Skip to main content
Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Mad at your roommate for missing rent and forgetting to load the dishwasher? Your woes are nothing compared to the horrors of Netflix’s latest docuseries, Worst Roommate Ever. Over the course of five episodes, the true crime series covers four harrowing cases filled with con artists, illegally cashed checks, and, yes, murder.
Diving in blind when it comes to cases like this can be stressful. You don’t know who to suspect or what’s going to go wrong. You just know it’s going to be bad. That’s why we’re here to help. If you’re the type of person who flips to the end of the book first, consider this your quick guide to the cases at the center of Worst Roommate Ever.
Episode 1: Dorothea Puente
Prepare for elder fraud to get a whole lot more disturbing. Years before her reign of terror, Puente was charged and convicted of illegally cashing 34 state and federal checks that belonged to the tenets of her boarding house. But it wasn’t until 1982 that her crimes got notably darker. Puente continued to take tenets, focusing on the elderly, mentally disabled, those who struggled with addiction. There were numerous reports that Puente stole these people’s Social Security checks. But then came the disappearances. Eventually seven bodies were found buried on the landlord’s property.
Altogether, Puente was charged with a total of nine murders, eight of which being her former tenets. The jury convicted her on three of those murders but couldn’t agree on the remaining six. The woman dubbed the “Death House Landlady” was given life without the possibility of parole. She eventually died in prison of natural causes in 2011 at the age of 82.
Episode 2: K.C. Joy
The murder of Maribel Ramos is a particularly tragic one. Ramos was a U.S. Army veteran who had served two combat tours in Iraq and was a student at California State University-Fullerton. Ramos met Kwang Chol Joy, better known as K.C. Joy, through Craigslist, and the two became roommates. Ramos’ family claimed that Joy developed an unhealthy romantic obsession with Ramos during their time together. But things really went south after a conversation about rent. On May 2, 2013, Ramos asked Joy to move out because he had missed several payments. It’s believed that Ramos was murdered either that day or the next.
It was Joy’s search history that gave him away. On May 16, he researched human decay and looked at a satellite image of a specific area on a public library’s computer. Investigators searched that area later that day and arrested Joy on May 17. Joy was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life. He is still serving time, though Joy has maintained his innocence.
Episode 3: Youssef Khater
Khater came into the public light while he was living in Chile as part of a 12-bedroom hostel. As Texas Monthly explained in depth, he said he was a marathon runner who was being sponsored to set a record by running the length of Chile. That sponsorship and the $8,000 that came with it were real, but Khater wasn’t. Not only did he take the money without running, but he also scammed his roommates out of money and took $12,000 in athletic gear and $38,000 from British runner Dominic Rayner. But the worst of his crimes targeted his roommate, Callie Quinn. After promising to show her a new apartment, Khater beat her over the head with a toilet seat and buried her alive, allegedly because Quinn had told a friend that Khater owed her money.
Thankfully, Quinn survived. Khater was later arrested, and though he admitted to attacking Quinn, he claimed that he never intended to kill her. Khater’s case was especially complicated because of its international nature. He was extradited from Chile to Denmark and acquitted of three of the five charges against him. Khater served prison time for three months before he was released. So where is this con man now? In 2017, it was reported that he had been arrested for fraud in Costa Rica but had been released soon afterwards. It’s unknown where he is today.
Episodes 4 and 5: Jamison Bachman
This is the story that inspired the title for the Netflix docuseries. Bachman, going by the name of Jed Creek, moved into the house of Alex Miller. Almost immediately, he became a roommate from hell, taking lightbulbs, removing chairs, and refusing to pay rent. Miller, thanks to her mother and a phone tracing service, later learned that Bachman was actually a serial squatter, a man who used tenancy law to terrorize his victims up and down the East coast. He would routinely con his way into new homes with sob stories then try to make his roommate’s life so terrible that they would move. That’s when things got violent.
Bachman never progressed to the point of killing his roommates, but he was charged with killing his brother, Harry Bachman. The case never made it to court. In December of 2017, Bachman died by suicide in his cell at Montgomery County Correctional Facility.
