Netflix’s You: Ranking Every Kill by How Much the Victim Deserved to Die

Throughout their lives, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) and Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) have murdered a whopping total of fifteen (15!) people. A few of these characters were undeserving of an untimely end, but in many cases, Joe and/or Love did a service to society by offing their prey. Neither Love nor Joe has a real credo or ethos surrounding their kills, ala Dexter Morgan, but they do occasionally eliminate bad actors from society when they target their victims. 

While viewers often cheer for Love and Joe to get away with murder, these types of kills are especially sweet. When bad things happen to bad people, the vigilante justice in You can certainly be electrifying to watch.

That’s not to say that Joe or Love are heroes of any kind. There have been plenty of innocent lives lost in their destructive wake. So, we’re here to set the record straight by sorting through all the murder madness. Below we’ve ranked the unsuspecting victims of You from dewy-eyed innocent to downright devilish. 

15. Delilah Alves 

When Did She Die?: Season 2 
Did She Deserve the Axe?: Absolutely not. A landlady / journalist, Delilah (Carmela Zumbado) was a complete innocent who simply had a curious mind and a key to Joe’s apartment. When Joe found her in his storage unit, he locked her in his cage with a swiftness, promising to let her out once he skipped town. After an impromptu acid trip with Forty, Joe returned to the cage, only to find Delilah dead, throat slit. Joe went nearly mad trying to figure out why he would have killed her, only to find out that Love was the murderer the entire time. 

14. Love’s First Husband

When Did He Die?: Prior to Season 1
Did He Deserve the Axe?: Nope. In the season 3 finale, Love admitted to incorrectly dosing her husband with the paralytic poison Aconite, using it orally instead of on the skin. She didn’t mean for him to die, but he died all the same. The man survived cancer only to be killed by Love. 

13. Elijah Thornton

When Did He Die?: Prior to season 1
Did He Deserve the Axe?: No. Elijah (Esteban Benito) simply had the misfortune of being the guy that Candace dated after she initially broke up with Joe. So Joe shoved him off a ledge at a party. Bye, bye, Elijah. We hardly knew ye. 

12. Guinevere Beck 

When Did She Die?: Season 1 finale
Did She Deserve the Axe?: Nah. Beck (Elizabeth Lail) might have been flighty and selfish, but her only big slip up was not putting curtains on her giant, street-facing windows. She was an aspiring writer and valiantly tried to write her way out of Joe’s clutches—Hamilton-stylez—but all she got for her effort was a posthumous publication after Joe strangled her to death. 

11. Natalie Engler 

When Did She Die?: Season 3 premiere
Did She Deserve the Axe?: Natalie (Michaela McManus) wasn’t a bad person, per se, but she was very much trying to cheat on her husband with the “boring neighbor.” Given her comfort level with how quickly and confidently she seduced Joe, a married new father, Natalie wasn’t a stranger to adultery. In fact, she nabbed her hubby Matthew Engler when he was still married. So, she definitely committed some sins. But were Natalie’s sins murder-worthy? Nope. Doesn’t matter. Love was threatened enough by Joe’s obsession with Natalie that she slit her throat mere weeks after meeting her, leaving Joe to clean up the mess. 

10. Peach Salinger

When Did She Die?: Season 1
Did She Deserve the Axe?: Peach (Shay Mitchell) was certainly a toxic friend who was a threat to Beck in many ways. She controlled Beck through a combination of money, guilt, and prestigious influence. She also flagrantly controlled others through these means, even releasing a drunken video of a friend in order to ruin her reputation. But, despite all her flaws, girl did not deserve to go out like she did. Joe attacked Peach not once but two times: once as she was jogging in Central Park, and then a second time at her house. When stalking Peach, Joe left an incriminating and crusty jar of urine behind, which is a loose end that may yet still come back to haunt him. 

9. Candace Stone

When Did She Die?: Season 2 
Did She Deserve to Die?: Much like Peach, Candace (Ambyr Childers) escaped Joe’s first murder attempt. She was his first obsession, and Joe thought she was dead until she came back into his life after Beck’s book was published. Joe fled to L.A. to get away from Candace, but she found him when a viral video of Forty Quinn surfaced. In order to protect Love and make Joe squirm, Candace started dating Forty and weasled her way into the Quinn inner circle. But when Candace finally confronted Love with the truth, she got a rude awakening: Love didn’t care. Oh, it was quite the opposite. Love only cared about protecting her beloved Joe. So she went slashy slashy with a broken beer bottle, and it was lights out for poor Candace. Cause of death? She failed to account for a potential second murderous sociopath. Oops.

