Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Entitled Rich Kid Got What He Deserved // The Dana Ewell Murder Story

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Dana Ewell masterminded the 1992 ambush murders of his parents, Dale and Glee, and his sister, Tiffany, inside their Fresno, California home to inherit an estimated $8 million family fortune. Driven by greed, the 21-year-old college student hired his roommate, Joel Radovcich, to carry out the executions on Easter Sunday.

So why did this spoiled, entitled rich kid have his whole family killed? Now, the guy's name is Dana, and Dana is a 21-year-old college student living in Fresno, California. And like I said, he's an entitled rich kid with expensive taste. Like he likes to wear name brand clothes, and he likes to flex on everyone at school that he's a self-made millionaire tycoon and an accomplished businessman, even though his dad is the one funding his entire lifestyle. He hasn't worked for shit. But one day in 1992, he finally gets caught. Because his dad finds out that he's been lying to other people and presenting himself as someone he's not.

And dad gets super angry, and he goes to Dana and he threatens to completely cut him out of the will. And Dana, he isn't about to accept that. I mean, he doesn't want to give up his rich kid lifestyle. Plus, his family estate is worth between $7 and $8 million. And he knows that if his dad dies, he'll be able to be. get millions. So he decides that he's going to murder his dad. Not only that, but he doesn't want to have to split that massive fortune with his mom and his sister, so he decides he's going to take them out too. That way he'll become the sole beneficiary of everything. Now Dana, he's, like I said, an entitled rich kid, so he's not going to do these assassinations himself. He's going to get someone else to do it. So he approaches his only real friend, this guy, Joel. So Dana and Joel, they're talking and Dana's like, want to take out my family? And he offers him a massive payout from the estate.

Allegedly he offers him a few million dollars. So Joel agrees. Then Dana gives him some cash up front to buy a gun. Now Joel, he ends up taking this assassination gig very seriously. He hits up his other friend and he buys an assault rifle. He reads and studies books about being a hitman. He learns how to make a homemade silencer using a cut-up tennis ball, and to make sure that he leaves absolutely zero trace of DNA at the crime scene,

no hairs or anything, he completely shaves his entire body from head to toe. Then the day finally comes, the day of the planned murder, Easter Sunday. And Dana, he's chilling 160 miles away at his girlfriend's parents' beach house. That way he has an alibi. While Joel, he heads over to Dana's family's place, and he uses Dana's keys and alarm code to sneak inside and no one is home. So he lays down a large sheet of plastic to sit on so he won't leave a single piece of his own DNA.

Then he waits there, silently in the dark. And 12 hours pass, and it's evening now. And Dana's mother and sister, they're just getting home. and they walk through the front door, and Joel is waiting there for them with his rifle, with a tennis ball silencer on it, and as soon as he sees the sister, blam, he shoots her, then blam, he shoots the mother. About 30 minutes later, Dana's dad pulls into the driveway, and the second he walks into the house, blam, Joel shoots him too.

Then he flees the scene. Almost immediately, Joel goes and he gives the murder weapon, back to his friend. That friend then takes the rifle completely apart and he tosses chunks of it into public dumpsters and storm drains and he buries the gun barrel in a random vacant lot. Two days later, the family housekeeper finds the bodies of Dana's mom, dad, and sister, and she calls the police. And so police start investigating. Meanwhile, Dana is pretty satisfied with how everything went down. I mean, his diabolical plan actually worked. And three weeks after the murders, he lets Joel move into his family home with him.

So now they're both living there. And at one point, Dana has a meeting with his attorneys to discuss the amount of his inheritance. I mean, this is going to be great for him. He's about to be a multi-millionaire. But when his attorneys read out the will, he learns that his dad locked the $8 million estate in a strict trust. Meaning he can't touch the bulk of his inheritance until he turns 30 years old. That's nine years away. And Dana, he obviously doesn't like this.

I mean, what's he going to do for the next nine years? He needs money now. So he comes up with a pretty evil backup plan. Steal money from his grandma, who lives an arrest home and has severe Alzheimer's. And this theft is easy for him, not only because of her medical condition, but because when his parents died, Dana became the trustee of her estate. So he takes $400,000 out of her trust account and completely drains the account down to nothing. Then he uses that money to keep funding his lavish lifestyle and just buy whatever.

Like he buys a bunch of cars, he pays for his girlfriend's law school tuition, he even buys a bunch of shit for Joel too. Like he pays thousands of dollars for Joel's helicopter flying lessons, because I guess Joel wants to learn how to fly a helicopter. Anyway, now police, they've long been suspicious of Dana, and they've been paying close attention to him, and they see that he's spending a bunch of money on his friend Joel. So they start thinking,

Joel might be involved in whatever Dana did to his parents. So they called Joel up, and they ask him if he could answer some questions for them. And Joel, he gets all defensive, and he doesn't want to answer any questions. So now the police really think he's involved. So they start monitoring the both of them. And Dana and Joel, they're not that stupid.

I mean, they suspect police are monitoring them, and so they get super paranoid. And they refuse to communicate with each other through their home landline phones. And they start exclusively communicating through pagers and public pay phones when they need to. But then, one day, undercover detectives low-key follow Joel to a gas station

payphone. And from that phone, Joel calls Dana, and one of the undercover detectives pretends to use the pay phone next to him, and he can overhear Joel's conversation. And he can hear that Joel is mad and yelling at Dana like, give me my quarter million dollars now, because I guess Dana owes him that much money. So the police start looking into Joel's bank records, and they can see that Dana has given him thousands of dollars multiple times. So now police are starting to piece together this entire plot. And one day they show up to Dana's college and they start questioning him on campus. And they lie to him and they tell him that they now have evidence that Joel was the one who killed his mom,

dad, and sister just to, you know, see how he reacts. And Dana, he plays it cool. But afterwards, he immediately calls Joel and tells him what the police just said to him. And this makes Joel super paranoid. And he drives to his friend's house, the one that buried the gun for him. And he tells him what's going on, and that if the police contact him,

that he should not tell them anything. But remember, police, they've been monitoring Joel, and they followed him to this guy's house. So now they're sure that he's involved in the murder somehow. So they bring the guy in, and they question him. And pretty quickly, he cracks, and he tells the police the truth about everything, that Dana paid Joel to kill his family,

and that he provided the gun and helped get rid of it afterwards. And so, bam, they arrest this guy. And I don't have a mugshot, but here's what he looks like in real life. Also, bam, police arrest Joel. Here's what he looks like in real life. And Dana eventually turns himself in. Here's a picture of him in police custody. And so, the guy who flipped on them, he ends up getting immunity, so no jail time.

While Joel, he goes to trial and he's found guilty and he gets life in. prison while Dana also goes to trial and he's also found guilty and he also gets life in prison.