Table of Contents
Introduction: The Unanswered Question and the Perfect Scapegoat
The question of who killed Montgomery “Monty” de la Cruz in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why presents a narrative paradox.
The direct, factual answer is deceptively simple: he was murdered by an anonymous fellow inmate while incarcerated.1
Yet, to leave the analysis there is to miss the point entirely.
The series deliberately renders the identity of the killer irrelevant, a footnote in a much larger, more disturbing story.3
The true focus of the narrative is not on the act of his murder, but on its profound and chilling convenience.
Monty’s death is less a mystery to be solved and more a moral catastrophe to be dissected, one that serves as the linchpin for the show’s final seasons and its bleak exploration of justice, trauma, and truth.
Montgomery de la Cruz, as portrayed by Timothy Granaderos, stands as one of the show’s most polarizing and complex antagonists.4
He is, without question, a perpetrator of a heinous and unforgettable crime: the brutal sexual assault of his classmate, Tyler Down.6
This act solidifies his status as a villain.
Simultaneously, the series reveals him to be a victim of profound and relentless abuse, suffering at the hands of a violently homophobic father while struggling with his own closeted sexuality.7
This duality creates a deeply uncomfortable portrait of a young man who is both a monster and a product of a monstrous environment.
This report posits that Monty’s death is a calculated narrative choice that transforms him from a character into a plot device of unparalleled utility.
His off-screen demise provides the show’s protagonists with the ultimate scapegoat, a dead man who cannot defend himself, upon whom they can pin the murder of Bryce Walker to protect one of their own.1
His death is not an endpoint but a catalyst, enabling the show’s heroes to commit a grave injustice in the name of loyalty.
The central question, therefore, is not “who killed Monty?” but rather “what did his death enable, and who is truly responsible for the lie that defines his legacy?”
I. An Unseen End: The Facts and Fictions of Monty’s Death
The circumstances of Monty’s death are communicated to the audience through hearsay and implication, a narrative strategy that intentionally obscures the event itself to emphasize its consequences.
By piecing together the available information, a clear, if incomplete, picture emerges of his final days.
The Official Narrative
At the conclusion of Season 3, Montgomery de la Cruz is arrested and imprisoned for the vicious sexual assault of Tyler Down, a crime he committed at the end of Season 2.2
While awaiting trial in county jail, his reputation precedes him.
Word spreads among the inmate population that he is a “child rapist,” a label stemming from the brutal nature of his attack on his teenage classmate.1
In the violent and hierarchical world of prison, such a crime makes him an immediate and vulnerable target.
The official narrative, as relayed to the other characters and the audience, is that he was killed in his cell by another inmate as a form of vigilante justice.2
The specific identity of his killer is never revealed, dismissed within the show as a “random dude” who heard the rumors about his crime.10
His death occurs just hours before Ani Achola begins weaving the lie that frames him for Bryce Walker’s murder, a coincidence of timing that is almost supernaturally convenient for the protagonists.9
The Foreshadowing of Violence
The show stops short of depicting Monty’s murder, but it does not leave his fate entirely to the imagination.
A chilling scene in the Season 3 finale serves as a direct and grim foreshadowing of what is to come.
During a jail visit, Monty’s father, a man established as the source of his son’s trauma and abuse, offers no comfort or support.
Instead, he delivers a cold, brutal warning, telling Monty that for his crime, he will get “beat to sh*t, at the minimum” in prison.3
This line of dialogue functions as a proxy for the violence itself.
It allows the writers to imply a savage and predictable end for Monty, fulfilling his father’s prophecy without needing to show the graphic details.
The audience is led to surmise that he was beaten to death, a fate that the narrative suggests was both inevitable and, in a dark way, deserved within the brutal logic of the prison system.3
The Deliberate Ambiguity of an Off-Screen Death
The decision to have Monty’s murder occur off-screen is one of the most significant narrative choices in the series.
For a show that had never shied away from depicting graphic and controversial events, including suicide and sexual assault, this conspicuous restraint was immediately notable.9
This ambiguity fueled widespread fan speculation that Monty might not be truly dead and could return in a dramatic twist in the final season.
The theories became so prevalent that showrunner Brian Yorkey publicly addressed them, confirming that Monty, like Bryce, was definitively “gone from this earth” but would continue to influence the story through flashbacks and the memories of other characters.9
The purpose of this narrative choice becomes clear when examined through the lens of its function.
By keeping the killer anonymous and the act itself unseen, the show effectively strips the event of its emotional weight and human tragedy.
The audience is prevented from witnessing Monty’s final moments of terror or pain, a depiction that might have engendered a degree of empathy for him as a victim.
