys Montrose was the killer tormenting him. Joe hunted down the actual Rhys, kidnapped, tortured, and finally killed him, before dumping his body off a bridge. It was only after this senseless murder of an innocent man that Joe began to confront the devastating reality that the killer he’d been hunting was himself. This realization, however, didn’t halt the violence.
Now seemingly integrating his darkness, Joe pragmatically killed Hugo, a bodyguard protecting Kate’s powerful father, Tom Lockwood (Greg Kinnear), stabbing him when Hugo interrupted his plans. He then murdered Tom Lockwood himself, disposing of the billionaire who posed the ultimate threat of exposure and control. In perhaps his most chilling act, demonstrating a complete abandonment of any prior warped morality, Joe killed Edward “Eddie” (Brad Alexander), the innocent boyfriend of his perceptive student Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman). He murdered Eddie solely to facilitate framing Nadia, planting evidence to silence her after she pieced together his crimes, ensuring his own escape.
Season 5: Final Murders in NYC (4 Kills)
Season 5 of You picks up three years after Joe Goldberg returned to New York City at the end of Season 4, now living openly alongside his powerful wife, Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie). In the new season, Joe tries to navigate this new life, leveraging Kate’s resources while attempting to keep his violent past buried and his killer instincts suppressed. However, corporate threats against Kate, combined with his complicated entanglement with a new romantic interest, aspiring writer Bronte (Madeline Brewer), inevitably drag his darkness back into the light.
Joe’s first victim of the final season was “Buffalo” Bob Cain (Michael Dempsey), Kate’s uncle and a loyal executive within Lockwood Corp. Bob discovered Kate had hushed up a corporate scandal and attempted to blackmail her into stepping down as CEO, because he wanted the company to abandon Kate’s non-profit focus and return to its former cutthroat capitalistic ways. Kate, feeling cornered, allowed Joe to intervene. Joe efficiently killed Bob and staged the death as a suicide by hanging. Seeing Joe’s cool methodology and apparent enjoyment in the act deeply disturbed Kate, highlighting his monstrous nature and pushing them apart.
Next, Joe killed Clayton (Tom Francis). Clayton was revealed to be the son of Dr. Nicky, the therapist Joe framed in Season 1, and was secretly working with Bronte to expose Joe and clear his father’s name. Complicating matters, Bronte, despite her initial goal, had actually fallen in love with Joe and begun to believe his claims of innocence. To force Joe’s hand, Clayton staged an attack on Bronte. Joe, believing Clayton was genuinely an abusive ex attacking the woman he cared for, reacted with impulsive rage and killed him during the confrontation. The murder was caught on a livestream by Bronte’s friends, Dominique (Natasha Behnam) and Phoenix (b), but the circumstances — Joe seemingly defending Bronte from her “abuser” — led to it being ruled as self-defense, especially with Bronte backing the story.
Later, Joe’s protective instincts took another dark turn. A misogynist named Dane (Jefferson White), enraged by Clayton’s death and believing Joe was a martyr, targeted Bronte to punish her for “tricking” Joe. Joe intercepted Dane, saved Bronte, and trapped Dane inside the glass cage back in Mooney’s basement. He tried to manipulate Bronte into killing Dane herself, pushing her to embrace her own potential darkness. Bronte refused, ultimately letting Dane go. Joe, however, saw Dane as a dangerous loose end that needed tying up. Joe tracked him down on the street and stabbed him to death, ensuring his silence.
Joe Goldberg’s final direct kill came during the chaotic climax of the series finale. After Bronte successfully engineered his exposure, Joe found himself hunted by the police. Making a desperate run for freedom into the woods, he encountered an unnamed police officer attempting to block his path. Without hesitation, Joe killed the officer, removing the final obstacle just moments before he was ultimately stopped and apprehended.
Twenty-two. That’s the final, confirmed number of people Joe Goldberg directly murdered across five seasons of You.
Which of Joe Goldberg’s 22 kills did you find the most shocking or disturbing in You? Join the discussion in the comments below!
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