The Serial Killers of General Hospital
Port Charles has had a serial killer loose in almost every decade since 1985, and a couple of them were vampires. For Halloween week, Shannon and Amanda go through every one of them in order, with a body count for each. They set a few rules first. Mob bosses don’t count, because for them killing is business. Anyone in a gray area got cut. The vampires stayed.
The Laurelton Murderer (1985 to 1986), also known as the Brownstone Murders
In December 1985, Terry Brock, Bobbie Spencer’s stepdaughter, was found at the bottom of the stairs in the brownstone next to a dead man. Neil Johnson had been stabbed. Terry had been sleepwalking, couldn’t remember what happened, and honestly wasn’t sure she hadn’t done it. Nobody in Port Charles knew Neil. He came from Laurelton, the small town where Terry grew up with her grandmother, Jennifer Talbot, and he was a cousin of two brothers from there, Kevin and Patrick O’Connor. Terry had history in Laurelton too. Three years earlier, she drank spiked punch at a Valentine’s Day dance and walked down Main Street naked, and the town ran her off.
Earl Moody was strangled next. He owned a big chunk of stock in Purity Water, a bottled water company that was the family fortune and had Terry as its face. His shares went to Patrick. Then Frisco Jones found Jennifer Talbot’s body during a police academy training exercise. Her will left Kevin half her estate, which put Anna Devane on his trail, and Lucy Coe, a mousy librarian back then, gave him an alibi with one eye on the inheritance. Terry got married anyway. The honeymoon on Catalina Island ended with her hanging onto a piece of rebar on the side of a cliff. Amanda thinks these should be called the Purity Water Murders instead.
Ryan Chamberlain (1992 to 1995, 2018 to 2023)
Ryan and Kevin Collins are identical twins. Their mother abused Ryan, and when their father, Victor, left, he took Kevin and left Ryan behind. At eight years old, Ryan stabbed his father’s mistress, Marsha Cooper, to death. He came to Port Charles in June 1992 as a pediatrician at General Hospital. Felicia had already watched him kill his wife in Texas, where he went by Todd Wilson, but she came home with amnesia and didn’t recognize him. He bombed her wedding to Mac Scorpio, killed his counselor Connie Cooper, and kidnapped little Georgie before everyone thought he died in a fun house explosion in 1995.
In 2018, it came out that Kevin had been keeping him alive at Ferncliff. Ryan locked Kevin up in his place and lived as him for more than six months, pushing Laura away so she’d stop asking questions. That fall, a Ferncliff nurse named Mary Pat Ingles tried to extort him, and her head ended up in a barrel of apples at a Halloween party. Kiki Jerome was found dead on Curtis and Jordan’s wedding night. Ryan stabbed Lulu and used hypnosis to make her think Franco did it, and he left Carly locked in his trunk in a ravine. He lost a hand at Niagara Falls and still came back, and later donated a kidney to Jordan from prison. His last stand came at Wyndemere in 2023, at the same moment his daughter was giving birth. Ryan is credited with 17 kills.
The General Homicide Killer (1997 to 1998, 1999, 2000)
This one played out on Port Charles, the spinoff that started in June 1997 around a class of seven interns at General Hospital. It started with a mystery novel called General Homicide, launched with a publicity stunt that faked a shooting in the GH lobby. Everyone at the hospital was reading it. Audrey noticed the characters looked a lot like Tony Jones, Steve Hardy, and Lucy, and Lucy was furious to find out she was the one with the pet goose. Kevin Collins wrote it, and the press loved that a man whose brother was a serial killer had written about one.
Then people started dying the way the characters died in the book. Dr. Bennett Devlin was found dead in the hospital lab after an argument with his daughter Julie, an intern who went by Morris so
nobody would know whose kid she was. Nurse Grace Sullivan was strangled with her own stethoscope during a circus performance at the hospital. In the book, Lucy’s character dies at the Nurses Ball. At the real Nurses Ball, intern Jake Marshak was found hanging from the rafters with a suicide note. Then the elevator doors opened at a party on Kevin holding Dr. Cassandra May’s body. She had been poisoned with cyanide, just like her character. On Halloween night, John Kanelos was killed with a sword in a death that wasn’t in the book, and in November a bomb went off in the hospital elevator shaft. Five people died.
