Samantha Spade


Special Agent Samantha "Sam" Spade is a fictional character portrayed by actress Poppy Montgomery on the CBS television drama Without a Trace.
Samantha is a Special Agent in the New York City FBI missing persons case squad led by Special Agent Jack Malone. She was raised in a poor, troubled home in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin and as a result is particularly empathetic to kids in troubled situations. She was very unhappy as a teenager and tried to run away when she was sixteen, but was stopped by her mother and a policeman. She had a short-lived marriage when she was eighteen. She has had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship with Jack Malone, that began with an affair while he was married. She also had a secret office romantic relationship with Martin Fitzgerald, which ended because of disagreements between them on whether or not to reveal it to the rest of the team. She has a son, Finn, with her ex-boyfriend Brian Donovan, who is played by Adam Kaufman, Montgomery's real-life boyfriend at the time.
In Episode 18 of Season 5, Sam's estranged older sister, Emily, visited. When Samantha was fourteen, she killed her mother Patricia 's then-boyfriend with a shovel because she caught him sexually abusing Emily. They buried him in the woods next to the cabin and eventually grew distant from each other. Samantha learns that as a result of this abuse, Emily had a son, Randy, who now has cancer so she sought a bone marrow donor. Sam is not a match but her mother is a possibility.
Spade received her name because her mother was a fan of fictional detective Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, created by Dashiell Hammett.