No villain in comic book history has committed more bone-chilling, unpredictable, and grotesquely theatrical crimes than the Joker. He’s not in it for money or power—he wants chaos, and he wants everyone in Gotham to suffer while he laughs. With a body count that rivals war zones and a mind that turns joy into terror, the Joker doesn’t just commit crimes—he curates nightmares.
#10: The Joker Poisons Gotham’s Water Supply (Batman #251)
In the classic Batman #251 by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, the Joker returns to his roots—lethal poison and twisted fun. After escaping Arkham, he unleashes a deadly toxin into Gotham’s water supply, infecting unsuspecting citizens with a gas that forces them to laugh themselves to death, all while sporting grotesque smiles.
What makes this crime, so chilling isn’t just the body count—it’s the way it weaponizes joy itself. Innocent people die laughing, their final moments painted with horrific glee. It’s a textbook Joker move theatrical, symbolic, and savagely efficient. Batman races to stop him, but the damage is already done.
The issue not only redefined the Joker for a new generation but reminded readers that his greatest weapon is unpredictability. This was the moment he returned not as a clownish crook—but as a full-blown terrorist with a punchline written in blood.
#9: Blowing Up a Hospital (The Dark Knight, 2008)
Though from film rather than comics, this moment is too iconic and terrifying to exclude. In The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Joker executes one of the most unnerving acts of domestic terrorism in Gotham history—he plants explosives inside Gotham General Hospital and detonates it in broad daylight, all while dressed as a nurse.
The build-up is masterful. He manipulates Harvey Dent into becoming Two-Face, plants psychological seeds of chaos, then calmly walks away from the explosion like it’s a prank. The casual nature of his violence—the slapstick timing of the detonator glitch—is what makes it horrifying. It’s not just mass destruction—it’s murder with a smile and a joke.
The Joker didn’t blow up a building to prove a point—he did it to show that Gotham’s institutions mean nothing, that terror can wear a grin. It was anarchic performance art. And Gotham was the audience.
#8: Turning Commissioner Gordon’s Wife into a Time Bomb (Batman: Endgame)
In Scott Snyder’s Batman: Endgame, the Joker returns more brutal than ever, infecting Gotham with a new Joker toxin that turns citizens into cackling maniacs. But one of his most disturbing acts comes when he captures Commissioner Gordon’s wife, ties a bomb to her heart, and rigs it to detonate if she stops laughing.
It’s psychological torment dialed to eleven. Jim Gordon, already exhausted, watches helplessly as his wife is forced to giggle while her body is wired to explode. Batman barely arrives in time to defuse the bomb and save her, but the emotional scars are permanent.
What makes this act, so grotesque isn’t just the danger—it’s the Joker’s gleeful manipulation of love, family, and fear. He doesn’t just kill. He corrupts. He twists joy into violence, turning laughter into a death sentence. Its cruelty engineered for maximum trauma—and its pure Joker.
#7: Infecting Gotham with Jokerized Babies (Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker)
In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, the Clown Prince returns from the grave—or so it seems—and unveils one of the most grotesque crimes in Gotham’s future: using nanotechnology to infect infants with his DNA, essentially creating an army of Jokerized babies.
While the concept sounds absurd, it’s deeply disturbing. These children, born into the world as living weapons, giggle uncontrollably as they display enhanced strength and psychotic behavior. The Joker doesn’t just want chaos now—he wants a legacy of madness.
It’s body horror, psychological warfare, and sci-fi nightmare fuel all rolled into one. Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis must confront a horror they never expected: that the Joker’s evil isn’t confined to one body or one lifetime. He’s infected Gotham’s future—one innocent child at a time.
#6: Murdering Sarah Essen-Gordon (No Man’s Land)
During the brutal No Man’s Land arc, Gotham is cut off from the rest of the world following a cataclysmic earthquake. Amidst the anarchy, the Joker unleashes one of his most emotionally devastating crimes: he murders Sarah Essen-Gordon, Commissioner Gordon’s wife, in cold blood, after luring her to a hostage scene involving kidnapped infants.
As she lowers her weapon to protect the babies, the Joker shoots her in the head—smiling the whole time. It’s not just a murder. It’s a message: mercy gets you killed in Joker’s Gotham.
This moment breaks Jim Gordon in a way no villain ever has. The Joker doesn’t just want to hurt Batman—he wants to destroy the people who anchor him. And in this moment, he succeeds. It’s a grim reminder that no one is safe—not even the most morally upright. In Joker’s world, empathy is a weakness—and he’ll exploit it every time.
#5: The Murder of Jason Todd (Batman: A Death in the Family)
Perhaps the most infamous crime in comic book history, the Joker’s murder of Jason Todd—the second Robin—is still one of his darkest, most shocking acts. In Batman: A Death in the Family, the Joker captures Jason, brutally beats him with a crowbar, and leaves him and his mother in a warehouse rigged with explosives. Batman doesn’t make it in time.
The panel of Joker swinging that crowbar is etched into the minds of fans forever. It wasn’t a quick kill. It was personal, sadistic, and deeply calculated to destroy Batman emotionally. Even worse? DC let readers decide Jason’s fate through a phone-in vote, which added an almost cruel sense of realism to the outcome. The fans voted for death—and Joker delivered.