Stephen Clay, Vampire Caleb Morley (2001 to 2003, 2013)
In its last couple of years, Port Charles went supernatural. Michael Easton came on in May 2001 as Father Michael Morley, a priest, and by June viewers met Caleb, a vampire from an old Transylvanian bloodline. For a while, people thought they were twins. They turned out to be the same man. Caleb had killed his fiancée, Olivia, when she left him, then found Livvie Locke, Kevin Collins’ daughter, played by Kelly Monaco, who looked just like her. He turned Jack Ramsey, Gabriela Garza, and Elizabeth Barrington into vampires and killed Rafe Kovich, a vampire slayer. Caleb died twice, once by lightning and once by a stake through the heart, and came back in October 2002 as a rock star named Stephen Clay.
Ten years later, he showed up on General Hospital, where Easton was playing John McBain. Lucy got them mixed up and stabbed McBain. Alison Barrington was killed on January 31, 2013, and her son Rafe Jr. was found leaning over her body holding a bloody spear. Caleb went through Port Charles fast after that. He kidnapped Sam and Danny and bit Sam three times, which he said would bring back her memory. Caleb is credited with 11 kills.
Joshua Temple, The Vampire King (2002 to 2003)
Joshua, played by Ian Buchanan, was hired to protect Caleb and ran the business side of Stephen Clay’s music career. He was human, with a few supernatural powers, and he wanted to be a vampire more than anything. Caleb refused to make him one. Joshua posed as a prince to get onto Malcolm Barrington’s yacht and killed him on board. Later, he drugged Elizabeth Barrington and went after her daughter Alison, and Elizabeth fought off the drugs and sank her fangs into his neck. He came back a vampire and thanked her for it, then started building a vampire nation of his own. He has one confirmed kill and a long list of attempts, and he stayed in because Shannon liked the story. Amanda’s takeaway: bite more responsibly.
Masked Killer at Quartermaine Mansion (2004)
A few months after Lila Quartermaine died, Edward was convinced she was still in the house, and Heather Webber claimed she could channel her. During a thunderstorm on August 23, 2004, Brook Lynn, Dillon, Georgie, Lucas, Sage Alcazar, and Sage’s friend Trent Parker held a séance with a Ouija board. The board warned that someone would die that night. Some of it was a prank, including Lila’s wheelchair rolling down the stairs. Sage had been feuding with Georgie over Dillon, so Georgie locked her in the basement freezer. When they went down to let her out, Sage was dead. She hadn’t frozen. She’d been stabbed. Next, the board spelled out EMILY WARN, someone tore up a photo of Emily and Nikolas, and Trent stumbled into a room with a gardening claw in his back. Mac’s bloody police badge turned up on the front step. The answer goes back to a car accident that left Nikolas with no memory earlier that year.
The Text Message Killer (2007 to 2008)
In September 2007, someone started luring people out with text messages and strangling them. Leticia Juarez, Carly’s nanny, was the first victim after she saw a masked man at Carly’s house. Anthony Zacchara was the first suspect, until Carly started getting texts from the killer and suspicion moved to his son, Johnny. Carly agreed to meet the killer at the Black and White Ball at Wyndemere, which is where next week’s episode picks up.
Georgie started to suspect Maxie’s boyfriend, Cooper Barrett, and asked Spinelli to look into him. Maxie was attacked in December and survived. A few weeks later, Georgie answered a text that was meant for Maxie and went to Rice Park, where Spinelli found her. DNA under her fingernails matched Cooper, and in January 2008 he was found hanged. It looked like he had killed himself out of guilt.
Maxie never believed it. She was sure Cooper had been framed, and she teamed up with Spinelli to clear his name and find the real killer. She was right. The texts didn’t stop, and in February Sam was attacked and ran into the street, where she was hit by a car. The Text Message Killer had four kills, and Cooper was one of them.
