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“ | Sit down, Mom. We have something to celebrate. | „ |
~ Marc Clifford preparing to kill his mother, Cora. |
Marc Clifford is the main antagonist of the Criminal Minds episode "A Place at the Table". He is a mass murderer who kills an entire family after learning that the family's patriarch is his biological father.
He was portrayed by Grant Harvey.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Marc is the result of an affair between a married man, Frank Kingman, and his mistress Cora Gilliam. In order to keep Cora from revealing the affair to his wife, Donna, Kingman secretly supported Cora and their son financially. Cora did not want her son to grow up feeling unwanted, so she told Marc that his father was Frank Powers, a veteran of the first Gulf War who had been killed in action before he was born. She even gave her son the last name Powers and set the dinner table for three every night to honor the fictional dead war hero she wanted him to believe his father was. Meanwhile, Kingman and Cora continued their affair for years, until Marc was in his early 20s, but he did not know that Marc was his son.
When Kingman stopped giving Cora money and Marc started looking into his mother's finances, he deduced that Kingman was his real father. He decided to get revenge on the entire Kingman family, as well as his mother for lying to him.
Posing as "Marc Clifford", he started dating Jenna Kingman, Frank's daughter, who was unaware that he was her half-brother. He told her he wanted to wait until they got married to have sex, but frequently cheated on her, until Jenna's brother (and Marc's half-brother) Dylan found out about his infidelity and threatened to tell Jenna unless he stopped. Kingman, meanwhile, realized his true relationship to Marc after Jenna introduced him as her boyfriend; horrified, he finally ended his affair with Cora and forbade Jenna to see Marc anymore.
"A Place at the Table"[]
To spite his father, from whom he is estranged, Dylan invites Clifford to a family dinner, giving Clifford the chance to enact his revenge. When Kingman sees him in his house, he loses his temper and orders him to leave, but Clifford pistol-whips him and then ties him, his wife Donna, his son Lance and Lance's boyfriend Ezra Warren, Donna's mother Clara, and Jenna to their chairs. He shot and killed Jenna, Lance, and Clara, and strangled Donna, pretending that she is Cora, the person he hates most of all.
He sets up the crime scene to look like a holiday family dinner, complete with Christmas decorations and a record of "Jingle Bells", with the unconscious Kingman seated at the head of the table. When Kingman regains consciousness, Clifford lets him suffer for a few minutes as he realizes that his entire family is dead, and then shoots him in the head. The only survivor is Ezra, who had passed out drunk in an upstairs bedroom and was unaware the murders had even happened until waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling upon the massacre.
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) investigates the murders, and questions Clifford, who claims to have been at work when the murders occurred. After Technical Analyst Penelope Garcia discovers Kingman's payments to Cora, the other agents deduce their affair and bring her in for questioning, briefly suspecting her of the murders. They are forced to let her go for lack of evidence, however, so she goes home - to find Clifford waiting for her with a gun. He forces her to sit at the table beside Kingman's dead body, and is about to kill when the BAU bursts in, having deduced his guilt and true identity after going over all the evidence. Marc surrenders, telling Cora that he already killed her.
Trivia[]
- Clifford is inspired primarily by real life family annihilator George Geschwendt, who held a grudge against a family for harassing him and retaliated by breaking into their house and shooting them all, sharing a similar cleanup M.O. too.
- Clifford's birth from an affair is similar to an affair of Austrian-American actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with a housekeeper of his home, with whom he sired a daughter and supported financially.
External Links[]
- Marc Clifford on the Criminal Minds Wiki