Philip Martin

*"You don't dive into business... you wade into it head first." - Philip Martin*

**Philip Martin** is the affable and easy-going owner of BloMart Medical Company, a medical research company based in Albany, New York. A widower, he has two sons named Donald and Harvey Martin.

Philip is a native of Beacon in Dutchess County, New York, where he was born and raised. His family was very wealthy, with family members who were doctors, lawyers, judges and politicians. His own father was a well-to-do lawyer in Albany, and his mother was a known hostess in social circles, who both died overseas in a plane crash off the coast of France. An only child, Philip was taken in by his Uncle Paul and Aunt Marcie. Paul Martin was one of the owners of Blomart Medical Company with Jack Bloomingdale in the 1930s.

Originally pursuing an acting career with a minor in business, Philip joined his uncle at BloMart as his assistant in the early Sixties after Bloomingdale was tried for insider training. To keep the company from being seized by the government, Bloomingdale sold his shares in the company to Paul Martin. Meanwhile, while in college, Philip met and dated Angelique Harridge in college, who he later married, having two sons.
Martin quickly got used to the pharmaceutical business as a salesman and assistant, usually making deals over golf and on fishing trips in Albany. He often traveled north often on business and often stayed at the Winchester Hotel near Winchester, New York where he became entranced by Monica Winchester, the daughter of Gage Winchester, the hotel owner. After his wife passed in 1958, his interest in Monica became more romantic, but his interest in her was rivaled by Carter Hedison, who also sought her as a love interest. Carter's company, Hedison Pharmaceuticals, was also a rival with Blomart for a government contract with the military, but while Martin was securing the contract, Carter romanced and later married Monica, having two children.

Over the years, Blomart embraced a recurring typo in the press and changed its name to Biomart. Philip also replaced his uncle as owner of the company after his uncle passed away in 1975. However, in 1986, Carter Hedison was surreptitiously buying up stock in the company through Alliance Industries to attempt a hostile takeover. By this point, however, Monica and Carter's relationship were separated and planning a divorce. He restarted his relationship with her and learned through her that Carter owned Alliance Industries buying up his company's stocks. He froze further sales of the stocks in he company and started talking to a lawyer to impede Carter.

To avoid court, Carter hired Dash Andrews, a former detective, to find a way to deter the investigation into the lawsuit. Andrews investigated both Bloomingdale's insider trading case and the death of Angelique Martin trying to implicate Philip Martin in a separate lawsuit to distract him. This revelation not only alerted Philip to the corrupt nature of Carter's personality but also offended Monica who demanded Carter to sign their divorce papers or else she'd go to the police. Carter in turn once more returned to Andrews once more to deter the resulting implications. Working on his own, Andrews headed to the Ashford Arms Hotel to contend with Martin. In the darkened room, he shot Monica with a silencer thinking she was Martin and then murdered Philip trying to defend her, later staging the scene as a murder-suicide. Hearing the news of the murders, Carter was shocked at how far Andrews had gone, and quit hiring him for jobs.

Since their father's ill-fated murder, both Donald and Harvey Martin inherited his position in the company and launched an investigation into the unanswered questions in the case. They also updated the name of the company from "Biomart" to "Biomark." Both of Monica's children, Blake Hedison and Rachel Hedison largely accepted the general fate of their mother's death, but Rachel always suspected her father had more of a part in it. In 1995, she acquired Dash Andrews's diary confessing to the murders from his son, William Samuelson, and sent a copy of it to Diana Freeling, a former Ashford Falls reporter now working as a TV news reporter in Albany, finally bringing charges against her father in the over ten year old case.