Samantha Spade

Samantha is a Special Agent in the New York City FBI missing persons case squad led by Special Agent Jack Malone. Little is known about her past. She was raised in an economically disadvantaged, troubled home in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin and as a result is particularly empathetic to kids in troubled situations. She was unhappy as a teenager and tried to run away when she was sixteen, but was stopped by her mother and a policeman. For a short time while she was eighteen, Sam was married, but the marriage didn’t last long.

Before she came to the FBI , Samantha was a New York City police officer. Sometime after she joined the missing persons squad, she had an affair with her then-married boss Jack, and still feels partially responsible for his divorce from his wife. She has also dated NYPD officer Eric Keller and a man named Dr. Fred, and had an inter-office romance with fellow agent Martin Fitzgerald.

Samantha was once held hostage with several other people after a ransom drop went bad, and was subsequently shot in the leg with her own gun. The man holding her hostage refused to let her go until Jack exchanged himself for her. After Sam returned to active duty, she was forced to shoot and kill two suspects and was sent into therapy. While she first believed the therapy was pointless, she eventually stopped fighting it and soon came to realize that her job was all she had.

Since Martin Fitzgerald joined the squad, he’d had an eye on Samantha, and she knew it. After Jack told the team he was going to relocate to Chicago to be with his wife and kids (she divorced him before the move), Sam gave in and asked Martin out for a drink, thus beginning their relationship. It is likely she only started a relationship with Martin to help herself get over Jack. Nonetheless, she and Martin stayed together for a while, at first hiding their relationship from the rest of the office because Samantha didn’t want to be seen as someone who got around. However, Martin soon grew tired of hiding and eventually broke up with Sam.

Sam once went undercover after one missing woman led the team to a series of women who had disappeared after going to work for a suspected drug trafficker. A few days after she went undercover, Sam was found out when she performed a police move on a man who was harassing her friend, and she was severely beaten by the thugs before her team was able to find her and save her.

Samantha was visibly shaken after Martin was shot and critically wounded, and, after a while of avoiding his bedside, finally came to him in the hospital and shared her feelings with him, though he was unconscious. Later, after he became addicted to prescription pain pills, Samantha was key in leading him to get help. She also takes extreme measures when Jack goes missing to find him, and her actions suggest she has some feelings left over for both men.