8. Ryan 

When Did He Die?: Season 3
Did He Deserve to Die?: Ryan (Scott Michael Foster) was a narcissistic TV reporter who ran on meth-laced smoothies and pure disdain for anyone who wasn’t in his inner circle. But Joe didn’t really care about all that. He only targeted Ryan because he was Marianne’s ex-husband, and Marianne was in Joe’s obsession crosshairs. Marianne and Ryan were going through a protracted custody battle for their daughter, and Joe’s solution to that problem was simply to eliminate the dude from existence. Did he deserve to die? Probably not. Is the world a better place without this guy in it? Definitely.  

7. Ron 

When Did He Die?: Season 1
Did He Deserve to Die?: This is the point in this list where things start to get complicated. Ron (Daniel Cosgrove) was a parole officer and the boyfriend of Joe’s next-door neighbor, Claudia. Ron routinely physically and emotionally abused both Claudia and her young son Paco, and this triggered Joe’s history of childhood trauma. So when Joe saw a chance to remove him from the equation, he took it. Whether or not Ron deserved to die is certainly up for debate. 

6. Joe’s Dad

When Did He Die?: Prior to Season 1
Did He Deserve to Die?: Joe certainly thought he did. After years of experiencing and witnessing abuse at his father’s hands, Joe fatally shot him. Following his father’s death, his mother abandoned him at an orphanage for boys and never looked back. This was the defining moment of Joe’s life and the moment from which much of his murderous pathology stems. 

5. Love and Forty’s Nanny

When Did She Die?: Prior to Season 1
Did She Deserve to Die?: This woman was a predator. When Forty and Love were in their early teens, their parents hired a nineteen year-old nanny to watch over them. She soon seduced Forty and started a sexual relationship with him. In response, Love slashed the nanny’s throat and made Forty think that he did it in a moment of passion. Sexual abuse, especially sexual abuse of underage children, is abhorrent and reprehensible, so it’s definitely a moral coin toss as to whether or not this woman deserved to live. However, Love’s decision to frame Forty for the killing is completely unforgivable. But we’ll get to her in a bit. 

4. Ben “Benji” Ashby 

When Did He Die?: Season 1
Did He Deserve to Die?: Beck’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci) was, oddly enough, also a murderer. After Joe wrangled him into his cage, Benji made a bid for release by showing him a video of how he accidentally drowned a fraternity pledge while hazing him. Benji was a manipulative, cheating POS who didn’t really care about Beck or anyone other than himself and his fledgling soda company. Also, did I mention how he was a murderer? So, survey says that, yes, Benji deserved to die. Beck didn’t really miss him all that much anyway. 

3. Henderson “Hendy” Butler

When Did He Die?: Season 2
Did He Deserve to Die?: Absolutely, yes. Comedian Hendy (Chris D’Elia) drugged and sexually abused dozens of underage girls for years and years. He took partially clothed pictures of them in their drugged state and kept them in a hidey-hole in his sex dungeon. With a brash bravado and untouchable attitude, Hendy made himself a quick mark for Joe who sought to protect Ellie, Delilah’s underage sister. When Joe tried to convince Hendy to make a confession video, Hendy took a frantic tumble down the stairs and fatally conked his head. Here, Joe definitely did the world a favor by eliminating this serial predator from the streets of L.A. 

2. Jasper

When Did He Die?: Season 2
Did He Deserve to Die?: This one is a resounding “yes.” Jasper was a gleeful psychopath who most definitely took pride in his line of violent work. When Joe was operating as Will Bettelheim, Jasper sought him out in order to collect Will’s staggering 50k debt. At first, Joe tries to reason his way out of the situation, and Jasper responds by calmly and methodically chopping off Joe’s pinky finger. Yikes. When Jasper comes around again, Joe has no choice but to murder him and then churn his sizeable body through the meat grinder at Anavrin. Jasper not only wins points for being one of the worst people that Joe has ever killed, but also for the most gruesome method of post-death disposal. Even murder maestro Love cringes when she hears about it early on in Season 3. Speaking of Love…

1. Love Quinn 

When Did She Die?: Season 3 finale
Did She Deserve to Die?: Yup yup yup. Love Quinn straight up murdered at least five people… that we know about. It’s quite possible that others ended up crossing this stab-happy fireball at some point in time but her secrets have died with her, and now we’ll never know. Love killed when she felt as if she or someone she loved was being threatened. In her mind, everyone and anyone who met that criterion was fair game. Thankfully, Love did exercise some rare restraint when it came to stabbing Joe’s paramour Marianne in front of her young daughter, but Joe killed her all the same. Joe is still lurking in the shadows, ready to find his next victim, but at least Love will never kill again. 

You season 3 is available to stream on Netflix now.