Franco Baldwin (2009 to 2013)
Franco was an artist whose canvas is murder. He was obsessed with Jason Morgan, sent him threats and “art,” and promised to kill one person for every person Jason had killed. His calling card was the tag CO77X, a file number from an old arrest. His first murder was Joey Limbo, who was lying on the ground after a mob shootout when Franco crushed his windpipe with his foot. He went after the women in Jason’s life, locking Sam in a soundproof room and leaving Lulu in a warehouse with a bomb under her chair. On July 21, 2010, he took Elizabeth’s newborn son Aiden from the hospital and handed him to Betsy Frank, the woman who raised Franco. Two days later, he opened an art show called Francophrenia, built as a trap for Jason.
When he came back in 2013 with Roger Howarth in the role, doctors found a brain tumor that had been changing his personality for years. Franco has at least six kills.
The Angel of Mercy Killer (2015 to 2016)
In the spring of 2016, patients at General Hospital started dying after being injected with Derisifol, a muscle relaxant. Owen Ellis, Sandra Jenkins, Dr. Matthew Mayes, and Julie Prescott all died between May and July, and the PCPD had no suspect. Valerie Spencer, a young cop helping
Detective Nathan West, found a cufflink in Finn’s lab on August 18 before someone knocked her out and took it back. During a power outage, Elizabeth was pushed down a flight of stairs by someone in white latex gloves. Ava figured out who it was and used it for blackmail instead of going to the police. In September, Sabrina Santiago found Monica unconscious with an injection mark in her neck, went for help, and a surgical glove fell out of the wrong person’s pocket. The first kill came months before any patient died.
The Hook (2022 to 2024)
In late August 2022, Ava was stabbed at the Quartermaine picnic with a hook from the boathouse. Brando Corbin was stabbed in September and seemed to be recovering until he started coughing up blood. The hook had been laced with poison. Diane survived an attack and told police the Hook was a woman, and Robert pointed out that every victim had a connection to Sonny. Oz Haggerty was killed on the docks right after signing an immunity deal. Nikolas fought off an attack at Wyndemere and recognized the hook as one from his own boathouse. Rory Cabrera tracked the killer to an apartment, went in alone, and died after one last goodbye with Trina. On New Year’s Eve, Britt Westbourne stopped an attack on Josslyn and got scratched, then died in Liesl’s arms on the Haunted Star. The mask came off on January 3, 2023, and Amanda is still not happy with who was under it.
Cyrus Renault (2020 to 2025)
Cyrus spent most of his time on the show as a drug lord. He’s Laura’s half brother, and in November 2020 he set off the bomb at the Floating Rib that killed Dev Cerci and Dustin Phillips and put Lulu in a coma for four years. He went to prison, said he found God, and got out early. In August 2024, Laura found him at the hospital reading the Bible to Lulu. That fall, Sam McCall donated part of her liver to Lulu, Lulu woke up, and Sam died of a digitalis overdose nobody had prescribed. Dex Heller was stabbed during the bell ringing at Rice Plaza and later died in his hospital room. Shannon and Amanda go back and forth on whether Cyrus counts as a serial killer at all.
(Dis)Honorable Mention: Cesar Faison
Faison shows up on other serial killer lists, and he’s one of the biggest villains General Hospital ever had. He doesn’t make this one. He killed for spy games, schemes, and his obsession with Anna, which puts him closer to Sonny and Jason than to Ryan or Heather.
The episode sets up next week’s Port Charles 411 on the Black and White Ball.
Join us Monday for this week’s recap.
We’ll meet you at the pier.
Sources
#GeneralHospital #GeneralHospitalPodcast #PortCharles411 #TerryBrock #BobbieSpencer #SerialKillers #RyanChamberlain #CyrusRenault #PaulHornsby #TextMessageKiller #AngelofMercy #HookKiller #HeatherWebber #FrancoBaldwin #JamesFranco #CalebMorely #JoshuaTemple #Vampires #PortCharles #MichaelEaston #CesarFaison #EmilyQuartermaine #GeorgieJones #KevinCollins #TracyQuartermaine
Comments