Tim Spencer

Anthony Geary as Tim Spencer

**Timothy "Tim" Spencer** is a fictional character on the ABC soap opera *General Hospital*. He was the father of legendary characters: the late Pat, Luke and Bobbie Spencer.

He was portrayed by Anthony Geary in a flashback episode on April 1, 2015 and also on July 23, 2015 when he appeared as a ghost to Luke.

## Background

Tim Spencer was the father of Pat, Luke and Bobbie Spencer. An Irish Catholic man, Tim was a dock worker and an alcoholic who beat his wife Lena and children. His attitude was very bigoted, racist, sexist, and intolerant of anything that went against societal norms (like girls wearing pants or his son losing a baseball game, or working with Italian and Japanese people on the docks). He was also a very, proud, arrogant man; and boasted about fighting in the World War, when he only fought in the Korean War.

He would beat his wife and children daily, cared more about his car and his alcohol than his family, and was ready to leave them with the state when Lena died. Despite his ill treatment of his wife, Tim was devastated and beside himself when he found out she died. His memory is painfully carried in infamy by his children.

The way Luke and Bobbie remembered it in 1960, Lena was thought to have been suffering from appendicitis and that Tim watched as she lay on the floor dying. Eventually, he told Luke to call for an ambulance, but it was too late. Then Tim was thought to have up and left Port Charles. It had been said that Lila Quartermaine was planning to adopt Luke and Bobbie before they went to live with Tim's sister, Ruby Anderson, in Jacksonville, Florida.

In 2015, Pat was later found to be in a convalescent home suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, whose knowledge of that night would explain the split in Luke's mind in 2013. Pat was determined to go back to Port Charles with Lulu Tracy and Bobbie to help her little brother, even if she had to hitchhike. She first told her family the truth about what really happened that night:

On April 1, 2015, it is finally determined what really happened to Tim and Lena; what was mentioned earlier about Tim abandoning the family was revealed to have been a lie. While Pat was at the hospital with her mother being checked out by Dr. Phil Brewer and Dr. Steve Hardy, Tim had received a call from the hospital that Lena was dead. Luke and Tim got in a fight where Tim called Luke out on him being a monster, he said to Luke that he and his son are exactly the same. He was about to leave and let the State handle his three children. Tim blasted angrily at Luke who was holding the baseball bat that hit Lena by mistake, provoked Luke and was bludgeoned to death.

Pat had been taken to the house later by their cousin Bill Eckert, Luke's look-a-like (whose father, Fred was notified by Dr. Hardy about Lena's death) only to find a shattered Luke and a dead Tim. Tim's body was buried behind the basement wall of the house by Bill and Pat, and the latter had signed the house over to Bill. Pat then sold Tim's car and used the money to go to Philadelphia, while Luke and Bobbie were sent to live with Ruby (Pat didn't know that her aunt ran a brothel, which devastated her when Luke and Bobbie told her).

The fact that Luke and Tim looked the same and Luke's fear of becoming like him have haunted Luke for decades, and is partially responsible for Luke's evil side manifesting. Evil Luke (or as he was known at the time, "Fluke") would later kidnap "himself" and keep him captive in that basement (and would wave around the baseball bat that Tim and Lena were killed with) projecting the part of his psyche that was the real Luke onto what was really Bill Eckert's decayed corpse. What had gotten the outside world's attention to the saga of Tim Spencer was because the house that Tim's corpse was buried in, where he had caused so much pain, was going to be turned into the A.J. Quartermaine memorial Clinic, in honor of his great-grandson Michael's biological father.

On July 23, Tim appeared as a ghost to Luke and tried to goad his son to go ahead and kill himself and join him in hell.

## Crimes Committed

* Physically abused his wife and children
* Slapped his daughter, Pat and threatened her with more force [Apr 1, 1963; revealed Apr 1, 2015]

## Health and Vitals

* Murdered by his son, Luke Spencer, when he hit him in the head with a baseball bat [Apr 1, 1963; revealed Apr 1, 2015]

## References

1. ↑ On the episode aired January 30, 1995, Luke told Sonny (to the best of his recollection of that night) that he last saw his father when his mother died. At the time, Luke said he was seven years old and Bobbie was three (his memory was spotty of that night from the trauma) In 1996, Bobbie was revealed to be 16 year old when she gave birth to Carly in 1973. This would establish Luke and Bobbie's birth years as 1953 and 1957 respectively.