This act changed Batman forever. It deepened his guilt, hardened his resolve, and haunted him for years. It also raised the Joker from a chaotic nuisance to a true agent of irreversible trauma. He wasn’t just killing for chaos. He was killing to break the Bat. And he came terrifyingly close.
Jason’s eventual resurrection only added to the pain, but the moment of his death remains one of Gotham’s greatest tragedies—and one of Joker’s most horrifying victories.
#4: Turning Gotham Against Batman (The Joker War)
In The Joker War, the Clown Prince doesn’t just commit a single horrific act—he wages a full-scale psychological and financial war on Gotham itself. After stealing Bruce Wayne’s fortune and hijacking Wayne Enterprises, Joker outfits gangs of criminals with high-tech gear, floods the city with chaos, and targets Batman’s very soul.
His greatest trick? Making the city doubt Batman. By impersonating Bruce Wayne, funding anarchy, and unleashing a city-wide hallucinogenic toxin, Joker strips Gotham of its faith. Even the Bat-family struggles to contain the fallout, as the Joker wages class warfare using Bruce’s own resources.
Joker doesn’t just break bones—he breaks systems. He twists wealth, legacy, and identity into weapons, showing that sometimes, terror doesn’t wear clown makeup—it wears a tailored suit. And while Batman ultimately prevails, the scars left by The Joker War run deep.
This storyline proves that the Joker doesn’t need a death toll to be terrifying. Sometimes, all it takes is turning Gotham’s hope into horror—by using Batman’s own tools against him.
#3: Paralyzing Barbara Gordon (The Killing Joke)
In Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, Joker commits one of his most grotesque and personal crimes: he shoots Barbara Gordon—Batgirl—point-blank in the spine, paralyzing her permanently. Then, he undresses her, photographs her, and uses the images to torture her father, Commissioner Gordon, in a twisted bid to prove that “one bad day” is all it takes to drive a man insane.
It’s not just physical violence—it’s psychological violation. Joker doesn’t just hurt Barbara. He turns her trauma into a weapon. The entire arc is a descent into madness, with Joker forcing Jim Gordon through a nightmare funhouse of torture and humiliation.
What makes this act so terrifying is how intimate it is. Joker isn’t attacking Gotham as a whole—he’s targeting Batman’s family. It’s not about money or power—it’s about proving a sick philosophical point, and he’s willing to mutilate an innocent woman to do it.
While Barbara eventually rises from the ashes as Oracle, this crime reshaped her life and cast a long shadow over Gotham’s heroes. It remains one of the most disturbing and controversial acts in Joker’s long, bloody history.
#2: Gassing Gotham and Killing Himself (Batman: Endgame)
In Batman: Endgame, Scott Snyder delivers what may be the Joker’s most apocalyptic plot: releasing a perfected version of his laughing toxin across all of Gotham, turning the city into a horde of deranged Joker zombies. It’s a final act of war—no punchlines, no hostages, no escape.
Even more horrifying? Joker believes he’s immortal, tied to some ancient dark power beneath Gotham. But as the city falls into chaos, he brings Batman into the belly of the Earth for a final confrontation, where both are mortally wounded. Rather than escape, Joker dies with Batman under the city, smiling as he succumbs to his wounds.
It’s terrifying not just for the body count, but for the scale. Joker isn’t just playing games—he’s executing the end of Gotham itself. This is Joker at his deadliest: mythic, unstoppable, and absolutely certain that if he must die, he’ll take Gotham and Batman with him.
Though both are later revived, Endgame remains the Joker’s most all-in, scorched-earth plan. He’s not just terrifying because he kills. He’s terrifying because he wins—by dragging Gotham into hell with a grin.
#1: Smiling Through Arkham’s Massacre (Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth)
In Grant Morrison’s nightmarish Arkham Asylum, Joker isn’t just a killer—he’s a malevolent force of psychological torment. When Arkham inmates take over the asylum, Joker becomes ringleader, turning the institution into a surreal house of horrors. He torments Batman through warped games and forces him to confront his deepest fears and traumas.
The terror here is existential. Joker doesn’t need to kill to horrify—he just needs to whisper into the cracks of Batman’s mind. He knows how to twist a sentence, a smile, a silence into something soul damaging. He turns Arkham into a mirror, reflecting every ounce of madness Batman tries to keep at bay.
At one point, Joker is given the chance to kill Batman outright—and doesn’t. Because that would end the game. He doesn’t want death. He wants eternal suffering, for Batman and everyone like him. The fear in Arkham Asylum isn’t loud—it’s creeping, intimate, inevitable. It’s the Joker as myth. The boogeyman with red lips.
More than any bomb, toxin, or murder, this story captures the pure horror of the Joker: that he lives inside your head. And once he gets in—he never leaves.
The Joker isn’t terrifying because he’s strong or smart—he’s terrifying because he doesn’t care. There’s no logic, no morality, no restraint. Just cruelty, chaos, and an infectious grin. From personal tragedies to city-wide massacres, these ten crimes show why the Joker isn’t just Gotham’s worst villain—he’s its living nightmare. And worst of all? He’s always just one punchline away from doing it all again.
