This Sunday, at the same time as Breaking Bad, the Emmys, and Sunday Night Football, Showtime’s Dexter will come to an unceremonious end, a weak shell of its former solid self. If it had set itself up to run for four seasons and four seasons only, it could’ve been one of the greats. Instead, Dexter‘s treadmilling legacy will be a show with more awful seasons, including a disastrous season eight, than good-to-great ones.
But there’s one thing you could always count on while watching Dexter: blood. Lots and lots blood. Leaving aside the issue of whether Dexter Morgan should be hailed as hero or not (he shouldn’t), few shows have had as high a body count as Dexter, so today, with the finale only a few days away, let’s take a look at Dexter‘s 10 most successful antagonists, based on their number of victims. It’s fun to remember the good ol’ days, and one guy in particular.
Name: A.J. Yates
Number of Kills: 6
Bizarro Zachary Quinto was one of season eight’s 72,048 antagonists, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already wiped him from your memory, like a blood drip on the Slice of Life. To recap: he’s not the backup quarterback for the Houston Texans but he IS a former patient of Dr. Evelyn Vogel who works as an electronics technician and, more importantly to Dexter, kidnaps women and breaks each of their toes before stabbing them to death. Why? Because his mommy was mean to him, that’s why, which also sums up approximately 89% of Dexter’s foes over the years. Anyway, Yates has murdered at least six females, and nearly added Debra to his kill column before Dexter speared him with a curtain hanger while he was hiding under the bed. Yeah. Season eight is miserable.
Name: Gene Marshall
Number of Kills: 7
Gene Marshall is one of Dexter’s earliest victims, dating back to 2002 BBS, i.e. Before Blood Slides. His story is expanded in the occasionally entertaining “Dexter Early Cuts” series, but on the show, we only meet him in a flashback, as Dexter’s throwing his blood slides into the ocean while the police are investigating the Ice Truck Killer. If you consider the “Early Cuts” canon, then Marshall’s crime was setting fire to apartment buildings with their residents still inside, mortally charring (my favorite Gwar song) at least seven strangers in the process. He also worked as a real estate developer, proving my theory that all real estate developers are secretly psychopaths.
Name: Little Chino
Number of Kills: 10
F*CK YEAH LITTLE CHINO. One of Dexter‘s most memorable villains is also one of its most gigantic. The actor who played the 6’8″ brute is Matt Willig, a former offensive lineman who won a Super Bowl ring with the Rams in 2000 and played for my Carolina Panthers. He was good enough to stay in the league for 12 years, but not so good as to stay on any of his six teams for longer than three seasons, and now he’s going to destroy me for that backhanded compliment. Anyway, on Dexter, Little Chino was a member of the Twenty-Ninth Street Kings and his passion project was hacking people to death with machetes, a common weapon in Dexterland. We know of at least 10 of his human hackings, to say nothing of all his web hackings, which is the hacky beginning to a hacky premise of an even hackier joke. Dexter eventually kills Little Chino with his own machete, but a more befitting death would have been for Dex to induce a, to paraphrase Billy Joel, heart-ahack-hack-hack-hack.
Name: Boyd Fowler
Number of Kills: 12
Boyd Crowder’s red trash brother, Boyd Fowler, was a part-time dead-animal-picker-upper for the Department of Sanitation and full-time member of Jordan Chase’s The Group, a collection of slimeball rapists and murderers (as opposed to non-slimeball rapists and murderers). The Dexter Wiki describes Boyd as a “man in his early 30s, with an iconic mustache,” which, no, though it does accurately explain his role in The Group: “His house acts as a holding cell for their captives, where The Group can rape, torture, and kill them in secure privacy.” He “took care” of 12 “problems,” through the use of formaldehyde and electricity, before dumping their corpses into a swamp in a barrel. Dexter kills Boyd with a knife, as is his wont, under the previously-unseen watching eye of Lumen Pierce.
Name: Jordan Chase
Number of Kills: 13
Oh hey Sherlock. Jordan Chase was a brilliant idea — a murdering motivational speaker — with terrible execution. Which is also how I’d describe the last four seasons of Dexter. Anyway, we already discussed Chase’s role in The Group and technically, he only slayed one person (Emily Birch, who’s killed in the solarium with the fireplace poker by Mr. Mustard) but his fingerprints are all over the aforementioned dirty dead dozen, in every sense but literally. His primal self eventually leads to his downfall, courtesy of Lumen’s shaky hands and Dexter’s shakier guidance.
Name: Travis Marshall
Number of Kills: 13
NOPE. Travis Marshall was one of the worst things to happen to Dexter, right up there with Prado not turning Dexter in, LaGuerta and Angel’s relationship, and the existence of Quinn. Even seeing his name fills me with rage, and then I start laughing because I remember how surprised we, the viewers, were supposed to be when we saw Professor Gellar’s frozen body. I won’t bother explaining Travis Marshall’s crimes, other than to say he killed somewhere between 13 and 15 people, based off the teachings of the Tableau or some crap, and I feel bad for the real-life real estate agent named Travis Marshall who Google believes is the second most important Travis Marshall. Or at least I would, were it not for my previously mentioned feelings on real estate monsters.
Name: Brian Moser
Number of Kills: 15
A.k.a. Rudy Cooper, a.k.a. the Ice Truck Killer, a.k.a. Biney, a.k.a. Dexter’s biological brother, a.k.a. Deb’s boyfriend, a.k.a. the first serial killer on Dexter other than the titular character, a.k.a. a guy who got his rocks off by strapping people to tables, flipping them upside down, and cutting their throats, to let the blood drain out of their body, a.k.a. he really could’ve used a Ghost Harry of his own. Brian tried to convince Dexter that he was the only who understood him, that Debra needed to go because she’s One of Them, not One of Us, that together they could rule the galaxy as BRO and BRAH, but he failed, and Dexter ended his life before he could kill any more helpless old ladies.
Name: Walter Kenney
Number of Kills: 16
The Tooth Fairy Killer was once one of Dexter’s idols — he was a ruthless, brutal killer of prostitutes who was never caught by the authorities, even after he dumped a victim on a sheriff’s lawn. Then Dexter actually met the Tooth Fairy, Walter Kenney, and like a child who doesn’t get an autograph from his favorite athlete, the adoration faded. He was a grumpy drunk in his 70s who tried to get his mojo back by killing his 16th lady of the night and removing her lateral incisor. He does, but the work is extremely sloppy, and Dexter takes pity on the old poop. Not enough to not kill Kenney, but rather than his usual method, he instead suffocates him with a pillow, to make it seem like he died of a heart attack, to keep secret the Tooth Fairy Killer’s identity.
Name: Oleg Mickic
Number of Kills: 16
Another season eighter. We know very little about Oleg, other than he’s a marksman for the Koshka Brotherhood. Dexter kills him in the middle of the day, at a very public golf range, because f*ck this season.
Name: Arthur Mitchell
Number of Kills: 267
To anyone who thinks Arthur “The Trinity Killer” Mitchell isn’t Dexter‘s single greatest villain:
That could be 28 minutes long, and I’d never tire of it.
