You Season 4 Part 1: The Real Murderers Who Inspired the ‘Rich Killer’ In The Netflix Series

Although for You Season 4 Part 1, there are several doubts to be resolved, this new installment focuses on Joe living in London with friends from the elite and facing a mysterious murderer. In You Season 4 Part 1, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) travels to London in search of Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) and adopts the persona of Jonathan Moore, a literature professor who has a group of friends from high society. But, everything gets complicated when ‘the rich killer’ begins to attack Joe’s social group. Due to his past, the protagonist has no choice but to investigate the deaths and find this murderer.

You Season 4 Part 1: Which Real Murderers Inspired the Rich Killer?

For the past three seasons, it was Joe who obsessed over people, committed murder, and does lewd acts, but now to keep his secret intact he must approach the Eat the Rich Killer and try to expose it first. Although the series is based on the novel by Sarah Pinborough and characters like Joe are not taken from reality, the new villain of the fourth season does take inspiration from real murderers and some fictional ones. Series co-creator Sera Gamble spoke to Entertainment Weekly in December 2022 about the inspiration and idea of ​​turning the tables on Joe and now he is facing a murderer.

The creator said that the series is like classic detective novels, always telling different stories and that they catch people, so for the fourth season they took advantage of the fact that Joe is in England.

“Maybe the first famous serial killer is from London with Jack the Ripper, so very quickly we started talking about classic whodunit structures: Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie”

Jack the Ripper was an actual assassin who operated between 1888 and 1891 and could never be caught. His ‘modus operandi’ is based on attacking prostitutes at night and in the darkest streets of London. The Jack the Ripper murders were very famous and because the police lacked today’s forensic technology, they were never able to find him or determine exactly if he was a man or a woman.

Another of the real murderers who could have inspired the character is John George Haigh, known as the Acid Bath Murderer, who also operated in England during the 1940s. This serial killer lived at 404 Onslow Court Hotel and from there he had a life of luxury that he sustained by murdering his friends from high society, just like Killer of the Rich in the series. The Acid Bath Killer tricked rich people into thinking he was a successful businessman, gained their trust, and slowly investigated how much wealth they had.

Being a refined, cultured, and kind person, he would become friends with the rich, but then in an abandoned warehouse, he would shoot them in the back. He earned the nickname from him because he later dissolved their bodies in sulfuric acid. Once his crimes were committed, he sold the possessions of his dead “friends” and even collected their savings. When he was caught, he confessed that he committed at least six murders. He was sentenced and hanged in 1949. Finally, a London assassin who could also serve as an inspiration for the fourth season of ‘You’ is John Martin Scripps, a man known as the Garden Butcher, who posed as a tourist in 1995. When John Martin traveled, he earned the trust of other tourists and thus murdered at least three in Singapore and Thailand. Once he committed the crime, he used the credit cards of his victims.