The focus is surgically shifted away from the question of who killed him and why, rendering those details narratively unimportant.3
This directorial decision is the first and most crucial step in Monty’s posthumous dehumanization.
It detaches his death from the character and transforms it into a pure plot mechanism.
He is not a person being murdered; he is a problem being removed from the board and, simultaneously, a solution being created for the protagonists’ dilemma.
This calculated detachment makes it easier for both the characters within the story and the audience watching it to accept his new role: the silent, perfect scapegoat.
II. The Anatomy of a Cover-Up: Framing a Dead Man
Monty’s death in jail becomes the dark cornerstone upon which the protagonists build a fortress of lies to protect themselves.
The conspiracy to frame him for the murder of Bryce Walker is a complex, multi-layered deception involving calculation, corruption, and the collective abandonment of the very principles the group once claimed to champion.
The Real Killer and the True Crime
To understand the frame-up, one must first understand the truth of what happened to Bryce Walker on the night of the Liberty High homecoming game.
His death was not the work of a single individual but the result of a fatal chain of events involving three of his classmates.
The sequence began with Zach Dempsey.
Enraged after Bryce deliberately tackled him during a game-day riot, causing a severe knee injury that destroyed his football future, Zach confronted Bryce at the local pier.11
He proceeded to beat Bryce savagely, breaking both of his legs and one of his arms.
Zach then destroyed Bryce’s phone and left him helpless and immobile on the pier, unable to call for help.11
Sometime later, Jessica Davis and Alex Standall arrived at the pier to meet Bryce, who had asked to speak with Jessica.12
They found him bleeding and gravely injured.
As Alex attempted to help him up, a pained and delirious Bryce began screaming threats, vowing revenge on Zach and accusing Jessica of setting him up.14
In that moment, Alex, who was already in a fragile state and using steroids supplied by Bryce, had a realization: Bryce would never change.
He would only continue to hurt people.
Fueled by a surge of protective rage, Alex told Bryce, “You hurt everyone I ever loved,” and pushed him off the pier into the dark water below.14
With his legs and arm broken, Bryce was unable to swim.
Alex and Jessica watched as he struggled and drowned.9
Thus, while Zach delivered the initial assault, it was Alex Standall who committed the act of murder.
The Architect of the Lie: Ani Achola’s Gambit
The cover-up was masterminded by Ani Achola, a character new to Season 3.
During her police interrogation regarding Bryce’s murder, she was informed by Deputy Bill Standall that Monty de la Cruz had been killed in his jail cell just hours before.2
Recognizing the extraordinary opportunity this presented, Ani seized it.
With Clay Jensen as the primary suspect, Ani concocted an elaborate and false narrative for the police designed to exonerate Clay, protect Alex, and pin the entire crime on the one person who could no longer speak: Monty.2
Her story cleverly weaponized the known facts of Monty’s life.
She built a motive around the public animosity between Monty and Bryce, specifically citing an incident where Bryce threatened to expose Monty for his assault on Tyler.2
Ani presented this as the catalyst for Monty’s supposed murderous rage, creating a plausible, albeit entirely fabricated, reason for him to have killed Bryce.2
This act of narrative invention was not a panicked improvisation but a calculated gambit to close the case and save her friends.
The Corrupt Enabler: Deputy Standall’s Complicity
Ani’s lie would have been baseless speculation without a key accomplice inside the investigation: Deputy Bill Standall, Alex’s father.
Already harboring deep suspicions about his own son’s involvement in Bryce’s death, Deputy Standall was a willing audience for Ani’s story.2
Rather than pursuing the truth, he chose to protect his son.
He accepted Ani’s fabricated narrative as the official version of events, lending it the credibility of law enforcement.9
His complicity went beyond passive acceptance; he became an active conspirator in the cover-up.
In a stunning act of corruption, Deputy Standall located and burned the clothes Alex had been wearing on the night of the murder, deliberately destroying crucial evidence to ensure his son’s freedom.9
His actions represent the total corrosion of the justice system from within, sacrificing legal and moral duty for paternal instinct.
The Collective Guilt
While Ani was the architect and Deputy Standall the enabler, the lie was ultimately a collective effort.
The core group of protagonists—Clay, Justin, Jessica, Zach, and Tony—all became accomplices, either actively or through their silence.9
Zach confessed to his assault on Bryce but faced no jail time because the murder itself was pinned on Monty.11
Jessica, a direct witness to the murder, allowed the lie to stand to protect Alex.
Clay, though tormented by guilt, went along with the plan to save himself from a wrongful conviction and to protect his friends.
This conspiracy marks a profound moral inversion for the group.
The same characters who, in Season 1, pursued a relentless and dangerous quest for truth and justice for Hannah Baker, became the architects of a profound injustice in Season 3.
