As sinfulness goes, you don’t get much worse than Helena Cassadine. Years before he ever came to Port Charles, Peter teamed up with Port Charles’ Wicked Witch to kidnap Jason and Drew. This diabolical duo kicked off the whole twin/conditioning/mind-swap/Patient 6/replacement/assassination debacle that took Jason away from us for five years and is still confusing us to this day.
Nathan’s death wasn’t technically Peter’s doing… but he wasn’t exactly broken up about it, either. Peter (and Lulu, admittedly) published an article with the big reveal that Nathan was Faison’s son. They wanted to lure the criminal mastermind out of hiding and, well, it worked. When Faison reared his head, he took Maxie hostage and shot Nathan while the dashing cop tried to save her. Peter, we learned afterwards, was also Faison’s son. He gleefully informed his dastardly dad that he’d outmaneuvered him — and that Cesar had killed the wrong son! Eh, what’s a brother compared to revenge?
While his culpability in Nathan’s death may have been a gray area (Maxie seemed to have no problem forgiving him and shacking up once her hubby was gone), for Obrecht at least, it was black-and-white. Peter killed her son. So Peter would pay. OK, OK, the grieving doc kidnapping Peter, holding him hostage and torturing him for weeks is not one of August’s misdeeds. But it did pretty much kick off their little game of tit for tat, so we’re throwing it in.
OK, so that wasn’t a thing, but Peter actually ingratiating himself to decent folks has got to be one of his most heinous crimes ever. No, sir, you do not get playtime with Violet and Anna. You are evil! Evil! Also, spoiler alert, Anna: Peter becomes a lot less cuddly once he turns out to be your nephew instead of your son. Get used to being tied up around him.
Yes, he was blackmailed into it, but Peter still sprung Shiloh from prison. And that only ended after a hostage situation with 1-year-old Wiley being held at gunpoint. Do you know how traumatizing that can be to a developing child?! So yes, we’re putting the blame squarely on Peter. If he hadn’t been such a creep and helped Helena kidnap Jason, Shiloh wouldn’t have had any ammunition to blackmail him with in the first place.
This one came in the form of Sam’s arrest. As if Shiloh’s escape wasn’t bad enough, Peter framed her for the jailbreak. That way, shooting the cult leader in the back with a flare gun (as Sam did at the end of their hostage standoff) seemed a lot less like self-defense and lot more like pre-meditated murder. She spent two months in prison for Peter’s crimes, then almost two years on parole. And we just know Peter slept like a baby the whole time.
Fine. You caught us. This is actually from the Very Special Christmas Carol episode of General Hospital, wherein Peter played Ebenezer’s nephew, Fred. But we still feel very threatened.
Dr. Andre Maddox had to perish for the crime of being too good at his job. The doc was one of the few people with the skill to stick Drew’s memories back in his head (from a flash drive, no less). And one of those memories was of Peter kidnapping him for Helena. So Peter hired a hitman to have Andre killed. Twice. We’d say that maybe he needed to hire better hitmen, but since Peter couldn’t even get the job done by tampering with Andre’s life support in the hospital, it’s probably good that he just gave up.
Eventually, Drew’s pesky mind ended up in Franco’s head, giving us for a little while a FrankenDrew (or is that FrancoDrew?). That was almost as bad as the real thing, so Peter decided it was time for the addled artist to go. He ordered a hit, then called it off — by killing the hitman as Franco was getting his mind back. Sorry, henchman, loyalty isn’t Peter’s strong suit.
In one of the least shocking developments ever, Spinelli did not take to Peter honing in on Maxie and cozying up to his daughter. But Spinelli’s plot to expose the villain for what he was backfired when Peter figured it out. And all we can say to that is: How dare Peter threaten to crush our favorite computer whiz? The man’s so squishy! (We mean that in the fondest, cuddliest way possible, Spinelli.)
Eventually, Peter’s Drew obsession paid off when one of his henchmen hijacked the guy’s plane, leaving everyone believing the lost Quartermaine had died. (Off screen, with no body, which… c’mon people!) But then Peter topped off the whole thing by framing Obrecht for Drew’s death — along with the attempts on Franco and Andre’s lives! We guess it was the least he could do after that little torture incident. It took about nine months and a stint in the Hague to clear her name, but when Obrecht finally came home, she was itching to get right back at Peter!
Peter, if we’re being honest, is not very good at killing people. So to see him actually succeed with Franco, of all people, was a shock. When the tortured artist eventually regained Drew’s memories, he knew that “I have a (presumed) dead man’s memories in my head from a flash drive” wasn’t exactly a legal silver bullet. So he kidnapped Peter to force a confession. Franco got one, but then Peter escaped, shot him and left him to bleed out in his own art studio. Sigh.
Since Jason was the first person to find Franco’s body, it just made sense to pin the murder on him. So Peter worked with Cyrus to send the hitman up the river, and it worked brilliantly. Honestly, though, Jason seemed to have a little too much fun with it. After being stabbed and shot in Pentonville, he ran off to become a Canadian fugitive with Britt. File that under words we never thought we’d write.
Ticked off by Aunt Anna, Peter wanted to get revenge by taking out her beau, Finn. To that end, he bribed a waiter to slip some poison into the doc’s drink… but a mixup poisoned Chase instead. That resulted in months of drama, culminating in Chase flatlining after marrying Willow on his deathbed. At least he survived. Which is more than we can say about his marriage to Willow.
Remember when Maxie gave birth to Louise in the woods because her nurse turned out to be a psychopathic imposter hired by Peter to kidnap his babymama, induce labor and give him the opportunity to run off with both of them? Well, Maxie certainly does.
Peter was one of the few people aware that Sonny was alive and well in Nixon Falls, suffering from amnesia and going by the name “Mike.” And Peter chose to tell no one. Partly, that was because he learned the truth while stalking Maxie, but mainly it was to give him leverage with which to blackmail Nina. And since she kept the “Mike” secret for months, maybe Peter was the lesser of two evils in this case.
OK, scratch that part about Peter being the lesser of two evils. He’s just plain evil. Once discovered, Nina tried sending her blackmailer off into a trap set up by her Auntie Liesl. It failed. So Peter returned to the Tan-O and went scorched earth on Nina. Literally. He tied her and poor Phyllis up and burned the bar down around them for revenge. Good thing he’s not very good at actually killing people — they both survived.
Unlike Sam, we don’t have much to say here. Dante tried to kill Peter while under Obrecht’s mind control, but honestly, we just wanted to include a pic of the baddy getting yelled at by Jason and Drew’s sometime wife. Enjoy.
By now, Peter is irredeemably evil. (At least we think he’s irredeemable. Stranger things have happened.) Drew’s been held in Victor Cassadine’s Greek island dungeon for years (and denied access to a shirt, the poor guy!), and Obrecht’s been hijacked over there, too. And… Did we mention that Peter’s evil now?
Working with Victor was bad enough, but then Peter had to one-up him and prove who was the real criminal mastermind. When Victor decided that his young partner was getting a bit too big for his britches, he tried to have him killed… only for Peter to turn the tables — and the Cassadine henchmen — on their boss! That is impressive. Horrible… but impressive.
At a certain point — like, say, when you’re holding Britt, Drew, Jason and half of Port Charles hostage on a supervillain’s Greek island — it seems like it might be worth taking a step back and asking: Am I being a little too evil? If Peter did ask that, though, the answer, clearly, was no.
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