Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Chuck E Cheese Massacre - The Nathan Dunlap story

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

This is the story of Nathan Dunlap and the Chuck E Cheese shooting

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And stream Paradise on Kulu and Kulu on Disney Plus. So this guy walks into a chucky cheese one night and he just starts blasting, blam, blam, unaliving some of the workers. And some people think this massacre inspired a whole ass video game franchise. Let me explain. Now the guy's name is Nathan, he's 19. And Nathan, he's kind of a turd. He's been in and out of trouble his whole life,

committing several armed robberies and spending time in a juvenile detention center. But now he has an actual actual. job, working at the pizza place slash arcade Chucky Cheese, where he works as a doughmaster. I guess that means he makes the pizza dough. But then, one night, he's working a shift, and he goes to talk to his manager because he wants to ask for more hours. So he asked the manager to give him more hours, and managers like, nah, bro. And this makes Nathan mad, and they start arguing, and it gets heated. And pretty quickly, bam, the manager straight up fires Nathan. And Nathan. And Nathan, Nathan, he doesn't take this firing well.

He's pissed off. He feels like he was wronged, and he vows that one day he's going to get revenge. And so a bit of time passes, and Nathan is still salty thinking about this. He hates that manager. He tells all his friends how he hates that manager. Sometimes he even visits the Chuckie Cheese to eat and bent to his old Chuckie Cheese coworkers, like, this place sucks, that manager sucks. And I guess his old coworkers humor him, but they don't.

don't really take him seriously. And five months go by, and this resentment has been building up in him this whole time. How dare they fire him when all he did was ask for more hours. Now, I don't know if he's in a bad mood or just having a terrible day, but one afternoon, Nathan is playing basketball with his friends, and he decides that this is it. Today is the day. And he says it out loud to his friends. Today is the day I'm going to get revenge on that manager and I'm going to rob that Chuckie cheese. So later that night, around 9 p.m., he gets a pew-poo that he had stolen from a friend's grandmother's house long before this. And he gets that pu-poo and he hides it in his pocket. Then he borrows his girlfriend's car and he drives it to the Chuckie cheese. And he goes inside, he sits at a

table, he orders a ham and cheese sandwich and he's acting pretty chill. And then he goes and he plays an arcade game. The game he plays is actually Hogan's Alley, which Hogan's Alley is ironically a shooting game, where you shoot targets with one of those big red arcade pu-pues. Anyway, after playing Hogan's Alley, Nathan goes and he chats with an employee, a former coworker of his, and he asked him if that old manager who fired him is working that night. And the former co-worker is like, nah, he's not working tonight. And so the guy who Nathan wants to get revenge on isn't even there. And And all this resentment building up in him just leads to nothing. So now what's he going to do?

Is he going to leave? Is he still going to rob the place? Well, when he sees the last few customers at the checkout counter collecting their prizes that they had won, that's the signal that the restaurant is about to close. So Nathan heads into the men's restroom to hide and figure out what to do. And while he's in there, the customers leave and the Chuck Echee Cheese workers, they start closing down the store. So Nathan, he's in the bathroom and he's looking at himself in the mirror, and he looks

looks at his reflection for maybe 10 minutes, trying to decide if he's going to actually go through with this crime he's been planning. And that is when he says, fuck it. He's gonna do it. And he walks out of the restroom and he pulls out his pew-poo. And he first sees an employee and she's cleaning the salad bar. And she doesn't even see him. And so he walks over to her and he puts his pew-poo up to her head and bang! She's unalived.

Then he quickly steps toward another employee. That employee is vacuuming, and Nathan holds up his pew-pue and bang right in the face, unalived. Then he sees another employee, and she actually sees him shoot the others, and she sees him coming, and she immediately gets on her knees, and she begs him not to unalive her. Don't shoot, I won't tell. But because she already saw him unalive two people, he replies, I have to. And he points his pew-pue at her head, and bang, unalived. Then Nathan runs into the kitchen, and this guy is there.

His name's Bobby. Bobby's cleaning up, and he had heard the shots coming from the dining room, but he thought it was the other workers like popping balloons, so it didn't alarm him. But now he sees Nathan coming toward him, and before he can react, bang! Nathan shoots him right in the jaw, and he falls to the ground. Then Nathan heads to the manager's office, where the night manager is,

and she's in there and she's logging receipts, And by the time she looks up and sees Nathan, he's already there pointing his pew-poo at her. And he's like, unlock the safe. So she does. And immediately after that, bang, Nathan shoots her. Then he takes her purse and he fills it with $1,500 cash from the safe, Chuckie cheese keychains, and for some weird reason, a bunch of game tokens. Like he's going to come back one day and try to win some prizes or something.

But anyway, after that, he gets in the car and he drives away. fleeing the scene. And he does all that. Unaliving innocent people, some of them he knew and worked with and he was cool with them. And he does all of this in a children's restaurant all for $1,500 and some game tokens. Here's what's really crazy though. We're actually kind of fortunate that he waited and did it when the restaurant was closing and not when it was open. Because if it had been open, if the place had been open, if you had walked into Chucky Cheese and started lighting the restaurant up on a Saturday during lunchtime, the place would have been full of kids, and there would have been a lot more casualties. Anyway, another side note, allegedly this whole tragic

event is what inspired the video game, which later became a whole franchise, Five Nights at Freddy's. Because both Five Nights and Freddy's and this story, they involve murders at a kid-friendly pizza restaurant with animatronics, and both stories. involve five victims. So yes, there are similarities, but unfortunately, from what I can tell, that's just internet lore. The creator of the game has never claimed Five Nights at Freddy's was inspired by this event, so it just seems to be a weird coincidence that the internet is buzzing about. Anyway, this story's not over, because not everyone involved in the shooting actually died. Crazy enough, Bobby, the guy from the kitchen, after Nathan shot him, he fell to the floor, and immediately

he starts playing dead, until Nathan walked past him to go to the manager's office to claim his next victim. So Bobby's not dead. So he gets up and he's all wounded, but he escapes. He runs out the back door of the restaurant and he runs to a nearby apartment complex. And he finds a resident and he's like, help, there's been a shooting at the Chucky Cheese. So that resident calls 911. Hello, the emergency 911. Listen, I have a man who's been shot in my house right here. He came from Chucky Cheese. He claims there's been a lot of people shot there. So then police show up and they find the four workers unalived and they talk to Bobby and he's able to tell them who did it. He's like, yeah, it was this guy who used to work here, Nathan.

So then police go to Nathan's mom's house where he lives. But he's not at his mom's house. He's at his girlfriend's house and he's smashing with her. Not exactly the most romantic time to do that, but okay. So his mom pages him and she tells him the police want to talk to him. So he stops smashing and he goes home to. to talk to the police. And eventually, bam, they arrest him.

Here's his mugshot. And ultimately, he goes to trial, and he's found guilty, and he's sentenced to death. But later, his sentence has changed to life in prison. So, shout out to Colorado.