Their shared trauma bonded them into a tribe where internal loyalty superseded any abstract commitment to morality.
The mission was no longer to expose the truth, but to bury it in order to protect their own.
This complex sequence of events underscores the deliberate and calculated nature of the framing.
It was not a single, panicked decision but a multi-stage conspiracy, making the moral transgression of the protagonists all the more significant.
| Table 1: Chronology of Injustice: From Bryce’s Murder to Monty’s Framing | |||
| Event | Characters Involved | Action/Decision | Narrative Consequence |
| Homecoming Game Riot | Zach Dempsey, Bryce Walker | Bryce intentionally injures Zach’s knee, ending his football prospects.11 | Establishes Zach’s motive for revenge. |
| Assault at the Pier | Zach Dempsey, Bryce Walker | Zach brutally beats Bryce, breaking his legs and arm, and destroys his phone.12 | Bryce is left incapacitated and unable to call for help, setting the stage for the murder. |
| The Murder | Alex Standall, Jessica Davis, Bryce Walker | Alex pushes the injured and threatening Bryce into the river; both Alex and Jessica watch him drown.14 | Bryce Walker is dead. Alex is the murderer, and Jessica is a witness. |
| Monty’s Arrest & Death | Monty de la Cruz, Tyler Down, Unnamed Inmate | Monty is arrested for the sexual assault of Tyler.6 He is subsequently killed in his jail cell by another inmate.1 | Monty is removed as a character and becomes a potential scapegoat. |
| The Conspiracy | Ani Achola, Deputy Standall | Ani learns of Monty’s death and fabricates a story blaming him for Bryce’s murder. Deputy Standall accepts the lie.2 | The official police narrative is established, diverting suspicion from Alex. |
| Destruction of Evidence | Deputy Standall | Deputy Standall burns Alex’s bloody clothes from the night of the murder.9 | Physical evidence linking Alex to the crime is eliminated, solidifying the cover-up. |
| The Lie is Cemented | Clay, Jessica, Justin, Zach, Tony | The entire group tacitly or explicitly agrees to the cover-up to protect Alex and themselves.9 | The protagonists become complicit in a major injustice, setting the central conflict for the final season. |
III. The Ghost in the Machine: Monty’s Alibi and the Unraveling Lie
Just as the protagonists believe they have successfully buried their crime with Monty’s reputation, a single, inconvenient truth emerges, threatening to unravel the entire conspiracy.
This truth is embodied by a new character who holds the key to Monty’s innocence, serving as a ghost of the past come to demand a reckoning.
The Inconvenient Truth: Winston Williams
The lie concocted by Ani was built on the assumption that Monty had no alibi for the night of Bryce’s murder.
This assumption was wrong.
On that very night, Monty was not hunting Bryce; he was engaged in a secret, emotional, and sexual encounter with Winston Williams, a student from the rival school, Hillcrest.2
This encounter, which explored Monty’s vulnerability and his struggle with his identity, provided him with a rock-solid alibi.
He could not have been at the pier killing Bryce because he was with Winston the entire time.2
The core group of conspirators was completely unaware of this fact when they chose him as their scapegoat, a fatal flaw in their otherwise carefully constructed plan.
A Reckoning in the Halls
Winston Williams evolves from a minor character into the primary antagonist of the final season, acting as an agent of the truth they tried to bury.
His quest is personal; he seeks “justice for his dead lover”.9
At the end of Season 3, he confronts Ani, making it clear that he knows her story is a lie.11
In Season 4, he transfers to Liberty High, his very presence in the school’s hallways a constant, living reminder of the group’s crime.
He becomes a ghost haunting their conscience, and his determination to clear Monty’s name fuels the central conflict of the season.
This conflict is visually symbolized by the damning graffiti that appears in the school: “Monty was framed”.9
Through Winston, Monty achieves a form of posthumous agency.
In life, Monty was a character defined by his violent actions and his inability to control his own narrative, trapped by his father’s abuse and his own self-hatred.
In death, however, the one secret, vulnerable part of his life—his relationship with Winston—becomes a powerful force for truth.
A profound irony emerges: the protagonists framed Monty by weaponizing his public reputation as a violent monster, but their lie is threatened by the emergence of his private truth as a closeted and vulnerable young man.
The narrative suggests that a truth, even one belonging to a reviled character, possesses a persistent power that cannot be easily erased by a convenient lie.
IV. A Portrait of the Condemned: The Duality of Monty de la Cruz
To fully grasp the moral complexity of Monty’s death and framing, one must grapple with the profound duality of his character.
He was not simply a villain, nor was he purely a victim.
