Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Youtuber Killed 3 People // The Randy Stair Murder Story

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

The Randy Stair case refers to a tragic incident that occurred on June 8, 2017, at a supermarket in Eaton Township, Pennsylvania. Stair, an employee at the store, opened fire during an overnight shift, killing three of his coworkers.

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Did you know that one time I shouted a guy out on my YouTube channel and he later became a mass murderer? This is a true story. Now the guy, his name is Randy, and he's around 16 when this story starts and he's living in Pennsylvania. And Randy, he's got a lot of problems. He's shy, he has trouble making friends, he also has trouble making eye contact with people, and ultimately he feels pretty insignificant in his life.

So when he like comes home from school or work or whatever, he escapes by watching cartoons and watching YouTube videos. And over time, Randy becomes obsessed with YouTube, and he wants nothing more than to become a successful YouTuber, hoping that maybe that'll make him feel important. Then one day in 2008, he finally decides to start his own YouTube channel, where he like posts vlogs and sketch comedy and stuff. and after a couple of years, Randy gets a few hundred followers, which is big to him. And at one point, he even posts a video that gets submitted to my old YouTube show called Equals 3, where I play the clip and I shout Randy out, letting people know that he's the original owner of the footage. Now, I never met the guy or anything like that or even talked to him.

I just found one of his videos, and I talked about it on my show. Anyways, Randy, he loves his YouTube channel. It becomes his thing. It's like the one place where he feels like he matters. But then he runs into a problem. And so now it's 2010. And Randy, he's around 17 or 18 at this point. He's officially an adult.

And his parents, they aren't happy with the fact that he still lives at home and that he spends all his time on YouTube. And unfortunately, Randy's YouTube channel isn't successful enough to earn income. So Randy's dad comes and tells him, you got to get a job so that you can start your own life and move out. And this pisses Randy off. I mean, he doesn't want to have to make his own money or move out, ever. So reluctantly, he gets a job at a local supermarket, like stocking shelves and cleaning aisles and stuff.

And he absolutely hates this job. And over time, he starts to become resentful, hating everyone around him who works there. And he starts writing in his journal about how he hates everyone, had his job and how it's not fair that everyone makes him feel so insignificant when clearly he's superior. He also writes how he doesn't like gay people or black people and how he hates his dad for making him get a job. The dude has a lot of misplaced anger. And so years go by and it's now 2013. And Randy still works at the supermarket and he still hates it there and he still is trying

to make it big on YouTube. And around this time, he gets deep. into watching this Nickelodeon cartoon Danny Phantom. You know, this is the cartoon about a boy who's a human ghost hybrid. But that is when he notices this one character, Imber McLean, a ghost girl, and Randy, he becomes obsessed with Ember McLean. In fact, he becomes so infatuated with her and with the whole ghost world

that he shifts his entire YouTube channel's content over. So now he's making much darker videos. And he starts creating an animated series himself called Imbur's Ghost Squad. It's basically a Danny Phantom fan project about a squad of ghost girls who kill humans. And he ends up reaching out to a bunch of different independent animators to help him out with this project. But the story that Randy wrote is about massacres and glorifying mass shooters and stuff. So each animator he reaches out to reads this and they're like, uh, no thanks. I don't want to be a part of this.

And so he gets rejected over and over and over again. And this just makes Randy retreat further back into this fictional cartoon world that he's created. And over time, he starts believing that the Ghost Squad characters are actually real. In fact, he starts falling in love with the character Ember. And he legitimately believes that she has feelings for him too. Not only that, but he starts believing that. where he truly belongs is not in this world that we all live in, but in the ghost world with Ember. He also starts idolizing the two shooters who shot up the Columbine High School back in 1999.

Randy thinks that they're like big heroes and he gets all inspired by their actions. Then he starts wearing a t-shirt that says natural selection because that's apparently what one of the shooters was wearing on the day of the shooting. Here's actually a picture of him. wearing it. And here he is wearing it again. And then to make it worse, in 2017, Randy, I guess he asks his mom to take him to a gun shop to buy some shotguns. And she does, and he buys two of them. And Randy is ecstatic about these two guns. Like he like vlogs about it and stuff. Oh my goddess. I am armed. After that, he writes in his journal, You were a fool to trust me with that shotgun. Oh, mother, if you only realized you,

You just signed my death warrant by taking me to that gun shop. After that, he rips out the page and he leaves this note lying around the house for some reason, but his parents never find it and they never read it. Randy also starts uploading videos of himself Target practicing. Now, by this point, it's still 2017, and Randy is still living at home, still working at the supermarket job that he hates, and he's still not making any money from his YouTube channel. And that is when he decides that it's finally time for him to become who he really feels like he's meant to be. A ghost girl.

He wants to join Ember in the ghost realm, and he believes that the only way for him to do this is to die. And so Randy starts planning his own death. But first, he has to decide whether he's going to die at home alone or if he's going to be like his Columbine heroes and take others out with him. And if he has to murder other people during all this, he wants it to be people at the supermarket that he works at because he hates that job so much. So he decides to flip a coin to help choose where he's going to die. If it's heads, I'll do it here. If it's tails, supermarket. Then he goes out and he literally flips a coin. That is a tails, folks, which means there's going to be a loss of a human life besides my own.

Possibly more than one. And he uploads this video to YouTube, but I guess no one reports him. So on the day of his big plan, Randy uploads one last video of his animated ghost series, which includes footage of him loading up two shotguns into a duffel bag and basically foreshadowing exactly what he's about to do. Then to prepare for transferring into the ghost world and becoming a ghost girl, he puts on black eye makeup, that looks like embers, and he puts on girls' clothing underneath his other clothes. So he heads off to the supermarket that he's worked at for the last seven years, and he's carrying two shotguns with him, that he named McKinsey and Rachel,

after the characters from his animated ghost series. So he gets there, and it's late, because he normally works the graveyard shift, and without his co-workers noticing, he barricades all the exits so that they can escape. Then he walks around the supermarket and blam, blam! Blam! He starts shooting his coworkers one by one. And he ends up killing three of them before he ultimately unalives himself.