I was looking through magazines in a drugstore earlier today (because every day is an adventure in my life) and I saw a Justice League-themed quiz in an issue of Entertainment Weekly. One of the questions was who killed Batman’s parents.
And I said to myself “It was Joe Chill” and congratulated myself for having a well-rounded education. But when I checked the answers, it said I was wrong. The magazine said the Joker killed Batman’s parents.
Did that happen at some point? I’ll even accept it if it happened in the current DC movie franchise (even though this would require me to believe Jared Leto is old enough to have killed Ben Affleck’s parents when he was a child). Or did this person get everything they knew about Batman from watching the 1989 movie?
What I read was that a gunman on the street took Bruce’s mother’s necklace and shot the father dead…the mother’s heart was weak and could not stand the shock of her husband being shot down.
There have been so many contradictory answers to this question.
The only person who is always at the scene, no matter what version of events is being retold, is young Bruce Wayne himself. This has lead me to believe that Bruce Wayne, as a child, killed his own parents. The truth will come out eventually.
It was Patrick Bateman. The subtle off-white color and raised lettering of Thomas Wayne’s business card sent him into a murderous rage. I mean, it even had a watermark.
If it’s a mystery I’d have to consider Alfred a good suspect. He ends up with proxy control of “Stately Wayne Manor” and maybe other holdings. Especially since they’ve moved away from the doddering old Alfred to the head butting Alfred with a colorful past.
There’s actually at least one universe where Alfred was the killer - the current iteration of Earth 3. He pulled the trigger after Bruce couldn’t…then he shot Bruce.
I think this is it. Bruce ‘Batman’ Wayne is clearly a psychopath. I first considered that the shock of seeing his parents killed made him this way but now I think it’s more likely this was an innate condition and he did indeed kill his parents in order to create an excuse for his life of crime under the guise of a vigilante.
They all did. It was common knowledge that the Waynes were attending the show that night, so every person with a grudge showed up to fix their wagon à la “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Taking the question seriously, it was just some random street thug whose name has been irretrievably lost to history, and who probably died of an overdose or something not too long after. If the killer could be identified, then Batman could have his revenge… but that can never happen, and so he just keeps on taking vengeance, and never finishing.
Wasn’t there something in the comic books relatively recently (I want to say one of the Justice League titles, as I don’t read any of the single-character DC ones) where Batman was asking somebody questions (who may have been under the influence of Wonder Woman’s lasso), and the conversation ended up something like this:
“Who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents?”
“Joe Chill”
“That’s right. What is the Joker’s real name?”
“Which Joker?”
In the original continuity (if that’s not an oxymoron), Joe Chill was a killer hired by Lew Moxon. That’s how it stayed until Burton made it the Joker (a masterful change, BTW).
Who know who it is now, with all the recons and reboots.
He was using the Mobius Chair, and we never actually hear the chair answer, but it told him that there are 3 Jokers. The exact nature of that hasn’t been revealed, that I’ve seen, but I’m way behind. I haven’t read any of Dark Nights, which it’s supposed to play into, I understand.
