Marcus grew up in an orphanage with Steve Johnson, and the two were good friends. He came to Salem originally to lend Steve a hand, and ended up taking a job at Salem's university hospital as a plastic surgeon. All his life, Marcus had wanted to know more about his past, and enlisted the help of an anesthesiologist at the hospital, Gail Carson. She, Steve, and Marcus all went to Charleston, South Carolina, to talk to Marcus' aunt, Lizzie, who gave them little information and told Marcus to stop looking into the past. Later Marcus was able to help his good friend when Steve needed the bones around his eye reconstructed so that he could wear a glass eye, and infiltrate Saul Taylor's revival camp. When a beam in the tent collapsed, Saul's daughter Faith was taken to the hospital, where she met Marcus, and the two began to date. However, her father had a problem with her dating a black man who was not of their faith, and made her stop seeing him. After a panicked Kayla told Gail what was really going on at the camp, Marcus and Gail infiltrated the camp together, and after being attacked and knocked unconscious, Marcus finally remembered his past, and realized that his parents had been killed when Saul Taylor and his partner, Jericho, had blown up the church his parents were in. When Marcus learned that Gail Carson was really an ISA agent who had merely pretended to be an anesthesiologist, it put a real kibosh on their relationship. A few years after the death of his good friend Steve, Marcus found himself falling in love with Kayla Brady, but when she told him she could not return his feelings (by this time she was in love with Shane Donovan), Marcus left Salem.