He was both, and the show’s refusal to present him as one or the other is what makes his story so unsettling and his role in the narrative so potent.
The Monster: An Unforgivable Crime
It is impossible to analyze Monty’s character without first acknowledging the monstrosity of his actions.
In the Season 2 finale, he corners Tyler Down in a bathroom and brutally sexually assaults him with a broom handle.1
The act is depicted as one of pure, sadistic violence, leaving Tyler physically and psychologically shattered—an event so traumatic it nearly leads Tyler to commit a school shooting.
Monty shows no remorse for this crime, which is the primary reason he is arrested and the foundation upon which his villainous reputation is built.
This unforgivable act makes him an unsympathetic figure for many, both within the show’s universe and among its audience, and it is precisely this lack of sympathy that makes his framing so palatable.8
The Victim: The Cycle of Abuse
Juxtaposed with his capacity for cruelty is his status as a victim.
The series gradually reveals that Monty is the target of extreme and prolonged abuse at the hands of his father.
This abuse is both physical—he frequently comes to school with visible bruises and broken bones that are largely ignored by his peers and teachers—and emotional.8
His father is a virulent homophobe, and Monty’s violent, aggressive behavior and his own loud homophobia are presented as direct consequences of this abuse and his deep, internalized self-loathing over being a closeted gay man.7
The show suggests that his violent outbursts, including the horrific assault on Tyler, are a twisted projection of the hatred he feels for himself and the pain inflicted upon him by his father.
He is a character trapped in a vicious cycle of violence: the victim of abuse becomes the perpetrator of it.
The Audience Divided: Redemption vs. Retribution
This duality intentionally created a sharp divide in audience reception.
Many viewers and online commentators argued that Monty, despite his terrible crime, was a product of his trauma and deserved a chance at redemption.8
They pointed to the systemic failures of the adults and institutions around him—the school faculty and law enforcement who ignored the clear signs of his abuse—as contributing factors to his downfall.8
For this segment of the audience, his murder in jail and subsequent framing represented a profound tragedy.
Actor Timothy Granaderos himself expressed hope that the exploration of Monty’s vulnerabilities would “humanize him” in the eyes of viewers.5
Conversely, another segment of the audience argued that his crime against Tyler was so heinous that it placed him beyond redemption.8
For them, any attempt to humanize Monty was a misguided effort to generate sympathy for a monster, and his fate in prison was a form of deserved retribution.
This debate highlights the central moral challenge posed by his character: can a person who has committed an unforgivable act still be worthy of empathy or justice?
Monty’s story serves as a tragic critique of how society often deals with its most damaged individuals.
His character arc demonstrates how monsters are often made, not born, forged in cycles of abuse, neglect, and systemic indifference.
When the protagonists frame him, they are not breaking this cycle; they are perpetuating it.
They use his death and his reputation to cleanse themselves of their own sin, projecting all guilt onto the community’s most broken and reviled member.
In doing so, they engage in the ultimate act of societal scapegoating, sacrificing a damaged individual for the illusion of collective peace and order.
Conclusion: The Weight of a Lie and the Definition of Justice
In the final analysis, the identity of the inmate who literally killed Monty de la Cruz is, by the show’s own design, the least important detail of his story.
The narrative deliberately makes his killer an anonymous figure to force a more challenging and uncomfortable inquiry.
Monty was not killed by a single person but by a confluence of destructive forces.
He was killed by his father’s fists and his homophobic rage.
He was killed by the systemic indifference of a school that saw his bruises but looked away.
He was killed by the predictable and brutal violence of a prison system that his own father foresaw.
And finally, his legacy was killed by the very people who called themselves heroes, the friends who sacrificed his name for their own salvation.
The framing of Montgomery de la Cruz stands as the series’ most cynical and complicated statement on the nature of justice.
It reveals that in the world of 13 Reasons Why, a world saturated with trauma, justice is not a fixed, noble ideal but a dangerously malleable concept, one that can be twisted and reshaped by desperation, loyalty, and fear.
The protagonists, led by a guilt-ridden Clay Jensen, choose to protect their own flawed, violent member, Alex, at the expense of another.
They decide that one life is worth more than another’s name, and that one crime can be erased by pinning it on a dead man who committed a different one.
The series leaves its audience in a place of profound moral ambiguity.
There is no clean resolution, no righteous victory.
There is only the heavy, corrosive weight of a lie.
The peace the characters achieve at the end of Season 3 is a fragile illusion, built upon the foundation of a profound injustice.
The story of who killed Monty de la Cruz is ultimately a cautionary tale about the true cost of such lies, posing a final, haunting question: Can a peace built on the desecration of truth ever be real, and who ultimately pays the price when the dead are forced to carry the sins of the living?
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