Brian Cranston says a summer waitressing job in Florida in the mid-1970s briefly put him on the edges of a murder case that would not be solved for months. He and his brother Kyle had stopped at the Hawaiian Inn, where they worked as waiters under head chef Peter Wong before leaving on motorcycles for Maine.

By Cranston’s telling, Wong was “awful,” and the staff spent their breaks talking about how they could get rid of him. He said on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast in 2024 that there was “no chance of anyone getting on Wong’s good side,” a line that captured just how badly the chef got along with the people working around him.

What happened next was much darker. Roughly a week or two after the Cranstons moved on, Wong’s body was found in the trunk of a car. Investigators later said he had been hit over the head with a board during a robbery. When homicide detectives began asking people at the Hawaiian Inn whether anyone had talked about hurting Wong, the Cranstons came up immediately.

That was enough to trigger an all-points bulletin while the brothers were still making their way through the Carolinas. The alert put them inside a murder investigation they had no part in, even as police kept working the case from the other end. Witnesses and surveillance footage eventually pointed detectives to the real killers, and they pieced together the crime before the Cranston brothers were tracked down.

The actual case ended with Billy Wayne Waughtel pleading guilty to killing Wong with the help of two accomplices. Waughtel later was murdered in prison while serving his sentence. Cranston’s account fits a grim irony: he and Kyle were joking about getting rid of a difficult boss, and within days they were being looked at in a homicide inquiry that belonged to someone else. In the end, police found the men who did it, and the Cranstons were cleared by the investigation before it caught up with them.

For Cranston, the story is less about celebrity nostalgia than about a roadside detour into a murder case that turned out to be real, violent and wholly unrelated to him. His answer to the memory, after all these years, was plain: “Get some help.”